Crux by Rosi Petkova

Fall 2011 Vol.47, No.3

A Quarterly Journal of Christian Thought and Opinion published by Regent College

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Julie Lane Gay Bethany Murphy Dal Schindell Rosi Petkova Ivan lo James I. Packer Bill Reimer Luci Shaw The Regent College Faculty

CRUX, a journal of Christian thought and opinion, seeks to expound the basic tenets of the Christian faith and to demonstrate that Christian truth is relevant to the whole of life. Its particular concern is to relate the teachings of Scripture to a broad spectrum of academic, social, and professional areas of interest, to integrate them, and to apply the insights gained to corporate and personal Christian life and witness. Founded in 1962 by the Toronto Graduate Christian Fellowship and subsequently published by a group of Christian faculty members associated with Scarborough College in the University of Toronto, CRUX has been published since 1979 by the Faculty and Alumni of Regent College, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Views expressed in CRUX should be regarded as the personal opinions of the individual authors rather than as reflecting the official opinions or policies of Regent College. Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Religious and Theological Abstracts, Old Testament Abstracts, New Testament Abstracts, and Religion Index One. This periodical is indexed in the ATLA Religion Database, published by the American Theological Library Association, 250 S. Wacker Drive, 16th Floor, Chicago, IL 60606. E-mail: <atla@atla.com>, website: <www.atla.com>. Subscriptions: CAD/USD$26 for one year, CAD/USD$49 for two years, and CAD/USD$72 for three years. CAD/ USD$7 for single copies. (For Canadian subscribers, please add the applicable HST/GST to the total amount.) Payments by credit cards or cheques are accepted. Cheques should be made out to Regent College. All editorial correspondence, notices of change of subscription address, and financial contributions to help defray the cost of publication should be sent to: CRUX Circulation Department Regent College 5800 University Boulevard Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 2E4 Books for review should be sent to: CRUX Book Review Editor Regent College 5800 University Boulevard Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 2E4

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Contents

CRUX Fall 2011,Vol. 47, No. 3

A Quarterly Journal of Christian Thought and Opinion published by Regent College

Articles Stop! In the Name of Love: The Radical Practice of Sabbath-Keeping Susan S. Phillips. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Of Mirth and Misery: Some Literary and Theological Reflections Sharon Jebb Smith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Reconnecting the Threads: Theology as Sacramental Tapestry Hans Boersma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Poetry Basilique du Notre Dame, Ottawa Diane Tucker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 The Trend Luci Shaw. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Signal Fires C.G. Bateman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Book R eviews Hope in Dark Days: The Politics and Ethics of Eschatological Reserve The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times, by Charles Mathewes, and Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics, by Nigel Biggar reviewed by Brian Williams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Going Missional: Conversations with 13 Canadian Churches Who Have Embraced Missional Life by Karen Stiller with Will Metzger, reviewed by Julie Lane-Gay . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Advertise in CRUX. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Jevgenij Ivanov’s cover illustration pictures the Sabbath (‫)שבת‬. In her article, Susan Phillips reminds us that Sabbath is a gift we can choose to receive. It is a temple in time, sheltering us from the “winds of culture,” providing us with a place to stop our striving, to face our limits and mortality, and to encounter the Holy One who longs to bless us. In Sabbath, we are both humbled and exalted. In Sabbath, creation and eternity meet.

Stop! In the Name of Love: The Radical Practice of Sabbath-Keeping Susan S. Phillips

Susan S. Phillips is Executive Director and Professor of Sociology and Christianity, New College, Berkeley. Editor’s Note: This article is based on an Under the Green Roof lecture delivered at Regent College in Summer, 2011.

ince 1965 millions of people around the world have listened to Diana Ross and The Supremes sing “Stop! In the Name of Love,” their right hands raised in the universal gesture commanding the observer to stop. Now it’s quite possible that Ross and her colleagues may not have been singing about Sabbath-keeping, but in recent years I have become a troubadour of Sabbath, and that song title expresses the invitation I believe God is extending to us. It’s a call to a radical practice, radical in the sense (as in the word “radish”) that it roots and grounds us in God’s grace, and radical in that it challenges the prevailing culture. Stop in the name of love. Put down your work, your usefulness, your work-based identity. Attend to the Lord who calls you to stop. Desist from distraction. This is gift and summons. Over the past dozen years or so, many long-time Christians have awakened to the need for regular practices that turn our hearts toward God. The speed of contemporary life and the fragmenting demands of interconnectivity can leave us feeling separated from God, our deepest selves, and from others. Five years ago in a public lecture at Regent College, “Garden or Circus: Christian Care in the Face of Contemporary Pressures,”1 I spoke about the circus of our lives in which we juggle our schedules, balance commitments, worry about what kind of net we’re working with, strive to launch, pedal as fast as we can, and attend to the acts the media highlights in its three rings—often,

in the United States at any rate, the War, the Economy, and the Disaster (whatever is current, be it a tsunami or a revolution). Five years later, the circus continues unabated with its accompanying social constructions of meaning, practices, and language. Also five years ago, the Harvard Business Review called jobs that require seventy-hour workweeks the new standard for professionals, and Fortune magazine claimed the sixty-hour workweek to be part time.2 Time studies show that people who claim to work that many hours in fact don’t. Nevertheless, they feel that they do—engulfed as we all are by workconsciousness—and, in fact, our work weeks have continued to lengthen over the course of the past fifty years. In 1948 Josef Pieper presciently warned against succumbing to the ethos of “total work,” and advocated leisure, which he claimed “is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality.”3 Today many of us find there are few clear boundaries between the kinds of work we do and other areas of our lives. Little of our leisure time is experienced as a “form of silence.” As a spiritual director I hear people speak about the rare and precious joy of going on vacation in such a remote location that they’re actually able to be off the grid. But when they’re not rafting in Patagonia or spelunking in New Mexico, they feel infinitely accessible and compelled to work. Their foothold in the job market and their own sense of 2

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is remitted under the Christian economy.”5 Wesley, who bore nineteen children and sometimes had as many as two hundred people worshiping in her home, received Sabbath as gift. She chose not to enter the theological debate surrounding Sabbath, but rather chose “to bless and praise our God for giving us leave to enjoy a Sabbath, for permitting us to refresh our souls by a view of that rest and glory which he hath prepared for those that love him.”6

legitimacy depend on their willingness to work at all times and in all places. Even on a beach. Even while driving. Even in the middle of the night. Even during Sabbath. A recent survey of Presbyterian clergy in the United States reports that since 1999 they have become more aware of Sabbath as “a Christian practice and something that needs to be revived” as an opportunity for rest and restoration.4 My experience, too, has been that more and more Christians, lay and ordained, are becoming aware of Sabbath. Trailblazers in the contemporary Protestant spiritual formation movement, such as Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, did not include Sabbath-keeping in their lists of spiritual disciplines thirty years ago, yet now, in the twenty-first century, it’s what I’m often asked to speak about at retreats and lectures in North America and elsewhere in the world. Even when I’m speaking about something else, the subject comes up, as it did most recently with the faculty at a Protestant seminary in Egypt on the heels of the revolution there. Sabbath-keeping is a practice that helps us remember God. It is also a gift from God to the people of God. Jesus told us that the Sabbath is made for people, and he, Jesus, is the Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:28). This gift, like all gifts, requires welcome, reception, open hands and hearts. Gifts entail mystery. We become vulnerable in opening to what is mysterious and not under our control. The preferred mode of constantly working conjures the sense of control and efficacy, while holding at bay what is mysterious and suppressing a sense of our own finitude. Indeed, one wonders how much defensiveness lies in the controversy concerning Sabbath-keeping. Acknowledging Sabbath as gift helps us focus on what is central rather than on the interminable debates about what behaviours are permitted or not on the Sabbath, and also the theological question about whether or not, as Susanna Wesley so beautifully put it in the eighteenth century, “the severity of the Jewish Sabbath

Another Countering Dominant cultural force Cultural Forces To acknowledge and receive Sabbath counters Sabbath as gift is to counter is the commodiseveral dominant forces in our culture. One, already fication of time, mentioned, is our drive for legitimation by virtue of our which views role as workers. The nontime in terms revealing, self-legitimating, and ref lexive response to of its costs and t he que stion “How a re you? ” is no longer “Fine,” benefits, use and but in the past few years has become “Busy.” Imagine how waste, investment this affects those who are and loss. sidelined from the workforce:

the disabled, unemployed, retired, and ill. Particularly insidious is the religious form of this view, about which Eugene Peterson wrote that we have been “subverted by ‘angel of light’ tactics … and consider our Sabbath breaking to be virtuous.”7 A not her cult ural force Sabbat h counters is the commodification of time, which views time in terms of its costs and benefits, use and waste, investment and loss. This can be experienced as efficient—as, for instance, when attorneys bill by every 7½ minutes—and it can be experienced as desolate—as, for example, in the song of T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock who says “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”8 A third force that Sabbath counters is that of protectionism. We desire safety in 3

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Stop! In the Name of Love: The Radical Practice of Sabbath-Keeping

But this time before you run to her Leaving me alone and hurt (think it over) Haven’t I been good to you?10

all ways. Our countries monitor borders for the sake of safety. We guard our own borders similarly—the borders of those territories we claim as ours, and the borders of our selves. Accepting the gift of Sabbath involves relinquishing the legitimating role of worker, doer, producer, and consumer, and also dropping our guard. Regent College is a community that encourages Sabbath and has offered numerous ref lections on and exemplars of Sabbath-keeping. Marva Dawn has written about Sabbath. Eugene Peterson has written in many places about the spiritual discipline and holy gift of Sabbath. Regent College president Rod Wilson in recent years has kept the Sabbath and spoken and written encouragingly about the grace he’s received in doing so.

This might be God’s invitation to keep the Sabbath day holy. We are to “be still, and know that I am God” (Ps 46:10).11 How do we respond to God’s beckoning to us in this way, instead of viewing it as the one of the Ten Commandments that is merely a suggestion? Isaiah 58 God’s words about Sabbath found in Isaiah 58 may serve as a guide for the movements of this radical spiritual practice of Sabbath keeping. This text appears in a section of Isaiah that the NRSV titles “False and True Worship.” The Lord tells the people that their spiritual disciplines are not true spiritual disciplines, but are rather selfcentered practices that strike the pose of worship. The “fast” that the Lord chooses is one of justice for the poor: letting the oppressed go free, bringing the homeless into our homes, sharing our bread with the hungry. When we act as the Lord chooses, we will be “like a watered garden” (Isa 58:11), restored and nourished. We do the Lord’s work, and, in doing so, we receive. We are cared for, fed, well watered. It is in this context that Sabbath is addressed:

A Gift Like all the Christian spiritual disciplines, Sabbat h keepi ng is fou ndationally relational. It’s about listening a nd responding to God. Trust is essential. Gift giving relies on and establishes a bond. In his classic book The Gift, drawing on the work of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and historian of religions Marcel Mauss, Lewis Hyde wrote: “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange, that a gift establishes a feelingbond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.”9 It is not only that Sabbath keeping is commanded, nor that it is a habit of highly effective people or devoutly religious people. It cultivates our bond with God who loves us and asks us, perhaps not totally unlike Diana Ross and The Supremes, to

If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob. (Isa 58:13–14)

Stop! in the name of love Before you break my heart Baby, baby I’m aware of where you go Each time you leave my door I watch you walk down the street Knowing your other love you’ll meet 4

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“Shabbat.” Stop. Sit down. Fold your hands. Take a deep breath. Look around you. Notice. What do you see? Smell, feel, hear, taste? In Genesis 2 God stopped. “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy” (vv. 2–3 NIV). (This is the first use of the word “holy”—qadosh— in Jewish Scriptures.) Like God, we stop from our doing, a nd we rest. Jesus shows us this stopping motion, time and again, in the midst of all kinds of urgent, important interests and af fairs, even in the wildness of the evening of his arrest. Going through Jericho with his disciples, Jesu s hea rd B a r tim aeu s calling to him from the side of the road. Jesus stopped, and so did those with him. Days after Jesus’ execution, two of his followers are overtaken by a stranger walking alongside them on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. He asks them what they’re talking about. They stop. In their stopping they experience the full force of their confused thoughts and mixed feelings. In both situations, stopping is the first move. It allows for encounter with the Holy One. So, too, Sabbath is a stop that allows for encounter with God. It enables us to register presence and possibility. During a pause between two busy weeks, the light of Sabbath glows like the candles lighted in Jewish homes when the sun sets and the Sabbath begins. We refrain from trampling the Sabbath. There is a human awareness—not necessarily associated with religious beliefs

This is the good news that God has been speaking since the beginning of time and through Jesus’ lordship over the Sabbath. God’s grace is to flow to us and through us to the world. Sabbath keeping is one of the ways we can open our hearts to that grace, receive it, and become well watered, so that the grace will flow through us such that the “light shall break forth like the dawn” (Isa 58:8).

The prophet’s passage begins with the word “refrain.” In Latin, this word comes from one meaning to stop a horse with a bridle. Perfect for us, I think, for Sabbath can feel like a bridle in the context of our galloping lives.

Stopping The prophet’s passage begins with the word “refrain.” In Latin, this word comes from one meaning to stop a horse with a bridle. Perfect for us, I think, for Sabbath can feel like a bridle in the context of our galloping lives. Stopping is just about the most counter-cultural action we can take. The Hebrew word “Shabbat” means “Quit … Stop … Take a break.”12 What helps us stop? To help themselves stop, Jews at the beginning of the Sabbath, as the sun sets on Friday evening, kindle the light. Every Friday at dinner as the sun goes down, Jewish women pray: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has set us apart by his commandments and commanded us to kindle the Sabbath lights.”13 They light two candles in remembrance of the two mentions of Sabbath in the Law (Deut 5:12–15 and Exod 20:8–11). I light one candle at the beginning of the spiritual direction hour, a reminder that the Light of the world is with us. When people stop in the chair across from me, they discover what is going on inside them. One person tells me, “I feel like a robot. I go about my days executing the tasks before me. I barely notice anything else. I fear stopping, because then I will feel regret for the emptiness of my days.” Another, a person engaged in ministry that gives life to many, says, “I feel flat. I have no idea what I really feel. No idea what God might be saying or doing. I’m just going through the motions—effectively and happily. But I feel cut off from what’s deeper.” 5

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and practices—that we need to stop. Peggy Orenstein wrote about the practice of “selfbinding,” as in Odysseus lashing himself to the mast to resist the Sirens.14 What strategies do we use to stop ourselves, in the absence of bridles and ropes tied to the mast? She refers to an Internet app for Macs called “Freedom,” which blocks your Internet access for up to eight hours at a stretch. We can enter this time in other ways, too. Some of these ways are involuntary. One of my directees says t hat it’s u sually ill nes s that creates a stopping, and she’d like to find other ways to slow down. James Kugel, Harvard professor of Hebrew Literature and cancer survivor, wrote about involuntary stopping:

He continued: Starkness and the musicless, small state of mind with which I began [the cancer journey]—certainly go together. Because it is that state of mind that makes the starkness accessible in the first place: being drawn back into smallness allows a window to open onto the stark world. In that place of darkness and great light, of absolutes and essences that are far removed from the stippled, reddish, purplish hurts of this existence, divine justice shines through. That is, I suppose, where Moses was when God told him that, despite all the vicissitudes of life, He was by nature “a merciful and compassionate God, abounding in kindness and faithfulness.”16

In the present moment of stopping, we savour the beginning of time, and have a foretaste of the eternal kingdom. Our night vision improves. We There is something proare humbled. foundly weird about the Wonder and awe way we in the modern West conceive of ourbecome possible. selves, or rather, don’t

Kugel was thrust out of his robotic state of “shuffling” through life, possibly of measuring out his life with coffee spoons and emails. He was moved into that space that Pieper calls the silence in which one might apprehend reality, possibly a space related to the Heideggerian concept of the “clearing” in which we stop. Sabbath allows this kind of stark look at the real. It links creation and eternity. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the renowned rabbi and theologian of the twentieth century, ended his gem of a book The Sabbath with the sentence, “Eternity utters a day,”17 which captures Susanna Wesley’s understanding of Sabbath as granting a view of the rest and glory ahead. In the present moment of stopping, we savour the beginning of time, and have a foretaste of the eternal kingdom. Our night vision improves. We are humbled. Wonder a nd awe become possible. We enter a different form of time than we navigate ordinarily. We have adapted to a culture in which time is instrumentalized and commodified. We use it and spend it. The word secular means that which is embedded in ordinary time, from saeculum: a century or age.18 We’ve lost

conceive of ourselves, as we shuffle through our days. … [Our soul] has become a strangely stunted and sealed organ, the product of the harsh environment in which it has been forced to develop. … [He writes that he was catapulted by terminal cancer into an environment of stark reality, in which] ideas about God seemed a funny luxury. No need then to think about what was real. What was real was this afternoon: no soft curves, just squares and rectangles rubbing up against each other with great friction, raw. … And … the smallness—trying to live among the great elements of the present, wife and children, afternoon sun, the starkness of the late-autumn afternoon sun.15 6

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all our kids’ sports gear would suddenly fly forward from nether recesses of the car. That’s what we experience when we stop: we discover, among other things, our baggage. W hen we come to worship we may experience s uch d i s c over y. We’ve worked quickly and efficiently all week and have managed to get ourselves to church. We sit; take some time in silent prayer; listen to the music. We are at rest. And we might, like the people on the Emmaus road, notice the upwelling of confusion, hopes, fears, questions, sadness, and longing. We, too, may long to catch a glimpse of the Lord, some indication that our hopes are not foolish. In worshipping we keep the Sabbath and “call it a delight.” We cease our trampling about and stop before the Lord. Scripture, biblical example, and the tradition of our faith invite us to observe an entire day of stopping each week, though there have been disputes in the church as to the Sabbath’s content, scheduling, theological import, and eschatological referent. Great insight into human nature is evidenced by framing the Sabbath between two settings of the sun. Many spiritual disciplines are under our control. We set the time for them and face the challenge of directing and holding our attention on the discipline. When life interferes, we can negotiate with disciplines, perhaps in this way: “I know I read Scripture and write in my journal in the morning, but today I have early meetings, so I’ll do these things in the evening.” And we may honour that commitment. But a Sabbath signaled by

our understanding of kairotic time— appointed or sanctified time, that which is gathered and assembled, is qualitative and experienced, rather than measured. A different kind of time. Charles Taylor referred to this as “higher” time, and he employs various adjectives to describe it: kairotic, eternal, knotted, gathered, vertical, hallowed, liminoid, and full. This “higher” time contrasts with secular time, which is ordinary, empty, homogenous, transitive, dispersed, horizontal, sequenced, and measured. And, as we so often describe our ordinary time, “busy.”19 Entering Sabbath time is to join God in this “higher,” or sacred, time. To do so, we stop, take off our shoes. The word sanctify in Exodus 20:8, where we’re enjoined to “remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it,” is the Hebrew word le-kadesh, which is the same word the Talmud uses to speak of consecrating or betrothing a woman to a man.20 Sabbath is covenantal. In Ezekiel (20:12–13, 21) God speaks of having given the people the Sabbath as a sign of holy covenant between them, but the people desecrated the Sabbath, and in doing so lost their understanding of God. The relationship was defiled. God, as Christ, entered time, thus sacralizing ordinary time.21 We can enter this time by participating in God’s life.22 Sabbath is a ritual—a practice—that reminds us of creation and eternity, turns our attention toward God. Possibly, like Diana Ross and The Supremes, God says to us, “Stop! In the name of love, before you break my heart. Think it over.”

We’ve lost our understanding of kairotic time— appointed or sanctified time, that which is gathered and assembled, is qualitative and experienced, rather than measured. A different kind of time.

Turning From When we stop, we notice that from which we’re turning. On my street there’s a stop sign that’s situated at the bottom of a downward sloping hill. One comes upon it suddenly, around a bend. In my mini-van soccer-mom days my friends and I used to laugh about how we would slam on the brakes as we came upon the stop sign, and 7

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Remembering Margaret Avison/Margaret Avison Remembering

paying attention 24/7 to what our “smart” phones convey to us. A few years ago I had reason to send emails out at seven in the morning to a number of people, including three presidents of seminaries. I sat at my desk amazed when each of the three presidents responded within five minutes. We are wired, connected, accessible, and conscious of demands on us at all hours of the day and night. We need a strong structure that will barricade us in a free space where those demands can’t reach us, if we are going to open our hearts before God for any length of time. That is what Sabbath offers. What does Scripture tell us ought to be outside the borders of the Sabbath? I think what we turn from falls into three general categories, though each of us knows the particular temptations we must add to the list.

the setting of the sun amplifies awareness that God’s holy day has begun, and we are invited into it. We can decline the invitation, but Sabbath day has arrived and is there for us to receive. Abraham Heschel declared that “the Sabbaths are our [Jews’] great cathedrals … which neither the Romans or Germans were able to burn.”23 The Sabbath is a temple in time. The Ten Commandments do not command the building of a temple or altar. They don’t command attending a worship service or participating in some of the spiritual disciplines we c on sider nor m at ive for people of faith. What the commandments do command is the sanctification of the seventh day. In keeping the Sabbath holy, we enter into a space and time of openness to God, the kind of space and time we experience when we enter a house of prayer. Heschel wrote of how significant this temple in time was for the Jews. They could enter its holy space o f r e m e m b e r i n g G o d’s faithfulness wherever they were: in the desert, in exile, in labour camps, even in times that were distractingly plentiful and productive. People have always needed this kind of architectural time to shelter us from the winds of culture and nattering of our own concerns. It could be argued that we especially need it now. We contend not only with the secular social structures of the market and the state, but also with the all-consuming, allentrancing structure of the Net. We no longer have a leisure class. People of wealth are known by their busyness. “Out of the office” messages have become obsolete, even on our email accounts, because current practice and the accompanying expectation is that we’re

The Sabbath is a temple in time. In keeping the Sabbath holy, we enter into a space and time of openness to God, the kind of space and time we experience when we enter a house of prayer.

1. Social Hierarchy In Exodus 20:8–11 we are instructed to stop all work, and rest. Not only each one of us, but all who live with us and work for us, including animals and the aliens in our land (or those in other lands who labour for us). This is a practice of justice as well as devotion, for we are not to expect others to work for us while we enjoy Sabbath rest. Rather, we are to see it as a practice and privilege of all humankind, all of whom are created in God’s image. This is radical thinking. Part of the interests and pursuits we put down on the Sabbath are those of social hierarchy by which some work to serve others who are enjoying leisure. Discernment is necessary to identify what activities or thoughts move us into the social hierarchy. Many people do not shop or go to restaurants on the Sabbath because doing so forces others to work for them. A minister who first showed me a life lived in accordance with the Sabbath was noticeably out of his ministerial role when I encountered him out and about on his Sabbath day. He wasn’t dressed like a preacher, and he didn’t orient toward me like my pastor. On the Sabbath, he was simply a friend to me. Sometimes 8

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stepping out of the social hierarchy means we are free from caregiving, except in circumstances that call to us loudly and clearly to make a caring exception on the Sabbath as Jesus did, for instance, with the man at the Bethesda pool. We are called to “choose life” and receive God’s love. At times, doing so for ourselves or another requires us to act in a way not normally compatible with Sabbath rest.

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of the category of instrumentality and economic calculation. We are to call the Sabbath a delight, not a resource; a gift, not a commodity; a spiritual discipline, not a duty. Jesus five times exposes Sabbath distortions as a cruel instrument of oppression and restores it to “a gift for living in free obedience before and with God” (Mark 2:23–28; 3:1–6; Luke 14:1–6; John 5:1–18; 9:1–41).25 In ou r world to d ay, as in Roman times, we instr umentalize rest. In bip ola r fa shion, we alternate between frenzied striving and mind-numbing d i s en g a gement, hopi n g the latter will refuel us to reengage the former. We have one of the longest workweeks and work-years in the world and proudly call ourselves “busy.” Thus we are reminded: Sabbath is holy, not useful. The Jesuit writer Peter van Breemen, in writing about prayer, offers wisdom for Sabbath: “Prayer cannot be a means to an end. Prayer is the last word—there is no word beyond prayer. … Prayer is not efficient, it doesn’t bring about anything—it’s the stillpoint, the axis around which everything rotates.”26

It is God who hallows the Sabbath, and we who call it “ holy”and observe it as such. It is objective holiness that we encounter, not merely a sensory experience. It is a relationship. We stop and turn from our occupations and preoccupations in order to orient toward God.

2. Work This is the category of activity most commonly mentioned in any consideration of what we turn from on the Sabbath. We are to work six days a week, and God’s work during the six days of creation is called “good” and “very good.” Then we are to rest, and that’s called “holy,” set apart (qadosh). In different translations of Isaiah 58, what we turn from are the following: pursuit of our interests and affairs, going our own way, doing as we please, and speaking idle words. People often ask what constitutes work, and, therefore, must be turned from on the Sabbath. Some pastors claim that leading worship is completely compatible with Sabbath observance. Others claim it’s not. Some people experience gardening as free and playful, and a great Sabbath engagement. For others gardening is the work of clearing out the weeds, making the garden fruitful, applying evaluative criteria and goals to the activity. It’s work. Again, this is a matter calling for prayerful discernment. 3. Instrumentality The third category we are to turn from on the Sabbath is that of instrumentality or usefulness. The Roman reaction to the Jews’ adherence to the law of abstaining from labour on the Sabbath was contempt (see Juvenal, Seneca, and others). Some Jews (such as Philo) legitimated the practice by referring to relaxation as a means to an end, which was Aristotle’s view. He wrote, “we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.”24 In Sabbath, time is moved out

Turning Toward It is God who hallows the Sabbath, and we who call it “holy” and observe it as such. It is objective holiness that we encounter, not merely a sensory experience. It is a relationship. We stop and turn from our occupations and preoccupations in order to orient toward God. So many words in Scripture begin with the prefix, in English, “re-.” Do it again. As human beings, we need to do many actions 9

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pouring, and open to receive. This is Mary Magdalene at the tomb, turning toward the gardener who calls her by name. This is Peter diving off the boat and swimming to shore, eager to receive what Jesus has to offer. This is also Jesus saying, “Thy will be done.” As we turn toward God, we relinquish control and trust God alone. There entails a pivot movement, a reorientation. One Hebrew word for soul is nephesh. It is a cognate of a Hebrew word for “breath” and may be a metaphor for neck.27 We breathe and ingest through our necks. Our necks also enable our eyes to turn in God’s direction. We can see this movement in worship. People close their eyes and turn their heads upward in openness to God. Some persons extend their arms and open their hands. Some kneel—such a full stop. This is like Moses stopping at the burning bush. No quick going back to the work of the field, his role in the work hierarchy, or his sense of legitimacy through meaningful labour. He stopped, noticing the burning bush that was not consumed. He turned from his work, toward his God, and God asked him to take off his shoes. He was on holy ground. The Sabbath is holy ground. We take off our shoes and stay for a while. We do not control what will happen. What we receive may change us radically, may cost us dearly, may bless us immeasurably. We turn toward it because we trust and love the One who asks us to take off our shoes and stay awhile.

repeatedly: breathe again, sleep again, eat again. So, too, we need to turn again and again toward God. We return to God. We repent of our wanderings, mental and otherwise, that have turned u s away f rom Go d. We remember God. We receive the Holy Spirit. We return to Jesus. We retreat from pursuing our own interests. We refrain from trampling the Sabbath. We do these things so that, once again, we can call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable. We will, once again, honor it, not going our own ways, serving our own interests, or pursuing our own affairs. We step back again into the cathedral in time where we hope to encounter God. In so doing, we stop. In the stopping, what’s deepest in us surfaces. Some things peel away from us: our social roles, our work, our constant immersion in efficiency thinking. Other things remain because they are deep and true—like our hopes and fears—and we bring them to God in prayer. One of my directees, a minister, says, “My mind is racing. Always racing. In the space of prayer, the sanctuary of Sabbath, the racing gradually ebbs and I’m left with what I experience as the core of me. That core of me is repentant before God, and also is thirsty to receive whatever God would give to me. I am humbled. I am grateful. I am at rest.” This is a contemplative stance—a stance of receptivity to God. Webster’s definition of contemplation is: “To look at or view with continued attention.” This is what the Sabbath allows. We can imagine this as a pitcher put down and at rest, finished with its

In the stopping, what’s deepest in us surfaces. Some things peel away from us: our social roles, our work, our constant immersion in efficiency thinking. Other things remain because they are deep and true— like our hopes and fears—and we bring them to God in prayer.

Exaltation and Feasting Continuing with these two verses of Isaiah 58, when we’ve refrained from trampling the Sabbath with the pursuit of our own interests, when we’ve called the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable, then God will make us ride upon the heights of the earth and feast on the inheritance from our Father. Now we have moved beyond what is within our power to conjure. We can stop. We can turn from. We can turn toward. But then it is God who acts, God who 10

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exalts, God who provides the feast. The text shifts from “if you” constructions to God saying, “I will.” Exalt, literally, means to lift high. One can be lifted high in rank, pride, power, character, or joy. Isaiah speaks of joy and the care of God in raising up the one who keeps the Sabbath. This is the same expression used to describe high places in Moses’ end-of-life song (Deut 32:13). Moses (as in Deut 28:1) is speaking about the blessing given by God in response to the people’s obedience. David is called “the man whom God exalted” (2 Sam 23:1). And the expression of God lifting up is most poignantly expressed in Isaiah’s song of the suffering servant: “See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high,” though he be “despised and rejected” (Isa 52:13; 53:3). Paul echoes this in Philippians 2 when writing about Jesus: “Therefore God also highly exalted him” (v. 9). There is no contradiction between exaltation and suffering. Being lifted on high is the mark of God’s blessing for faithfulness. In fact, Sabbath puts us in touch with what Kugel calls our smallness. In this sacred time, we encounter our limits, our mortality. Humility and elevation. “Exaltation” in the Bible is a relational word. We exalt God, and God exalts the faithful. But we can also exalt ourselves, exalt other gods, and respond to the exaltation of others. Jesus sums it up neatly, saying, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matt 23:12). The experience in Sabbath is sheer gift. We can stop, turn from, and turn toward, but the experience of exaltation is not subject to our control. In the social sciences we traditionally have studied two spatial dimensions: the horizontal one of intimacy and attachment, and the vertical one of relative social status and power. Some theorists are now pointing to a third dimension, which is that of purity or pollution, and we often use vertical images of morality to convey it;

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for example, “low life” and “moral stature.” Exaltation is the theological word for what psychologists now are calling “elevation.” Jonathan Haidt wrote: “Elevation is elicited by acts of virtue or moral beauty; it causes warm, open feelings (“dilation?”) in the chest; and it motivates people to behave more virtuously themselves.” 28 This is contemporary science exploring an aspect of human experience that biblical wisdom has commented on for millennia. This movement of the heart toward grace is a hallmark of great literature, too, as illustrated by William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29. (Imagine that “thee” refers to the Lord.)

We can stop. We can turn from. We can turn toward. But then it is God who acts, God who exalts, God who provides When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes, the feast. The I all alone beweep my text shifts outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven from “ if you” with my bootless cries, And look upon myself constructions to and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one God saying, more rich in hope, “I will.” Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising Haply I think on thee—and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

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are. It extracts us from productivity, consumption, and efficiency—the engines of our modern culture. It acquaints us with our finitude: embodiment, temporality, mortality. Jewish and Christian writers on the subject of Sabbath, like Heschel and Peterson, affirm that creation and eternity meet in the Sabbath.

Haidt found that research subjects who wrote about experiences of elevation described warm, pleasant, or “tingling” feelings (often in their chests) and were more likely to report wanting to help others, to become better people themselves, and to affiliate with others.29 There is often an expansion of the chest, a sense of the stretching of the heart. We read this in the sonnet. The poet’s state rises like the lark at break of day, and he sings. He in hales sweet love and no longer nurtures envy. Perhaps, like the participants in Haidt’s resea rch, he ex hales some of the love he has received. T hi s pro ce s s i s no sur prise to us. The structure of grace is flow: we receive God’s grace when we open ourselves to it. It nourishes and purifies our souls. And then that grace flows through us to the world. As God said through the prophet Joel (2:13)—“Rend your hearts and not your clothing.” Our hearts are stretched, and we become capable again of “true worship,” which in Isaia h 58 is set forth as letting the oppressed go free, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, working for justice. Sabbath allows repentance, remembrance, renewal. From that, “repair of the world” might be possible as the light breaks forth like dawn and the watered garden bears fruit in the world. Sabbath frees us for a time from legitimating social structures and mental constructs, important as those

Sabbath frees us for a time from legitimating social structures and mental constructs, important as those are. It extracts us from productivity, consumption, and efficiency—the engines of our modern culture. It acquaints us with our finitude: embodiment, temporality, mortality. Creation and eternity meet in the Sabbath.

Lent and Holy Saturday Lent and Easter allow us to enter into extended Sabbath time. They are sacred knots in historical time, bringing us experientially closer to the final days of Jesus than we are, for example, to some autumn day three years ago. This closeness to other Easters is possible because the notion of time exists in the context of the kingdom that holds creation and eternity. This is the time we observe in Sabbath. We also observe it communally, a dimension of Sabbath we’ve lost in modern times. The haunting question for today with regard to Sabbath is, how do we restore it as a communal practice, a gift of God for the people of God? The communal observance of Easter may offer wisdom with regard to Sabbath. During Lent we remember how Jesus entered into all dimensions of finitude. On the Sabbath, when he was in the tomb, the forces of creation and eternity mingled. In the Protestant worship tradition we give scant attention to Holy Saturday. This year I had a different experience, having been invited to the Greek Orthodox observation of Holy Week and Pascha (Easter) at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. In that tradition Holy Saturday, or Great Saturday (in Judaism the Saturday after Passover is the Great Shabbat), there is grief, but not only grief. There are also the anticipation and acknowledgement that Jesus—whose funeral has just been enacted—is harrowing hell. New life is beginning. Tears mingle with sweet smelling spices. The light shines in the darkness, like phosphorescence in a black sea or the faint arching of a rare night rainbow. 12

Stop! In the Name of Love: The Radical Practice of Sabbath-Keeping

A client tells me that re-experiencing trauma is like Holy Saturday. There is horrendous grief, but it takes place in the context of knowing life goes on and healing takes place, by God’s grace. We enter into Lent knowing that Easter will come. In Sabbath we enter into a place of starkness that de-centers our ego and brings our mortality to mind. Yet it does so in the context of our relationship with the One who grants us Sabbath, the One who is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, Creator and Eternity. We are found, redeemed, and cherished. On Holy Saturday morning, the monks of St. Catherine’s in the Sinai chanted, as they have been doing for centuries, a hymn that was familiar to me though I come from a different Christian tradition. It is an amplification of Habakkuk 2:20—“The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.” It speaks of what is possible in Sabbath:

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Brace, 1930), 13. 9 The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (New York: Vintage, 2007), 72. 10 Written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Edward Holland Jr. (sung by The Supremes), 1965. 11 All Scripture references are from the NRSV unless otherwise marked. 12 Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), 109. 13 Cited in Lynne M. Baab’s Sabbath-Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 127. 14 “Stop Your Search Engines: Forcing Ourselves Offline May Be the Path to True Knowledge,” New York Times Magazine, October 25, 2009, 11–12. 15 In the Valley of the Shadow: On the Foundations of Religious Belief (New York: Free Press, 2011), 86–87. 16 Ibid., 141. 17 The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (Boston: Shambala, 2003), 93. 18 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 54. 19 For more on this book by Taylor, see Mark Sampson, “Faith in Modernity: Reflections from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age,” in Crux 46, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 28–39. 20 Heschel, Sabbath, 44. Text of Exod 20:8, as rendered by Heschel. 21 See Taylor, Secular Age, 56. 22 Ibid., 57 23 Heschel, Sabbath, xv. 24 Nicomachean Ethics 10.6.l.34–35. 25 Peterson, Christ Plays, 112. 26 Quoted in the foreword by Edward Farrell of van Breemen’s book As Bread That Is Broken (Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1974), 7–8. 27 See H.W. Wolff, “Nephesh—Needy Man,” in Anthropology of the Old Testament (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler Press, 1996), 10–25. Referenced in Barry Newman, “The Essence of Spirit (XV),” Barry Newman’s Blog, September 16, 2010, http:// barrynewman.wordpress.com/category/nephesh/; also, reflecting on Ps 63:2: Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton, 2009), xxvii-xxviii, referenced in Google books, http://sumsekel.blogspot.com/2008/04/ robert-alter-on-nephesh-as-throat-in.html. 28 “Elevation and the Positive Psychology of Morality,” in Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Well-Lived Life, ed. Corey L.M. Keyes and Jonathan Haidt (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003), 276. 29 Ibid., 282. 30 Liturgy of St. James, fourth century (Σιγησάτο παρα σὰρξ βροτεία), translated from Greek to English by Gerard Moultrie, 1864.

Let all mortal flesh keep silence, And with fear and trembling stand; Ponder nothing earthly minded, For with blessing in His hand, Christ our God to earth descendeth, Our full homage to demand.30 Endnotes

1 T h i s l e c t u r e w a s p u b l i s h e d i n Transformation: An International Dialogue on Mission and Ethics 22, no. 3 (July 2005): 158–65. 2 See Laura Vanderkam, “Overestimating Our Overworking,” Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2009. 3 Quoted by Judith Shulevitz in The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (New York: Random House, 2010), 202. 4 Religion Watch 26, no. 5 (March–April 2011): 4. 5 Letter from May 22, 1709, in Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings, ed. Charles Wallace Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 304. 6 Ibid. 7 “Confessions of a Former Sabbath Breaker,” Christianity Today, September 2, 1988, 26. 8 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1935 (New York: Harcourt, 13

Poetry

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Basilique du Notre Dame, Ottawa Diane Tucker My life: bits of smashed glass in a bloody mire. I lift them up here. My arms seem very long today. Up go all the filthy fragments of me into the royal buttressed blue. Look! Fistfuls of dirty shards arise and come down again as stars, as a constellation: my life arrayed behind and before, all her molecules scoured and reassembled, a jeweled system in the dark air, imperceptibly orbiting. Diane Tucker was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is the author of two books of poems, God on His Haunches and Bright Scarves of Hours, and the novel His Sweet Favour. She lives in Burnaby, BC.

“Title Of Mirth and Misery: author Some Literary and Theological Reflections Sharon Jebb Smith

genre called “misery literature”— or “mis lit”—has been dominating the book sales in the UK for a few years (and I have to confess that the genre seems to thrive in Ireland, which is where I hail from). These books are not just mildly depressing. They focus on bereavement, child abuse, and rape. Some are non-fiction, often memoirs, such as Angela’s Ashes. Others are fictional books, with such titles as Daddy’s Little Earner and Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes. Misery literature is not just restricted to Ireland or the UK, but is widespread in the Commonwealth. Literary prizes tend to reward the tragic novel, as is indicated by the comments that appeared in the media, from one particular judge of the 2010 Orange Prize who declared that many of the books she had to read were utterly depressing and “without a shred of redemption.” “There was very little wit and no jokes. … There does need to be some joy, not just misery.”1 Another judge, this time of the Booker Prize, said that she had to read books by men and women that she still shudders to recall: “That’s eight months of my life I won’t get back. The theme of the year was casual rape, usually set in the 1950s. And animal abuse. Why spend 30 pages carefully delineating the nuances of a character if you can just have him ritually slaughter a cat?”2 Canadian literature does seem to lack some of the excesses of the full-blown genre of misery literature, but it also has a grim side to it. As long ago as 1972,

Margaret Atwood said that Canadian literature was about “survival and victims.” And one recent blogger puts it this way: In Canada it’s either trendy-Torontonian-loses-girlfriend-and-becomessuicidal, or small-town-girl-hatessmall-town-and-wants-to-get-out, or dysfunctional-family-in-Maritimesyearns-for-good-old-days-whenalcoholic-Uncle-Fergus-knew-allthe-words-to-“The-Road-to-the-Isles.”3 In a book group that a friend belongs to in Ontario, at least one member has said that she hates the topics and never reads the books, but just goes along for the company and the food. Likewise, the United States is not without its miserable literature, if not quite “mis lit.” The presence of books such as A Child Called It, and We Need to Talk about Kevin are indicative. The Burned Children of America, a collection of some of the younger voices in contemporary American fiction, has been described as being about “fear of death and advertising.”4 In story after story, novel upon novel, death appeared with his hood and scythe, sometimes suddenly in a car smash, but more often in the long prelude of cancer or dementia. It would seem, then, that there is more than a little a moribund hue to the literature of what is sometimes known as the North Atlantic. As the novelist Zadie Smith asks in her introduction to The Burned Children, “why so sad, people?”5 Like these judges, I too have struggled with the negative effect of reading 15

Sharon Jebb Smith is a freelance lecturer in literature and theology, and spiritual theology. She is currently teaching at the University of Aberdeen and at Union Theological College, Belfast. Editor’s Note: This article is based on an Under the Green Roof lecture delivered at Regent College in Summer, 2011.

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the opposite. Reviewers praise books that are “gritty,” “unflinching,” and “bleakly realistic.” These qualities are lauded, whereas novels with more redemptive themes tend to be viewed as if they are less profound and verging on being a little naïve. If the arts, including fiction, are the new religion of the secular age, as many would argue, then the priestly caste— the authors, assisted by the critics—are presenting us with a joyless religion.7 What is this trend saying to us? Is the increase of “mis lit” saying something about our culture that is worth pondering, at the very least, if not trying to address? And what does theology have to say in response to this trend? More specifically, have we recourse to theologically inclined writers who will guide and resource us, as we try to negotiate the culture in which we live? Is there any guidance for those who try to engage with it, as readers, or perhaps as critics or writers or artists? I believe that certain Christian writers have tried to help us reject this, and this is what I want to explore in this piece. Firstly, then, what is mis lit telling us? The old adage “misery loves company” is a pretty good indication of the situation. In other words, misery literature is flourishing in the North Atlantic society because people are not happy. They are anxious, fearful, and exhausted from constant change. It is subtle, but persistent, and the cumulative effect is to create in us a kind of low-level background stress somewhere between fear and anxiety. I hesitate to distinguish between the words “fear” and “anxiety.” Technically, anxiety refers to a more general concern, whereas fear refers to something with a specific object, but I’m not alone in querying such a clear demarcation between the two. One solution has been the adoption of the German term angst. Or, more mildly, perhaps, “disquieted.” Whatever we call it, identifying it is important; it enables us to realize what is happening, to assess it, and to reject it. For me, the point of rejection came in my study of Samuel Beckett. My initial

miserable contemporary (and modern) literature. Perhaps my greatest struggle was when I spent two years studying Samuel Beckett, whose work focuses on darkness and difficulty, and the absence of meaning. Throughout, he seems haunted by the apparent absence of God in a world of suffering and misery. We are born “astride the grave” is a repeated cry in Waiting for Godot. One of his short plays, Breath, lasts a matter of seconds. It opens to a strangled cry, suggestive of the pain of birth, and it closes with a similar strangled cry, this time suggestive of the pain of death. In between the light shines on a pile of rubbish, before dimming. It is a dramatic enactment of birth and death “astride the grave.” Initially, I started out sympathetic to his questions. Life is painful and sometimes God does indeed appear to be absent in the pain. I believed that questions do need to be asked, honestly and thoughtfully. But after two years with Beckett and his critics, I found myself depressed and unhappy, worn down by his unrelentingly bleak outlook. And yet, despite the bleakness of his writing, Beckett is much lauded, and his work is highly regarded in academic circles. His cryptic melancholic angst is continually analyzed, and his “mournful blasphemies” (to quote from the cover of my own copy of the text6) are highly praised. Now Samuel Beckett is a unique voice, and one would not like to draw too many generalizations from comments on his work, but the high regard in which he is held has led me to ponder the notion that it is more acceptable in academia (and the media) to convey a dark vision, one of pain, cynicism, and darkness, than it is to convey

If the arts, including fiction, are the new religion of the secular age, as many would argue, then the priestly caste— the authors, assisted by the critics—are presenting us with a joyless religion.

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be the light of the world. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has written in The Christian and Anxiety that “only a Christian who does not allow himself to be infected by modern humanity’s neurotic anxiety … has any hope of exercising a Christian influence on this age. He will not haughtily turn away from the anxiety of his fellow men and fellow Christians but will show them how to extricate themselves from their fruitless withdrawal into themselves and will point out the paths by which they can step out into the open, into faith’s daring.”9 Faith is indeed crucial to release people from their “fruitless withdrawal.” It underpins all attempts to rid ourselves of anxiety and fear. Here, however, I specifically want to focus on three particular aspects of “faith’s daring,” in order to help us cultivate an attitude of life that is free of “neurotic anxiety” and that may enable us to extricate ourselves and others from the grip of misery. In order to do this, I am going to explore several theological concepts as expressed in writing that has traditionally been categorized as literature, as well as writing that is considered to be theological in traditional terms.

sympathy for his pain turned to impatience. Increasingly I wanted to say, “It doesn’t have to be this way. There are other ways of looking at life!” His outlook seemed to me to be a refusal of consolation. My rejection of this bleak outlook was furthered one day in conversation with Micheal O’Siadhail, the Irish poet. “What would you say to your fellow Dubliner, Samuel Beckett? ” I asked him. “I have no time for Samuel Beckett,” O’Siadhail said. “I have just spent five years studying the records of the holocaust and I found more hope in them than I have ever found in the writing of Samuel Beckett. The Hebrew Scriptures tell us that God says he has set before us darkness and light—choose light.” Of course, the biblical texts do not pretend that this life will be free from anxiety and darkness. But we have the choice—many times each day, in fact— when we can choose either darkness or light. We can choose not to be disquieted. Didn’t Jesus himself say, “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself” (Matt 6:34 ESV)? In his letter to the Philippians, Paul urges them, “Do not be anxious about anything” (Phil 4:68). I have long been struck by the fact that “Do not be afraid” is the most common injunction in the New Testament. Yet people of faith continue to feel anxiety. Neither fear nor anxiety has been listed as one of the deadly sins … and perhaps for that reason they have not always been recognized as the corrosive traits that they really are. Of course, the Bible teaches the fear of the Lord, something that is quite different to the kind of fear I am discussing. But perhaps it is this that has allowed the church to see fear as acceptable, at times even using it to bring people into line. And many Christians seem to find that this sits well with their own mindset, accepting life in a fearful Christian subculture. But anxiety not only drags down the individuals concerned, but others around them—whereas Christians are called to

Of course, the biblical texts do not pretend that this life will be free from anxiety and darkness. But we have the choice—many times each day, in fact—when we can choose either darkness or light.

Joy The first concept is joy. In John 15:11, Christ says, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” And in Philippians 4:4, Paul—writing from prison—tells the church there to “Rejoice in the Lord always.” The word “joy” in some form or other (and there are seven forms), appears in the New Testament 326 times. Every New Testament writer touches on joy in one of its forms. Joy, then, should be a mark of the Christian. 17

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which glorious countenance fills all heaven full of the joy and bliss of the divinity.11

It is usefully explored in the work of Julian of Norwich, the medieval anchorite (religious solitary) in England. While recovering from an illness, she received visions of Christ, which she recorded in what is known as the Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love, which recount her visions and what she u nder sto o d f rom t hem. Increasingly recognized as a theologian, one of her great themes is that of joy. In her account there are more than fifty references to “joy,” “bliss,” “blessedness,” “cheer,” a n d “e njoy m e nt ”— t h i s last of which she has been accredited with introducing into English.10 Julian is convinced that joy is the chief purpose in life. It is God’s intention that we should enjoy him and share in the triune joy. Right in the first vision, Julian has a glimpse of heaven, and she realizes that heaven promises eternal joy for those who have truly turned to God. But more than that, she also realizes that God also fully intends us to share in his joy in this life. In an attempt to show the way in which God treats us, she uses the metaphor of the great king who treats his servant with familiarity, cheerfully and personally, both in private and in public. This, she says, is the way the Lord treats us: not distantly, or coldly. In one of her visions she sees God as the host at a banquet:

In fact for Julian, God the Trinity is joy, and our longing for joy—which she believes all of us experience—is inextricably bound to our longing for God. The fullness of joy is to see God in all things. We ought to ask for this gift of joy from God, she says, for God is eager to give it. Julian was not saying this lightly: her century, the fourteenth, was a difficult time in England. The Black Death, or Great Plague—which was highly contagious and killed people suddenly and horribly—hit England when Julian would have been six. Norwich is said to have had less than half of its population survive. The plague struck twice more when Julian was eighteen and twenty-seven. There was unrest too with regard to the church—in 1377 came the great Schism with two Popes vying for authority on the Continent of Europe and John Wyclif publically denouncing the worldly behaviour of the ecclesiastical leaders. His followers, the Lollards, were persecuted by the church hierarchy and burned to death just out of sight of Julian’s cell. In addition, there was the ongoing war with France—the Hundred Years’ War—that led to such heavy taxation that the serfs rebelled in the Peasants Revolt. Crops were failing and cattle dying of disease. Things must have looked very unstable from every angle. We can’t be sure how Julian personally was affected. We don’t know if she was married and had children; if so, it is very possible that they died in the plague. But she would certainly have lost family and friends and she would certainly have known about fear and anxiety. As she says, “This place is a prison and this life a penance;” but, she says, God “wants us to find joy in the remedy. The remedy is that our Lord is with us, protecting and leading us into fullness of joy; for it is an endless joy to us, as our Lord intends, that he who will be our bliss when we are there will be our protector while we are here.”12

For Julian, God the Trinity is joy, and our longing for joy—which she believes all of us experience— is inextricably bound to our longing for God. The fullness of joy is to see God in all things. We ought to ask for this gift of joy from God, she says, for God is eager to give it.

I saw him reign in his house as a king and fill it all full of joy and mirth, gladdening and consoling his dear friends with himself, very familiarly and courteously, and with wonderful melody in endless love in his own fair blissful countenance, 18

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the topic of laughter was one which was considered significant enough for theological discussion and controversy. For laughter was considered by many a particular problem in Christianity. Biblical references to laughter are not always positive; for example, in Luke 6:25 Jesus says, “Woe to you who laugh now for you will mourn and weep.” And Sarah’s laughter is often considered to be contemptuous of God’s word to her. Perhaps the issue that has been most problematic is the argument from silence: it is not recorded that Jesus ever laughed (as Samuel Beckett was quick to point out). For many church fathers this has been a compelling reason for Christians to restrain their laughter, and a lively debate about laughter was ongoing in the Middle Ages. Such thinkers as John Chrysostom concluded that laughter does not seem to be a sin, but that it leads to sin. St. Bernard and John Cassian did not think laughter appropriate for monks, and this became embedded in much of the ascetic tradition. In 1418 t he Second Cou ncil of Constance decreed that any cleric or monk who spoke jocular words should be declared anathema. This ethos was captured by the novelist and semiologist Umberto Eco in his book The Name of the Rose, a detective story set in an Italian monastery during the Middle Ages. The tale is about a murderous conspiracy to hide from the world the only surviving copy of a treatise on laughter by Greek philosopher Aristotle (the counterpart to his famous work on the theory of tragedy, and one that was indeed historically lost). For one of the monks, the

Our joy and the joy of others will ensue if we are able to turn our suffering over to God. We can enter into this joy by orienting ourselves toward it—by contemplating the Lord’s joy. But in order to do this, we must cease to blame God; we must accept that his judgments are right. We cannot access this joy until we understand that our joy is not to be found in our own self-fulfilment, but in the sharing of God’s happiness. This does not come naturally to humans; it is something that we need to cultivate deliberately, by learning to enjoy God in all things. As Julian puts it, “it is God’s will that we should hold on to gladness with all our might.”13 Through the “weal and the woe,” as Julian puts it, or the wellness and woe of life, we can learn to grow in love if we can learn to grow emotionally.14 Julian learns this in an interesting way; she goes through a gamut of emotions. In the seventh revelation she experiences alternating joy and sorrow about twenty times: the lesson she draws from this showing is that “God wishes us to know that he safely protects us in both joy and sorrow equally and he loves us as much in sorrow as in joy.” “Therefore,” she goes on, “it is not God’s will that we should be guided by feelings of pain, grieving and mourning over them, but should quickly pass beyond them and remain in eternal joy.”15 Julian is not trying to teach a false kind of cheerfulness, nor a stoic front; rather, she is encouraging us to take our wounds to God and let him transform our perspective, so that we can let go of the pain. We have to choose to foster a spirit of joy and delight.16 For Julian, Christianity is a religion that transforms our suffering into peace, and ultimately joy; and hence “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”17 But this is an attitude that must be chosen.18

Laughter Laughter is our second a rea of consideration. In the Middle Ages 19

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supported laughter. Thomas Aquinas conceded the value of humour, writing:

old and blind Jorge de Burgos, laughter and comedy are a weakness, a sign of human limitation and foolishness. Anything that elevates humour is in danger of suggesting that laughter is to be the goal of human life. And for Jorge laughter is base, a defense for simple people and part of the foolishness of our flesh. He is opposed to the idea that humour can heal the sick and believes that “laughter, for a few moments, distracts the peasant from fear.”19 He is concerned that the discovery of Aristotle’s work might allow that “laughter would be defined as the new art … for canceling fear.”20 For Jorge, fear is one of the best ways of keeping the peasants under control. His particular concern is that laughter frees the peasants from fear of the devil—a prospect that Julian would heartily agree with, and one that she, like Teresa of Avila, would actively encourage. The reader of The Name of the Rose is enabled to dismiss Jorge’s emphasis on fear and control quite easily with the help of the protagonist, William of Baskerville, who is a Franciscan and thus from a laughter-loving order. For William, laughter is proper to humans. It is not only health and life giving, but will free people from a single-minded fanaticism, which can lead to its own heresy. For William, Jorge’s very grimness means that he is of the devil’s party, for the devil is grim, “faith without a smile.”21 At the end of the book, as the Abbey burns to the ground, William ponders the seriousness that obsesses over being absolutely right. Perhaps, he reflects, those who love humanity should make it their mission to “make truth laugh.”22 And there were indeed theologians and thinkers in the Middle Ages who

Amusement does have an aspect of good inasmuch as it is useful for human living. As man sometimes needs to give his body rest from labors, so also he sometimes needs to rest his soul from mental strain that ensues from his application to serious affairs. This is done by amusement.23

Meister Eckhart believed that we should never put our trust in a spirituality that is devoid of laughter, because good humour and laughter characterize the innermost relations between the persons of the Trinity. He says, “When the Father laughs to the Son, and the Son laughs back to the Father, that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love, and that love is the Holy Spirit.”24 Julian too seemed to conflate God’s love and God’s joy. Certainly there are many Christians who would testify to a felt experience of God’s laughter as being part of his love for them, even as they don’t understand it. Perhaps that is why G.K. Chesterton said he fancied that God’s mirth was one thing that was too great for him to show us when he walked upon earth.25 After the Reformation the emphasis changed. Luther had emphasized the duty of Christians to be joyful, and in the Puritans we can even detect a concern with joylessness as evidenced in the sermons and writings of William Perkins, Edmund Spenser, and John Donne, to name a few. Richard Baxter wrote, “Keep company with the more cheerful sort of the Godly. There is no mirth like the mirth of believers.”26 More recently, in the twentieth century, theologians such as Barth, Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, and Rahner have all lauded the value of humour. Karl Barth is perhaps of particular interest here. For Barth, like Julian, the true creaturely response to the divine itself must be joyful. Specifically, he emphasized the role of humour as crucial in response 20

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All human activity is best understood as a game—and indeed is played better and more successfully the more it is recognized as a game. But what kind of play or amusement is appropriate for the soul? Surely this attitude does not give a licence for folly, or base humour? This lies at the h e a r t o f t he m e d iev a l concer n about laughter. It can be appropriate and inappropriate, helpful or harmful. As with so much, it is a matter of discernment for us to learn about good laughter and the holy joy that enables it. Barth has s o met h i n g t o s ay her e too; true humour, he says, is always g r im humou r, ack nowle dgi ng tea r s of suffering while transcending them through hopef ul laughter. T hough g r im, hu mou r shou ld provide release through its embrace of joy and hope. For him, true humour is most often self-directed, but when it aims at others, it does so without malevolence.30 Barth’s conclusions are strikingly similar to those of C.S. Lewis, who has much to say that is helpful here too. Like Barth, Lewis believed that for Christians to refuse the apostolic injunction to “rejoice” was sin, and that they sinned as much by that as by anything else. 31 Like Barth, Lewis thought that humility was essential—it was a cheerful virtue. And like Barth, Lewis also thought that Satan fell by force of his gravity—in hell everyone lives in deadly serious envy and resentment; Goethe’s Faust exhibits the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon

to God—alongside gratitude, humility, and relinquishment. In short, humour is not merely a concession to humans but a divine command. Barth suggests humour is an attitude that is ultimately demanded in all that we do. Speaking primarily to theologians—but also, I think, to all who take their work seriously—he called them to understand that they are really God’s little children at play. When children play properly, they do so with great seriousness a nd dedication a s well as humour. Humour, like play, does not require that we take nothing seriously at all but that we refuse to take the present with ultimate seriousness because God’s future, which breaks into the present, is more serious. In short, humour is the proper response to the true seriousness of the work of God in contrast to our own.27 B a r t h objected st rongly to t he humourlessness of theologians—those who take themselves too seriously, like Jorge in The Name of the Rose. For Barth, the inadequacy of his own thought was always before him, and he stressed that the refusal to recognize human limitation is to deny the goodness of createdness and represents a desire to become gods rather than to live cheerfully and modestly as creatures. We often fail to observe even those limits that we should enthusiastically welcome, such as the divine command to limit our work with rest, he said. Barth observes the tension under which we so often work and remarks that, if we could just learn to relax, there might then be far fewer psychopaths and excited bundles of nerves, particularly among theologians.28 For Barth, the demonic world was humorless precisely because of the failure to respect limits: these spirits of complaint falsely depress and rob us of our humour by persuading us that the natural limits of our physical and psychical existence are a constriction, curse, and misfortune, when, in actuality, we are borne, sustained, and even uplifted by God within these limits.29 Once again, he reminds us of the dangers of taking ourselves too seriously.

According to Barth, humour, like play, does not require that we take nothing seriously at all but that we refuse to take the present with ultimate seriousness because God’s future, which breaks into the present, is more serious. In short, humour is the proper response to the true seriousness of the work of God in contrast to our own.

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the self, which is the mark of hell.32 (In a similar vein, G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy said that “a characteristic of great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”33) In The Screwtape Letters, the demons are told to avoid awakening anyone’s sense of humour. As they don’t fully understand humour, they have to be told what it is. Lewis outlines four causes of laughter that are worthy of our attention. (I should point out that the book is written in the form of a letter from Screwtape, the senior devil, to his junior, Wo r mwo o d, a b o u t t h e person whom Wormwood has been assigned to look after. Note, of course that for Screwtape, “our Father” is the devil. “The Enemy” is God.)

the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven— a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell. Fun is closely related to Joy—a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of course, to divert humans from something else which the Enemy would like them to be feeling or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.34

cially glad to hear that the two new friends have now made him acquainted with their whole set. All these, as I find from the record office, are thoroughly reliable people; steady, consistent scoffers and worldlings who without any spectacular crimes are progressing quietly and comfortably towards our Father’s house. You speak of their being great laughers. I trust this does not mean that you are under the impression that laughter as such is always in our favour. The point is worth some attention. I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first [that is, Joy] among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which

Screwtape continues that the third category, jokes, is more promising for the use of young tempters, depending on their content, and depending on the way in which they are delivered. Some use jokes about themselves to excuse wrong behaviour that would otherwise be shameful, but if turned into a source of laughter can then be made to appear excusable. But the most useful of all for the tempter is flippancy, which builds up around a person an effective armourplating against the Enemy, and is “a thousand miles away from joy, for it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.”35 The joy that gives rise to laughter, then, is the quality to be disrupted by the demons whenever possible, for joy is an altogether divine emotion. As Lewis famously said, joy is the serious business of heaven.36 In an image not unlike Dante’s

Like Barth, Lewis believed that for Christians to refuse the apostolic injunction to “rejoice” was sin, and that they sinned as much by that as by My Dear Wormwood,  Everything is clearly anything else. going very well. I am spe-

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sound of celestial laughter, Lewis suggests that in heaven the plains and forests shake with the sound of laughter, “like the revelry of a whole college of giants together laughing, dancing, singing, roaring at their high works.”37 But for Lewis, the brief times we are able to have fun on this earth—to be festive, to play, and to dance—are foreshadowings of the eschaton. In this life, “cursed with labour, hemmed around with necessities, tripped up with frustrations, doomed to perpetual plannings, puzzlings and anxieties,” play and dance beckon us toward the world that is not the “Shadowlands,” but is the world made real. Such pure and spontaneous pleasures are the “patches of Godlight” in the woods of our life here and now.38

book reflects one of the seven planets in medieval astronomy (Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Saturn). Lewis was long fascinated by the medieval worldview, and believed there was wisdom in that era that has been lost in the modern age. (Indeed it was to the influence of medieval literary writers, as well as Chesterton, that Lewis attributed his way of combining humour with serious issues.) He did not believe that the medieval view of the solar system was “literally” accurate, nor did he believe that the planets influence life on earth as astrologers suggest. Equally, he didn’t believe in the pagan deities named after the planets. But he did believe that the seven medieval planets were useful as literary metaphors, or as “spiritual symbols” of “permanent value.”39 It was the symbolic value of the planets that Lewis believed reflected some aspect of reality, of life, and of God himself, and so in his writing—not just in the Narnia series—his narratives often reflect the mood or atmosphere of one of the planets. Saturn is the planet that speaks of sorrow, disaster, melancholy, pestilence, and ill luck. He is “the last planet, old and ugly.”40 In medieval times it was associated with melancholy, sickness, disaster.41 That which reflects Saturn’s qualities are called saturnine. Elements in The Last Battle are saturnine, not least the dwarfs who see only darkness and danger around them and are unable to appreciate the good in the food that Aslan provides, complaining that it tastes like hay and old turnips. Lewis objected strongly to writers who were saturnocentric in their approach— and by this he meant astringent, tough, unmerry, unconciliatory, and serious, although not necessarily profound or virtuous. Into these categories he put T.S. Eliot and John Donne (though he came to qualify this somewhat for Eliot). In an article on Donne he objected to the dislike of peace and pleasure and heart’s-ease that was to be found in the literary critical world. He felt that in that sphere people were refusing anything conciliatory (the same

Joviality The concept of heaven—or rather the heavens—takes me to the third area that is suggestive of an approach to life that banishes misery. Joviality. It is an attitude of life, if not quite in the way that the word “jovial” is normally understood. For this concept I am totally in debt, once again, to C.S. Lewis. And yet, on the face of it, Lewis’s life would not seem to have been a good breeding ground for any kind of joviality. He had lost his mother as a child, then had to endure the worst of English boarding schools—cold, cruel, and inhospitable—before being called up to serve in the First World War. As a young man, he too was cross with God—both disbelieving in him and blaming him at the same time. But as he went through his twenties, Lewis chose a very different path, turning away from bitterness and anger and the miserific state. We know this from much that he explicitly articulated, such as his comments in Screwtape Letters. But we also know it from a thread that subtly weaves through much of his work, unidentified until Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, which outlines the way in which the seven planets were the connecting feature in the Narnia series. Each Narnia 23

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trend that I was to find so overwhelming decades later). Even in the 1920s and 1930s Lewis felt there was too much Saturn in the literary world, in contrast to previous eras. (I wonder what he would say to the saturnocentric world of misery literature today?) In fact, Lewis believed that people in general knew Saturn only too well; his generation, having suffered the Great War, were only too easily induced into thinking that Saturn reigns the planets. But in fact, in the planetary world, it is Jupiter, king of the planets, that reigns. The qualities of Jupiter are that of a king, but a king at peace—cheerful, festive, temperate, tranquil, magnanimous, leisurely.42 He is suggestive of benevolence, p e a c e , a n d j o y. T h e personality that ref lects this is now “imper fectly expressed” by t he word “jovial”—due to the fact that Jupiter, the king of the gods, is also called Jove in English.43 In referring to Jupiter, directly or indirectly, Lewis was following in the time-honoured tradition of using the pagan terminology to refer to the Christian God: Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were among the authors with whom Lewis was familiar who would have used the alternative name for Jupiter, “Jove,” to refer directly to God. To contemporary ears it may sound unfamiliar, but Lewis was so steeped in the writings of the Middle Ages that it was second nature for him to use this terminology. Jupiter is the ruling planet of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, although Lewis obscures this fact slightly by not actually naming the planet. And yet Aslan has all the qualities of Jupiter—kingly, benevolent, tranquil, and festive. (Hence the presence of Father Christmas—a presence that so

often confused the critics—fits into the jovial theme.) And in The Cosmic Trilogy, toward the end of That Hideous Strength, Jupiter overmatches Saturn, causing an atmosphere both playful and regal: In the kitchen [Jupiter’s] coming was felt. No-one afterwards knew how it happened but somehow the kettle was put on, the hot toddy brewed. Arthur—the only musician among them—was bidden to get out his fiddle. The chairs were pushed back, the floor cleared. They danced. What they danced no-one could remember. It was some round dance, no modern shuffling: it involved beating the floor, clapping of hands, leaping high. And no-one while it lasted thought himself or his fellow ridiculous. It may, in fact, have been some village measure, not ill-suited to the tiled kitchen: the spirit in which they danced it was not so. It seemed to each that the room was filled with kings and queens, that the wildness of their dance expressed heroic energy and its quieter movements had seized the very spirit behind all noble ceremonies.44

Lewis objected strongly to writers who were saturnocentric in their approach—and by this he meant astringent, tough, unmerry, unconciliatory, and serious, although not necessarily profound or virtuous.

But this is not the end of the novel. Here, and in the Nar nia series, in keeping with the Christian story, life remains complex. There are challenges, struggles, fears, and sacrifices. Throughout the Narnia tales, Aslan may be there encouraging them to “laugh and fear not” (as he specifically does in The Magician’s Nephew), but it is not until the very end of the Narnia series, as the children find themselves in the new Narnia, that they are struck by the fact that, as Lucy puts it, “one can’t feel afraid, even if one wants to.”45 For Lewis, fear and anxiety shall only be fully conquered in the life that is to come, in the new Narnia. Up until that point there is plenty in the Old Narnia to cause fear and anxiety. Death and pain have still to be navigated. In 24

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conveyed his own lifelong experiences of heavenly longing. These moments of longing, or sehnsucht, came to him as a boy and carried on into adulthood; perhaps it was this spiritual joy, or “sweet desire” that, in its outflowing, informed Lewis’s campaign to shift the emphasis to Jupiter and away from Saturn. He had tasted heavenly joy that infused his earthly moments—and he wanted to share that. That he chose to do so in story form was fitting. Lewis could not leave narrative to the saturnocentric and the writers of mis lit. There is little doubt that Lewis was inspired by Tolkien’s theory of “eucatastrophe” or reversal of catastrophe, whereby the story of Christ contains the greatest eucatastrophe. For both men, story was a form of evangelium. For Tolkien, when this sudden turn of eucatastrophe comes, “we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.” 50 Certain stories then can give, as Tolkien puts it, a fleeting “glimpse of joy beyond the walls of the world, striking the human heart with a poignancy as sharp as grief itself.”51 Such glimpses of joy in the stories of Tolkien and Lewis do not trivialize evil or fear or anxiety, but rather are intended to dispel angst—subverting the perspective, reminding people that there are other ways of looking at things. This is what Tolkien called “recovery,” whereby assumptions are changed by means of an outside perspective. Stories can enable people to see things as they

The Last Battle, even Aslan appears to let Tirian down by being absent when he most needs him. No character introduced at the beginning of the book is still alive at the end, carrying with it a great sense of loss for a children’s novel. And there is no sense in the work of Lewis that losses should not be lamented—Lewis wrote his own heartfelt lament over the loss of his wife in A Grief Observed. He recognized that in life it is often easier to lament than to exult. And it is quite wrong not to mourn with those who mourn; rejection of the saturnine does not call Christians to a blithe insensitivity. The Christian is baptized into a death, and there is thus a tragic death at the centre of Christian worship.46 Christian joy, Lewis said, has to be the sort of joy that coexists with that fact. In a profoundly mysterious way, the pain of the crucifixion is integral to the joy of the resurrection. To know the joy of one, we must have felt the pain of the other. Thus Lewis’s jovial vision did not exclude pain and suffering, but his emphasis, like Julian’s, was on the holding on to joy. In fact, Lewis had a lot to say about joy too, which should be included as we draw to a close our consideration of the cultivation of “faith’s daring.” L ewi s k new only to o well t hat unalloyed happiness is not available to us in this life. As he articulated in The Problem of Pain: “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world; but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy.”47 The Christian was right to find joy in earthly pleasures—“a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match.”48 But real joy—heavenly joy—was most profoundly of a spiritual nature. True joy was “to be in perfect love with God— drunk with, drowned in, dissolved by, that delight,”49 which then will flow out as praise. Lewis’s use of the word “Joy” with a capital “J,” in a specifically spiritual sense,

In a profoundly mysterious way, the pain of the crucifixion is integral to the joy of the resurrection. To know the joy of one, we must have felt the pain of the other. Thus Lewis’s jovial vision did not exclude pain and suffering, but his emphasis, like Julian’s, was on the holding on to joy.

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were meant to see them. The medieval “holy fool,” we are told, wa s iconocla stic. Embodyi ng morosophia—foolish wisdom—the role of the fools was to shift the perspectives of those who listened to them, laying bare the false and the merely conventional. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary theorist, believed that it was the novelist who would take over the role of the holy fool, exposing contemporary conventions and falsities. It is my belief that the literary and critical world certainly needs its current conventions exposed. But the challenge goes much wider than that, starting with our own personal “recovery” of perspective, our own cultivation of these elements of “faith’s daring,” and spreading out from there. In the end, this is what each of our writers and theologians has been trying to tell us; it is high time that we allow our perspective to be changed, recovering a spirit of joy and delight and— as Julian put it—holding on to gladness with all our might.

12 Ibid., 168. 13 Ibid., 64. 14 Ibid., 125–26. 15 Ibid., 64. 16 Or, as Flannery O’Connor put it in a letter to a friend, we want to stalk joy (even with our teeth ground). 17 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, 85. 18 Somewhat in that spirit, Mike Mason, a Regent College graduate, has written about his experiment in joy Champagne for the Soul. In the face of a profound loss, he chose to focus on joy, as a kind of experiment. He found that it made a tangible difference to his life. Mason stresses that the Holy Spirit is intimately related to joy. Joy is more than the “fruit of the Spirit” for him; it comes with the presence of the Spirit (Gal 5:22; Rom 14:17; 1 Thess 1:6). 19 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (London: Vintage Books, 2004), 467. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 469. 22 Ibid., 483. 23 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle, trans. C.I. Litzinger (Chicago: St. Augustine’s Press), 4.16.851, http://www. aquinasonline.com/Topics/Humor/. 24 Raymond B. Blakney, Meister Eckhart: A Mod ern Transl at ion (New York: Har per Torchbooks, 1941), 245. 25 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 240. 26 Richard Baxter, The Practical Works of Richard Baxter: With a Life of the Author and a Critical Examination of His Writings by William Orme, vol. 9 (London: James Duncan, 1830), 24. 27 Karl Barth, Ethics, ed. Dietrich Braun, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), 503-5. 28 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. Henry A. Kennedy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 550–59, 573. 29 Ibid., III/3, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 529. 30 Barth, Ethics, 511–12. 31 C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, in Selected Books (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 503. 32 C.S. Lewis, preface to The Screwtape Letters (London: William Collins Sons, 1960), ix. 33 Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 177. 34 C.S. L ewi s, Th e Sc rewt a p e L et t e rs (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944), 57–58. 35 Ibid., 60. 36 C.S. Lewis, Prayer: Letters to Malcolm (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1998), 90. 37 C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1998), 36. 38 Lewis, Prayer, 88.

Endnotes

1 Daisy Goodwin, “Groaning under a Pile of Misery Lit,” The Sunday Times, March 21, 2010, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_ and_entertainment/books/article7069633.ece. 2 Ibid. 3 Alison Flood, “Julian Gough Slams Fellow Irish Novelists as ‘Priestly Caste’ Cut Off from the Culture,” The Guardian, February 11, 2010, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/11/juliangough-irish-novlists-priestly-caste. 4 Zadie Smith, quoted by Ian Jack, “A Very Uncertain Country,” The Guardian, March 10, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/ mar/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview29. 5 Ibid. 6 Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1958). 7 Flood, “Julian Gough.” 8 Scripture quotations are from the NIV, unless otherwise noted. 9 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 88. 10 Domenico Pezzini, “The Vocabulary of Joy in Julian of Norwich,” Studies in Spirituality 4 (1994):97. 11 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 62. 26

Of Mirth and Misery: Some Literary and Theological Reflections

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39 C.S. Lewis, “The Alliterative Metre,” Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 23f. 40 C.S. Lewis, “The Planets,” in Poems (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1994), 29. 41 C . S. L ew i s , T h e D i s c a r d e d Im a g e (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 205. 42 Ibid., 106. 43 Ibid., 105. 44 C.S. Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London: Pan Books, 1989), 691–92.

45 C.S. Lewis, Th e Mag ician’s Neph ew (London: Penguin Books, 1951), 110; The Last Battle (London: Penguin Books, 1956), 156. 46 C.S. Lewis, Ref lections on the Psalms (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1982), 48. 47 C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943), 103. 48 Ibid. 49 Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 82. 50 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” in A Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 69–70. 51 Ibid.

Poetry

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The Trend Luci Shaw Five p.m. An autumn-coloured sky like the colour of my friend Mary’s hair. Like the just-turning-to-flame leaves on the vine maple we planted only last year. A gift surprising as a birthday cake, even though it’s expected. The mangoes in the wooden bowl on the table match the brilliant colour splash of the bird’s head at the porch feeder. Even the bright mesh of the ratty pot-scrubber in my hand is glory leaking through. Luci Shaw is a poet, essayist, and author of more than thirty books. She is Regent’s writer in residence and lives in Bellingham, WA, with her husband John Hoyte. Her most recent book of poems is Harvesting Fog.

Reconnecting the Threads: Theology as Sacramental Tapestry Hans Boersma

n this short essay, I would like to introduce some of the main ideas that motivate and underlie my recent book, Heavenly Participation.1 First, I will present some of the background to this book—how it is that the various bits of the argument made their way into the final product. I figure that usually one can tell quite a bit about a book if one knows what it is that motivated the author to write it and why he has written in the particular way that he has. Then, on the assumption that the front cover of the book tells the reader what it’s all about, I thought it might also be helpful if I related something both about the artwork on the cover and about each of the main words in the title.

and, what is more, had a great deal of appreciation for them. Congar has a way of dissolving false dilemmas with regard to the Scripturetradition relationship. One of the things he makes clear is that in an important sense, tradition is simply the church’s authoritative interpretation of Scripture itself. That is to say, he doesn’t see Scripture and tradition as two separate sources of revelation, the way I had always been taught Catholics look at things. In other words, he doesn’t take some doctrines (for example, original sin) from the Bible, while arguing that other doctrines (for example, the immaculate conception of Mary) came from some kind of secret tradition, completely separate from Scripture. No, for Congar Scripture itself is the ultimate norm of authority in the church; and tradition, you could say, is simply the way in which people interpreted Scripture over the centuries. Now, just in case this tempts some people to start reading Congar, I don’t suggest to start with Tra dit ion an d Traditions. It’s a bit of a cumbersome and repetitive book. To get the basic argument, it’s much better to go to a smaller and much better structured book called The Meaning of Tradition.3 I think that book’s a little gem. Now around the same time—perhaps partially through the reading of Congar—I stumbled across a small essay by Henri de Lubac called “Spiritual Understanding.” It is a basic essay, in which de Lubac outlines why he doesn’t think historical exegesis is enough, and why he believes that the pre-

Background to Heavenly Participation First, then, the background. About eleven years ago, when I was teaching at Trinity Western University in Langley, I joined a few friends and colleagues i n a n e cu men ic a l r e a d i n g g ro u p, made up of evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox, a group that we called “Paradosis” (Tradition). One of the books that we discussed during our informal conversations was Yves Congar’s Tradition and Traditions.2 That huge tome, written by a twentieth-century French Dominican theologian, was impressive to me not just in its scholarship but also in the opening that it created for Catholic-Protestant dialogue. As a Protestant, I sensed that I was in the presence of a Catholic scholar who truly understood non-Catholics 29

Hans Boersma is the J.I. Packer Professor of Theology at Regent College.

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his book Scripture in the Tradition.6 Now, that title may be a bit deceptive. It may give the impression that the book is about Scripture and tradition, or about the way people looked at Scripture in the history of the church. It isn’t really about either. What this book does this: it explains how people interpreted Scripture in the Middle Ages, and it puts up a defense of what de Lubac calls “spiritual interpretation” over against a purely historical approach to interpretation. That book, Scripture in the Tradition, really began to shift my thinking about how to read Scripture. From a different angle than Congar, de Lubac, too, conveyed to me the importance of reading Scripture through the lens of the church and the church’s tradition. So when in 2007 Regent College graciously gave me a year-long sabbatical, I thought I should investigate both Congar and de Lubac in some more detail and I should look at others in this group of nouvelle théologie, as well. I wanted to know why it is that they, as theologians in the modern age, thought a ressourcement, or a retrieval, of pre-modern theology might be so beneficial to us. The result was a book called Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology, which, depending on your disposition, you may either find terribly boring or an interesting labyrinth that follows along a whole bunch of Catholic thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.7 It’s more of an academic book, and while I certainly did pour my heart into it, I do realize that it’s not a book that everyone will want to read. (Besides, the price is so exorbitant that many probably wouldn’t buy the book even if they were interested.) In any case, by the time I was finished my research on nouvelle théologie, I had read lots of material not only from Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac, but also from Congar’s teacher, Marie-Dominique Chenu; and I had read students of de Lubac, such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean Daniélou, and Henri Bouillard. I won’t go into all of them in this essay,

modern tradition, with their typology, their allegory, their four-fold interpretation, still has something to say to us today. What I didn’t know at the time was that de Lubac, along wit h Conga r a nd others, was part of a group of French Catholics who had caused quite the uproar in the Catholic Church in the mid-twentieth century. I didn’t know about this so-called nouvelle théologie until much later. As an aside, the term nouvelle théolog ie is a real misnomer, since the theologians that we today know as nouvelle theologians wa nted to b e a ny t hi ng but new. They wanted to engage in a ressourcement, a retrieval, of the pre-modern t radition— t he chu rch fathers, medieval theology— in the face of what they saw as a far too strictly rational approach to theology that h ad c ome to dom i n ate Catholicism, especially in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anyway, as faculty at Trinity Western, we would sometimes have discussions on how theology and the Bible fit together, and for one of those discussions, I prepared a paper using this essay by de Lubac. Later, I started to read some of de Lubac’s other scholarship on the history of biblical interpretation. Also here, for a first foray into de Lubac, I don’t suggest that one begin with his massive four-volume book called Medieval Exegesis, or with his recently translated book on Origen, called History and Spirit.5 By far the best place to start is

The theologians that we today know as nouvelle theologians wanted to be anything but new. They wanted to engage in a ressourcement, a retrieval, of the pre-modern tradition—the church fathers, medieval theology—in the face of what they saw as a far too strictly rational approach to theology that had come to dominate Catholicism, especially in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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but let me just say that as an evangelical I have been so impressed by the resonances that I felt with these Catholic thinkers. Here they were, often bravely resisting the rationalistic tendencies of the dominant Catholic school of thought, almost all of them losing their jobs as a result of their writing and teaching, and nonetheless persisting while submitting to the church’s discipline when it came. And not only were they persisting, but they were actually making an impact—such an impact that when the Second Vatican Council came around in 1962, it was these theologians that shaped in many ways some of the main documents of the Council, for example the document on the church (Lumen Gentium) and the document on Scripture and tradition (Dei Verbum). I couldn’t help but think if it’s true that these theologians represent in some ways the official position of the Catholic Church, if these theologians continue to shape Catholic theology today, then much of what I always used to think about Catholicism no longer quite holds. Yes, we may still have disagreements, but on a number of major issues, we would actually be a lot closer together than I would have ever thought possible. T he book t hat came out of my sabbatical was, as I said, a rather technical book. Two dear colleagues, Richard Mouw from Fuller Seminary and our own John Stackhouse, both suggested I should also publish a more popular version. Now I must confess I was somewhat hesitant at first. I frankly wasn’t sure how I would pull that off. But the more I thought about it, the more I became excited about the idea. The only thing was, I didn’t want to focus just on nouvelle théologie. After all, the reason I was excited about nouvelle théologie wasn’t just because of these theologians themselves. I could have studied some of the seventeenth-century Caroline divines instead, or the Oxford Movement, or T.S. Eliot, or C.S. Lewis. It’s not the historical figures themselves that I am mostly intrigued with. Rather, I’m fascinated by

what they are retrieving from the earlier tradition, namely, what I’ve called in the title of this essay a “sacramental tapestry.” And while to me it was by now pretty clear why these nouvelle theologians had captured my imagination, my first book really didn’t make that clear. And by simply expounding their theology one more time—even if it was in a bit more of a popular way—I still wouldn’t get the message through as to why this “sacramental tapestry” was so important. That’s why most of the first part of this new book, Heavenly Participation, doesn’t just zero in on nouvelle théologie itself. Instead, what I do there is (1) clarify what a “sacramental tapestry” is, and (2) explain why this is culturally so important today.

The reason I was excited about nouvelle théologie wasn’t just because of these theologians themselves. Rather, I’m fascinated by what they are retrieving from the The Cultural Significance earlier tradition, of nouvelle théologie With that last point, the namely, what I’ve cultural importance, I am really touching on what I called in the title think is the most important thing about nouvelle of this essay a théologie. It’s not so much “sacramental the individual theological notions, though I do think tapestry.” t h e y ’r e i n d i s p e n s a b l e . Rather, it’s the potential of this sacramental approach to reality to be able to shape, or rather to re-shape, our cultural heritage. Let me unpack this a little bit. In his book, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, my friend James K. A. Smith talks about theological developments in the late Middle Ages that affected not just theology itself, but that led to a whole new cultural constellation of ideas and realities. Smith speaks of a paradigm shift in Western culture that gave birth to remarkably new, quite unparalleled accounts of the world and social relation31

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ships. These philosophical and theological shifts gave birth to new social arrangements, new political ideals, new economic models, and new accounts of human nature, all of which were slowly globalized through the exportation of liberal democracy and capitalist economics.8

that social arrangements, political ideals, and economic models are also regarded as neutral. What really allows us to live together in society, so we think, is the common, neutral terrain of purely natural realities. Second, not only do we now regard the natural order as neutral, but we inevitably also think of it as strictly autonomous. That is to say, these neutral public realities do not depend—or so we think—on the supernatural. After all, if natural realities are self-enclosed, then they must also function in a fully self-enclosed fashion. Any sort of purposes that we might construe in politics or economics have nothing to do with the supernatural end of the beatific vision. When we talk about heaven, or about the beatific vision, we’re talking about private ideas, about Sunday stuff. But when we talk about the national debt or about economic trade arrangements, then we’re talking about the Monday-to-Friday stuff, about neutral, public life, which is quite independent and autonomous from any sort of perspective that the Christian faith might provide. That is to say, we live as if natural realities were purely immanent, strictly self-enclosed, and, therefore, entirely autonomous. So, the two consequences of a purely natural world are that we understand such a world to be both neutral and strictly autonomous. What happens when we look at reality in this way is this: we get a split-level universe. The bottom level is the public, neutral, autonomous realm of nature, with its own, independent processes, concerns, and aims. The top level is the private, subjective realm of the supernatural. Think of what happens when one no longer holds that the natural world has a link with anything beyond itself, when one has come to believe that the aims of the natural realm are purely horizontal, have nothing to do with the eternal purpose of eventually seeing the face of God. There’s a funny kind of irony that takes place here.

Think of what won’t discuss each of these happens when one Idevelopments. Instead, I want to briefly mention no longer holds I think underlies thesewhat new that the natural arrangements of modernity. Every single one of them world has a link stems from a key assumption about the natural realities of with anything the world that we observe us. The assumption beyond itself, when around is that these realities are purely natural. They have one has come no in herent connection to believe that with anything that exceeds their own, natural being. the aims of the They in no way depend for continued existence natural realm are their on greater, transcendent The created order purely horizontal, realities. has become a purely natural have nothing to do order, radically separate from the life of God. with the eternal T h e r e s u lt s o f t h i s assumption of an order of purpose of eventu- pure nature (pura natura) at least twofold: first, ally seeing the face are we now assume that the realities around us, since of God. they are purely natural, are also neutral. A tree is a tree is a tree. It doesn’t matter whether you look at the tree or I look at the tree, we both see exactly the same thing, and by using scientific language we can both adequately and fully articulate what we both see as we’re looking at the tree. Once we take that step—of saying that the natural order is neutral, that is to say, not determined by the realities of which our faith speaks—it becomes easy to see

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We have assumed that the world around us is purely natural, strictly autonomous; that its beauty, its truth, its goodness—its very being itself—is self-enclosed, doesn’t derive from anywhere else. How, if that is true, do we determine how to care for this world around us? Where do we find the norms by which to decide how to treat it? It seems to me no coincidence that environmental mismanagement has become a huge problem in the modern world. It’s almost inevitable: if the natural order is purely autonomous and has no link to anything transcendent, you of course treat it as you see it: a collection of purely quantifiable objects, whose goodness and beauty reach no further than themselves. Let me relate an experience that I mention also in Heavenly Participation: A few years ago, a local Christian high school organized a school trip to a “Body Worlds” exhibit set up at Science World in Vancouver. “Body Worlds” turned out to be an exhibit of plasticized human bodies, organized by Gunther von Hagens, a German anatomist whose exhibitions and public autopsies (performed while dressed in a black fedora) have led to protests and legal controversies throughout the world. Von Hagens’s displays reduce the human body to simply an object, one that we can purchase, plasticize, display, and analyze for the sake of education and entertainment. In some circles, objections to Von Hagens’s exhibits have been quite pronounced. To my surprise, within this evangelical school community, there was little or no concern about the exhibit’s objectification and exploitation of the human body; instead, the exhibit was regarded as an opportunity for the students to see how the body was “fearfully and wonderfully made.” More troubling perhaps than Von Hagens’s display seemed to me its broad evangelical acceptance with an appeal to the goodness of the created order. I think my book makes quite clear that my argument is not with the goodness of the created order. Rather, I have become convinced that a certain type of appeal to

the goodness of creation—such as the one I just described—lapses into its opposite: into a denigration and commodification of the created order, in this case of the human body. When the body is just a body—purely an object—why would you not use it simply in line with self-enclosed purely natural ends? The irony of this is, of course, that it is precisely at the point in history where we think we value natural realities higher than ever before—by regarding them as autonomous, independent f r o m a ny s u p e r n at u r a l reality—that we actually lose the ability of recognizing any true significance in the natural world. After all, it is only when we recognize that the created order has a supernatural end, a heavenly end, that we’re going to t reat t he world a rou nd us in a heavenly way. We need to get a keen sense, I think, of this irony. For it is quite easy to critique the Christian tradition— especially the church fathers and the Middle Ages—for their otherworldliness, for their inability to take the contingency of this-worldly realities seriously, for their flight mentality, for their focus on heaven instead of on earth. And, so we think, with their consistent contempt for the human body, with their preoccupation with heaven, with their lack of celebration of the goodness of creation, it is hardly a wonder that these earlier Christians also treated the earth in such a negative fashion. Interestingly, the real situation is exactly the other way around. Think of it: I am sure they had all kinds of problems in the Middle Ages, but where were the

The irony is, of course, that it is precisely at the point in history where we think we value natural realities higher than ever before— by regarding them as autonomous, independent from any supernatural reality—that we actually lose the ability of recognizing any true significance in the natural world.

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final day. So, in one of his most famous paintings, The Last Judgment, angels and saints join hands in a heavenly procession, ready to enter paradisal bliss. From now on, the saints will be joining the divine liturgy in the singing of the heavenly Sanctus (Isa 6:3; Rev 4:8). Heavenly participation was the vision that animated Fra Angelico’s work, and it is that same vision that also inspires my book—hence the cover. Now this should be no news for us evangelicals. Heaven has always been important in evangelicalism. And for good reason: the Bible itself is full of talk about heaven; it is full of this otherworldly focus. For Saint Paul, heaven is our home. After all, he insists that our citizenship papers carry the stamp of heaven. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” he plainly remarks (Phil 3:20; cf. Eph 2:12).9 This citizenship of Christians is incompatible with attempts to turn earthly ends into ultimate concerns. Speaking of enemies of the cross, the apostle comments: “Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things” (Phil 3:19). Not only is heaven the “place” in which Christians are already at home today, but it also marks their origin and aim. Believers are blessed “in the heavenly realms” (Eph 1:3) since heaven is the place of their eternal predestination “in Christ” (Eph 1:4; cf. 1:11). The origin of the Christian hope lies in Christ and, therefore, in heaven. Likewise, the prize for which St. Paul aims and toward which he “strains” (Phil 3:13) is the “heavenward” call in Christ Jesus (Phil 3:14; cf. 2 Tim 4:18).10 The heavenly identity of believers is, according to St. Paul, already a present reality. The quite realized eschatology of the letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians is emphatic about this present reality. For Paul, it is not as though believers here on a purely natural earth somehow identify with this far-away supernatural place called “heaven.” Rather, we have a real, a participatory, connection wit h heaven. T he cent ral pa schal event—Christ’s death, resurrection, and

disasters of Chernobyl or Fukushima? Where were the oil spills of Exxon Valdez or the Gulf of Mexico? The mistreatment of our natural world is not the result of earlier Christian otherworldliness; it is the result of contemporary modern thisworldliness. It’s a result of looking at the world around us as made up of purely natural objects that have no significance beyond themselves.

A single-minded focus on earth actually causes problems for the earth, while, paradoxically, if we become more heavenly minded, we will actually treat the earth and the created objects around us with a great deal more integrity. Indeed, I have become convinced that only a heavenly minded Christian faith will do us any earthly good.

The Importance of Heaven Let me move to the next step. I have tried to give an impression as to how I’ve come to write my book and shared some of the deepest concerns that have motivated me in writing it. Let me now try to unpack the title and begin by saying something about heaven. After all, if it’s true what I’ve just argued, then that means that a single-minded focus on earth actually causes problems for the earth, while, paradoxically, if we become more heavenly minded, we will actually treat the earth and the created objects around us with a great deal more integrity. Indeed, I have become convinced that only a heavenly minded Christian faith will do us any earthly good. I have purposely used for the cover of the book part of a painting by the fifteenth-century Italian artist Fra Angelico (ca. 1395–1455). Fra Angelico had a preoccupation with heaven. The Dominican friar recognized that life lived on earth carried eternal implications. No doubt, the Renaissance painter’s fervent hope was for the seraphic angels to take him to heaven on the 34

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ascension—is something in which you and I participate: God “made us alive with Christ,” insists Paul (Eph 2:5). He “raised us up with Christ” (Eph 2:6; cf. Col 3:1). The result of this sharing in Christ is that believers participate in heavenly realities. We are seated with Christ “in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:6; cf. 1:3). The danger, of course, in what I’m doing here is that some readers are going to think, “Oh, he’s trying to pull us away from earthly realities. He wants us to forget about the goodness of the created order, the beauty of this world.” But remember what I mentioned earlier about the irony of modernity: it is the single-minded focus on this-worldly realities that actually renders it impossible for us to genuinely value them. The opposite is true, as well: it is by focusing on heavenly realities that we get much greater appreciation also for earthly realities. Why is that so? It has to do with the second word in the book title: participation. I know that word has a Platonic background, and I’m not overly troubled by that background. (I explain more about that in the book itself.) But the word “participation,” for people throughout at least the first thousand years of the church’s history, meant the following: it meant that natural realities participate in something greater. And that something greater is the eternal Word of God, the Logos. In other words, there is no such thing as “pure nature”; there is no such thing as a natural order that stands autonomously on its own two feet. Nature is graced, from the outset, by sharing, or participating in the life of God. Why is it that the created world is so beautiful, so true, and so good? The reason is simply this: there is a reflection, albeit ever so dim, of the beauty, the truth, and the goodness of God himself. The created world is a sacrament that owes everything—even its very existence itself—to the God who has called it into being. The temporal, created order has its ultimate end not in itself but in the mysterious reality that transcends it. The

end of created being lies beyond itself. “I was created to see thee,” confesses St. Anselm, “and not yet have I done that for which I was made.”11 For Augustine, the difference between enjoying (frui) something and using (uti) it is that “to enjoy something is to hold fast to it in love for its own sake.”12 Accordingly, while we may use this good created order, only the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is to be enjoyed. Only he can be loved strictly for his own sake.13 The temporal, created order may only be used (uti) with an eye to the eternal purpose of the enjoyment (frui) of God. (Needless to say, for St. Augustine, the word “use” did not have the negative connotation of “abuse,” which our word “use” often does carry since we now live in a purely natural world.) This distinction is important because it is precisely by celebrating created realities for their own sake (frui) that we unhinge them from their grounding in the eternal Word or Logos of God. Unhinged from their transcendent source, created objects lose their source of meaning; they become unsuspecting victims of the objectifying human gaze and turn into the manageable playthings of the totalizing human grasp. The irony of a misunderstood focus on the goodness of creation is that it results in its mirror-opposite—a Gnostic-type of devaluation of created life. What this means is that a genuine appreciation of the created order depends on us not making it primary, seeing that its ultimate goal lies beyond itself: earthly realities find their meaning in heaven itself.

Unhinged from their transcendent source, created objects lose their source of meaning; they become unsuspecting victims of the objectifying human gaze and turn into the manageable playthings of the totalizing human grasp.

Truth and Theology in a Sacramental World Some readers may well think at this point, 35

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surely we are far removed here from the French Catholic movement of nouvelle théologie. But actually, the reason I am interested in nouvelle théologie lies precisely in these cultural issues. What I do in the second part of the book is point to five theological areas to show how in each of these, the nouvelle theologians refused to acknowledge a separate, purely natural order. In each of these five areas, they asked the question: If it’s true that created realities are sacraments, if it’s true that they exist by way of participation in the eternal Word of God, in the Son of God who has become incarnate for us; in other words, if it is tr ue that he is the true reality, and that everything else finds its being in created and contingent dependence on him, then what does that do to our understanding of these particular theological areas that we’re looking at here? Put dif ferently, the nouvelle theologians believed that a retrieval of the sacramental tapestry of the church fathers and the medieval theologians requires us to renew our focus on Christ in every area of doctrine—for all this talk about participation and about sacraments is ultimately talk about Christ. In my book I trace five specific areas where I think we can learn from nouvelle théolog ie—the Eucharist, tradition, interpretation of Scripture, truth, and theology. In the little bit of space that is left, I want to focus on the last two: the nature of truth and our

understanding of theology. If natural realities—whether we’re talking creation, history, Old Testament, or plain old human truth claims, it doesn’t matter—if these natural realities are not just neutral, objective, purely natural, and self-enclosed realties, but if in a sacramental way they participate in heaven itself, then that has implications for the way in which we look at human truth claims. It means on the one hand, a recognition of the limits of human truth claims. After all, while there is, as it were, a “real presence” in our truth claims—our statements of truth really do participate sacramentally in the Truth (capital T), the Word himself—this participation is really quite provisional. We can no longer say of human propositions or of theological systems—no matter how carefully constructed—that they have the final say on the truth. The Truth with a capital T is always greater than our merely sacramental sharing in it. As Anselm, the great eleventh-century theologian, put it in his Proslogium:

Human truth claims, and especially truth claims about God, never reach strict correspondence with reality; they are never more than a sacramental participation in the eternal Word of God himself. A sacramental understanding of truth thus exposes modern claims of full comprehension and control over the natural world as a false arrogation of divine knowledge.

Do thou help me for thy goodness’ sake! Lord, I sought thy face; thy face, Lord, will I seek; hide not thy face far from me (Psalms xxvii.8). Free me from myself toward thee. Cleanse, heal, sharpen, enlighten the eye of my mind, that it may behold thee. Let my soul recover its strength, and with all its understanding let it strive toward thee, O Lord. What art thou, Lord, what art thou? What shall my heart conceive thee to be?14 Human truth claims, and especially truth claims about God, never reach strict correspondence with reality; they are never more than a sacramental participation in the eternal Word of God himself. A sacramental understanding of truth thus exposes modern claims of full comprehension and control over the natural world as a false arrogation of divine knowledge. At the same time, a sacramental 36

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Reconnecting the Threads: Theology as Sacramental Tapestry

view of truth also implies a firm “no” to skepticism—the great bane of our postmodern world. Skepticism despairs of the possibility that human statements of truth might even participate in the truth of the reality that they seek out. It seems to me that many contemporary evangelicals a re r ig ht i n re acti n g a g a i n st t he overconfidence of modernity. But we need to be cautious where to put our next step, for the radical skepticism of postmodernity is far more debilitating than the problems that we faced with modernity. If we have no participation in truth whatsoever, then we’re simply floating on the flotsam of the wreckage of modernity. Surely the Christian faith is more hopeful than that. Theology as knowledge of God— scientia dei—according to the pre-modern perspective advocated by the nouvelle theologians, is a participation in divine self-knowledge. It’s not an attempt to grasp God, and it certainly ought not be an attempt to control God. On a participatory understanding, theology takes on a priestly role. The theologian initiates people deeper into the sacramental reality of the life of God. That’s why theology can never be a merely academic enterprise. Theology will never feel at home in the neutral public sphere of the academy. Theology is a discipline that begins in faith and that ends in the beatific vision. Theology leads to heavenly participation. I hope I am clear: I am not advocating a lack of academic rigour. What I am suggesting, however, is that theology is primarily an ecclesial discipline that leads to contemplation of heavenly realities. If that’s how we do theology—and we all fall far short in this enterprise—then we will have come a long way in our attempt at reconnecting the threads of a sacramental tapestry.

The Biblical, Historical, and Theological Evidence for Catholic Teaching on Tradition, trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas Rainborough (San Diego: Basilica; Needham Heights: Simon & Schuster, 1966). 3 Yves Congar, The Meaning of Tradition, trans. A.N. Woodrow (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004). 4 “Spiritual Understanding,” trans. Luke O’Neill, in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Stephen E. Fowl (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 3–25. 5 Much of the four French volumes has now been published in English in Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Mark Sebanc and E.M. Macierowski (1998–2009). For de Lubac’s book on Origen, see idem, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture according to Origen, trans. Anne Englund Nash with Juvenal Merriell (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007). 6 Henri de Lubac, Scripture in the Tradition, trans. Luke O’Neill (New York: Herder & Herder/ Crossroad, 2000). 7 Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 8 J a m e s K . A . S m i t h , Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 91. 9 Scripture quotations are from the NIV, unless otherwise marked. 10 C.S. Lewis seems to echo this Pauline theme: “I have come home at last! This is my real country!” cries the Unicorn toward the end of The Last Battle, while stamping his right fore-hoof on the ground. “I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this” (The Chronicles of Narnia [New York: HarperCollins, 2001], 760). 11 St. Anselm, Proslogium, in St. Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. S.N. Deane, 2nd ed. (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1968), I. 12 St. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. and introd. R.P.H. Green, Oxford World’s Classics (1997; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), I.8 (emphasis added). 13 Ibid., I.10. 14 St. Anselm, Proslogium, XVIII. See also ibid., I.

On a participatory understanding, theology takes on a priestly role. The theologian initiates people deeper into the sacramental reality of the life of God. That’s why theology can never be a merely academic enterprise.

Endnotes

1 Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). 2 Yves M.-J. Congar, Tradition and Traditions: 37

Poetry

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Signal Fires C.G. Bateman You cannot help liking Joseph. So many of us feel that kinship with his heart and body betrayed. Those brothers of his who were supposed to look out for him, turned as one man, one crazed man, in a fit of rage. Sold as our Lord Christ. Sold for silver, the sliver price. I rather think the Ishmaelites were a sight for sore eyes, a way to escape the hawkish clutches of his murderous brothers. These traveling traders were your way of freeing him. If he wept at all, it was for his mother. Favour did not merely follow, it went ahead of him, lighting signal fires. Betrayed again. An awkward honour forced old Potiphar’s hand. Given his Josephine profits, it was surely an excruciating gesture. And those precious half-seconds before the wise old man realized he was the mark. The daughter of the priest of On, how justly and perfectly ironic. Asenath for Joseph, Egypt for Israel. Between the dreams and the droughts, the son settled his betrayers on the best land in Egypt. He brought his Father to meet Pharaoh, imagine. Was there a little, “you rebuked me and your sons wanted to kill me?!” here? The wandering Aramean blessed the King, then said, “few and hard have been the years of my life.” I see Joseph sitting on his vice-regent’s throne, in that hot, humid, and humourless room: the fans of slaves overhead. All the while, Pharaoh and Father darted nervous looks in his direction. Soon, Joseph captured them with his piercing eyes: for one long moment, before releasing them with a grin. C.G. Bateman is a published academic and poet currently engaged in a PhD program at the University of British Columbia, Faculty of Law.

Book Reviews

Hope in Dark Days: The Politics and Ethics of Eschatological Reserve

A nyone readi n g t h i s li kely remembers where they were the morning of September 11, 2001, and what TV, radio, telephone, or person first announced to them the morningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s events. I heard it from a barista who handed me the news along with my morning coffee on the first day of a new semester at seminary. Three hours later I sat through a chapel service of tears and laments, cries for justice and mercy, imprecatory psalms and prayer. It was a dark service for a dark day as we and the rest of the world stumbled into the future. In the weeks following the attacks I and many others asked how C h r i st i a n s sho u ld re s p ond, knowing that our primary political identity was rooted not in the particular nation-states that had birthed and bred us, but in the kingdom of God. And yet, we were still citizens of the United States, or Canada, or Great Britain, or wherever. We were still called to the vocation of citizen and asked how we might act as citizens of both polities, one temporal and one eternal. Obviously, the al Qaeda attacks and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq did not create a discourse of serious theopolitical reflection ex nihilo, but they did, along with other social, political, and economic events, present a new set of morally complex circumstances to a new generation. In the intervening decade we have not lacked people offering to

The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times by Charles Mathewes Eerdmans, 2010 288 pages ISBN-13: 978-0802865083 $22 CAD

Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics by Nigel Biggar Eerdmans, 2011 144 pages ISBN-13: 978-0802864000 $18 CAD 39

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in part a theologically driven empirical approach to moral dialogue. Mathewes and Biggar are obviously not the first to contemplate these questions. If a book about living in the tension between the eschatological kingdom of God and the secular kingdoms of the day sounds familiar, it should. It was called The City of God and was written by Augustine in the fifth century during the collapse of the western Roman Empire. I find it instructive that both authors draw from politically minded theologians positioned on either side of Christendom. Mathewes opens with reflections on Karl Barth but then moves to Augustine. Biggar, conversely, begins with Augustine and takes us to Barth. Augustine and Barth are wise guides for difficult terrain, even if we don’t follow them around every theological bend. They both lived through turbulent times at either end of Christendom, and were both deeply immersed in the polis. Consider Augustine conf ronting t he violent Donatists, political injustice, the slave trade, the imperial torture of prisoners for the sake of gaining information, the frequently used death penalty, various regional wars, and the attack on the capital city. Sounds all too familiar. Likewise, consider Barth confronting Nazi totalitarianism, the Communist hegemony of the East, the Capitalist hegemony of the West, the nuclear arms race, the secularized nationstate, the rearmament of Germany, and the widening gap between rich and poor. Though neither Mathewes’s nor Biggar’s book is “about” Augustine or Barth, both ask how their words and witness might inform our own. Central to Mathewes’s work, both in The Republic of Grace and in his larger A Theology of Public Life (2007), is an important theological question that N.T. Wright, C.S. Lewis, Oliver O’Donovan, Hans Boersma, and others have con sidered, namely, how t he eschatological renewal and redemption of all things should shape and inform the way we live “in the meantime,” or, as

explain our “new world” to citizens of industrialized Western liberal democracies trying to understand foreign religions and foreign lands. Two recent books, however, offer to do more. They address our status and our situation sub species aeternitatis and offer wise theological and moral counsel to help us attend to both the changing and the unchanging structural realities of our world. The first, The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times, is by Charles Mathewes, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. The cover—a picture of the 9/11 aftermath in New York City— and the subtitle are telling. It is part political primer, part meditation on the theological virtues. Fundamentally, it is a book for citizens. The medieval era produced several “handbooks for Christian princes,” ostensibly written for individuals responsible for making political decisions. Mathewes adapts this genre for our own age of liberal democracy, where, at least putatively, the citizen is the sovereign. He writes, he tells us, not “for polities and presidents” but for “churches and citizens,” that is, for us. Nigel Biggar, a graduate of Regent College and currently Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, addresses similar questions in Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics. Whereas Mathewes helps us see the theo-political terrain that stretches from here to eternity, Biggar leads us to the noisy conference room of the political engineers and moral guides who plan to take us across it. His goal, it seems, is to prepare Christians to sit at the table alongside people who oppose or are indifferent to their theological convictions, but who may yet welcome and embrace their moral conclusions. Christians, he argues, should expect to find people who began the moral journey from different starting points, but who have arrived at similar destinations. It is 40

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elections in Poland, Ukraine, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, or (yet to be seen) in Libya. I fi nd t hi s di sti nction bet ween apocalyptic presumption and eschatological hope quite helpful not only when considering problems like sin, death, corruption, and chaotic disorder, but also with regard to “short term”(!) dilemmas like terrorism, race relations, totalitarianism, materialistic consumerism, economic crises, and the like. From this vision of the eschaton, Mathewes considers how the theological virtues prepare us to participate in the earthly polis, and how our participation in the earthly polis prepares us for our true citizenship in the “republic of grace,” the kingdom of God. Chapters two to four consider the unique challenges that our “dark times” present to the virtues of hope, faith, and love. Hope is sorely tested by all that 9/11 represents; faith, by the hegemony of the powerful nation-state, especially the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union; and love, by millennial capitalism that draws our desires toward disordered ends. These are the “dark times” in which we find ourselves: hopeless and resentful terrorism that is more skilled at destruction than construction; nationstates that claim the idolatrous allegiances of their citizens; and a consumer culture that diminishes our ability to love the right things at the right time in the right way. So when Mathewes claims, “Hope is the central political virtue” for our day, it is hard to disagree. In Part 2 of the book, after learning to see as Christians, Mathewes considers how we might look like Christians, practising love, faith, and hope in the political spheres. Sounding very Augustinian, Mathewes explains how love reorders our desires toward proper ends, and should personally and culturally help us resist the market’s attempt to enframe every aspect of human life. Love teaches that we are not primarily consumers seeking happiness but lovers receiving joy. Politically,

Mathewes refers to it, “during the world.” How might we live now in ways that proleptically participate in and witness to the eschatological transformation that is coming? How should that inform our practices of Christian discipleship and political citizenship? The posture he insists we adopt toward the world is eschatological reserve that leads to hopeful discontent with the way things are. The alternative is apocalyptic presumption that leads to lethargic despair that things will never be different. For Mathewes, this is an important step toward seeing the world as Christians, which we must do before we can act in the world as Christians. Eschatological reserve keeps us from losing ourselves in the immediacy of the world’s disordered events and from assuming that whatever new states of affairs those events bring represent an apocalyptic end to cultural or political history. The posture of eschatological reserve and hopeful expectation reminds us not only that the disordered world is not a permanent state of affairs, but also that any particular disordered development within the world is not permanent. Mathewes acknowledges throughout his book that this theological clarity actually ratchets up the moral ambiguity and complexity of the world, which tempts us toward apocalyptic and simplistic either–or and us–them solutions. However, between naïve utopianism and cynical despair, Mathewes finds theo-political hope. Even though the book was published just months before the recent “Arab Spring,” and even though it predicts that substantial changes in the Middle East would likely take decades, the rapid changes in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, and other countries actually support Mathewes’s emphasis that while things will be different at the end of time, they could be different in the meantime, sometimes even sooner than we expect. Few living in the 1960s and 1970s could imagine the collapse of the Soviet Union, and few in the 1980s and 1990s could imagine democratic 41

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to be a war of terror is more properly a war over hope—a war to see who will most shape the hopes and fears of the populations caught up in it” (53). In response, Mathewes prescribes genuine dialogue about the panoply of concerns that drive terrorism, and the fostering of new states of affairs that offer thisworldly, socio-political hope. Apart from the question of terrorism, he contends that hope mobilizes energy for civic change, opposes apocalyptic cynicism, reveals the covenantal basis of community, and works on behalf of the vulnerable and dispossessed in society. Mathewes is under no delusion that any of this will be easy, quick, or clean. In fact, he doubts these things will ever happen— at least to the extent we long for. Instead, hope chastens our this-worldly desires and reminds us that our political engagement is iconic, is sacramental. The longings we experience for world peace, for shalom, for integrated selves and societies—these longings are real and valid but will never be fully satisfied “during the world.” Instead, their cultivation and practice now prepare us to indwell that day when they will be fully satisfied. We “learn to be ‘trained by our longings’ to seek a certain eschatological consummation, and none before then. … It is an eschatological practice, performed in this life” (226–27). This is a compelling idea that I hope Mathewes and others continue to develop. While Mathewes offers Christian distinctiveness and the vision of a counterpolis toward which we hasten by God’s grace, Biggar works within the theological world described by Mathewes and considers the finer details of how Christian citizens might come alongside non-Christian citizens for the common good. Like Mathewes, Biggar refuses to sacrifice either theological integrity or a deeply immersed participation in the world, and he is concerned that the discipline of academic Christian ethics too often fails to bring “the resources of its historical mining to engage at close, honest, and

Mathewes suggests that love leads to merciful judgment, so that the exercise of political authority sacramentally and iconically reflects the cosmic King who has temporarily authorized certain political tasks “in the meantime.” These tasks have as their end what sounds like a politically fostered shalom, though Mathewes never explicitly invokes that Hebrew idea. Looking at faith through a political lens, the Christian citizen experiences a dilemma that many dual citizens face. What to do when the country that issued one of your passports conflicts with the country that issued the other? The church has often taken one of two apocalyptic routes, both of which obviate the need for patient observation and shrewd discrimination: casual collaboration leading to complacent acquiescence (think Sadduccees or Eusebius) or stringent opposition leading to despairing resignation (think Essenes or the Schleitheim Confession). Instead, Mathewes counsels, the proper political exercise of faith prohibits us f rom surrendering either passport. Even though faith calls us to locate our fundamental political identity in the heavenly polis—a fact that has always vexed secular political authorities—it also calls us to participate in God’s work by supporting the goals of order and justice, primarily (though not exclusively) through the polities we inhabit. Yet we do this not on the terms or for the reasons that the polity asks us to. Our account depicts the polity as serving God’s purposes, not its own ends. … Christians’ civic fidelity is anchored in religious fidelity. … They seek the welfare of the city, so to speak, out of fidelity to God. (194) Thus love and faith. What of hope, the theological virtue Mathewes thinks most absent and most needed in our “dark times”? Somewhat surprisingly, Mathewes diagnoses global terrorism to be both a cause and a result of endemic hopelessness: “What seems to United States audiences 42

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CRUX Fall 2011, Vol. 47, No.3

of the Christian church, that Christians might have something to learn from non-Christians, and that a measure of consensus between them is possible” (109). Thus the title, Behaving in Public. Thinking Barth and Thomas together has not been a common practice in theological or ethical circles. Even so, Biggar advocates what he calls a “Barthian Thomism.” Hopefully, we hear more about this in the future from Biggar. With Thomas, he affirms the priority of a morally ordered universe that generates knowable moral norms—norms that can generate precise judgments in particular cases, even if they “do not pretend to be final or conclusive” (22). With Barth, he confesses that the revelation of Christ challenges and clarifies, but also confirms, what had been thought to be the natural law and the human good. With both Thomas and Barth, he affirms that we should expect to discover the unpredictable Spirit blowing where he will in the lives of believers and unbelievers alike. Between moral norms and the Spirit’s movement, Biggar endorses what sounds like a very Augustinian emphasis on virtue formation: “Moral life is not primarily about analysis, deliberation, or reflection. … On the contrary, moral life is primarily about the ordering of attitudes and dispositions, curbing some and growing others. Most fundamentally,” and here he echoes Mathewes, “it is about the education of desire or love” (80). The love he advocates is the love with which our “Lord and Master” loved the world. If we will so love the world, Biggar insists, we must play pastor before we play prophet. “For the only people a prophet has the right to prophesy against are those he has first cared to make his own” (112). We live in “dark times,” and morally ambiguous times, and times marked by economic, political, and social disorder a nd c omplexit y— ti me s Aug u sti ne and Barth would recognize even if the particulars have changed. And we ask the same questions they did: How do we live

considerate quarters with present issues of public policy. … The rest of the world is being daily misshapen by decisions about public policy, and Christian ethics should care to reserve some of its energy for engaging critically and constructively with those, too” (21). Why, he presses, should professional moral theologians, who have more time than legislators, civil servants, and pastors, “grant themselves the luxury of an indeterminacy that the rest of humanity can ill afford” (21)? Instead, the church and the Christian ethicist should witness to and actively work toward the individual and public good that is revealed by the light of Jesus Christ. In this pursuit of the common good, Biggar hopes to relieve Christian ethicists of an understandable but unnecessary concern, namely, the compulsion to offer uniquely “Christian” solutions to practical, moral dilemmas as the only way to maintain theological integrity. Instead, Biggar argues persuasively that Christian theological integrity does not require ethical or political distinctiveness. “One is a virtue; the other is an accident of history” (8). We should in fact expect to arrive at the same moral conclusions that others arrive at by different means. This should be obvious given the Christian belief that what is true is true for all and not just for Christians, that all persons are fellow sinners created in the image of God and structurally open to the Spirit, that despite sin’s epistemic distortion all inhabit the same world and are capable of moral reflection and discernment. Thus, though sometimes the Christian ethicist will be called to be the sole prophetic voice critiquing and denouncing wickedness, she may more often need to be the wise policy maker who unsurprisingly finds common ground with others, or who surprisingly finds in others, better conclusions. In such a case, she should readily and humbly adopt them as correlates of the gospel that she simply had not seen. “Both Aquinas and Barth justify a Christian expectation that moral wisdom is to be found outside 43

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than they otherwise would be. We hope that we fulfill the vocation of dual citizens, called to foster personal, communal, and political shalom now that anticipates and sacramentally attests the eschatological shalom of then. And for what it’s worth, I finished both these books decidedly more hopeful than I have been since I ordered that coffee ten years ago. ~Brian Williams (MCS, ThM, Regent College), author of The Potter’s Rib: Mentoring for Pastoral Formation, taught theology, philosophy, and literature at Cair Paravel Latin School in Topeka, KS, for six years, and is currently Theologian in Residence at First Presbyterian Church (PCUSA).

with theological integrity before God and with others as citizens of the kingdom of heaven who find ourselves in foreign lands? How do we love our neighbour and seek communal shalom and individual flourishing? Apprehension of the theological and moral framework in which we live does not always make the way forward clearer. Augustine and Barth knew this better than most of us. Mathewes, who works with the University of Virginia’s Project on Lived Theology, and Biggar, who directs the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, know this too. What can we hope for then? We hope that a bracing theological apprehension of the way things are makes our speech and our actions more faithful, more loving, and more hope-filled

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CRUX Fall 2011, Vol. 47, No.3

Going Missional: Conversations with 13 Canadian Churches Who Have Embraced Missional Life

It is generally a concept that stays within Protestant evangelicalism, and to some it means preaching the gospel in the far reaches of Nepal, while to others it means an intentional inclination to serve the practical needs of those around you. This book leans entirely toward the latter. But a long standing divisiveness, at least in the last fifty years, has meant that missional is a concept that appealed to Christians whose inclinations are toward more social-justice-flavoured ways to love the world, and rankled Christians who have felt it was far more loving to focus on articulating the gospel. This book intends to bypass both of these emphases and show that for the twenty-first century, going missional need not be exclusionary but is always practical. According to these churches, being missional is loving the people in front of you, outside the church doors as well as within, and it has many different faces. One of the strengths of the book is that Karen Stiller works harder to show what missional can look like, rather than laying out a grid to get it right. She leaves a lot to God. What missional looks like for these thirteen church is highly varied—some were huge endeavours such as giving over most of their building during the week to a program for young offenders. Others were more modest—mowing lawns. In Duncan, BC, Pastor Mark Buchanan decided going missional meant leading his congregation to understand more fully their local native community, largely through workshops, and then offering themselves as volunteers for the 2008 North American Indigenous Games (the Aboriginal communities’ Olympics equivalent). Christ Church, a congregation of 175 in Oshawa, ON, assessed practical needs within a two-kilometre radius of their sanctuary and came up with “a loosy-goosey church experience for whole families one Saturday morning a month” called “Messy Church,” an outreach to families who could not get there

by Karen Stiller with Will Metzger Word Alive Press, 2010 161 pages $15.99 CAD Few people read the title Going Missional without feeling either a bit intrigued or a bit agitated. “Missional” is one of those words that evokes response. Christians are usually interested in going that direction or wary of its implications. At the very least, most of us feel intimidated—nervous we couldn’t do it very well. Thankfully, Going Missional is a help for all of us. Written by Canadian Karen Stiller, and catalyzed by World Vision (which tells me it will be well done but increases the agitation) Going Missional is largely thirteen conversations depicting how various Canadian churches have been intentional about becoming missional in their communities. These are “Go Local” and doable stories at their best. Situated from Duncan, BC, to Halifax, NS (there is at least one church from every province), the thirteen churches range in size from sixty-five to three thousand, and denominationally from Anglicans to the non-denominational. What does it mean to be “missional” and why does it matter? Missional is a fluid word—most likely coined in the late nineteenth century but disseminated in the late twentieth by Lesslie Newbigin and in the twenty-first century by New York pastor and author Timothy Keller. 45

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describes their steps and hurdles to give an honest, though not exhaustive, portrayal of what each church encou ntered. These vignettes give us a picture rather than a manual, though there are some good practical suggestions at the end of each chapter. Stiller concludes her conversations with two surprisingly honest personal essays: “The Challenges of Going Missional” and “What I Learned Along the Way.” She keeps the cost, the downsides, of going missional front and centre—she knows the realities of how such changes intersect with having three kids, working, and being married to a pastor. Her reflections are worth the price of the book. Some readers will want more of a blueprint, others will want more biblical theology to undergird what God might be calling them to do. At times readers may feel nudged rather than offered a vista— that there are one too many messages of “you can do it!” But Going Missional provides a very helpful step, practical and inspirational, to get you off and running. It would be an ideal choice for a Bible study to read together and then say, okay, what can we do? What is plausible for us? For me?

otherwise. Christ Church members also began regularly providing bus subsidies for local teens so they could get to school, and assembling backpacks full of school supplies, regularly delivered to the nearby elementary school. In Montreal, QC, Nouvelle Vie is a large, non-denominational congregation with Pentecostal roots, and their missional ministry arose through the 1998 ice storm that crushed so much of Eastern Canada. Because the church was one of the only large buildings with a generator (and thus heat), they opened their doors as a shelter—canceling Sunday services because the sanctuary was full of people and their small collection of worldly goods. Out of this, a full-scale centre was born, offering tangible assistance to those struggling with poverty. Action Nouvelle Vie currently provides everything from warm coats to language classes and support networks, serving over eight thousand people per month. T h e s e t h i r t e e n c o nv e r s a t i o n s incorporate interviews with pastors, those keen (and not keen) on their church going missional, city employees, and local business leaders. Their comments are neither rosy nor simplistic. Stiller aptly

~Julie Lane-Gay is senior editor for Crux.

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