Worlds Apart

History flows, from creation to separation by covenant infidelity, from separation to the reconciliation of those who receive the Son and the finalized reprobation of those who reject the son, and from there to the eschaton, the entire course of events punctuated by supernatural intrusions by God which propel both the sacred and secular. And to reduce the one to the other in either direction is to deny the redemptive, ethical distinction between those who are of the City of God and those who are of the City of Man.

Yet the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. It is the rejection of the Gospel preached which condemns man in his city, not his culture, not his ethics nor his morals, which in truth, he shares in common with the just. The point of condemnation occurs with the revealing of the Kingdom as something other than what is common, other than what is ordinarily normative for the Christian and the non-Christian, a message that tells man what is necessary for peace over and against what he thinks is necessary. And in doing so, radically challenging his epistemological methodology, calling him to look outside the city for hope, a message alien to his natural inclinations; that he will not find hope within and that he is not truly human in the intended sense, but only a shadow of his previous self, bound to death and damnation by chains of rebellion.

Hence, it is the very thing which sets the Christian apart from the world which condemns the world at the level of covenant infidelity, not cultural inferiority. The theocratic intrusion of the Mosaic economy was the shadow of the heavenly reality imposed upon creation in order to establish a vocabulary so that, the Kingdom of God with it’s Heavenly Jerusalem, could be understood as the reality to the shadow that was the Kingdom of Israel. Imperfect rule by fallen man coupled with the insufficient atonement by the blood of creatures was not the goal of the creation nor the end of God’s purpose of redemption.

Furthermore, in the act of communion, we participate in the already/not yet of the Kingdom of God; communion as participation in and the reception of the benefits of the inaugurated Kingdom of God. And the Kingdom breaks in through Word and Sacrament-the gathering of the saints together on the Lord’s day is the City of God amongst the City of Man, Word and Sacrament setting it apart by private practice, not public participation. It is the secular drama which serves as the stage for the drama of redemption; it is, as the foundry of cultural development, the storehouse where from which God draws in order to communicate to his people. This is the accommodation of the Divine to the finite, the use of the ordinary and the mundane to communicate transcendence, to reveal his will in a way which employs structures intelligible to the reason of man. A content and method innately intuitive to man rather than foreign and confusing; the intention of communication being more than mere reception but interaction, comprehension and apprehension. It is simply not enough to hear a message, but it must be understood in order for it to have an effect. It must appeal to the inherent reason which man possesses, which is common to all, the means whereby creation is navigated successfully. It is impossible to apprehend or receive any communication from anyone if the groundwork of common ideas is not first established.

Moreover, it is the vocabulary of the culture which is utilized by God in order to communicate his will, his intentions and his elucidation of historic events. Culture serves the purpose of harboring the message of the Gospel yet itself is the product of those in rebellion to their creator, setting up fiefdoms in contrast to the pilgrims who are God’s people; those not looking to homestead but to subsist-as the Church militant-until they reach home. Because home is the goal of the journey, that which the pilgrim is ever strengthening himself with, the promise of Sabbath, the sure promise of home.

 

 

We May Be Pilgrims But This Ain’t Plymouth

With Noah we find a brief unmasking of the doctrine of election, regarding the unmerited favor in saving Noah and his family and the gathering from every type of creature of the earth. The widespread selection indicates mercy not caprice. Whereas God could destroy all because of their wickedness, dealing with mankind in a context of “in Adam” covenant infidelity-instead he plucks Noah and his family out in mercy and graciously protects them through the flood, bringing them out to a new land, a cleansed land, a hearkening back to paradise lost and a murky image of paradise to come.

This is the nature of a peculiar people, those saved not by any merit of their own but by the grace of God. Though belonging to a people broken and wicked, subsisting in the ruins of creation brought about by covenant infidelity, finding solace in the deluded superiority-idolatry-of human nature over evil; people caught up in a recapitulation of Babel, a movement back towards cultural and religious homogeny and hegemony. It is from these people that God chooses, that the Spirit calls through the preaching of the Gospel, that Christ unites to himself by faith. It is these people, chosen in mercy and grace, placed in the ark of the Church, to be kept by the Holy Spirit, in the midst of this present evil age until they depart it or it comes to a close who are the people of God, who live in a new covenant relationship with their Creator, experiencing what it is to be truly human, heirs of the promise.

Therefore, the Church and her Gospel is not a choice of collective resolve to simply live better lives as is the minimal result in Pascal’s Wager. Rather, it is the manifest statement by God that he has kept a people for himself out of the midst of fallen humanity. And it is not wickedness on the part of God to choose one and not the other, to choose Jacob over Esau-in order to show mercy to the former and judgement to the latter-because all have sinned, all are guilty before the law. It is his prerogative to do so-in point of fact, a God who displayed no justice in the face of transgression could not be merciful nor gracious. To do so would render the active and passive obedience of Christ to an exemplary model at best regarding the atonement, leaving the resurrection as nothing but a husk from which we must draw the kernel of our own moral and political liberation; leaving us as Pelagius, no savior and ultimately no God but our own will to power.

Thus, moralism/pietism strips Christianity of all that separates it from the other religions of the world, depleting it of all that is exclusively and externally redemptive, leading man back into himself instead of causing him to look outside of himself for reconciliation. For the only one he is beholden to, the only one he has sinned against, is himself, because God is merely the projection of his ideal self and so the Gospel does indeed become “seven steps to a better you”. Whereas, Christian belief or faith has traditionally and rightly been seen as that which is caused by God, moralism creates their god by their belief, relegating the Gospel to an action that they must live out in lieu of one that has been done for them apart from their consent and not categorized by the cultural mores of the day.

And this is the point, the Church is peculiar, it doesn’t belong here and has no need to either assimilate the culture nor be absorbed by it. The people of God must militate against this, convincing the more impressionable members of it’s community of this and simultaneously making it a credible representation to the culture at large. The modern Church is at many places at a point of crisis and it must decide whether it would be a peculiar people in covenant with God subsisting here as pilgrims in the midst of an evil age which is hostile to it or one of many “faiths” in the pantheon of mankind’s pursuit of deification.

Evil, Love and Silence from Helm’s Deep

Divine permission is compatible with the absence of risk for God as long as there are types of actions which God can prevent but which he nevertheless cannot cause, even though he may be willing for them to occur. Then God controls an evil action by permitting it – by deciding not to prevent it – and the evil action occurs because it is caused by the natures and circumstances of those who perpetrate it.

Paul Helm

Read the whole paper here.

What really matters?

What happens when a society begins to stop merely celebrating diversity and cherishing cultural pluralism and starts to cherish pluralism itself, presenting diversity for diversities sake as virtuous? When did the ideas of distinction and deviation become confused and co-mingled?

Perhaps I’m simply amused by those individuals who seem to associate progress and technological advancement with a sort of moral evolutionary theory with the “modern” or maybe, “post-modern” conjectures on absolutes, objectivity vs. subjectivity, and gender roles as the apex of humanities social progress. It is these types of people who seem to be dumbstruck by the idea that society may not want or be ready for a Woman or Black president simply because they are Black or a Woman. But it also seems that they believe society should function from a platform of social promotion and enforced de-segregation in the political arena. The reality is, though, that mankind, both as individuals and collectively, fear change on almost every level and when change is pushed upon them deeper and more distinct divisions will be the only lasting consequence.

I guess I just have a hard time wrapping my head around those who decry discrimination in society yet reinforce those divisions with their politics, often re-segregating their constituents at every election; constantly describing their situation with inflammatory and pejorative rhetoric as those in need of not simply a representative but of a champion, a hero to rescue them from their oppressors.

People have become so convinced that they are divided, both culturally and economically, that I fear we still have far to go. Martin Luther King Jr. said,

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

I think we have begun to do that very thing as a collective people, both white and black, to walk back, to turn our society ever more so into the battleground of us against them. We deprive each other on a regular basis of the richness that we as individuals and citizens can offer each other because we have, both passively and actively, determined who and what the other is before a word is spoken. What we don’t seem to realize is that we cannot rectify the past by reliving and rekindling those ideologies of mistrust and victimization but rather by determining to know people as they are today and seeing them as those created Imago Dei. In that sense, the playing field is always level, it is what we do that distinguishes us rather then the color of our skin, our gender, or our heritage. Ethnic diversity is a myth that has been confused with cultural diversity, it isn’t our race which makes us who we are, but our environment, who it is that teaches us, that influences us, that raises us. I don’t believe that it takes a village to raise a child, but it is certainly where the child grows up. It is the village, in this sense, that makes the individual.

When I was a boy, they taught us that America was a melting pot where we created a new culture from many diverse heritages, a true E Pluribus Unum, I guess they don’t teach that anymore.

Late Night Thoughts: Did time pass at creation or up to and after?

If we remove the notion of time entirely from the doctrine of God don’t we run the risk of reducing all actions of God to temporally located from an anthropic perspective and merely logically oriented into chronological categories from the Divine perspective.  It seems to me that we would end up with a temporally dipolar creator who is much more Greek than biblical.  To not locate time in any sense within the creator seems odd to me, but perhaps not to others.

Of course, this is somewhat relative in regards to what one might view as the essential definition of time.  I myself do not affirm that time is necessarily dependent on matter to exist but rather on conscienousness(not sure if it is a real word, but I like it) or self-awareness(though this might seem odd to some).

Who do you support?

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