theology – Communio

St Bruno

Today we liturgically recall great monastic founder and reformer, St Bruno. What we admire and are grateful for in the mission of Bruno is his accent on silence and contemplation in the daily search for the face of God. Pope Benedict offers us a few ideas for meditation. Of course, Benedict few ideas help us to seek the face of the saints in turn who show us the face of God. There is much in Benedict’s meditation for our own journey in the spiritual life and the scope of good, reliable and reason theology.

Redemptoris Mater Chapel, Apostolic Palace
Friday, 6 October 2006, Feast of Saint Bruno

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I have not prepared a real Homily, only a few ideas for meditation.

As clearly appears, the mission of St Bruno, today’s saint, is, we might say, interpreted in the prayer for this day, which reminds us, despite being somewhat different in the Italian text, that his mission was silence and contemplation.

But silence and contemplation have a purpose: they serve, in the distractions of daily life, to preserve permanent union with God. This is their purpose: that union with God may always be present in our souls and may transform our entire being.

Silence and contemplation, characteristic of St Bruno, help us find this profound, continuous union with God in the distractions of every day. Silence and contemplation: speaking is the beautiful vocation of the theologian. This is his mission: in the loquacity of our day and of other times, in the plethora of words, to make the essential words heard. Through words, it means making present the Word, the Word who comes from God, the Word who is God.

Yet, since we are part of this world with all its words, how can we make the Word present in words other than through a process of purification of our thoughts, which in addition must be above all a process of purification of our words?

How can we open the world, and first of all ourselves, to the Word without entering into the silence of God from which his Word proceeds? For the purification of our words, hence, also for the purification of the words of the world, we need that silence which becomes contemplation, which introduces us into God’s silence and brings us to the point where the Word, the redeeming Word, is born.

St Thomas Aquinas, with a long tradition, says that in theology God is not the object of which we speak. This is our own normal conception.

God, in reality, is not the object but the subject of theology. The one who speaks through theology, the speaking subject, must be God himself. And our speech and thoughts must always serve to ensure that what God says, the Word of God, is listened to and finds room in the world.

Thus, once again we find ourselves invited to this process of forfeiting our own words, this process of purification so that our words may be nothing but the instrument through which God can speak, and hence, that he may truly be the subject and not the object of theology.

In this context, a beautiful phrase from the First Letter of St Peter springs to my mind. It is from verse 22 of the first chapter. The Latin goes like this: “Castificantes animas nostras in oboedentia veritatis”. Obedience to the truth must “purify” our souls and thus guide us to upright speech and upright action.

In other words, speaking in the hope of being applauded, governed by what people want to hear out of obedience to the dictatorship of current opinion, is considered to be a sort of prostitution: of words and of the soul.

The “purity” to which the Apostle Peter is referring means not submitting to these standards, not seeking applause, but rather, seeking obedience to the truth.

And I think that this is the fundamental virtue for the theologian, this discipline of obedience to the truth, which makes us, although it may be hard, collaborators of the truth, mouthpieces of truth, for it is not we who speak in today’s river of words, but it is the truth which speaks in us, who are really purified and made chaste by obedience to the truth. So it is that we can truly be harbingers of the truth.

This reminds me of St Ignatius of Antioch and something beautiful he said: “Those who have understood the Lord’s words understand his silence, for the Lord should be recognized in his silence”. The analysis of Jesus’ words reaches a certain point but lives on in our thoughts.

Only when we attain that silence of the Lord, his being with the Father from which words come, can we truly begin to grasp the depth of these words.

Jesus’ words are born in his silence on the Mountain, as Scripture tells us, in his being with the Father.

Words are born from this silence of communion with the Father, from being immersed in the Father, and only on reaching this point, on starting from this point, do we arrive at the real depth of the Word and can ourselves be authentic interpreters of the Word. The Lord invites us verbally to climb the Mountain with him and thus, in his silence, to learn anew the true meaning of words.

In saying this, we have arrived at today’s two Readings. Job had cried out to God and had even argued with God in the face of the glaring injustice with which God was treating him. He is now confronted with God’s greatness. And he understands that before the true greatness of God all our speech is nothing but poverty and we come nowhere near the greatness of his being; so he says: “I have spoken… twice, but I will proceed no further” [Jb 40: 5].

We are silent before the grandeur of God, for it dwarfs our words. This makes me think of the last weeks of St Thomas’ life. In these last weeks, he no longer wrote, he no longer spoke. His friends asked him: “Teacher, why are you no longer speaking? Why are you not writing?”. And he said: “Before what I have seen now all my words appear to me as straw”.

Fr Jean-Pierre Torrel, the great expert on St Thomas, tells us not to misconstrue these words. Straw is not nothing. Straw bears grains of wheat and this is the great value of straw. It bears the ear of wheat. And even the straw of words continues to be worthwhile since it produces wheat.

For us, however, I would say that this is a relativization of our work; yet, at the same time, it is an appreciation of our work. It is also an indication in order that our way of working, our straw, may truly bear the wheat of God’s Word.

The Gospel ends with the words: “He who hears you, hears me”. What an admonition! What an examination of conscience those words are! Is it true that those who hear me are really listening to the Lord? Let us work and pray so that it may be ever more true that those who hear us hear Christ. Amen!

Moved from theologia to technologia

I recently found this admonition by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware on certain connections:

“Once theology forgets the unavoidable limitations of the human understanding; once it overlooks the apophatic dimension of theology; once it replaces the ineffable Word of God with human logic, then, as the Cappadocians assert, it ceases to be theo-logia and sinks to the level of techno-logia.”

It seems that theologians, public thinkers, and the clergy, have already arrived a technologia. The poor state of preaching, writing/speak, and catechesis demonstrates this fact. The disconnect between faith and reason is key in this regard.

Study theology (anyway)

A friend brought my attention to an essay by pulling out this quote:

A good theologian…’has to be a historian, a philosopher, a linguist, a skillful interpreter of texts both ancient and modern, and probably many other things besides.’ In many ways, a course in theology is an ideal synthesis of all other liberal arts: …as Wood terms it, ‘Queen of the Humanities.’ …the absence of theology in our universities is an unfortunate example of blindness—willful or no—to the fact that engagement with the past requires more than mere objective or comparative analysis. It requires a willingness to look outside our own perspectives in order engage with the great questions—and questioners—of history on their own terms.

The whole essay is here

Who God is reveals our Christian life

As we move toward Lent and therefore to the Paschal Mysteries of Easter, we ought to reflect upon who God is (theologia) and not merely what God does (ecomomia). Both aspects of our spiritual life are important but acts can not be put before being. Our liturgical prayer, for example, first identifies who God is, and then shows us what He has done for us, and then we make His name known in the doxology.

We are members of a family of faith concerned with the covenant relationship (communio). When we consider who are as Christians we baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity and taught to observe what we have learned of Christ Jesus. In baptism we are created in priest, prophet and king according to the mind of the Lord. Study in the Creed, the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed –all in the light of the Gospel. The proclamation of the Gospel leads us to baptism (not the other way around) and then the Christian manner of living. This is a history that reveals the Mystery.

We are the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21), a constant theme in our faith and how we live this faith.

Happy Thanksgiving

The act of gratitude is the first step of holiness. This is the teaching of great saints: Augustine, Aquinas, Benedict, Mom. Loyola spoke of the sin of ingratitude in strong terms. Why is gratitude especially important? For one, it reminds us that we don’t make ourselves. It reminds us that God is in-charge and that He loves us. As one commentator said, “The habitual practice of this first step [of Loyola’s teaching on the Examen that you start with gratitude for all that God has given,] opposes “spiritual amnesia” that the enemy tries to cause with desolation.” Jesuit Fr. John Navone writes, “Tell me what you remember, and I’ll tell you what you are (, S.J.). Another Jesuit, Fr. John Hardon, used to say “the human memory is like a sieve.”

Our asceticism is to create the space to consciously remember good things — the blessings thus becomes a first step; acknowledging them moves into thanksgiving. Blessings on Thanksgiving Day 2015!

Picturing God?

This image, “The Holy Trinity of God,” by Viktor Vasnetsov is a rather interesting image for Christians.

Some will say, with historical precedent, that this image of the Trinity is heretical because God the Father cannot be depicted in a human form. The proponents of a biblical and liturgical theology state that God the Father is invisible and unable to be depicted in matter. Jesus Christ was born of the indescribable Father, therefore the Father cannot depicted be in an image. Having said this, it has not stopped artists from attempting to show us the Father. The Russians are noted for this.

I happen to like this image but I understand the caution and even the rejection of the image. For many, this issue may an Eastern Christian matter and not a Western one. It is, however, not that easy to say that this is a matter for one portion of the Church and not another. There is something called the unity of faith.

The teaching comes from 7th Ecumenical Council in AD 787, Second Nicea which focussed on the place of iconography in the Church and the very heated controversy between the iconoclasts and the iconodules. No doubt I can’t deal with the whole of the Council but the teaching of the Church was formulated by Saint John of Damascus who said,

Concerning the charge of idolatry: Icons are not idols but symbols, therefore when an Orthodox venerates an icon, he is not guilty of idolatry. He is not worshipping the symbol, but merely venerating it. Such veneration is not directed toward wood, or paint or stone, but towards the person depicted. Therefore relative honor is shown to material objects, but worship is due to God alone.

We do not make obeisance to the nature of wood, but we revere and do obeisance to Him who was crucified on the Cross… When the two beams of the Cross are joined together I adore the figure because of Christ who was crucified on the Cross, but if the beams are separated, I throw them away and burn them.

The Second Council of Nicea formally taught as a result of the Damascene:

Icons are necessary and essential because they protect the full and proper doctrine of the Incarnation. While God cannot be represented in His eternal nature (“…no man has seen God”, John 1:18), He can be depicted simply because He “became human and took flesh.” Of Him who took a material body, material images can be made. In so taking a material body, God proved that matter can be redeemed. He deified matter, making it spirit-bearing, and so if flesh can be a medium for the Spirit, so can wood or paint, although in a different fashion.

I do not worship matter, but the Creator of matter, who for my sake became material and deigned to dwell in matter, who through matter effected my salvation.

Now, where do we go from here? In my mind I think of this issue as very similar to the biblical prohibition from pronouncing he name of God (YHWH). Recall that Benedict XVI asked Catholics to respect this biblical discipline. Sadly, Catholics can have a rather bold and sometimes arrogant approach to some things…

Who is Christ in our time?

A running fight between a priest and his religious superior over how direct the priest can be in his preaching that Jesus is The Way, The Truth and The Life has been ensuing for an extended period of time. The dialogue between the two is not edifying. The superior is arguing that the priest is teaching his own brand of Catholicism that is offending some of the faculty and some of the parents. The priest is preaching and teaching what Church believes, and is articulated in the Second Vatican Council and other documents like Dominus Iesus. The latter contends that the fruits of V2 have too often generated poorly catechized adults and has contributed to a general weakening of the truth of salvation. Jesus Christ has been reduced to moralisms or what beige Catholicism shows, “the nice Jesus.” Reading the homilies you do realize that the priest is not pouring vinegar in the eyes of the congregants but he is being clear in his teaching: the gospel is true, and the magisterium of the Catholic Church is accurate –salvation is at hand. His point: Do you believe in what is biblically revealed by God? Or, is theology made up as you go along to get along? If it is the latter, then we are in deep trouble.

Catholics can’t be the only ones dealing with matters of doctrine and dogma. Sure enough, the Wall Street Journal answered my question. No, Catholics, the Orthodox and other ecclesial communities are having to face the problems of what is being preached, and what face of Jesus Christ is being revealed today to the world. The secularists are not the only ones to “change” the face of Jesus. The content of a priest’s preaching is as much important as the how something is said. Words matter; concepts matter, clear thinking is crucial. Yet, style cannot be confused with content.

In the “Houses of Worship” column in WSJ today Stephen Prothero writes about a Seattle Evangelical Pastor Mark Driscoll and his efforts to portray a more robust understanding of who Jesus Christ is, an image that does not make Jesus out to be a “pansy.” Driscoll evidently believes that many quarters of Christianity have distorted the Christology to fit contemporary concerns. Prothero characterizes Pastor Driscoll as believing “too many American churches are populated by ‘chicks’ and a bunch of nice, tender chickified church boys.” In other words, what Driscoll sees in Christian churches today is a face of Jesus that is cosmetically altered to fit a current ideology, one that is not too challenging, one that has little-to-no-concern for ultimate things. Dare I say, the current Jesus is anemic.

I think it is fair to say that Jesus Christ we ought to preach, the Second Person of the Trinity, is not made in the image and likeness of certain men and women. He is the image of Someone greater, the Divine Mystery.

What else does Driscoll think and say? Apparently, his assessment indicates that some Christians have swapped out the revealed Son of God for “a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in his hair.” Jesus is metrosexual. Sounds similar to the controversy noted above. Prothero notes that some segments of American Christianity, since the 1800s, have preached a “Jesus as a brave warrior –not a meek preacher….” It is thought that if the image and person preached –Jesus– was more masculine men would be coming back to the practice of religion, or we would be more faithful to what is biblically revealed. I am not sure that has to be an agenda item; but I am concerned that the truth be preached and not glossed-over to suit a constituency.

I happen to think that the person of Jesus we often warm up too is inconsistent with what is foretold in the prophecies of the OT, and in the portrait given in the NT. Sacred Scripture does not give us an effeminate savior. Quite the contrary, Jesus of the NT is not aiming to be a “nice God-man interested in how you’re feeling.” We don’t have a Savior who is a good social worker. Salvation is not the liberation of personal anxieties but the liberation from sin and death; it is the opening the possibility of encountering the Beatific vision. Think of Jesus’ interaction with tax collectors, the pharisees, the mis-guided apostles and so on, ought to give us an indication of the person of Jesus: being “nice,” that is, sentimental, is not going to get you to heaven.

Prothero quotes Billy Sunday who said in 1916: “Lord save us from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, think-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, sissified, three-carat Christianity.” A strong, masculine Jesus was transformed in the 60’s and 70’s with “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Godspell.” You know, I think Billy Sunday is right.

Stephen Prothero is uneasy with and dismissive of, Pastor Driscoll and Sunday, because he lacks a Catholic understanding of Scripture, liturgy, and theology. Prothero, likes suburban Catholicism with a pretty low Christology. It seems to me that he sees the person of Jesus as relative and subjective. And is inconsistent with what is witnessed by the saints. Rather unfortunately, Prothero doesn’t hold to the existence of objective reality, objective truth. A reading of the person of Jesus in Scripture and orthodox biblical exegesis shows a face of Jesus concerned more with the true “ends” of man and woman rather than being given a make-over to suit post-modern problems in psychology. Nowadays, according to some, you just have fit-in if you are going to be an acceptable preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Theology: Catholic and Orthodox?

What does it mean to say “Theologically… thus and such….”

There are many “professional” theologians and types of reflection on God, the biblical teaching, ecclesial tradition, prayer, the spiritual life, etc, how do you discern who to read? Sometimes the professionals lack the lex agenda (that is, the law of life) that’s required for an authentic Christian life. By nature, we worship, believe, live and act in accordance with the promptings of the Holy Spirit. It will make your head spin in trying to make a good decision on what to read and what to avoid. We know that not everything in print (or on a blog) is worth the time.

Admittedly, Catholics, clergy and laity alike, can stand behind the veil of something they know little about and the implications of what is published. Selecting a good book in theology is often made in a knee-jerk way. For example you will hear some priests say, “I will never read anything written by a Jesuit” or “she’s fema-nazi, a heretic” or there is a perspective that contends that “reading outside the ecclesial family is wrong.”

It is true, not everything in the field of liberation theology is germane to an authentic Catholic life. But that can be said of all the allied fields in theological reflection. An honest intellectual will say that you have to know what reasonable people are saying. We need less ideology and more openness to faith and reason is needed. Faith and reason are oriented in loving the truth. So while one could argue that the theological reflection of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger is far more satisfying than Hans Kung and Karl Rahner when you read, study and pray with sacred Scripture, knowing a something of the other is good. A critical reader ought to be able to enter into a respectful and lively dialogue with thinkers; there can’t be an a priori stance that one or the other is always wrong. The default answer to every question doesn’t have to be NO. Yet. dialogue is not negotiation; openness to the other doesn’t mean you compromise the truth. The point is that we have to have an objectivity (know the the sources of claims made) about what believe and teach and live.

I have long argued that a Catholic’s first theological reflection is liturgical. The maxim of St Prosper of Aquitaine guides: legem credendi lex statuat supplicant. Meaning: The Church’s faith precedes the faith of the believer who is invited to adhere to it. When the Church celebrates the sacraments, she confesses the faith received from the apostles – whence the ancient saying: lex orandi, lex credendi (or: legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi, according to Prosper of Aquitaine [5th cent.]). The law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays. Liturgy is a constitutive element of the holy and living Tradition (Catechism, 1124). Let’s start here rather than attend to confessional lines of how catholic one is, or not.

The point of theology is reflect in a public way who God is and God’s grace operative in our world. Theology is in pursuit of wisdom and of making disciples.

A 2008 blog post at Erenikon, “What is Orthodox Theology?” asked the same questions regarding but for the Orthodox believer. I would say that much of is held and live in the Orthodox Church coheres with Catholic theology. Several Catholic theologians I know use the thinking of professional theologians who belong to the Orthodox Church.

Distinguishing religion and theology

Subconsciously we are still studying the history of doctrine as a history of philosophy, and therefore we are bound to miss the very thing. For both theology and doctrine are not philosophy. It is not a speculation on religious topics or problems, even as it does not exclude the theological use of reasons. But it begins, earnestly and emphatically, with revelation — not with an innate “revelation” of the truth in the human mind, but with a concrete Revelation in history, with a true encounter. It is a personal datum — not because it is a private business of human personalities, but because it is a self-disclosure and challenge of a Divine Person of the Personal God.

Father Georges Florovsky

Religion and Theological Tensions

A New Apologetics project

In the years since Blessed John Paul introduced his desire to have new work on knowing, living, and sharing the truth of the Catholic Faith, there’s been a lot of good energy for the new evangelization. You can think of the Tear of Faith, the encyclicals of the recent popes, and most crucial has been Benedict XVI’s establishment of a Vatican office to spearhead evangelization efforts.

Getting to the heart of what the new evangelization means, how it’s supposed to “look” and why it needs our attention is slowing being revealed. I have to say that too many use the word evangelization without precision and without real content and experience. Nevertheless, since John Paul and Benedict, now with Pope Francis we have a new awareness of evangelization’s aim: and affection for Christ and to offer a reasonable proposal for faith in a comprehensive way.

I happen to think the Holy Spirit is working diligently and effectively in having us slowly develop the needed resources with regard to persons and materials. Rushing into such work would not be reasonable since it does take time to do the hard work in truly knowing the need in a time of limited resources. The immediate past Pontiff set the Church’s face on this renewed manner of living focusing us on the personal relationship with the Lord,, bridging the gap between faith and reason, and by asking us to intimately know Scripture, the Liturgy and the Magisterium (I don’t want to call the new evangelization a ‘project’ because it is about our heart and mind).

A Cambridge, Massachusetts group of faithful Catholics have responded to Church’s call for a “New Apologetics,” a new way of proposing Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life.

“New Apologetics” is a contemporary way of engaging the questions which need to be addressed; those tough issues are often inadequately answered, or worse, dismissed as unimportant. This is a serious, beautiful adventure.

The New Apologetics is group qualified persons working to share the beauty of the truth of the Church today, in the language of today.

The New Apologetics website is www.NewApologetics.com

May Saint Thérèse of Lisieux guide this new work.