Monthly Archives: June 2007

Everything in heaven comes apart

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Which is the title of one of my favourite Martyn Joseph songs. I have had the strangest of mornings, of bizarre extremes, positive and negative. I felt as if I was precisely ‘coming apart’ – but God’s grace is present in it.

We had one of my all-time favourite psalms at Morning Prayer – psalm 45, which I’d like at my funeral, but a different verse struck me today rather than the usual ones:

“Your right hand will teach you terrible things”

That was, of course, the burden of the Old Testament Heart. It is starting to shape me more and more; sometimes it is frightening, but I do believe that God is in it. God being in it, of course, doesn’t stop it being painful.

Ho hum.

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 Wicker Man (Director’s Cut)

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I really enjoyed this, the original in Director’s Cut form (not the Nicholas Cage vehicle, tho’ I’m sure I’ll watch that at some point), though it isn’t clear to me why it is classed as a ‘horror’ film (though the ending is clearly horrific, it’s not “horror” horrific. I suspect that distinction doesn’t ultimately make sense, but anyhow…)

Half way through the film I had very little sympathy for the policeman – I thought his position was self-righteous and arrogant. In his shoes I would either have ‘smelled the coffee’ and headed off for reinforcements, or I would have thought ‘this is too embedded for trivial interference’ and left them to it. My views changed a bit over the course of watching it, partly because Girard exercised his influence, and I started to see it as a question of stopping the scapegoating, and that the sergeant does end up as a genuine martyr to the faith (ie not just executed for being stupid).

It was a very sinister film, in the best sense of that word, especially the use of masks (made me think of John Fowles’ Magus; the book, that is, as I haven’t seen the film). I also kept thinking of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer: “It is now clear that what gives this practice depth is its connection with the burning of a man” (see here for a much fuller explanation of what I’m on about!). You should also check out what John Morehead has to say here.

I purchased the ‘collector’s edition’ DVD, ie the one with extra material and commentaries, so I think I’m going to spend some time studying this; I think it’s one of those films that repay close attention.