Transubstantiation

In this post I want to explore the idea of transubstantiation and Christian relatedness.  Firstly, I don't presume to follow all the arguments of transubstantiation, but as I understand it, it says that, despite appearances, at officiation the bread and wine transform into the actual body and blood of Christ.  In philosophical/theological language (drawn from Aristotle) this means that the substance of the bread and wine change, while the accidents (the physical manifestation) stays the same.  What I would like to suggest is that the often arcane and violent discussion of transubstantiation is a red-herring. That is, it places undue stress on the actual bread and wine as being either Christ's body and blood or simply symbols, which suggests a watered down version of the same thing.  

Let me digress a little.  My wife and I are planning on adopting a  baby this year.  In legal terms what this means is that in every sense except the physical (the accidents of DNA, so to speak) that child will be ours as it's parents (in substance).  A kind of legal transubstantiation will have taken place by an officiating judge.  Following the previous post, this got me thinking about how our relation to one another exists within a personal, institutional and legal matrix through which we are constituted as persons.  Physical relation through blood is one type of relation among many, as the case of adoption shows.

For the Christian, then, what is the source and ground of our relation to one another?  Is it the mental assent to certain metaphysical ideas about reality, i.e. God, immortality, freedom, etc?  Is it a shared moral horizon?  Is it the trust we all place in Christ as our saviour?  In many ways these do constitute our shared relatedness to one another; but the problem is that none of these involve the highly emotive and binding relatedness of blood-relation.  Without this form of relatedness a Christian community of believers represent merely a club of like-minded people who more or less agree with one another.

So, where I think that the issue of transubstantiation might have been misplaced is in fixating on the bread and wine as the (only) site of transubstantiation.  Believing or not believing that the bread and wine take on the substance of Christ misses the point that as the broken body and spilled blood of Christ it is we who are transubstantiated in our inner being, taking on a material blood-relation to Christ and his family that is more than a watered down and abstract symbolism.  The bread is real bread and the wine is real wine that actually enters our body and in some small way sustains it.  And in this sense, through sharing his body and blood the incarnation spills over into us, his brothers and sisters, giving us an actual, physical relation to both Him and one another that transcends all familial, legal and institutional relations, revealing them to be merely watered down versions of what we share in Christ.  It is in this sharing of the bread and wine that our relation to one another and Christ is grounded, and because it is an event that occurs in real time it means that our unity is not symbolic or theoretical but heartily visceral.                                   

What makes a thing a thing?

One question that has bothered me since I can remember is ‘what makes a thing a thing?’  That is, does merely existing at a certain time, in a certain space, make a thing a thing?  This probably seems an odd place to start a discussion on the Trinity, but hopefully it will become clearer as I go on. 

In my doctoral studies I have spent a great deal of time thinking about what it is that makes a given object an art object.  Obviously, there are almost as many answers as there are people who have ever looked at an object and thought, ‘Ooh, I like that!’  The point is though that there are a recognisable class of objects which we more or less collectively describe as being art.  The history of art has led to various challenges as to who or what is authorised to say whether such and such an object has the status of a work of art, not least Duchamp’s famous upturned urinal, (1917) Fountain.  In this sense, the thing-ness (to mimic Heidegger’s vocabulary) of art, that which is most essential to it as what it is, is not as simple as saying that it just is.  We could say then that what makes an art object the thing that it is are the network of institutional discourses that work to legitimise certain types of objects over and above other objects: art is what certain authoritative people say that it is. 

That cannot be all to be said about the matter though, because along with being institutionally constituted art enacts a play of the conceptual and the material which resists whatever discursive networks may have to say about it.  It is because of this base materiality that the thing-ness of art is more than just what we can say about it.  Where we would like to see a stable category (i.e. ‘art’), we find an elusive fluidity that slips away from even our power to name; we know that it is, but we don’t always know how it is.  And this point about stable categories is pivotal, because if post-Enlightenment modernity is about anything it is about the obsessive categorisation of the world according to what Foucault called the will to knowledge.  The inevitable collapse of this project into a post-modernity that threw a de-centred subject adrift in a world of rickety foundations is more revealing of humanity’s own nihilistic assumptions about reality than existential meaninglessness. 

So what bearing does any of this, as riveting as it no doubt is, have on Trinitarian theology?  So far postmodern and post-structural philosophy seems to head in the direction away from categories of thinking which suggest a grounded ontology, away from thinking that our categories have any basis in reality (whatever that is).  Nietzche’s so-called death of God brought to an end the cultural and scientific delusion that there was a fixed basis for anything, as he knew it would.  In order for something to be real, so the thinking goes, it needs to be grounded in something ultimately real, which in philosophy has always been more or less guaranteed by the Aristotelian first cause (AKA God).  Not to be confused with the God who rescued the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, this ‘God’ functioned essentially as a kind of quilting point in reality, tying up all the loose ends and making sure that everything ultimately always made sense.  Without a stable point of fixed reference it was only a matter of time before someone, Foucault, pointed out the obvious that ‘man’ as a category was also effectively dead: no God = no man.  All that is solid, wrote Marx, melts into air. 

In all this, a ‘light bulb moment’ came for me when I read the first section of Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulas’ influential Being as Communion, 1985.  For Zizioulas, God is not best described as a kind of fixed ontological substance at the basis of reality, but is himself a communion of persons in a relation of love.  He writes: ‘The being of God is a relational being: without the concept of communion it would not be possible to speak of the being of God.’  ‘The substance of God,’ he continues, ‘”God,” has no ontological content, no true being, apart from communion.  In this way, communion becomes an ontological concept in Patristic thought...God exists because of an event of communion.  [...] it is communion which makes things “be”: nothing exists without it, not even God.’  In a sense then, to plunge as far down as possible into reality in the hope of hitting a fixed point of reference, a stable ultimate reality, is as futile an endeavour as modernity has proven it to be.  God, according to Zizioulas, is an event of communion; the being of God is here best described not as a static entity, but as a movement of relation.  Moreover, this movement of relation does not pre-exist those involved in the dance of love it enacts; the Father, Son, and Spirit do not spring from this movement, just as they cannot be said to pre-exist the movement: they are the movement; they are this movement of relating love.  Zizioulas quite strongly posits the Father as the ‘cause’ or origin of this movement, but the Father Himself is only constituted as Father by the simple fact of being a Father.  Thus, while He precedes the Son in terms barely describable, the Father’s fatherliness is constituted precisely by the Son as son.  Just as a human father only exists as a father once he has been relationally constituted through siring a son or daughter, there never was an ultimate being out of whom sprang another identically ultimate being, the Son.  The Father is only insofar as He is father to the Son.  God as ultimate reality has the character of relation.  And I haven’t even mentioned the Holy Spirit in this dance of love.

Getting back then, what is it that makes a thing a thing?  While Trinitarian theology opens up a space for conceptualising being as communion, it must be admitted that there is no direct or easy analogy between human being and God’s being.  As image bearers we are not wholly other to God, but neither are we identical.  For Zizioulas, and I am reducing him enormously throughout this entire piece, it is in our personhood that we carry the image of God, not, that is, in our capacity to exist relationally, but in the fact that it is only in relation that we exist at all.  Like God’s, our being is in communion, in ties that bind, in being sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, employers and employees, citizens and rulers, communicants, etc.  The ‘truth’ about ourselves is not to be found in the intricacies of our individual conscious and unconscious fantasies, as so much popular thought (following Freud) seems to imagine, but in who we are in, to, and with others.  Ultimately, Christianity, it seems to me, is about preparing the way for drawing humanity into the movement of loving relation that is God the Father, Son, and Spirit.  We exist in our physical and institutional relations with one another, we exist in our relations with one another as the church body, and we exist finally (and completely) in the wider church’s partaking of the movement of loving relationality that is Father, Son, and Spirit.                   

Nice Jesus vs Nasty God

In many people's eyes this.....










...is the only thing preventing God the Father doing this.....

For an excellent talk that gave me the idea, see here: How Glorious is Jesus Christ! The Heart of Christ

Christian Discipleship

I want to write now about the tangled issue of Christian discipleship and the relation between ourselves as sinners and the God of grace.

Ordinarily, I find that a bigger issue in my discipleship is not so much the specific, individual sins that I continue to commit, but rather my unwillingness to believe that Christ's grace is sufficient even for me, a sinner.  That is, the coldness in my heart towards Christ that comes when I choose not to approach him because I've sinned is a bigger issue than the sin which was the occasion for the coldness.  The common complaint of Romans 6: 1 ('What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?') is that individuals might misinterpret God's grace to mean that they now have total freedom to do whatever they choose.  I understand this complaint, but it doesn't ring true in me, I feel.  As much as I love to sin, I don't actually want to, and would prefer to see myself before Christ as sinless.  Thus, when I sin my tendency is to avoid him, which is a fundamental lack of trust in his love, in his grace, in his forgiveness, and in his person.  This is the bigger issue, and the very one for which the world stands condemned by Christ.  

The task of Christian discipleship, unless I am very much mistaken, is then not so much to stop individual acts of sinning (though this comes with the caveat that of course the Christian should fight against sin in themselves), but is rather a disciplining of themselves to accept the truth of God's grace; that he invites us as sinners, that his promise is to us as sinners, and that it is as sinners that he died for us on the cross.  And this is a much harder pill to swallow because it involves acknowledging one's shame before him and accepting the grace which is so alien to us.  This does not mean that there is a tacit approval of sin that so many (myself included) worry about; but is rather an acknowledgement that worse than any specific sin that you can name is the very real possibility of not accepting or believing Christ when he calls us as sinners to come to him.

Dr John Walton - Genesis 1 & 2 as an account of functional origins not material

Have just been listening to Dr John Walton give a lecture on 'Genesis as Ancient Cosmology'.  I heard about Walton in a lecture given by NT Wright, in which Wright is impressed with the way in which Walton interprets Genesis 1 as being a temple document.

Basically, I was also impressed by the way in which Walton discusses the difference between modern scientific ontology and ancient near eastern views on being.  For example, according to Walton, the ancient Egyptians referred to the desert as 'the non-existent'.  The view that they, and many in the ancient near east, took to what we call reality was an eminently functional one.  (I am not sure, but I don't think that functional was equal to utilitarian, as such).  So, in modern parlance, to say of yourself at a party that 'I might as well not have existed' makes perfect sense to ancient near eastern ears.  That is, that even though you obviously inhabited a certain location within material reality at the party, you were unable or unwilling to function as a party-goer; thus, you didn't exist according to this functionalist logic.  The desert, then, even though it had obvious material presence, for the Egyptians did not exist because it held no function in their world.  Walton uses this point to draw out the conclusion that to read Genesis 1 as an account of material origins is to massively miss the point, as though what is interesting in the text (which itself functions as a myth of origins, not a science text) is how old the universe is, or of what it is made, or how it came to have its current material form.

There is a lot more, and I would recommend watching the hour long lecture.

Marilynne Robinson

This is wonderful:

Marilynne Robinson

'When I came across that Idea in Calvin I was very deeply pleased, it was one of those things where it opened a new way of looking at the world. I think one of the experiences that people have that makes them uneasy with religion often is that they know people whom they understand as ethically deficient or whatever, at the same time that they just really love them, and they have good reasons to love them, which might not have anything to do with trusting them, or benefitting from them, or anything else. They love them aesthetically, you know, in terms of the charms of the person, the way, the grace…however unconscious it might be. And the idea that God would be blind to what is in many cases the most interesting or the most beautiful encounter that you yourself have with another human being…this is disturbing…it alienates one from God in a way. And I think that the idea that God can love people aesthetically, that King David can be the apple of his eye with all the terrible stuff that he’s up to (and all the rest of it, you know); that there’s a sort of loyalty – fatherly loyalty of, you know, ‘if that kid can’t stay out of trouble – what a beautiful kid, I can’t bear the thought that he would be away from me.’ I like that, I think it’s wonderful.'

It's from here:
The Balm in Gilead - ABC

What is salvation?

This link: Barth: What make a Christian Christian? takes you to a very interesting article in which the author discusses Barth's views on what it is that makes a Christian a Christian.  Is it in being 'saved' (yes, but...); is it accepting and living by a moral code (yes, but...); is it directing one's attention towards a future in which God's kingdom has been finally established (yes, but...)?  In his Church Dogmatics, Barth, according to Terry J. Wright, agrees broadly with these propositions, but adds that none of them are enough to encapsulate the being of a Christian.  Primarily this is because none of them are particularly Christ-centred.  They all suggest that the focus and centre of the Christian is, or should be, either individual salvation, moralism, or an other-worldly approach to the here and now.  For Barth, then, the centre of the Christian life has to be as a living witness to Christ's work and lordship, which is not a work that we can do, but is rather that in which we are invited to participate, however badly.

Interestingly, at Inhabitatio Dei, Halden is also talking about what it is to be and to become a Christian.  (See: To become and to be a Christian.  Thoughts about such things have been on my mind recently too, partly because I have been reading chapters of Robert Letham's The Holy Trinity (2004) in which he discusses the Trinity in relation to worship and mission (chapter 4), and the second section of Zizioulas's Being and Communion.  (Note to self: don't forget your totally unrelated PhD project!).  These works have brought to the fore issues of what it means to be saved, how, through whom, and for what.  Coming from an Anglo-Charismatic background I grew up with the vague idea that salvation was a specifically individual event, a choice that one made.  Clearly more than a little of the consumerist culture of contemporary England fed this belief; though I can also see it in a highly developed and not-particularly-individualist-form in Kierkegaard.  The point, though, is that I'm starting to understand that just as salvation outside of Christ is not an option, neither is salvation as an individual outside of the Church.  Thinking through the idea of theosis backwards, in which the Church is invited as the Bride of Christ to enter fully by grace (not by nature) into the Trinitarian life of God, our own sanctification/divinization is only possible in and through the Church as both the Bride and the Body of Christ.  Christ in us (singular), us in Christ, that Christ might be in us (plural), and us in Christ; that we might enter into the perichoretic union between the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit.  To borrow from Gregory of Nyssa: whenever I think of salvation individualistically, I must also think of it collectively, and visa versa; and whenever I think of it collectively, I must also think of it intra-trinitarianly.  No doubt I have expressed this cack-handedly, and am open to correction; but nonetheless, what appears to be coming into view for how I understand salvation is a thing of incredible beauty that privileges, to pilfer shamelessly from Gunton, both the One and the Many, of which we, individually and collectively, are invited to join.