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“But what does that have to do with real life?” I have come to expect an occasional question like this in courses on systematic theology. I confess that I am often tempted to snap back, “If you would just abandon your vulgar notions of ‘real’ life and muster some intellectual curiosity you could spare us your question!” Usually, I overcome the temptation and give a little speech instead. If students complain that theology is too “theoretical,” I invite them to consider Kant’s argument that nothing is as practical as a good theory. If they object that theologians entertain outdated and there­ fore irrelevant ideas, I offer them a Kierkegaardian observation that the right kind of non-contemporaneity may be more timely than today’s newspaper. I conclude by explaining how ideas that seem detached from everyday concerns may in fact touch the very heart of those concerns.

And yet, when I am done with my disquisition, I have dealt with only half of the worry expressed in my student’s skeptical question. We theolo­gians sometimes do teach and write as if we have made a studied effort to avoid contact with the “impurities” of human lives. We do so partly by our choice of topics. The number of pages theologians have devoted to the question of transubstantiation -which does or does not take place durng any given Sunday -would, I suspect, far exceed the number of pages we have devoted to the daily work that fills our lives Monday through Sat­urday. We also take flight from the concerns of the quotidian by how we treat great theological themes such as the Trinity, Christology, and soteriology. As thinkers we rightly focus on conceptual difficulties  -“How can God be one and three persons at the same time?” “How can Christ be both God and man?” “How can we owe salvation to nothing but grace and yet be free?”  -but in the process we sometimes lose the larger significance of these doctrines. Moreover, as academics we are caught in the movement toward increased specialization. On the one hand, specialization seems a necessary condition for fundamental research. On the other hand, it tends to make us lose sight of the overarching subject of the­ology. The scholarly interests of theologians then fail to match the realities of the people in the pew and on the street.

There is yet another important reason for a perceived disconnect be­ tween theology and so-called “real” life. It lies in the distinction between the theoretical and the practical sciences that goes all the way back to Aris­totle and his disciples. According to this distinction, the goal of the theoretical sciences is truth, and the goal of the practical sciences is action. Aristotle considered the theoretical sciences, in which knowledge is pursued for knowledge’s sake, a higher wisdom than the practical sciences, which are pursued for their usefulness. It has long been debated how theology fits into this Aristotelian scheme -Thomas Aquinas, for instance, weighed in on the side of theology being a theoretical science, and Duns Scotus argued that it was a practical ones. Obviously, if theology is a theoretical science, then it only secondarily has something to do with practices; one has to make separate inquiry into practical implications of knowledge pursued for its own sake. But if theology is a practical science, then practices are from the start included within the purview of its concerns.

From Miroslav Volf, “Theology for a Way of Life.” In Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life. Edited by Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002, p. 245-6.

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I come from a Christian tradition that eschews the organisation of worship. Drawing on an approach to worship developed in the 20th century which drew on Romantic thought, spontaneous worship was seen as more authentic and repetitious liturgy deadening to the soul. My own experience has been quite the inverse. I found spontaneous worship to be surprisingly repetitious and only different in that the level of care was lower and many crucial elements of worship (particularly confession and absolution) were often omitted. I love the prayerbook and find worship using Cranmer’s prose to be uniquely nourishing to my soul.
I bring this sensibility to my reading of liturgy, particularly those texts in the New Testament which are so often wielded as weapons by the anti-liturgical. One of these came up today in the sermon, and liturgy was far from the topic which was eloquently covered by the preaching today, it still struck me as an interesting challenge for biblical interpreters striving to remain contemporary while not anachronistic.
The text is from Mark 7:

“Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.) And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God)— then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.” (Mark 7:1–13 ESV)

The Pharisees and scribes, described as coming from the liturgical police in Jerusalem, were probably sent to undermine Jesus’ ministry by pointing out the lax conduct of his disciples here. Mark even provides his readers with a gloss in verse 3 explaining the basis for their criticism. There is a polemic against the Pharisees on several levels here.

First, that they are slavishly attentive to ritual behavior without getting at the heart of the matter. Jesus drives this home by quoting Isaiah 29:13.1

Second, and perhaps worse still, this attentiveness to ritual is based on an overwrought respect for the “tradition of the elders” (Greek: paradosin tōn presbyterōn)  as Jesus notes, “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8). He goes on to intensify this critique of tradition in verse 9 and following as he notes that the practice of corban is a “You have a fine way of  rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!”

As I’ve seen, our response to this very incisive critique by Jesus can be overextended, and I tend to think that an over-reaction which seeks to abolish ‘tradition’ and purge our religion of ‘ritual acts’ has its own consequences. In some ways, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s appeal to tradition as a basis for the cultivation of coherent moral action, is a 20th century reaction to the 19th and early 20th century to the sort of over-reaction by Protestant Christians I am describing here.

So if we are to try and avoid overreaction, I would like to explore some possible ways we can read this text (and others like it) more carefully and less anachronistically.

First of all, as my good professor of NT studies at Regent college suggests, it is important to get the Phrarisees right: the trouble with the Pharisees is not that they sought to construct impossibly elaborate ritual schemes that imprisoned people. Rather, as Rikk Watts suggests: “we often hold them to be hypocrites and fairly nasty people” but actually, “you’d probably like having a Pharisee next door, they were good people: no late night parties; no wild women or loud cars; no drugs; a bit over keen on being religious, but not too bad. In fact they were respected by the people; even though the people couldn’t live up to their expections… Why then did they come in for such flack [from Jesus and his disciples]? Because they are the ones who are offering the most serious alternative to Jesus. Populist to a degree; not distant and self-interested like the Sadducees; not violent like the zealots, nor off with the visionaries in the desert: which for most was just not an alternative.” (a few quotes from Rikk’s brilliant Introductory NT course, in the lecture on Jewish and Palestinian Backgrounds to the NT).

Jesus’ rejoinder to the Pharisees changes the language slightly, which is also noteworthy – while the pharisees are concerned that the disciples seem to be unconcerned with the “tradition of the elders” (paradosin tōn presbyterōn), picking up on the opposition posed in Isaiah 29, Jesus suggests that they “abandon God’s commandments” and instead “hold to the tradition of men” (krateite tēn paradosin tōn anthrōpōn) – in verse 9 his reference is just to “your tradition,” elders are not mentioned again until Mark 8:312. It helps if we note that this opposition is a specific one: between the commands of God, probably a reference to the Torah (or books of Moses) and the tradition of men (which is probably a reference to the accumulated oral tradition of rabbinic halachah, which involved exegesis on scripture). Taken in this light, Jesus’ example in vs. 10-13 makes a good deal of sense: primacy is given to the Torah where we read in the law of Moses that one is to honor father and mother3. We may interpret that text, but if our interpretation overrides its plain meaning, this is unacceptable. But this example is itself a noteworthy defense of tradition, both in the sense of affirming the primacy of the original statement of the covenant over against innovative new interpretations, and in the very basic affirmation to honor one’s parents – which is itself the most basic definition of tradition.

So we can not only rescue tradition here, but in fact affirm that Jesus is calling the Pharisees to a conservative form of tradition reception. But what of the dismissal of liturgy that we find in Jesus’ words here? There are two different sets of ritual acts noted in the text: first ritual handwashing which Mark observes is not merely Pharasaic practice, but universally Jewish (in vs. 3 “…and all the Jews” GK: pantes hoi Ioudaioi). The second is added by Mark in vs. 4, where he refers to other sorts of ritual washing: “And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as  the washing of  cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.” I’ll have to do a bit more background work on this before I’m confident about my conclusions here, but I’ll preliminarily suggest that the same opposition holds for this example. Ritual washing for all people is nowhere prescribed in the Hebrew bible. We find the instruction in Exodus 30 that Aaron and his sons wash their hands before approaching the altar (which may have provided the basis for the rabbinic instruction), but this is as specific as the Hebrew bible gets on the matter. So the rejection here of ritual washing is not a rejection of a liturgical practice prescribed in Torah, but a creative extrapolation of one. This seems to me to be an important distinction, and affirms that we are not rejecting liturgical worship, but a dangerous method of interpreting scripture as the basis for commending certain liturgical forms.

Of course, I’m not so sure that the intention here is to reject creative biblical interpretation either, but I’ll save that one for another post!

  • 1. “And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men, therefore, behold, I will again do wonderful things with this people, with wonder upon wonder; and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.” (Isaiah 29:13–14 ESV)
  • 2. “And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.” (Mark 8:31 ESV)
  • 3. ““Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12 ESV)

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Sometimes “justice” isn’t the most comprehensive response to evil:

As Martha Minow puts it: in the face of collective violence, “…closure is not possible. Even if it were, any closure would insult those whose lives are forever ruptured. Even to speak, to grope for words to describe horrific events, is to pretend to negate their unspeakable qualities and effects. Yet silence is also an unacceptable offense, a shocking implication that the perpetrators in fact succeeded.” From Between vengeance and forgiveness: facing history after genocide and mass violence (1998), p.5.

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“…ethics cannot be understood and ventured as an independent discipline working on its own presuppositions and and according to its own methods, but only as an integral element in dogmatics.” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV.4 §74 “The Central Problem of Special Ethics”).

I resonate with this statement by Barth so deeply, yet find the application of this conviction in contemporary theological writing so often results in moral reflection that is superficially engaged and deeply disappointing. Even though we may conceive of ethics as a part of the task of theological reflection, this does not mean that a degree in Christian Doctrine leaves one properly equipped to conduct the task of Christian ethics.

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It has been a blessedly full year! Our son is now 1 year old and babbling, crawling, climbing, and walking all over the place. This blog has been a casualty to that new paternal vocation, but we’re finally getting settled back into some family rhythms and I’m happy to be back to some writing.

You may also notice that my blog is suddenly much uglier. I’ve made a transition from wordpress to drupal, which is something like moving from a honda civic to a porsche. There are an abundance of new features that I’ll be rolling out on this blog over the course of time, but there is a steeper learning and maintenance curve that I’m working hard to master. So, for now, apologies for the ugly layout. I’ll be working to clean this template up into something sharper in the near future.

Thanks friends and readers for your patience this past year as I’ve been slow to write both here and via email. I’m looking forward to getting back into correspondence with you!

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Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

For me there is something satisfying about giving your house a good scrub and then sitting down in the midst of organization and cleanliness to enjoy a good book and a cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon. More than an abstract satisfaction associated with cleaning, I feel it like a satisfaction of putting your own space in order. There is something unique about home, a kind of familiarity that develops into a special sort of appreciation. In my case, I can tell where the cat is walking by the creak of particular floorboards, I know exactly which spaces get the right sort of light for reading a book, and each corner of home has potent memories associated with it. Housekeeping offers a way of defending the importance of the bundle of memories and reflexes which we associate with our home.

This can extend beyond the walls of your apartment and function on a city-level too. I’m always excited to run into someone from my hometown of Seattle as no one else understands the many things (refined appreciation of well-roasted coffee or a love of the mixed smells of rain and cedar trees) which are unique to my geographical home. There is an unavoidably intimate bond you share with a person who has drunk in the same smells and sights over a lifetime. New places that we experience get absorbed into our place-memory, but we nevertheless tend to experience an anchoring in time and place.

Contrary to what some might think, this familiarity is actually an experience that we share with God. The writer of the gospel of John surely had this in mind when he recounts, “So the Word became flesh; he made his home among us” (Jn 1:14 REB). In John’s original Greek, the word translated as “made his home” (literally “tabernacled”) refers back to the Tabernacle in Exodus, where we are also reminded that God asked the people to make space for him to be with them in a way that resonates with our own unique anchoring in place and time. But the suggestion here isn’t that God becomes a permanent guest staying in our space, but rather than he takes up residence in our home along with us, sharing our intimate emplaced experience with us.

While other religious traditions emphasise the distance of God from men and our dusty spaces, Jesus uniquely emphasised his sharing in our embeddedness. And contrary to what we might expect, this intimacy does not diminish the power of God. Instead, the familiarity that brings satisfaction to housekeeping is another form of the intimacy known by the maker of all time and space.

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Against Rome Augustine had argued that since property originates in the divine act of creation, the ownership and use of property should always be related to a divine and transcendent conception of justice in which God gives to each sufficient to meet their needs. In the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas elaborated the implications of this Augustinian view when he founds his account of natural right and property on its derivation from providential relations between creator and creation, and between creatures. In Thomist political thought property involves responsibilities to uphold the common good, as well as rights to individual use, for if it is used in such a way as to deny the sufficiency of others then its original ordering to the individual by providence is undermined. In these circumstances the householder whose children are hungry for want of sustenance acquires a divinely given right to take bread from a person who has excess of bread who loses the right to call such an act theft.14 For Aquinas the act of taking what is needed by he who lacks does not involve a foundational conflict since the individual property owner is not an autonomous rights holder but steward of that which emanates from the providence of God and that remains part of created order, and not just a humanly constructed domain.

From Northcott, Michael S. 2011. Parochial ecology on st briavels common: Rebalancing the local and the universal in anglican ecclesiology and practice. Journal of Anglican Studies Pending Publication: page 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1740355311000167.

See also Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, ‘Natural Law and Perfect Community: Contributions of Christian Platonism to Political Theory’, Modern Theology 14 (1998), pp. 19-46.

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‘Parks, street trees, and manicured lawns do very little to establish the connection between us and the land. They teach us nothing of its productivity, nothing of its capacities. Many people who are born, raised, and live out their lives in cities simply do not know where the food they eat comes from or what a living garden is like. Their only connection with the productivity of the land comes from packaged tomatoes on the supermarket shelf. But contact with the land and its growing process is not simply a quaint nicety from the past that we can let go of casually. More likely, it is a basic part of the process of organic security. Deep down, there must be some sense of insecurity in city dwellers who depend entirely upon the supermarkets for their produce.’

From Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (1977).

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In reaction to… discomforts, whites frequently claim to ‘not see difference’. Ignoring race with black people (such as not mentioning slavery or the race of a famous figure) is comparable to ‘that [behavior] exhibited by certain people on encountering someone with a visible physical handicap. They pretend not to notice that the handicap exists and hope, thereby, to minimize discomfort.’ Indeed, as Toni Morrison points out, ‘the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture’. Yet the will to ‘not see’ these differences, Cose insists, is a costly ‘solution’. Aversive reactions eventuate in practices of avoidance and group isolation, providing supports for an obliviousness that is a denied, thus repressed, will-to-disregard. This obliviousness, importantly, can co-exist with belief in equality and (Christian) inclusiveness.

Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church, (OUP, 2007) p. 20. Referencing Ellis Cose, Color-Blind: Seeing beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 189-90.

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In the face of seeming Christian indifference about injustice, several commentators have sought to retrieve the force of Jesus’ concern for injustice. Particularly against the portraits which paint Jesus in soft pastel hues with a happy lamb over his shoulders, smiling white schoolchildren at his feet, and happy crowds in tow; commentators have recently noted that Jesus did not always wear a smile. In fact, he had particularly strong words of judgement for perpetrators of injustice, particularly if they were religious insiders. We read of Jesus’ indictment of religious insiders (perhaps the religious teachers of his day) who by their leadership cause their followers to stumble: “‘But anyone who is the downfall of one of these little ones who have faith, would be better thrown into the sea with a great mill stone hung round his neck.” (Mark 9:42 NJB, see Matt 18:6–7, Mark 9:42, Luke 17:1–3). The statement in Luke is preceded by a particularly vivid parable about a rich man named Lazarus who feasts with indifferent extravagance in spite of great poverty just outside his door and as a result experiences harsh judgement (Luke 16:19–31). Similarly, Jesus shows his anger not with words but with action when he physically drove out those who were subverting the worship of God’s people by creating a commercial opportunity for themselves in the temple (see Matt 21:12–13, Mark 11:15–17, Luke 19:45–46). Finally, in Matthew we find another parable which unflinchingly tells of judgement of “sheep” and “goats”: “in so far as you neglected do this [helped the hungry and thirsty, clothed the naked, and visited the sick] to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.”  And they will go away to eternal punishment, and the upright to eternal life’ (Matt 25:31–46). Close study of each of these statements in context yields a far more nuanced reading than I have provided here, which in some cases can explain the reasons for Jesus’ harshness. But one cannot deny that there is a measure of forcefulness, righteous anger, and judgement which lies behind these words. In short, commentators note, Jesus was no milk-toast.

I hope that Jesus’ concern for justice has been definitively re-established for our generation, but this is not actually my concern here. There is a further danger behind this (albeit partially authentic) recasting of an angry Jesus and that is that in the midst of our rhetoric we may “lose the forest for the trees.” We cannot appreciate Jesus’ full personality, if we fail to acknowledge the overwhelming measure of grace which he extended to all sorts of people, including those with wealth and power who acted with cruelty and abuse. Failing to acknowledge this, we have simply made the same mistake twice, substituting unmeasured but righteous anger for wimpy grace. Counter-examples abound, including the extending of grace for a cruelly religious Saul who acted in unrighteous judgement (Acts 9) and the tax-collector Zaccheus who made a habit of abusing his public office and extorting people and finds himself hosting Jesus at his table (Luke 19). I also wonder whether this over-correction with respect to Jesus may be a consequence of the failure to correct a popular misreading of the Old Testament which inversely finds only a God of harsh judgement. One cannot fail to note that there are surely stern words and acts of judgement in the pages of the Old Testament, but these exists in the midst of a text that largely expresses an extraordinary measure of grace and a commitment by God to the redemption of the whole creation. Jesus’ offer of friendship and words of redemption were extended to the tax-payer and the tax-extorter alike, just as God’s larger work of redemption is concerned with all persons. How we conduct ourselves is of the utmost importance, but we must not lose sight of the fact that God’s grace is indefatigable particularly for the sake of “overheated” rhetoric about social justice.