ATR/94:3. Editor s Notes

Transcription

1 ATR/94:3 Editor s Notes The wide-ranging essays of this Summer 2012 issue of the Anglican Theological Review encourage us to practice just the sort of archeology of Christian tradition that Timothy Sedgwick described in his introduction to our Spring issue. We look beyond ourselves and our own times in seeking to understand and come to reasoned positions on contemporary matters where the consequences are broad, far-reaching, and in some important ways unforeseeable. We seek wisdom and guidance where we have found it before; tradition sheds light and encourages insight, across vast differences of time and context. In various ways, the articles in this issue grapple with some of the challenges involved in receiving again what has come before in order to understand better how to be faithful now. In our first article, William Fraatz asks what light C. S. Lewis might shed on the current debate about health care in the United States. A scholar of literature and apologist for Christianity, Lewis was generally conservative in his theology and in his social thought. But his social conservatism was not consistent, and one large area of inconsistency was the postwar British Welfare State and its National Health Service. Lewis used terms of cautious praise for the former, and quite glowing terms for the latter (with which he had sustained direct experience). Fraatz observes certain parallels and notes certain differences in comparing the NHS with what may come into being through the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), with the PPACA likely to result in far fewer basic social changes than the NHS of Lewis s time. Lewis did not object to a national health care system on principle, let alone on the grounds that social conservatives in the United States adduce in relation to the PPACA. It seems reasonable to conclude then, that Lewis cannot legitimately be invoked to support the conservative cause here and now, nor can Lewis be used to give a ringing endorsement for universal health care. However, Fraatz s discussion gives reason to pause and remember Lewis s own inveterate insistence that the moral and religious dimensions of a problem need to be examined carefully, without self-coddling, and assisted by those who disagree. 377

2 378 Anglican Theological Review Careful examination of contentious difference would certainly seem to be a hallmark of Anglicans desire to live in unity with diversity. The fact of contentious differences within the church is before us continually as debate continues about the Anglican Covenant. Kathryn L. Reinhard finds three core principles in Paul s ecclesiology conscience, interdependence, and embodied difference that embrace diversity in identity and practice as an element in a manifestation of unity that is robust and dynamic. Reinhard examines 1 Corinthians and Romans in order to unfold Paul s views on the conscience and on embodied difference as they point to Paul s larger theological commitment to the unconditional acceptance of the other, even the other as enemy, concluding that it seems even the enemy has integrity in her difference as enemy. Reinhard s study of Paul suggests that contemporary debates would benefit from greater consideration of difference as a matter of conscience and thus, performatively at least, as matters which may allow a considerable diversity of opinion and practice. Reinhard notes that shifting the ground of debate to conscience does risk a greater range of diversity than Paul might allow. At the same time, conscience can function as a mechanism to keep people of varying conviction and practice in relationship with one another, much as it did in Paul s discussion of meat offered to idols in 1 Corinthians. Paul s statement that there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit (1 Cor. 12:4) underlies John Kenneth Gibson s look at the pneumatological elements of diversity in the church. While all three Persons of the Trinity work to reconcile humanity, it is the Spirit s particular mission to unify. The Spirit works communally as well as individually, so the relative absence of discussion of the role of the Spirit in Western theology and ecclesiology hampers the church as it attempts to understand the homogeneity of its local life in congregations even as it embraces a theology that puts high value on difference and alterity. Gibson agrees with Moltmann in maintaining that the Spirit s gift of unity is not merely for the fullness of the church; it is also missional in that the church is called to the task of unity in the world. And this task is one for the local church which, Gibson maintains, ought to manifest and unify the diversity of the particular communities in which it is set. At the same time, churches continue to be highly segregated by race and class, at times despite sustained practical attention to increasing diversity in the pews and the denomination. For many if not most congregations in the United States and Canada,

3 Editor s Notes 379 the unity in diversity in church and society is at most an eschatological hope and one that often seems quite distant. Yet it is for that hope that the churches live, and appropriating the unifying power of the Spirit may bring the realization of that hope closer. With Stephen R. Shaver s article we shift the focus from ecclesiology to liturgics, and specifically to the possibilities still alive in the practice of eastward-facing eucharistic celebration. One of the gifts of God present in the liturgical renewal movement of the last several decades has been the recovery of the participation of the whole assembly in the movement of the eucharist. This symbolic shift, now a constant practice in many Anglican congregations in Canada and the United States, has done much to critique and dismantle clericalism, along with the emphasis on baptism as the fundamental commissioning for ministry as part of God s reconciling mission in the world. Indeed, the symbolic and practical shifts prompted by liturgical renewal have been sufficiently comprehensive as to allow a reexamination of eastward-facing celebrations to see what positive value they continue to hold. Shaver notes that facing east resonates deeply with the incarnational and eschatological symbolism of Christ as the one who is coming, the Sun which rises and knows no setting. Conceivably, then, the orientation of priest as well as people toward what is coming places emphasis on what Christ is doing rather than on the actions of the priest whose actions the people observe. Eastward celebration may also recover the symbolism of worship as the movement of the whole people (led in a certain way by the priest) forward on their journey to God. Shaver is far from advocating a complete return to eastward-facing celebrations. Rather, he suggests that reincorporating this practice, perhaps along with other changes in the arrangement of the assembly (as buildings allow) may have the salutary effect of destabilizing what has now become customary and familiar. In the midst of great concern for its future and fate in a rapidly secularizing world, the church may find that this destabilization breaks open the church toward the coming of its Lord. Indeed, destabilizing the customary and familiar is necessary for growth in faith, so that the daily the ordinary may be a place of encounter with and witness to God. Mark S. Medley follows Rowan Williams s view of martyrdom as a discipline enjoined by baptism, to be practiced in daily life so that Christians always carry in their personal and ecclesial body the kenotic death of Christ, considering what holiness is and how it can be performed in the routines of daily

4 380 Anglican Theological Review existence. The dramatic and heroic deaths of early Christians and of contemporary Christians facing persecution are highly unlikely for many Christians around the North Atlantic. In our various impulses and urges toward self-glorification, many of us may count this a loss. Instead, Williams says, we are called to faithful lives that are non-dramatic, and in such lives to grow in faith in Christ and participation in his Body. On this reading, martyrdom entails pursuing the prosaic, living in this world, immersing ourselves in the truth of our given realities, and resisting the proffers of security and certainty that are without Christ. Martyrdom is a discipline integral to living into baptism, to be lived out in ordinary time, and with humility. Like the more dramatic martyrdoms which we recollect on particular days, quotidian martyrdom reminds us that we live new lives transformed in Christ; we live under the sovereignty of God, even in the absence of drama and flames. Readers of the ATR are familiar with the Practicing Theology section that we include in some of our thematic issues. Short essays under that heading offer possibilities for moving our theological commitments in certain areas into the ordinary lives of our congregations and community. With this issue, we begin the occasional offering of essays of this sort that are not necessarily suggested by the major articles of the issue. In his essay, Jay Sidebotham recounts the efforts of the Church of the Holy Spirit, Lake Forest, Illinois, to learn from others how their church might grow in multifaceted ways. They turned to research conducted for the Willow Creek Community Church, a megachurch in Chicago s northwest suburbs, research devised by a marketing researcher who is a parishioner of Holy Spirit. The research instruments did not translate easily from evangelicalism to mainstream Anglicanism; Sidebotham recounts some of the struggles that ensued. In the midst of these struggles, it is already becoming apparent that taking this research seriously (if not literally) has brought some unexpected new life to a secure and rather comfortable congregation. Following Sidebotham s essay is one by Anthony D. Baker on the relation of theology and poetry. This is the first of a number of essays probing the overlaps and fissures of two genres that are often considered quite distinct, even at some odds with each other. We offer these essays because the ATR has long included poetry as a matter of course one of the few theological journals that does so and we

5 Editor s Notes 381 want to reflect on why we do, as we also include an expanded poetry section in this issue. In his essay, Baker argues that insofar as theology verbalizes what exceeds human language, and visualizes what exceeds human vision, it is always poetic in its content if not in form. Baker goes on to explore both poetry and theology as poeisis, meaning-making that discloses truths and insights that did not exist before. Poetry, Baker says, reaches toward the unsayable in ways that are non-propositional and thereby provokes reconsideration of what we think we already understand fully. Theology, by contrast, often has a more systematic logic, attempting to state clearly the faith that believers hold. But given that this faith is in something, in someone who is always beyond and more, theology too reaches toward the unsayable; it is mythopoetic even as it states what Christians take as fact. Without this impulse, theology is flat and thereby falls short of its purpose. This issue also includes a book review article on the christological controversy by Charles M. Stang, a controversy that is notoriously difficult to understand, and even more so to appreciate. Stang s article examines what the theological stakes are in this controversy, focusing on the way in which Christology necessarily addresses the crucial question of the human subject. Christology raises this question because it struggles with how to express the belief that Christ is at one and the same time the human subject and likewise fully divine. In reviewing how these works examine some of the major features of the controversy, Stang helps us see how and why these controversies continue to matter to Christians now. What we say of Christ necessarily shapes what we say of God, of ourselves, and most importantly of the relationship between the two on which our very lives depend. Ellen K. Wondra Editor in Chief

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