Category Archives: theology

A quickie on Corpus Christi

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This is for Justin Lewis-Anthony, and also for Steve Hayes who asked a similar question sometime back, and also for Chris Garton-Zavesky as it will explain where I’m coming from. The root source of my perspective on this is Henri de Lubac (via Fergus Kerr to begin with) but I should say that it’s very much my perspective, and in particular the specific view I express here is not compatible with official RC teaching (I don’t think. Not yet anyhow – we’ll have to wait for the post-Vatican II generation to take control 😉 NB I haven’t yet finished reading Cavanaugh so I don’t know if he agrees with my take on this, but his overall argument seems strikingly compatible.

(BTW a direct link to the talk I’m referring to is here, it’s the talks numbered 3.1 and 3.2)

The phrase ‘Corpus Christi’ refers to three things: the body of Jesus of Nazareth whilst he was a human here on earth (which meaning I’ll now ignore) and two more things: the community of believers (the church) and the bread and wine in communion (the sacrament).

For the first thousand years or so of Christian history, across East and West, the relationship between those two latter forms was:
– corpus verum, the true body (touchable, physical) was the church, ie your baptised neighbour;
– corpus mysticum, the mystical body (apprehended by faith) was the sacrament, ie the bread and wine shared in the context of worship.

Following the impact of nominalist philosophy and wider cultural trends (possibly a re-assertion of pagan heroic ideology) the Pope instituted the new festival of Corpus Christi which involved a reversal of those two meanings, viz, from now on:
– corpus verum, the true body, was the sacrament, thereby touchable and physical, and, most especially, a vehicle for devotion (so you have the invention of the monstrance and waving the host around) – and the priest becomes the magic ingredient of a production line;
– corpus mysticum, the mystical body, was the church, thereby only apprehensible by faith, which meant that if the authorities didn’t believe you had faith, there was no longer any blasphemy involved in torturing you into the right belief – hence the inquisition.

From this, as I say, most everything that has gone wrong in Western Christianity stems.

I was first exposed to de Lubac’s arguments in a class led by Catherine Pickstock at Cambridge in 1998. In that class I pointed out that the logical consequence of de Lubac’s research was to undermine the validity of exposition of the sacrament. This wasn’t a popular thought, and Aquinas was invoked. Whether Aquinas can really give an independent justification of exposition I’m not sure, but I suspect that only someone concerned to preserve him (and the wider catholic church) from error would wish to argue for it.

As I say, more on this in my talk. One day it might all get written up!

Gulp

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“He urged Bible-loving Christians to consider theological study and a ministry of teaching and writing. His model was that of the stream from which Christians drink. The stream is polluted by bad theology. Our task is to feed in good theology. ‘Trickle-down’ theories are risky, but I think this one works. I had been heading for parish ministry; from that day on I knew God was calling me to an academic, though still very much church-related, vocation.”

(Tom Wright here ; HT Chrisendom)

I certainly think bad theology is responsible for an astonishing amount of heartache and anguish, and that the ‘cure of souls’ is precisely about applying the medicine of the (genuine) gospel. Hence the ‘teaching and writing’ aspect, which grabs my guts. I can’t reconcile this with academia though. It’s not so much that bad theology is embedded in our prominent institutions (though that is true) it is that there is a structural problem – I’m not sure it is possible to do good theology apart from the eucharistic community, and the academies are NOT eucharistic communities. Hopefully there will form a place where that element of my vocation can emerge healthily. This blog has something to do with it, I believe…

Theological learning

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Living theologians with whom I find myself in most sympathy tend to be either moderate evangelicals (Eugene Peterson, Tom Wright) or non-doctrinaire Catholics, like Nicholas Lash and James Alison. One of the latter is Fergus Kerr, and I’ve just taken delivery of his ’20th C Catholic theologians’, which looks most exciting. At the end of the preface he writes this:

“I cannot resist adding a word of thanks to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of the Internet search engine Google, without which my claims to learning would be even more tenuous.”

Now there is a sentiment with which I am in wholehearted sympathy!

The Bread of Life

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Audio recordings of my four learning church talks on communion (split into 8 half-hour segments).

Gabcast! Learning Church (Mersea) #2 – Bread of Life 1.1

First part of talks on communion.

Gabcast! Learning Church (Mersea) #3 – Bread of Life 1.2

Part 2 of sequence of talks on communion

Gabcast! Learning Church (Mersea) #4 – Bread of Life 2.1

Part three of talks on communion

Gabcast! Learning Church (Mersea) #9 – Bread of Life 2.2

Gabcast! Learning Church (Mersea) #8 – Bread of Life 3.1

Gabcast! Learning Church (Mersea) #7 – Bread of Life 3.2

Gabcast! Learning Church (Mersea) #6 – Bread of Life 4.1

Gabcast! Learning Church (Mersea) #5 – Bread of Life 4.2

TBTM20070606

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So then, when you come to the Lord’s Supper to feed spiritually upon Christ, and when you thank the Lord for his great favour, for the redemption whereby you are delivered from despair, and for the pledge whereby you are assured of eternal salvation, when you join with your brethren in partaking of the bread and wine which are the tokens of the body of Christ, then in the true sense of the word you eat him sacramentally. You do inwardly that which you represent outwardly, your soul being strengthened by the faith which you attest in the tokens.
(found here, a post chiming with many of my preoccupations at the moment. And that’s Zwingli by the way, remarkable!)

Is Christ Divided? session 6

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And now I have surpassed myself – this is _next_week’s_sheet!!

BTW, this is picking up themes from a thread on the blog last September, see here for a relevant sermon, and then a sequence of posts, here , here and here.

My thinking has continued to develop, and these notes contain my most up-to-date thoughts on the question of church discipline. Hit ‘full post’ for the text.


Notes for the house groups on 1 Corinthians.

Week six, beginning Sunday 27 May: 1 Corinthians 5

Main theme: the nature of church discipline

The ONE question for discussion!!

1.What are the grounds for excommunicating a member of the church?

Supplementary thoughts:
Paul is clear that the ‘immoral brother’ should be cast out, ‘put out of your fellowship’, handed over to Satan, not even to eat with, expelled. How does this reconcile with Jesus’ life and ministry, where he was condemned by the Pharisees for table fellowship with sinners? Is it to do with the nature of the offence committed? How does this reconcile with Jesus’ teaching about not judging? How does this reconcile with the idea that ‘we are none of us righteous, no not one’?

A way forward may be to consider Matthew 18.15-35, especially vv 15-17 (bear in mind that this gospel is written by a tax collector!) The structure for church discipline here is:
– take a matter up privately (the ‘against you’ in v15 may be spurious)
– take one or two other members of the congregation with you
– take it to the church body as a whole
– if the church is rejected then the sinner is outside the community.

The difference here is that it is the sinner’s choice that places them outside the community; it is less a matter of condemnation than a refusal to accept forgiveness (the rest of Mt 18). In other words, the matter is less about whether a member of the community is a sinner – for we are all sinners – than whether the understanding within which sin is dealt with (repentance/forgiveness/new life) is shared. The issue is not about any individual act (however wicked); rather it is about how community life is to be maintained when it is structured on Jesus. Hence verse 11 – someone who calls himself a brother, but rejects the teaching of the community.

Different church communities have followed different policies on this over time. What sort of framework would be best for Mersea?

Notes on verses
v1 – the context is probably a stepmother and stepson following the death of the father; there may be an issue about securing an inheritance lying behind the controversy
v5 – ‘hand this man over to Satan’ – ie back into the world
v5b – the word ‘his’ is not in the Greek; the second half of this sentence may therefore be about the church (ie the expulsion saves _the_church_ on the day of the Lord)
vv7-8 – we’ll come back to this when we explore communion later

A little something extra:
A brother in Scetis committed a fault. A council was called to which abba Moses was invited, but he refused to go to it. Then the priest sent someone to him, saying, ‘Come, for everyone is waiting for you’. So he got up and went. He took a leaking jug and filled it with water and carried it with him. The others came out to meet him and said, ‘What is this, father?’ The old man said to them, ‘My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the sins of another.’ When they heard that, they said no more to the brother but forgave him.

A brother asked abba Poemen, ‘If I see my brother sin, is it right to say nothing about it?’ The old man replied, ‘Whenever we cover our brother’s sin, God will cover ours; whenever we tell people about our brother’s guilt, God will do the same about ours.’

A brother sinned and the priest ordered him to go out of the church; abba Bessarion got up and went out with him, saying ‘I, too, am a sinner.’

(From ‘Daily Readings with the Desert Fathers’, ed Benedicta Ward)

Is Christ Divided? session 5

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This week’s sheet….
Notes for the house groups on 1 Corinthians.

Week five, beginning Sunday 20 May: 1 Corinthians 4.6 – 4.21

Main theme: the nature of power
apostolic style and authority
grace

Questions to prompt discussion

1.What does ‘do not go beyond what is written’ mean?
2.How does this link with taking pride in ‘one man over another’? Can you think of examples in the contemporary church (in UK and worldwide) where there is such pride?
3.Is there anything that a Christian can boast about? If only the cross, does this mean that a Christian should never enjoy a sense of achievement? (or similar)
4.Would you like Paul as your church leader? Paul is engaging with what he perceives to be the arrogance of the church community, and a large part of his method is sarcasm (vv 8-13) – but is sarcasm a form of blessing or answering kindly?
5.What is the power of the Kingdom of God? What is the context of Paul’s statement – and therefore what is he suggesting specifically?

Some background thoughts
Paul is still struggling with ‘party spirit’ at Corinth. He has been talking about Apollos as an example, not because he is particularly angry with Apollos or disagrees with him, but because the Corinthians have distorted the faith through emphasising the importance of individual leaders. That is the ‘idiom’ of their culture, and against this Paul is emphasising the nature of apostolic leadership – humiliated and weak. There is a strong sense that the Corinthians have started to look down on Paul as a manual worker who doesn’t speak well.

Paul is here exercising an episcopal role, ie oversight of the church community which he founded, and is using parental language to try and exercise discipline. It would appear that his attempt goes wrong, and the divisions are not overcome (see 2 Cor 1.23 – 2.4).

There are strong echoes of the cross (1.18-25) in Paul’s description of apostolic ministry.

Notes on verses
v6 – “Few scholars claim to understand the allusion” to not go beyond what is written; yet I suspect that the point Paul was trying to make can be discerned. NB there was no New Testament at this time
v8 – almost certainly not economic riches or kingship, but figures of speech used by popular philosophers of the time
v9 – ‘end of the procession’ – captured prisoners dragged behind triumphant military leaders, usually to be executed as entertainment or sold into slavery
v14 – ‘guardians’ – literally childminders, babysitters
v14 – compare with 6.5

Is Christ Divided? session 4

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Catching up…
Notes for the house groups on 1 Corinthians.

Week four, beginning Sunday 5 May: 1 Corinthians 3.1 – 4.5

Main theme: Divisions in the church
The nature of leadership
All things come from God
Party ‘faction’ is absurd – Christ is the sole foundation

Questions to prompt discussion

1.What is the nature of Paul’s distinction between milk and solid food?
2.Why is division seen as a sign of spiritual infancy?
3.What is leadership? What is specifically Christian leadership?
4.What place does obedience play in your understanding of discipleship?
5.How is leadership judged, and by whom?
6.What builds a church? What are the good materials to use? Are they present in Mersea?
7.What is God’s temple? How is this linked with the new temple of Christ’s body?

Some background thoughts

The first part of this section is springing the rhetorical trap laid in the last chapter (remember the shift from ‘I’ language to ‘we’ language). Paul is very opposed to the idea of being aligned with a human leader or authority, as opposed to Christ – it a) places leaders on a pedestal, where they don’t belong; b) causes faction and rivalry; and c) encourages them to consider human praise rather than divine judgement.

There are three metaphors here, discussing leadership: agriculture (v 3.5-9); building (v 3.9-17); and slavery (household servants) (4.1-5); in each of them Paul undercuts the importance of human leadership: The leader is a) the servant of the community, ‘belonging’ to the community (v 21-23); b) agents or instruments of Christ (no intrinsic merit – growth comes from God alone); and c) judged by God alone. In elevating human leadership the church is actually diminishing itself.

You might like to look at Hebrews 13.17!

Notes on verses
v 3.1 – infants in Christ are ‘fleshly’, vulnerable to sin; this isn’t flesh vs spirit, but flesh governed by sin rather than flesh governed by spirit
v 4&5 – there is no indication that Paul disagrees doctrinally with Apollos – he wouldn’t keep quiet about it if he did!
v 11 – the foundation in Christ, link with 1.23 (scandal)
v 13 – the day, cf 1.8
v 16 – the ‘you’ is plural, not singular (ie the congregation is the temple); possible parallel between Spirit dwelling in church and ‘shekinah’ presence in Jerusalem temple
v 4.1 – secret things of God = ‘sacred mysteries’ (link with Learning Church talk)