Tag: Augustine
0 My Favorite Christmas Sermon – 2
You would have suffered eternal death, had he not been born in time. Never would you have been freed from sinful flesh, had he not taken on himself the likeness of sinful flesh. You would have suffered everlasting unhappiness, had it not been for this mercy. You would never have returned to life, had he not shared your death. You would have been lost if he had not hastened ‘to your aid. You would have perished, had he not come.
Let us then joyfully celebrate the coming of our salvation and redemption. Let us celebrate the festive day on which he who is the great and eternal day came from the great and endless day of eternity into our own short day of time.
He has become our justice, our sanctification, our redemption, so that, as it is written: Let him who glories glory in the Lord.
Truth, then, has arisen from the earth: Christ who said, I am the Truth, was born of the Virgin. And justice looked down from heaven: because believing in this new-born child, man is justified not by himself but by God.
Truth has arisen from the earth: because the Word was made flesh. And justice looked down from heaven: because every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.
Truth has arisen from the earth: flesh from Mary. And justice looked down from heaven: for man can receive nothing unless it has been given him from heaven.
Justified by faith, let us be at peace with God: for justice and peace have embraced one another. Through our Lord Jesus Christ: for Truth has arisen from the earth. Through whom we have access to that grace in which we stand, and our boast is in our hope of God’s glory. He does not say: “of our glory,” but of God’s glory: for justice has not come out of us but has looked down from heaven. Therefore he who glories, let him glory, not in himself, but in the Lord.
For this reason, when our Lord was born of the Virgin, the message of the angelic voices was: Glory to God in the highest, and peace to men of good will.
For how could there be peace on earth unless Truth has arisen from the earth, that is, unless Christ were born of our flesh? And he is our peace who made the two into one: that we might be men of good will, sweetly linked by the bond of unity.
Let us then rejoice in this grace, so that our glorying may bear witness to our good conscience by which we glory, not in ourselves, but in the Lord. That is why Scripture says: He is my glory, the one who lifts up my head. For what greater grace could God have made to dawn on us than to make his only Son become the son of man, so that a son of man might in his turn become son of God?
Ask if this were merited; ask for its reason, for its justification, and see whether you will find any other answer but sheer grace.
0 Ex Nihilo
As we’ve explored a bit already, Christians and Jews read the Genesis story and see in it a God who creates out of nothing. This impacts both how we understand creation and ourselves as creatures and how we understand God.
That God creates from nothing points to the giftedness of creation. Whether God created literally according to lyrical layout of Genesis 1 or whether God created through something like the Big Bang doesn’t really change the substance of what Christians confess in the Creed. Everything is a gift. Everything depends on the graciousness of God.
That God creates from nothing also points to the radical, absolute Otherness, Transcendence and Lordship of God. The Genesis story, and the Abrahamic faiths that grew from it, see an ontological difference between Creator and creation. Ontological is an impressive theological term meaning ‘being.’
Simply (re)stated, though God creates God is not a part of the world nor is the world a part of God. Because God creates from nothing, God is radically other than creation. This distinguishes Christianity from a number Ancient Near Eastern, Eastern and New Age religions that either understand the created world as something co-inhering in the divine life or simply identify the divine with the natural world.
Creation is charged with sacredness because God made it and thus it points to God in an almost sacramental sense. But creation is not God.
0 The Risk of Love
I posted earlier about the Christian conviction that sin/evil is nothing, literally ‘no-thing.’ If you’re like me when I first heard this metaphysical perspective, then you’re head is hurting.
On the one hand, it’s easy to see how logic dictates the nothingness or unreality of evil. On the other hand, putting the matter into these philosophical categories doesn’t necessarily answer our felt questions about why bad things happen to good people (aside: if we’re sinners, then the adjective ‘good’ is an assumption isn’t it?) or why wholesale tragedies like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan occur.
A less philosophical, easier to understand, but only slightly more satisfying way to think about this comes from Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. Its an answer rooted in God’s risk of love towards us.
For Augustine, the drama of the human story and the beauty of the Christ story is that God creates so that we can share life and love with God.
God didn’t create a mechanized universe in which we have no choice but to worship dutifully. God wasn’t creating automatons or servile followers. God was creating friends and lovers. Because God is in the Trinity loving relationship, God wants to share loving relationship with us.
Consider my wife.
What makes our relationship authentic, loving and beautiful is that both of us love one another freely. It’s a free exchange of love. It’s reciprocal. Nothing is forced. If it was, you’d call it abuse not love. You’d think it tragic.
As any friend or lover knows, loving relationship can’t be coerced. If it is then it’s only a pale imitation of the actual thing.
In creation, then, God risks that we might not reciprocate God’s love. God hardwires us for love. God calls us back to relationship through Abraham, Israel, the prophets and Christ but God never forces our hand.
The risk inherent in God’s love is our freedom.
And as we are free to love God we are free to love other ends.
What we call sin is disordered love: love of money, love of pleasure, love of an ideology etc.
And what we call evil is often the wreckage of our disordered loves. The fact remains evil is mysterious and, as the Book of Job (38) amply demonstrates, any theory or explanation of it ultimately proves unsatisfying. As vague and metaphysical as it can sound, I can’t help thinking our calling evil ‘a shadow, nothing, not God’ is as faithful a way of speaking as we can legitimately muster. In the face of suffering, what Christians should speak are not answers or theories but confessions and professions. We should affirm not God’s providence (‘there’s a plan for everything…’) but the scope of God’s love (‘Jesus wept…’).
After all, what is critical for Christians to remember in such discussions- and this is what Augustine was keen to secure- is that the Cross is the full measure of God’s love and character and that all of creation shimmers with that same perfect charity and love.
Explanations may prove elusive but this way of speaking of God forbids faithful Christians from ever consigning another’s suffering to God’s will, and in the face of natural evil Christians should only mourn, help redeem disaster and to keep looking for creation’s goodness that lies below tragedy’s surface.
Because if God is Trinity peace is always a more determinative, if at times hard to see, reality.
0 Hell and Nothingness
So Genesis 1 stresses that you and I, everyone and everything, is good. Thoroughly. Creation and all that is within it is an occasion for God’s joy and delight.
Certainly that’s a naive perspective is it not? I need only travel a mile from my house to Route One to see contradictory evidence of infinite goodness. I need only look at the pictures of those soldiers serving overseas on the church wall to discover that all is not perfect in the world. Right?
Very often it feels easier to believe in Sin, Evil and Broken-ness than it does to believe in God’s goodness or our own. It’s cliche to hear theologians admit that Sin is the only objectively verifiable doctrine Christians espouse. Just think how most street-preacher’s tracts begin not with God’s infinite love expressed in Jesus but with Sin and the wages earned from Sin and only then wind their way to a God who loves me.
Our ‘faith’ in the reality of Evil and Sin is so unshakably strong Christians sometimes speak as though Evil were a Reality or Presence within our world in defiant opposition to God- as though Evil were the villain to God’s protagonist, paired equals squaring off with the fate of creation hanging in the balance.
This way of thinking about evil, though commonplace, was a heresy Augustine himself fought against his entire life. Here’s why:
If you take a logical step back from the passion we feel about a creation that seems always to be suffering, then you see that Evil cannot be its own Reality, Presence or Substance apart from or in opposition to God.
If it were then logically God would not be all-powerful, perfect love, and creation would no longer be the overflowing of an infinitely self-giving God. As David Hart notes, there is a sense in which Christians confess that this world is the only world God could’ve created, not by necessity or limitation but because God is perfect freedom and cannot but express himself perfectly and completely. This is the only world God could’ve created because this is God’s perfect expression of his love.
If David Hart is right about the goodness of creation, then what is evil?
What is sin?
In C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, hell is envisioned as an existence where everything and every inhabitant exists only as a shadow with no solid reality. Lewis’ story is a narrative take on Augustine’s understanding of the sin and evil.
Simply put (okay, not so simple), evil- whether it is natural evil, such as a tsunami, or radical evil, a human act such as the Holocaust- is not a real thing in itself. It has no substance or existence of its own.
The early Church, following Augustine’s lead, referred to evil as a ‘privation of the good’ or the ‘absence of the good.’ John Wesley echoed this same understanding when he defined sin and salvation primarily in a medical sense; sin is a disease of our nature and salvation, as the Greek word for salvation itself means, is ‘healing. All this is to say that for the Church the most consistent way of thinking about evil is that its ‘nothing.’ Literally, it’s no-thing. This is why St. Paul can afford to sound so confident about the ‘principalities and powers’ exercising no more dominion in the world than we afford them.
Just as evil is thought to be nothing in the ancient church, hell then was thought to be not a place of eternal punishment so much as an existence- even in this world- of those who refuse God’s love and goodness; those who live outside of or independent from God, who encompasses all being, eventually and unavoidably whither away into nothingness. Shadow as Lewis describes it.
0 Creation and the Sinking Ship Fallacy
We’re in a sermon series on the ‘Seven Truths that Changed the Word: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas.’ This weekend’s theme is Creation Ex Nihilo. I seldom reflect too much on creation theology, mostly, I think, because creation theology tends to be abstracted from the particularity of Christ.
But that doesn’t mean creation isn’t an integral part of our faith. It isn’t to say that creation isn’t a part of the Good News. There’s plenty of grist for reflection.
This week I’ve been thinking about those people I encountered on doorsteps and how impoverished their faith-view was because if there’s one thing the Genesis story makes clear about creation: It Really Is Good.
Yes, creation is fallen. Yes, the present world as its splayed across the front pages of the Washington Post is far from what God intended with the opening salvo of the Genesis story. Yes, creation is, as Paul writes in Romans 8, groaning while it awaits Christ’s final redemption. And it’s true we’ve turned what God’s given as gift into an object to be used and abused at our pleasure.
Traditionally, Christians- no, Protestants- have been very faithful when it comes to affirming creation’s broken-ness.
So good, in fact, I don’t think we need to dwell on it anymore.
Traditionally, Christians- no, Protestants- have been sinfully terrible at affirming the goodness of God’s creation.
Christians have even neglected the goodness of creation in the name of faithfulness. Far too often Christians have emphasized the ‘spiritual’ at the expense of the material, thinking that true fidelity required a miserly disposition towards the pleasures of this world.
Misreading St. Paul, Christians have regrettably thought faithfulness required a distinction between the spiritual and the material, between the body and the soul, between the spirit and the flesh. Mistakenly looking towards the pie in the sky, Christians just as often have stressed the goodness of the next life at the expense of this life.
The variety and frequency of error notwithstanding, a Christian confession of God as Creator can abide by no division between flesh and spirit, material and soul. When we say God created the heavens and the earth, we remember that God declared our surroundings ‘good.’ God looked upon our earth, our bodies, our felt experience and called it ‘very good.’
Good food is very good. Love for another is very good. A beautiful vista, a deep friendship, a worthwhile endeavor- they’re all very, very good because that’s how God made them.
Christianity isn’t about practicing a sort of split personality syndrome when it comes to our religious versus everyday lives. Christian selflessness doesn’t mean we regard creation with a miserly disdain. An authentic Christianity sees every moment and every object in our lives as graced. Failure to enjoy life and creation is in a very real sense a theological failure.
Christians are so often so focused on the Cross they forget that God deemed our earthly, fleshly lives good enough to take flesh himself in Christ.
The temptation to divide existence into spiritual and material distinctions is a fourth century heresy called Manicheanism, which in St. Augustine’s day saw the created world as inherently corrupt, broken and even evil. The spiritual, heavenly, world precisely because it was not finite was desirable. Thus the goal of the spiritual life was to escape our earthly lives to the spiritual realm.
St. Augustine devoted a large number of years to debating and defeating the Manichees. Even though modern believers still exhibit a propensity to divide the spiritual from the material, Augustine believed the Trinity warned against any such inclination. If God is Trinity and if Creation is the result of God’s gracious, unnecessary self-giving, then to question Creation’s goodness is, in effect, to question the goodness of God.
1 We Are What We Love?
Think about it this: If I say I love my wife, Ali, but you witness no actions, passions or behavior that affirms this then you would conclude I don’t really love her. Right?
Yet how often do we accept the exact opposite when it comes to someone who says they love God or Jesus?
How often do we accept as legitimate the faith of those who say they believe in God but give no evidence of love in their lives- love for God or for others?
We’re in the midst of our fall sermon series, Seven Truths that Changed the World: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas.
But why ideas? It’s common to reduce Christianity to a system of beliefs, but it hasn’t always and wasn’t originally so.
St Augustine of Hippo was a 5th century theologian and bishop of North Africa. In response to the fall of Rome, which many Romans blamed on Christianity and which was an almost inconceivable event at the time, Augustine wrote a long work of theology entitled The City of God.
In it, Augustine characterizes Rome’s fall as inevitable by drawing a contrast between the earthly city (Rome) and the heavenly city. Interestingly, according to Augustine, what distinguishes citizens of the two cities is not beliefs but love.
The earthly city is necessarily finite, even doomed, because its citizens’ love is directed towards finite ends whereas what distinguishes the citizens of the heavenly city is a love aimed towards God. For Augustine, and I would argue for the scriptures, our primordial orientation to the world as creatures is not knowledge or belief but love. We are not led in the world by our head. We instead feel our way in the world with our hands and our heart. As creatures we are not mere containers for ideas or beliefs. As creatures our lives are dynamic, aimed outward from ourselves to the world.
Another way of putting this is that humans are not primarily rational creatures we are intentional creatures; that is, we are aimed towards an object other than ourselves.
For Augustine, we are essentially and ultimately lovers. To be human is to love. And it’s what we love that defines who we are. Our ultimate love is what constitutes our identity. It’s not what I think that shapes me from the ground up; it’s what I love.
Look at the creation story in Genesis.
Jews and Christians have always taught that God created ex nihilo, out of nothing. In other words, God didn’t need to create. Father, Son and Spirit didn’t need us because God was incomplete without us or because God was lonely.
No, creation is grace all the way down. God makes us for no other reason but to share God’s love and life. Creation is the joy and love God has within God spilled over.
In Genesis we are made for no other reason but to love God.
Augustine’s way of putting this is that we are teleological creatures. ‘Telos’ means end. We are creatures directed towards an end: God and God’s Kindgom. That’s how we’re wired from the Day One of creation (and this is what Sin is: to have our loves directed towards something other than the Kingdom. Sin isn’t the absence of love it’s misdirected love).
We’re teleological, End-driven, creatures. We’re not pushed by beliefs; we are pulled by a desire. It’s not that we’re intellectually convinced and then we muster up the heart to follow Jesus. It’s that we’re attracted to a vision of the End that Christ gives us.
Look at the Sermon on the Mount, the crux of Jesus’ earthly teaching.
Standing on top of the mountain, preaching to the crowds but speaking to his disciples, Jesus uses not the language of belief or ideas. Jesus speaks in the language of desire: ‘Blessed are those who mourn for you will rejoice. Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness sake…’
It’s the language of want Jesus uses to form his people.
It’s possible to persuade me rationally. You may logically convince me. But until you’ve gotten me to want differently, until you’ve redirected my love and desire, you’ve not changed me.
And I am still far from being a disciple.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement in 18th century England, called such Christians ‘almost Christians.’ For Wesley, believing in Jesus was a pale imitation of what we were made for: having the love of God ‘shed abroad in our hearts.’
For Wesley, like St Augustine, since we are made to love God and be directed towards God, to be a disciple is not about having right ideas. Being a disciple is about becoming the kind of person who loves rightly- who desires God and loves neighbor and is directed beyond oneself towards the world in love.
0 Was Ayn Rand a Slave?
I’m not exactly sure how or when Ayn Rand (Ayn is Russian for ‘worst fiction writer ever’) became a prized philosopher. Or, for that matter, I’m not sure when she even qualified to be considered a philosopher as such.
While the recent terrible film version of Atlas Shrugged demonstrated Rand’s limits for plot, character and pathos, her work as a philosopher continues to receive praise and self-serious examination.
What’s even more troubling is to see how her unembarrassed espousal of self-interest has been adopted by self-avowed Christians. It seems more than a little obvious that the world seen through Rand’s eyes could not be more divergent than the one seen through Jesus’ eyes. That the previous sentence might be interpreted as a partisan attack only proves how far Christians have gone in forgetting their core story or, perhaps, in being able to apply that story to the world around them.
It’s one thing to agree to a free-market as a means for our common life together. It’s another to treat it as an end in and of itself, a move a Christian should not agree to make.
For that statement to make sense, though, requires a reminder of just what Christians mean by the word ‘sin.’
The church’s way of thinking about sin is a function of how it thinks about creation and evil.
We are creatures made to desire an end (telos).
God and God’s Kingdom is the End to which we’re properly oriented; that’s how God made us.
Because we’re end-driven creatures, human freedom is different than how we typically define it in modern America. Culturally, civically and economically we tend to think of freedom in the negative; that is, freedom is the absence of coercion. Thus, the ‘free market’ is a market without any external controls or values imposed upon it.
Freedom, in such a context, is not directed to any End, or rather it’s directed to whatever End the individual decides.
For Christians, however, freedom isn’t defined negatively as something that exists in the absence of coercion.
Freedom isn’t freedom from something; freedom is freedom for something.
Freedom is freedom for the Kingdom.
In other words, as telos-driven creatures we are free only when we are directed towards and participating in the Kingdom, only when we’re wrapped up in God’s will.
Freedom then, as Paul describes it, isn’t independence itself but dependence on God. When we try to live- or shop- without acknowledging our dependence on God, our loves become disordered, directed towards some other end but God. A Paul says of his own pre-Christ life, the freedom he thought he enjoyed was actually slavery.
Augustine says famously that ‘our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee (God).’
Question:
Why is it that the pursuit of, say, material happiness so often leads to sensations of emptiness and meaninglessness? Even nothingness?
Here’s why, according to Augustine.
Because creation is given as a gracious gift, the goodness of creation is only ‘good’ insofar as it participates and points back to God’s greater goodness. Wine is good, for example, because its a sign of the graciousness of what God has made.
However, when you’re no longer directed towards or participating in God’s End, the Kingdom, you effectively strip the material things in creation from God’s goodness. They no longer have the purpose for which God gave them. They no longer have any meaning.
Think of the pervasive sin of consumerism.
As William Cavanaugh says:
“All such loves are disordered loves, loves looking for something worth loving that is not just arbitrarily chosen. A person buys something- anything- trying to fill the hole that is the empty shrine (by which he means our having been created to desire the Kingdom). And once the shopper purchases the thing, it turns into a nothing and he has to head back to the mall to continue the search. With no objective End to guide the search, his search is literally endless.”
In this way, the ‘free market’ as we tend to think about it isn’t free at all. In the words of Paul, it’s slavery. Or, put the other way round, only someone who loves God can participate in the market without becoming a slave.
Sorry Ayn.
Here’s a good story from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the rise of Rand.