Incompletely human

Even if humans were statistically just as likely to sin as they are to love their children, it cannot, for Thomas, be right in the same sense of the word “natural” to say that human beings naturally sin as that they naturally love their children. To find oneself puzzled by the words of the Letter to the Hebrews because the exception of his sinlessness seems a very drastic limitation upon Christ's solidarity with us; to find oneself wondering whether Christ could really have known what it is like to be us if he does not experience sin, as it were, from the inside; to imagine that one of the solidarities in which human beings share is solidarity in sin because we all do it and so understand one another in our sinning; to conclude, therefore, that it is a restriction on Christ's solidarity with us that he is absolutely sinless, for a Christ who could not sin would seem not to share our human nature in its concrete actuality—all this is, for Thomas, getting things upside down. 

...Unlike Christ, it is we who are incompletely human. Docetism is the heresy that Jesus is not truly a human being, but only apparently so, because he is too good to be true. Thomas's position is that it is we who, on account of our sinfulness, are not good enough to be true. We do not know for ourselves and from ourselves what it is like to be truly human. From ourselves and from others at best we get partial glimpses of what a true human being looks like. But we have no full picture of what it is to be truly human except from the human nature of Christ. The point about the exception made in the Letter to the Hebrews is that “solidarity in sin” is in fact an oxymoron.

...the casual theological identification of fallen human nature with human nature as such ignores what is manifestly intended by the author of Hebrews, for whom Christ alone can perfectly communicate with us because he is perfectly, indefectibly, human; it is precisely because he is free of sin that the intimacy of Christ's solidarity with our sinful selves is unhindered, and in him the view of what we truly are is uncluttered by the obstructing impedimenta of sin; and so it is precisely because we are dehumanized by our sinfulness that our solidarities with Christ and with one another are so tragically awry, and in consequence, our relationships, personal and political, beset by fantasy and illusion. For Thomas, Christ is more intimately human than we are, not less; closer to our true selfhood than we are; in closer solidarity with us because he is without sin, not distanced from us on account of his innocence, as we are distanced from ourselves by sin, from one another, and from God.

From Denys Turner's Thomas Aquinas, a Portrait. 

Running towards the destruction to help out

You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running towards the destruction to help out.... This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it, but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness. But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago. So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will."

Patton Oswalt
Facebook post responding to Boston bombing

I intended to post this some time back but it got slotted into the drafts and then went out of my mind. Oswalt is right up to a point: there are always great people who will run 'towards the destruction to help out'. And that does show that the heart of God is at work in humanity. However I'm not so sure that he's entirely right about humanity not being inherently evil. Certainly the theology of the church, and of the Jewish people before that, was that the world and its people were awry and that we needed a Saviour to put it right again. Christians believe this was Jesus and that he has saved the world. However the working out of this salvation is still having to be done day by day, bit by bit, and the history of the 20th century alone shows that evil rears its ugly head at the drop of a hat. 

The place to start

All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are already prigs... Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.

G.K. Chesterton 

What's Wrong with the World

Loving Christ

But as St Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ. Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person; but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea.

From page 17 of St Francis of Assisi, by G K Chesterton.

The joys of Christian living

Life in Christ includes the joy of eating together, enthusiasm for making progress, the pelasure of working and learning, the joy of serving whoever needs us, contact with nature, enthusiasm for communal projects, the pleasure of living sexuality in keeping with the Gospel, and all the things that the Father gives us as signs of his sincere love. We can find the Lord in the midst of the joys of our limited existence, and that gives rise to sincere gratitude. So the mercy of the ‘Samaritan Church’ tends to cure the wounds of those who feel rejected or excluded so that man can live this happy, whole, full life, a ‘life in abundance.’

From My Door is Always Open: interviews with Pope Francis, by Antonio Spadaro. Pages 69-70

The end of the world

A lengthy extract from P T Forsyth's The Justification of God, pages 75-7. 

 

This great, and righteous, and blessed goal then—what is it? We speak of the end of the world. But (it has been said) in any great sense of the word world, it can have no end. Our deeper views of creation, and of the relation of the creature to the Creator, do not allow us to think of the universe as an external and mechanical product of His, which He could destroy and make another. The existence of the universe is too closely bound up with the being of God for that its life is the immanence of the Transcendent. It does not emerge into Eternity, which is not simply a beyond. The infinite is the content of a finite which holds of the Eternal. The world belongs to God in a deeper sense than being His property. The body is not but the property of the soul. The world holds of God. It cannot therefore have an end, as it had no beginning, in the popular sense of the words; it has a consummation. The universe is not a mere phase of the Infinite which passes like a vapour. It is not a mere parenthesis otiose to an eternal context. It is not a mere scaffolding, not a mere collapsible tent. We cannot strictly speak of the end of the world; we can only speak of the end of certain worlds within the world. Stardust is still a constituent of the world. Extinct suns still have a place in systems. And extinct systems may mean a re-adjustment of the balance of power in space, but they need not mean the winding-up oft he universe.

When we do speak of the end of the world, we really mean the end of man. And, if there be a redemption at all, that end is neither in dust nor fire. The end of Humanity can but mean the return of man to God, in free worship, humble service, and intelligent communion. It means the consummation of the souls that began as His natural creatures and end as redeemed sons. For spiritual personality is a growth through the creative discipline of life, and especially through its tragedies. The supreme tragedy becomes, in the Cross of Christ, the vehicle of the eternal Redemption, and the Source of the New Creation. Man’s end is not dissolution but Eternity, an active communion in the Life divine. A communion it is, and no mere immersion. It is ‘not mere fusion in the Divine, which, for a being like man, would be  extinction. And no mere endless existence could be a true end for man. It could be no consummation. Immortality is much more than just going on. Were it not more it would be the burden of Tithonus.  Eternity is not duration. The true end is the completion of that schooling of soul, will, and person which earthly life divinely means, and which for God’s side is constant new creation and its joy. It is perfect and active union with God’s active Will, the barter of its love, and its secure intercommunion. It is the surrender to God, not of our personality,not of our existence as persons, but of our person, of our egoism as persons; for the living God is God of the living not of the dead. It is a kingdom of souls as ends that realise themselves, though only in the gift of the Spirit, which descends upon us rather than mounts through us. We face here a great paradox. By grace it is given souls to have life in themselves. The great end, therefore, is not even an immortality sentimentalised—a metaphysical, rational, and credible immortality sentimentalised; but it is a moral realm of persons made perfect on a universal and eternal scale by the gift of a holy God. It is the self-realisation of the Holy. It is the Divine Commedia on the scale of all existence. To the whole of Humanity, with faith and hope eclipsed by world catastrophe, the infinite and most merciful Majesty yet says, ‘Fear not, little flock, it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.’ And, ‘Si quis amavit novit quid haec vox clamat.’ *

The chief cause of our being unhinged by catastrophe is twofold. First, that we have drawn our faith from the order of the world instead of its crisis, from the integrity of the moral order rather than from the tragedy of its recovery in the Cross. And, even if we start there, the second error is that we have been more engrossed with the ill we are saved from than with Him who saves us, and the Kingdom for which we are saved. We are more taken up with the wrongs so many men have to bear than with the wrong God has to bear from us all—God who yet atones and redeems in giving us a Kingdom which is always His in reality and ours in reversion. It is not as if God first redeemed, and, having thus prepared the ground, brought in the Kingdom; but He redeemed us by bringing in the Kingdom, and setting it up in eternal righteousness and Eternal Life. The Cross of Christ is not the preliminary of the Kingdom; it is the Kingdom breaking in. It is not the clearing of the site for the heavenly city; it is the city itself

descending out of heaven from God. 

 

*The Latin phrase Forsyth quotes seems a little obscure. According to the rough online translation it means; If anyone knows the sound of this voice and he loved. Presumably that needs to be translated into actual English as something along the lines of: If anyone knows the sound of this voice, he loves it. I'm open to a better interpretation. Forsyth, as usual, gives no indication where the line comes from, and Google seems to indicate that he's the only person quoting it. Again, it would be interesting to know its origin.

Increate Godhead

The atoning thing [of the Atonement] was not its amount or acuteness, but its obedience, its sanctity.

These pathetic ways of thinking about Christ regard him too much as a mere individual before God. They do not satisfy if Christ's relation with man was a racial one and he represented humanity. Especially they do not hold good if that relationship was no mere blood relationship, natural relationship, but a supernatural relationship - blood relationship only in the mystic Christian sense. We are blood relations of Christ, but not in the natural sense of that term, only in the supernatural sense, as those who are related to him in his blood, in his death, and his spirit. The value of Christ's unity and sympathy with us was not simply that he was continuous with the race at its head. It was not a relation of identity. The race was not prolonged into him. The value consists in that life-act of self-identification by which Christ the eternal Son of God became man. We hear much about Christ's essential identity with the human race. That is not true in the sense in which other great men, like Shakespeare, for instance, were identical with the human race, gathering up in consummation its natural genius. Christ's identity was not natural or created identity, but the self-identification of the Creator. Everything turns upon this - whether Christ was a created being, however grand, or whether he was of increate Godhead.

P T Forsyth in The Work of Christ, pages 135/6

Holy love or nothing

Get rid of the idea that judgement is chiefly retribution, and directly infliction. Realise that it is, positively, the establishing and the securing of eternal righteousness and holiness. View punishment as an indirect and collateral necessity, like the surgical pains that make room for nature's curing power. You will then find nothing morally repulsive in the idea of judgment effected in and on Christ, any more than in the thought that the kingdom was set up for him.

God could only justify man before him by justifying himself and his holy law before men. If he had not vindicated his holiness to the uttermost in that way of judgment, it would not be a kind of holiness that men could trust. Thus a faith which could justify man, which could make a foundation for a new humanity, could not exist. We can only be eternally justified by faith in a God who justifies himself as so holy that he must set up his holiness in human history at any price, even at the price of his own beloved and eternal Son.

I close, then, upon that unchangeable word of God's self-justifying holiness. Even the sinner could not trust a love that could not justify itself as holy. It is the holiness of God's love, I urge, that alone enables us to trust him. Without that we should only love him, and the love would fluctuate. For we could not be perfectly sure that his would not. It is the holiness in God's love that is the eternal, stable, unchangeable element in it - the holiness secured for history and its destiny in the Cross. It is only the unchangeable that we could trust; and there alone we find it. If we only loved the love of God, we should have no staple, eternal, universal religion. But we love the holy love he established in Christ, and therefore we are safe with an everlasting salvation.

From P T Forsyth's The Work of Christ, pages 122-3

Reduction

The most fundamental of these desecrations has been the reduction of the human image, which we once understood as the image of God, to an image merely of humanity itself as a "higher animal" -- with the implied permission to be more bewildered, violent, self-deluded, destructive, and self-destructive than any of the animals. From the desecration of that image, the desecration of the world and all its places and creatures inexorably follows. For it appears that, having once repudiated our primordial likening to the maker and preserver of the world, we don't become merely higher animals, merely neutral components of the creation-by-chance of the materialists, but are ruled instead by an antithetical likeness to whatever unmakes and fragments the world.
Wendell Berry"Against the Nihil of the Age" in Imagination in Place

Place

Place is space that has historical meanings, where some things have happened that are now remembered and that provide continuity and identity across generations. Place is space in which important words have been spoken that have established identity, defined vocation, and envisioned destiny. Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands have been issued. Place is indeed a protest against the unpromising pursuit of space. It is a declaration that our humanness cannot be found in escape, detachment, absence of commitment, and undefined freedom.

Walter BrueggemannThe Land

A good setting

God not only created humanity good, God also placed us in a good setting. This setting was both sufficient to meet our material needs and a delightful place characterized by beauty and variety. To not be attached to a particular place (or to be displaced) is portrayed in Scripture as a dreadful consequence of sin, and not a marker of freedom. To experience shalom is not to be delivered from place, but to experience sustenance and delight in a particular place as we wait for the good place that is being prepared for us.

Eric Jacobsen
The Space Between

Education

Education in the true sense, of course, is an enablement to serve -- both the living human community in its natural household or neighborhood and its precious cultural possessions that the living community inherits or should inherit. To educate is, literally, to ‘bring up,’ to bring young people into a responsible maturity, to help them be good caretakers of what they have been given, to help them to be charitable toward fellow creatures.

Wendell Berry
“Higher Education and Home Defense” from Home Economics

Vatican II

Christ summons the Church, as she goes her pilgrim way, to that continual reformation of which she always had need.

Coming forth fromthe eternal Father's love, founded in time by Christ the Redeemer, and made one in the Holy Spirit, the Church has a saving and an eschatological purpose which can be fully attained only in the future world. But she is already present in this world, and is composed of men, that is, members of the earthly city who have a call to form the family of God's children during the present history of the human race, and to keep increasing it until the Lord returns.
This she does most of all by her healing and elevating impact on the dignity of the person, by the way in which she strengthens the seams of human society and imbues the everyday activities of men with a deeper meaning and importance. Thus, through her individual memebrs and her whole community, the Church believes she can contribute greatly toward making the family of man and its history more human.

The two quotes above come from the documents of the Vatican II Council. They're quoted on page 72 of Robert Warren's On the Anvil.

Being Human

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God ... gloried in becoming a member of the human race.

- Thomas Merton, from A Book of Hours

Matter Matters

Bodies matter to God. Matter matters. Until we can proclaim that wondrous truth, ecology will be a sideline in our pastoring and preaching, our theologies and liturgies ... Wetlands and rivers, wheat fields and dough rising, people dancing in the aisles and people sleeping in the streets of our cities. Matter matters to God.

- Barbara Lundblad, from her sermon "Matter Matters"

I think sometimes I imagine salvation is being removed from the possibility of pain and suffering. But that's so much not what it's like to be born. As soon as we start that trip down the birth canal, we become vulnerable to all sorts of wonderful and frightening and beautiful and horrible and sad and amazing things.

Debbie Blue
Sensual Orthodoxy