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I have spent some time in the past two weeks -- in the little time available -- trying to understand what is going on institutionally in the North American culture and to own influential sources that have formed me. One of the strangest events has been how I am now perceived as a "conservative" by colleagues and the institution whereas seven years ago, I would have been branded a "liberal." Such are the categories that come in this awkward transition between high and late modernity. Of course, I am both and neither.

I remember as a freshman at Mount Vernon Nazarene College in 1977 reading a book for my introduction to philosophy class called, Ideas have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver. It deeply impacted me, though I soon forgot that I had read it. Nor was Richard Weaver nor his influence mentioned to me again in my education. The book was originally published by the University of Chicago Press in 1948.

About two years ago I discovered that a substantial academic discourse among the American conservative intellectual movement and that Weaver was regarded as an iconic founder by some in this movement. It did not accord with my memory and what I had experienced as "conservative politics" from the '80s onward. So two years ago I picked up the book, Steps toward Restoration: The Consequences of Richard Weaver's Ideas edited by Ted J. Smith III and published by ISI Books of the Intercollegiate Institute, an organization to sustain conservative cultural and political causes. I wanted some "down time" reading this weekend, and read some of the essays. It has been very interesting.

Most interesting, it recalled that the book did an intellectual/genealogical criticism of modernity and liberalism. It gives a certain declensionist view. Weaver criticizes in it the notion of progress and replaces it with a notion of degeneration. What struck me as really interesting, however, as an essay by Robert A. Preston. He described Weaver's commitment to transcendence, and its lost due to the cultural/intellectual commitments of medieval nominalism. According to Preston (and seemingly corresponding to my memory by and large),

"It is also the realm of the universal that is htat basis of truth. Weaer accepts the traditional definition of metaphysical truthyas that which cannot be otherwise than it is, and truth in this sense in unchanging and always and everywhere the same . . . .

The doctrine of nominalism . . . holds that only the individual is real. The universal is seen as a mental fiction useful in organizing the disparate aspects of reality so that they may be more easily studies or categorized. Nominalism explicity denies any such reality as human nature being grounded outside the knowning mind. . . . Reality is not intelligible, it is sensible only. . . .

The implications of this doctrine are fearful. There is no order of truth in the traditional sense, there are only facts; there are no universally valid moral principles, but only relative moral standards . . . the denial of the intelligibility of the universe entails the denial of undersatnding and wisdom as the basis of authority and law, and substitutesw ealth and power; the purpose of each individual human life within the created order loses its meaning, and the purpose of human life is not discovered by analysis of the real, but chosen by each individual to be whatever he or she wants it to be . . . .

Weaver traces the rise of nominalism in the 14th century with William of Ockham, through its development by the British Empiricists inthe 18th century to its popular acceptance inthe 20th century. For its rapid spread from the end of World War I until the time of his writing of Ideas, Weaver credits what he calls 'the great stereopticon." That is, the movies, the press and the radio. Television had not achieved the status that it has today, but if Weaver had revised Ideas he certainly would have included television as even a greater force for cultural and social dissolution" (pp. 48-50).

As I read this, I discovered a similar story to that told by Etienne Gilson, Michael Allan Gillespie (Nihilism before Nietzsche), Benedict XVI, and Conor Cunningham and others within so-called "radical orthodoxy". The times coming out of the WWII were interesting intellectual years as the world struggled with what it had wrought; however the Cold War seems to have diverted these thoughts into other veins radically redefined what "conservative" was to be many things that Weaver initially criticized and that seem "leftist" today.

More about these shifts later. Yet it does show that what contemporary culture calls conservative and liberal are two wings within a common framework, far distant from the intellectual traditions that produced the terms in the first place.

Posted by johnwright at 12:40 PM | Comments (15)

Today we gathered for our Easter service – a multicongregational, baptismal service. We started a little late – not unusual, as we waited for the French-speaking baptismal candidate who had transportation problems and the Khmer-language congregation was a little late joining us. Pastor Anthony and the French congregation led music – the beauty of the Caribbean transformation of praise choruses was wonderful. Marietta and two daughters sang a wonderful a cappello piece; the Swahili congregation sang; Peter Biel, the pastor of the Nuer congregation, preached; the Spanish language congregation was there in its presence. It was long for Anglos and others with Easter plans (approaching 1:00 by the time we finished); but as usual numbingly profound.

The highlight for me was the baptismal service, of which I got to participate in directly. From our congregation I baptized Theresa Luginbuhl, sealing her faith after many years; I also baptized Emmanuela Antoine. According to early Christian practice, I submerge each candidate three times: once in the name of each Person of the Triune God. According to Mid-City practice, we invite the children forward for teaching purposes.

I prayed a blessing over the waters and Nicole Thomas-Doris brought Theresa to the baptismal tank. Theresa’s family was there, and friends as well, to witness her baptism. Her sister brought forth her 19 month old niece, who dearly loves her aunt. She watched as I submerged Theresa with concern, finger at the side of her mouth. As I submerged Theresa, she started crying. By the time she came up the second and third time, she was crying hard. Laughter dissipated the resultant tension, but the little girl’s response was correct. She had not learned to sentimentalize baptism; she saw the burial, the danger, in having her auntie pushed underwater; she enjoyed her risen to new life, a rising that calmed her. She reminded us that baptism is the participation of the person into the form of Christ.

Von Balthasar speaks of Christ as the Centre of the Form of Revelation in The Glory of the Lord (pp. 463-525). He explicates, “The expression the ‘centre of the form of revelation’ does not refer to a particular section of this form however central which, in order to be read as form, would then essentially need to be filled out by other more peripheral aspects. What the phrase is intended to denote is, rather, the reality which lends the form its total coherence and comprehensibility. . . . Christ . . . is the form because he is the content. This holds absolutely, for he is the only Son of the Father, and whatever he establishes and institutes has its meaning only through him, is dependent only on him and is kept vital only by him. If for a single moment we were to look away from him and attempt to consider and understand the Church as an autonomous form, the Church would not have the slightest plausibility. It would be plausible neither as a religious institution (for its sacraments and the diakonia belonging to them are ‘bearable’ only as modes by which the living Kyrios is present) nor as an historical power for order and culture in the sense of the Action Francaise and of the German Catholic Nazis. On the contrary, seen in this way it loses all credibility, and for this reason the Church Fathers often compared the Church’s light with the light of the moon, borrowed from the sun and showing its relativity most clearly in its phases. The plausibility of Christianity stands and falls with Christ’s, something which has in essence always been acknowledged” (p. 463).

The resurrection of Jesus, of course, witnesses to the plausibility of Christ as the centre of the form of revelation. Von Balthasar notes that “The Gospel presents Christ’s form in such a way that ‘flesh’ and spirit’, Incarnation to the point of suffering and death, and resurrected life are all interrelated down to the smallest details. If the Resurrection is excised, then not only certain things but simply everythning about Jesus’ earthly life becomes incomprehensible. Of if we understand the Risen Lord as merely the ‘Christ of faith’, without an interior identity with the Jesus of history, then once again the whole form becomes incomprehensible. The first, early form is legible only if we see that it is to be wholly ‘used up’ in death and resurrection. But death and resurrection (which constitute a strict ideal unity) are comprehensible only if they are understood as the transformation of this early form by God’s power, and not as the form’s spiritualization and apotheosis” (p. 467).

This is why the church over the centuries has connected baptism with Easter -- united with the form of Christ where it is most luminous -- on Easter. The form of the revelation of God in Jesus becomes fully manifest in the resurrected body of Jesus, without which any other aspect of his life seen in his effect in his followers, becomes utterly unintelligible. Faith opens into reason, so that in seeing the hidden but manifest form of revelation in Jesus, we might see the glory of the Lord.

Posted by johnwright at 10:40 PM | Comments (5)

Today at the distribution we had celery, carrots, and other products to distribute -- 2 1/2 tons of carrots. They were in 50 lb bags, though broken into pieces. Someone speculated that they were packaged for animals and had found their way to the foodbank. It is fascinating to see how these economic processes work themselves out. Our numbers are down from their peak two months ago; a direct correlation with the vacancy signs in the apartment complexes. One can feel the deflationary cycle run through the neighborhood -- even dropping the demand for free goods.

The day's most moving point when Igor came to me and wished me a happy Easter. Igor rooms with Vladimir, who spit on Ericka Poole when we put numbers on people's hands -- they are elderly Jewish men who survived the German invasion of Russia in World War II. Igor explained to us that after the Nazis, one doesn't put numbers on human skin after such an experience. Vladimir has recently been in the hospital with back problems -- we are trying to translate some of his Russian biblical poetry. Igor's act of forgiveness of Christians for their involvement in this atrocity in his words to me brought tears to my eyes.

Holy Saturday is an interesting day. One of von Balthasar's most provocative concepts were his reflections on Holy Saturday -- Christ's descent into Hell. His classical text is Mysterium Pascale: The Mystery of Easter, pp. 148-88. Perhaps his introductory comments can introduce us to his reflections:

The more eloquently the Gospels describe the passion of the living Jesus, his death and burial, the more striking is their entirely understandable silence when it comes to the time inbetween his placing in the grave and the event of the Resurrection. We are grateful to them for this. Death calls for this silence, not only by reason of the mourning of the survivors but, even more, because of what we know of the dwelling and condition of the dead. When we ascribe to the dead forms of activity that are ne and yet prolong those of earth, we are not simply expressing our perplexity. We are also defining ourselves against a partial event. It is a happening which affects the whole person, though not necessarily to the point of obliterating the huan subject altogether. It is a situation whcih signifies inteh first place the abandonment of all spontaneous activity and so a passivity, a state in which, perhaps the vital activity now brought to its end is mysteriously summed up" (p. 148).

One of von Balthasar's crucial reflections from Holy Saturday, is Christ's solidarity with the dead. As a consistent theme in von Balthasar is the objectivity of salvation in which we participate through Christ's participation as God taking on the fullness of human life -- even death. He writes at the end of the chapter, "The proclamation, in its sheer objectivity, and inasmuch as it is evangelion or good news, should be understood as an action which plants within eternal death a manifesto of eternal life-- not matter how that proclamation is made, or which persons are its heralds, or what the positive, or less positive dispositions of those whom the proclamation conerns. This removes at a stroke the problem, so pre-occupying for teh Fathers, of how those already dead can be subsequently converted, and not only of the possibility of such a post-mortem conversion but also of the number of thsoe thus converting.

The theme of liberation, that is, of the salvation offered to the dead, as the content of this proclamation, must be understood no less objectively. Jus as Jersus' condition in death is scarcely described in its subjective aspect, so here too the subjective effect of the proclamationon the 'spirits in prison' hardly enters into the reckoning. The dramactic portrait of the experience of triumph, of a joyful encounter between Jesus and the prsinoners, and inparticular between the new Adam and the old, is not prohibited as a form of pious contemplatoin, but it does go beyond what theology can affirm. . . . .

On Holy Saturday the Church is invited rather to follow at a distance" (pp. 180-1).

Posted by johnwright at 8:56 PM | Comments (11)

We finished our Good Friday service on the Seven Last Words of Christ with Southeast Church of the Nazarene, as has become our practice over the years. The preaching was wonderfully good; it is good always to gather with them. We have established deep ties over the years.

This section provides a small reflection from The Glory of the Lord appropriate to today, it seemed to me on the conversion necessary to see the suffering of Christ, that which "shows for the hiddenness of God and the sinner's ruinous condition," that is simultaneously the place where the church, and the individual believer, finds his true self.

In order to see the form of the Redeemer, therefore, a turning is necessary: a turning away from one’s own image and a turning to the image of God. And here lies the whole problem of the representation of Jesus in images, particularly of his suffering. The turning or ‘con-version’ is the prerequisite, not only for ‘being able’ to endure this image and look at it, but the prerequisite for being able to see at all what it expresses objectively. Such conversion can take place only in the individual; only individuals can see crucifixes on walls or at street corners. Consequently, the question can at least be raised whether the crucifix can be, so to speak, the ‘official’ image of Christ for the whole community, or whether the latter, as a corporate body, should not have as its symbolic image, rather, the glorified Kyrios, as was the case in the ancient Church. The coming to prominence of the image of the suffering Christ in the Gothic Age is closely connected with the privatization of devotion, the need for interiority and the striving for contemplation that followed an age of external representation which, in part, abused the image of glorification in order to achieve an earthly anticipation of the eschatological Kingdom. Nevertheless, the problem of the image of the suffering Christ, which shows forth the hiddenness of God and the sinner’s ruinous condition and exhorts to conversion, has its limits in the essence of the community’s worship, which is directly oriented to the memorial of Christ’s suffering. It is in this anamesis [remembrance] (1 Cor 11.24), this memoria passionis, that the Church achieves her own true self. This occurs, naturally, to the extent that the Church consists of nothing but sinners who gather together and celebrate the memorial Meal in common, becoming a ‘church’ only through communion in this memorial. The Church exists in no other form. Thus, we here stand beyong the tension between individual and community. The Church is always a personal reality, and it is this persona Ecclesiae which contemplates God’s image of hiddenness—and must contemplate it, since the Church is the adequate subject for whose sake this image was designed in the first place. The Church is the sinful woman who has undergone conversion once and for all and who, nevertheless, must still be converted anew every day. As such, the Church has not only to ‘believe’ the image of hiddenness, but to contemplate it. To persevere in contemplation before this image is for her ‘the one thing necessary’ (Lk 10.41), because the spiritual power of the image will then ‘transform [her] into the same image’ (2 Cor 3.18). Precisely here, where God conceals himself, contemplation becomes an essential dimension of the Christian faith. (pp. 522-24)

Posted by johnwright at 10:49 PM | Comments (6)

We held our traditional Maundy Thursday service tonight -- simple barley soup, cheese, crackers; the Lord's Supper; foot-washing. It is a slow moving service and evening -- which is good. It is as close to a contemplative service that we have in the course of the year.

Of course von Balthasar framed much of the evening, heightening my sensitivity to the simple but profound beauty of the evening. The simple candles and fruit and table cloths; the chalice and the bread; the piano and the violin. Even amid the orange carpet and the duct tape, we participated in the beauty of the Last Supper/Footwashing on the evening that Jesus was betrayed. The footwashing takes a long time; it was a wonderful gift for quiet prayer.

How does one describe this "experience of faith"? Von Balthasar raises this question in a prolonged section of The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1. He finds the language of experience difficult, but legitimate. He writes, "Regardless how problematic the concept of experience has become in the history of theology, . . . . it nevertheless remains indispensable when faith is understood as the encounter of teh whole person with God. . .. God wants ma no only with his intellectu (which would, in any case, have to be sacrificed to a truth which is not self-evident), but, from the outset, also with his will; he wants man not only with his soul, but also equally with his body" (p. 219). The language of experience cannot be abandoned, but must be rightly ordered, even subordinated as the outcome of gift of faith.

The experience of faith is not a Jungian archetype that can be "unearthed from the depths of man, not even by the most penetrating analysis, niether as a 'lost image which must be restored' . . . nor as a 'hidden archetype which must be made conscious'" (p. 221). "The experience of human totality and human depths is not, therefore, the way which opens up to the Christian experience of faith, even though this human depth and totality is subsequently put at the service of the Christian experience and, what is more, has already been incorporated by God himself into the image of the man Christ. If experience . . . even in a worldly sense is not a state but an event .. . . it follows that it is not man's entry (Einfahren) into himself, into his best and highest possibilities, which can become an experience (Erfahrung), but, rather, it is his act of entering into the Son of God, Christ JEsus, who is naturally inaccessible to him, which becomes the experience that alone can claim for itself his undivded obedience' (p. 222).

We should not miss the significance of von Balthasar's ordering the experience of faith. Where we usually see experience as moving from the outside in, via our empiricist commitments, von Balthasar gives us a different empiricism: one that experience moves us from the insight out; experience that has its end in what is experienced, not merely experience per se. The experience of faith takes one's subjectivity into the free gift of Jesus Christ, the revelation of God; it does not collapse Jesus within. As von Balthasar says, "Seen from this perspective, Christian experience can mean only the progressive growth of noe's own existence into Christ's existence, on the basis of Christ's contiuing action in taking shape in the believer: 'until Christ has taken shape in you' (Gal 4.19) (p. 224). Christian experience is another name for sanctification: "an initiation (and, therefore, an experience) within the realm of God's own reality, and hence it finally becomes the process by which this reality takes shape in the believer. However, the rightness of the form of reveation initially 'seen' in faith -- the form to which the believer surrenders and entrusts himself -- is confirmed within this existence of self-surrender as being true and correct, and this gives the believer a new form of Christian certitude which can be called 'Christian experience'" (p. 225).

A member left the service tonight saying that the Maundy Thursday service is one of her favorite of the year. I understand completely. It was a time, through Christ in the Spirit, within the realm of God's own reality, and hence it finally becomes the process by which this reality takes shape in the believer. Von Balthasar helps us render what we experienced intelligible, both to ourselves and to others.

Posted by johnwright at 10:20 PM | Comments (6)

To appeal to beauty as theologically significant reaches into our daily lives with a language that is unavoidable. Yet the language by which one accounts for this beauty makes all the difference in the world. We have been shaped, profoundly, by a concept of beauty that arises from German and English romanticism, with the result of what von Balthasar calls "aesthetic theology". He, instead, wants to develop a theolotical aesthetics. How does one render the beauty that we experience as intelligible? As we pass through the horrible Beauty that we observe in the Maunday Thursday through Easter Sunday service, what is it that we experience?

Von Balthasar draws upon a little known, at least in Protestant circles, 19th century theologian named Matthias Joseph Scheeben as a precedent for his program. Von Balthasar writes: "Scheeben is here only meant to be representative of the way an (all too) 'aesthetic' theology . . . may possibly be refined and made credible as a theological aesthetics. By this we mean a theology which does not primarly work with the extra-theological categoeris of a worldly philosophical aesthetics . . . , but which develops its tehory of beauty from the data of revelation itself with genuinely theoloigcal methods" (p. 117). We do not find "beauty" in the world and then project this image from 'nature' upon God; God reveals God's own self in Jesus that allows us to see the Beauty in the world as the revelation of God's own Triune Beauty.

This is the difference between a Romantic account of Beauty that undercuts the whole necessity of revelation -- and thus, ultimately collapses the category of Beauty back in upon itself. Von Balthasar writes, "Romantic theology ultimately failed because of a deep theological inadequacy, namely, that it did not sufficiently distinguish between creation and revelation, or, to formulate it in the terms of our enquiry, we can say that Romantic theology foundered on a kind of aesthetic and religious monism" (p. 104). Beauty is found as always already present in nature as a given -- one looks into the depths of what is to find beauty. Beauty is "behind" or "below" the surface, needed to be excavated to be discovered by looking inward at the nature that is always already there. Beauty becomes the natural "inner" and "depth" dimension to what is -- and always has been and will be.

Von Balthasar finds in Scheedben a concept of beauty as Gift, found in the elevation of what is in its origin in God, being elevated through the visible evidence of its participation in a radically transcendent God: "As against Romantic theology, Scheeben defends with relenting sharpness the separation between nature and supernature, a defence supported by a comprehensive uses of heresiology. In the first place, says Scheeben, supernature is not a moment in nature by which God brings it to perfection, a complement to nature which causes nature to pass from potency to act, or a medicine that ‘cures’ nature of the disease of having its back to Gdo by making it con-vert to him. Nor can nature claim to ‘strive positively’ after supernature or assert ‘certain rights to it’. . . . . All connecting lnes that could naturally lead from below into the Realm above are severed by Scheeben" (p. 105). God does not find God's end within the immanence of beauty already found within nature, that ultimately places God and nature as found within each other. Beauty is not grounded in nature that is then equated with God.

Instead, nature itself is already graced, a gift, and beauty is a sign, a signal of that which exceeds and goes beyond nature -- beauty is not "natural" at all! Beauty is the elevation of nature into its origin and end -- God. "The world of grace is the world of God himself to created nature, thereby granting it a share in his own substance and nature. . . . . God’s revelation of himself, according to Scheeben, means the transporting of man from his own immanent and finite sphere into the divine, transcendental, and infinite sphere” (p. 106). In encountering beauty, one does not delve into the depths of nature; one is transported into the heights, sees creation elevated into its origin and end in the Beauty that is eternally and forever the Triune God. As von Balthasar states, "We must begin from above, from the heights, in order then to see how the divine beauty gradually penetrates and elevates all depths of reality" (p. 108).

Of course we see the fullness of this penetration and elevation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here is the Glory of the Lord, not in the play of surfaces given by Botox, but in the poor crucified and raised human from Nazareth who gave his life a ransom for many.

Posted by johnwright at 7:13 PM | Comments (6)

Tonight, of course, is Tuesday -- which means Bread of Life downtown. I've been a little nervous about the evening -- the first Padres game; the winter shelter is closed; and the new "camp" around the post-office. The camp, set up and taken down every evening, is on a migratory path of those wealthier who are going to Padres games. I was afraid that the city might intervene. I am very thankful to say that they did not. All was very come on 8th Avenue.

After preaching and the meal, I went out to the street with some sandwiches with Maddie Flag. I talked with Jay and two others -- a woman who was spending her first night on the streets and a woman who had one time been a business owner but had suffered spousal abuse, head injury, amnesia, and subsequent homelessness. I didn't count exactly how many tents were there, but it was at least nine in fine, good order, symetric, well-formed. It seems that Jay has become a leader in the area in the upkeep, construction, protection, and care of the neighborhood that emerges every evening and dissolves every morning. They spoke that the police now smile in the morning at them as they see them clean the area in the care for their neighborhood.

As I sat on a blanket, rolled up as a seating cushion to protect from the hardness of the concrete -- a mobile chair cushion -- I couldn't help feel like I was back in Winamac on a porch in an evening talking with parishioners and their neighbors. I have wonderful neighbors here where I live, but none treated me with the kindness and care in providing seating for a conversation as I stayed there. There was an orderliness, a beauty, a form in which I participated. On the streets, in the doorway to a tent, I found neighbors.

The idea of "form" is central to von Balthasar's theology of Beauty. He draws upon a long philosophical heritage here, but retrieves it from a "pure philosophy" to a philosophical concept that finds its end as it is taken up and transformed by the form of divine revelation in Jesus Christ. The Christian life is to become "in-formed" by Jesus Christ. He writes,

"to be a Christian is precisely a form. How could it be otherwise, since being a Christian is a grace, a possibility of existence opened up to us by God's act of justification, by the God-Man's act of redemption? This is not the formless, general possibility of alleged freedom, but the exact possibility, appointed by God for every individual in his existence as a member of Christ's body, in his task within the body, in his mission, his charism, his Christian service to the Church and to the world. Considered in all its dimensions, what could be more holistic, indissoluable, and at the same time more clearly contoured than this form of being a Christian? This form transcends the questionableness of men's own choices and self-evaluation. It transcends, too, the uncertainty and melancholy that are, at bottom, inherent in most life-forms for the simple reason that something entirely different would have been chosen and that was intended and striven after was never actually attained. But the Christian form is structurally a part of the miracle of the forgiveness of sins, of justification, of holiness, the miracle that transfigures and ennobles the whole sphere of being and which in itself guarantees that a spiritual form will thrive as the greatest of beauties. The image of existence is here illuminated by the archetype of Christ, and set to work by the free might of the Creator Spirit with all the sovereignty of one who need not destroy the natural in order to achieve his supernatural goal. For this reason, however, it is clear that in any age -- and most especially in our own -- the Christian will realise his mission only if he truly becomes this form which has been willed and instituted by Christ. The exterior of this form must express and reflect its interior to the world in a credible manner, and the interior must be confirmed, justified, and made love-worthy in its radiant beauty through the truth of the exterior that manifests it. When it is achieved, Christian form is the most beautiful thing that may be found in the human realm. The simple Christian knows this as he loves his saints among other reasons because the resplendent image of their life is so love-worthy and engaging. But the spiritual force necessary to have an eye for a saint's life is by no means to be taken for granted" (p. 28).

To be invited into the form of hospitality on 8th Avenue today, and participate a little of God's hospitality of us revealed in Jesus Christ is very humbling. But God's Beauty surrounds us, with Christ as the archetype, if only we will have eyes to see.

Posted by johnwright at 8:25 PM | Comments (5)

I gathered with the Monastic Living and Learning Community tonight to share in the Lord's Supper -- after playing half of a basketball intermural game. My season points per game average dropped to 1.0 -- four points in four games. I set a pick and got sent about 5 feet from where I sent it. Thank God for Motrin tonight at bedtime. It was wonderful meeting with these men and sharing their experiences from the year and in the Body and Blood of Christ.

Cody Ellis memorized the following passage from von Balthasar, and justly so; I would like just to share it with you. It describes a great situation of loss in our world, the loss of the ability to see Beauty:

In a world without beauty--even if people cannot dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it -- in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out. Man stands before the good and asks himself why it must be done and not rather its alternative, evil. For this, too, is a possibility, and even the more exciting one: Why not investigate Satan's depths? In a world that no longer has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency. In other worlds, syllogisms may still dutifully clatter away like rotary presses or computers which infallibly spew out an exact number of answers by the minute. But the logic of these answers is itself a mechanism which no longer captivates anyone. The very conclusions are no longer conclusive. And if this is how the transcendentals fare because one of them has been banished, what will happen with Being itself? Thomas described Being (das Sein) as a 'sure light' for that which exists (das Seiende). WIll this light not necessarily die out where the very language of light has been forgotten and the mystery of Being is no longer allowed to express itself? What remains is then a mere lump of existence which, even if it claims for itself the freedom proper to spirits, nevertheless remains totally dark and incomprehensible even to iteslf. The witness borne by Being becomes untrustworthy for the person who can no longer read the language of beauty" (p. 19).

Posted by johnwright at 9:28 PM | Comments (4)

Holy week, of course, began today. We gathered in the parking lot for our multicongregational procession. Henrique again brought the Palms; Pastor Anthony led the music; Pastor Mona led the singing. A guitar quartet emerged from Haiti, the Congo, Los Angeles, and the central valley of California, with a drum player who had literally to destroy all evidence of his past to survive the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; they joined together for an impromptu jam around the Hebrew word, “Hosanna!” It was a fascinating fusion of American folk, Caribbean, and Congolese guitar music. As the procession began, a 2 year old Swahili girl enthusiastically entered the void formed by the movement of the musicians – with her mother reaching to keep up! She caught the joy and excitement of entering the parade better than anyone else in the morning!

As we traditionally celebrate today as Passion Sunday, we had our long reading of the Passion narrative, this year from the Gospel of Mark. We moved straight from the Gospel reading into the Lord’s Supper, with only our baptismal candidate prayed over and dismissed separating the reading from the Eucharistic rite. It was a moving, joyous/sad occasion.

As part of Holy Week, I want to blog each day. I am going to finish this week, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, as part of my holy week observance. Reading von Balthasar is simultaneously an act of intellect and devotion, a quickening of mind and spirit, thought and prayer combined into one. In sharing with you, I hope that I can share “in the form” through faith that takes us into the heights of participation into what really is.

We live in a day where being has been collapsed into becoming. Transcendence is sustained, if at all, only to keep immanence “open” to what is yet to come. History has become a larger category than God. No place is this more evident than the loss of the Beautiful or Beauty as a theological category. Ironically, the American holiness movement has one of the few Protestant groups (if we truly are “Protestant”) to sustain a discourse of “beauty.” In pictures from the past, one can often see banners over sanctuaries that would proclaim “Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness.” Aaron Friberg’s reconstruction of H. Orton Wiley’s First Pasadena College “Presidential Address” (google Friberg and Didache to find his excellent article) shows how theological aesthetics were at the core of the early Wiley’s understanding of Christian liberal arts education. As modernist Methodist influences came into the holiness movement, the movement moved in Kantian directions in which theology and the Christian life became understand, not in aesthetic, but moral terms – moral duties to the “Law”. Von Balthasar’s work helps us to return to the category of theological aesthetics from early 20th century holiness Romanticism to reclaim the Christological focus of the beauty of holiness.

Von Balthasar begins in the “Foreword” to speak of his mission in this volume, a mission that still stands important today in the emptying of theology to its political implications as a variation of its modernist, Kantian roots: “We here attempt to develop a Christian theology in the light of the third transcendental, that is to say: to complement the vision of the true and the good with that of the beautiful (pulchrum). The introduction will show how impoverished Christian thinking has been by the growing loss of this perspective which one so strongly informed theology. It is . . . our intent . . . to restore theology to a main artery which it has abandoned. But this is in no sense to imply that the aesthetic perspective ought now to dominate theology in the place of the logical and the ethical. It is true, however, that the transcendental are inseparable, and that neglecting one can only have a devastating effect on the others” (p. 9).

He goes on to entice us, “If all beauty is objectively located at the intersection of two moments which Thomas calls species and lumen (‘form’ and ‘splendour’), then the encounter of these is characterized by the two movements of beholding and of being enraptured” (p. 10). Von Balthasar here challenges us to see and to participate in Beauty, not as a form of aestheticism, to be participate joyfully in what really is – a joy that is often taken from us by the “solemnity” of the modernist commitments to the “true” and the “good” or “justice.” This morning the little Swahili girl beheld and became enraptured – the rest of us were too still too uncomfortable in the awkwardness of different languages, social groupings, differences, and so on. Yet in the movement of the beauty of the music singing praises to God, she beheld, and in beholding saw the joy that really was there and became enraptured in the movement of the Palm Sunday procession. She witnessed to the very Reality that von Balthasar seeks to make intelligible to us in his volume.

Posted by johnwright at 6:55 PM | Comments (9)