Receiving Mercy and Being Merciful

Meditation on the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity Texts:

“Receiving Mercy and Being Merciful”

St. Matthew 18:21-35 and Philippians 1:3-11

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            In this week’s Gospel account the Apostle Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?  Till seven times?”  When we see Peter asking these questions we are prone to view Peter as always seeming to insert his foot into his mouth before our Lord.  I am not sure that such a perspective is necessarily how we are to best understand the situation.  Perhaps, St. Peter was already acting as a sort of spokesmen for Jesus’ disciples.  If that were the case he was asking Jesus to clarify his teaching so that the disciples would more completely understand his astonishing teachings on forgiveness.  If Peter was asking Jesus this question about how often to forgive sinners for the other disciples, as well as for himself, then we can imagine him asking that same question for disciples in every time and place wherever there would ever be followers of Jesus Christ.  He was asking this question, in a sense for you and for me: “How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?”  In our smugness we look at Peter asking Jesus this question and are prone to say to Peter, “That is a tacky question you lout.”  But in our humanity, especially when we have someone that gets on our nerves and gives us a pain in the butt, we really want to ask Jesus “How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?”

            Jesus tells us a story about a man standing before the king.  This man had a great debt, a debt he could never repay.  The king planned to get at least part of the money back that this debtor owed him.  He announced his plan to sell the man, the man’s wife, and their children into slavery.  This servant, with the great debt fell down before the king, prostrated himself, and asked the king to have mercy on him and he would repay the debt.  The Lord, or the king in this story, was moved to compassion.  He felt for the debtor.  He forgave the debtor all his debts.  The debt was totally cancelled.  The king was moved by his compassion towards the man to forgive all his debts.

            But then a little later this man forgiven a huge debt he could in no way repay discovered a fellow-servant owed him a small amount.  But this one who had been forgiven such a great debt treated this man with a little debt without mercy or compassion.  When the man who owed him money asked for mercy even as he had done before the king, the forgiven debtor refused to be merciful.  He ordered the other man to be sent to prison.  The citizens and fellow-servants then poured out their petitions to the king and asked if such an injustice was going to be allowed to stand?  The King responded this time not with mercy but with wrath and ordered him sent to the tormentors.

            This story has a sharp cutting edge to it.  Jesus warns that if we do not forgive everyone his brother’s trespass against us that our heavenly Father like that king in the story will do so to us.  We sometimes imagine ourselves safe with Jesus because he is viewed always it seems as if the face of mercy.  Yet we do well to remember that Jesus, more than any of the prophets or any of the Apostles, warned of God’s wrath and judgment that was to come upon evil sinners.  Jesus pronounces that this debtor who had been once forgiven a great debt, but was then unwilling to forgive a small debt, was now to be treated as an evil sinner.  Let us beware.  Let us not remove this reality from our Lord Jesus Christ.  Let us learn why Jesus described this man as evil, even though our Lord had come to set the captive sinner free and to grant us a way to know life, abundant life, and eternal life.

            Perhaps we can better understand this matter if we think about how Jesus once spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well.  He was asking her for a drink of water from the well, and when she was surprised that he a Jew was speaking to her, he told her that if she were to ask him he could give her living water, living water that would become in her a spring of flowing water.  We sometimes forget how whenever the Old Testament spoke of a washing it required flowing or living water.  Living water is water that is flowing.  The Jordan River flowed.  The Dead Sea had no outlet and so water flowing into the Dead Sea became stagnant.  Mercy is meant to be something flowing from God into us, taking up residence in us and becoming like a flowing stream to be a source of showing mercy to others.  That is the sort of way we need to think of mercy.  It is not something given to us just so we can have eternal security because even though we were great sinners we asked Jesus into our hearts.  That is not all of what God wants to do in giving us mercy.  God is initiating mercy into us that we may participate in the mercy of God and may in that participation become merciful in our souls and therefore become merciful to others.  Grace is not something which is given to us and then allowed to stagnate in us and then just die.  Grace is something meant to reside in us and live in us, and then be shared with others.  It is for that reason that we pray “Forgive us our trespasses as we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us.”  We are living in a world where Christ in redeeming us, has been calling us to pay our forgiven debts forward by forgiving others their debts against us.  How oft shall we forgive the brother who sins against us?  How much has our Lord forgiven us?  Let that be our standard.  That is Jesus’ answer to Peter, to the disciples, and to you and me.

            Our Epistle reading found in Philippians 1:3-11 is a word of encouragement from the Apostle Paul regarding this same phenomenon.  He describes how because God through Christ had begun a good work in them, that the Apostle was confident that God would complete this good work in them even unto the day of Christ Jesus.  The Philippians had participated in the Gospel, had believed in Christ, had suffered with the Apostle Paul in his sufferings, and all Paul now wanted for them was for them to continue to grow in the grace of God; that their love, their knowledge, their understanding of God; and their ability to show discernment in their Christian lives might continue to grow and increase.

            There is a mindset that imagines an expectation of spiritual growth to be some sort of a requirement forced upon a Christian and therefore it must be rejected as if it is a salvation by works.  But the truth is different.  God’s grace to us is spiritual life in the place of spiritual death and stagnation.  Grace is grace.  Mercy is mercy.  The grace and mercy of God that extends forgiveness to us grants life to us, and life as long as it is alive causes growth in accord with the nature of the life that is given.  What God begins he is able to complete; that is grace, and nothing but grace.  For this gift to cease being grace this grace would have to cease from continuing.  Martin Luther taught regarding the Word of God in the Gospel, that it is the nature of the Gospel to save and redeem and to create faith in the hearts and souls of those who hear the Gospel.  But there is a battle for our souls, and there is a tendency in the soul of sinful men and women to resist the good news of our forgiveness, to resist mercy, and to misuse grace.  But the Apostle saw the Philippians as being men and women who being moved by grace responded to grace by desiring it to take up residence in their souls, and to have their behavior unto others guided by that same influence of grace.

            Indeed, that is why this man who had owed such a great debt and was forgiven, only to withhold forgiveness to a lesser debtor, was judged to be such an evil man.  Jesus saw this man as an evil man to rightfully be handed over to the torturers.  He had received mercy, but he then built a dam around himself so that the mercy given him would not be permitted to be given to anyone else.  He wanted to have mercy for himself but had no true desire to want to become mercy for another.  He turned mercy from God into selfishness for himself.  This surely is not the way of grace.  Instead of wishing to see grace grow in him, he resisted its place in his inner being.

            I want to give an example of a man who may have been very near the point where he might have been judged an evil man, but may have been saved from such destruction by seeing amazing events unfold before his eyes.  This is a story I heard in my church when Father Moses Berry, an Orthodox priest visiting our church described how the land where the church is located, in which he is a priest had become his family’s property prior to our Civil War.  Father Moses Berry is an African-American, and like many African-Americans his ancestors were at one time slaves in America.  One day, an ancestor of Father Moses Berry was being punished by his white slave-owner.  The slave-owner was a church going man but it did not keep from using the whip on Moses Berry’s ancestor.  I do not know the offense for which his ancestor was being whipped, but as the slave-owner whipped the ancestor the ancestor began crying out.  The slave-owner kept whipping upon the man until he realized what Moses Berry’s ancestor was crying out.  He was crying out over and over again in his pain and misery, “Lord, be merciful to me, the sinner.”  The white slave-owner was shocked when he heard those words.  He quit whipping the slave.  The slave-owner was grieved at his actions.  He set Moses Berry’s ancestor free.  He gave the new freed man and his family forty acres for his family.  He signed the deed over to the former slave.  He helped him get established on his new homestead.

            I would dare say that the slave-owner had probably sung hymns in church much of his life with a sense of joy in being forgiven of his sins.  But a far clearer understanding of God’s mercy penetrated his soul when he realized what a terrible sin he had committed against this man that was crying out, “Lord, be merciful, to me the sinner.  At least for that day, the slave-owner understood that God’s mercy to him was meant to be shared, not to be treated as one’s own private property.  I do not know any more of the details of what happened with the slave-owner, but I tell the story because some of us may be in danger of judgment for our lack of mercy.  Yet if we will but seek God’s mercy, and seek especially that his mercy might take up residence within us, and flow forth from us, there is yet hope even for a selfish person to be granted to participate and flourish in the grace and mercy of God, until that mercy takes up residence in our souls and spills over into the lives of those around us.

            In conclusion, let us pray this week’s collect:  “Lord, we beseech thee to keep thy household the Church in continual godliness; that through thy protection it may be free from all adversities, and devoutly given to serve thee in good works, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Calendars, collects, lectionaries - Abiding lessons from the Ancient church

Calendars, Collects, and Lectionaries: Part II

Are there Abiding Lessons for the Modern Church?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            For the sake of honesty in presenting this blog, I acknowledge that I am partial to the liturgical sort of worship which makes use of church calendars, lectionaries (with assigned Scripture texts) and collects (proscribed prayers meant to be used with the readings and observances of a church calendar in liturgical worship).  Nonetheless I recognize that God meets with and I believe gives approval of worship different from what I like on a routine basis.  But I do believe there are three lessons we can draw from the benefits of the liturgical style of worship that we can began to discuss in my previous blog.

            A lack of ease in obtaining copies of the Holy Scriptures was one of the reasons I felt the early church developed a worship service making use of a lectionary proscribing assigned readings from the Scriptures and proscribed prayers known as collects.  There were certain benefits of that practice that I think we may not easily think about.

            The first benefit I would like to consider in this blog is how the focus of the early church was directed towards seeing Christ in his life events and in his teachings.  I spent a number of years in churches where most of the preaching was done by going through books of the Bible in a consecutive “expository” manner.  There was this feeling that when you came to a passage you had to say something about it even the truth taught that day did not seem all that significant to spend the thirty, forty-five, or even sixty minutes addressing.  This is where we were in the Bible and we needed to deal with this passage no matter how much we would have liked to be able to hearing about something that seemed a bit more applicable to our church setting.  In some ways those sort of sermon days created an idea that understanding the Christian faith was primarily an academic exercise, and it led to the idea that we had to have a “Biblical understanding” about every issue and every verse, no matter significant or insignificant it might seem to be.

            I think the leaders within the early church, the Church Fathers, and the Apostles might have said to us something like “The Bible is important but the importance of the Bible is to set forth the person, life, work, and teachings of Jesus Christ.”  That is something I think the liturgical church making use of a church calendar to follow the life and teachings of Jesus Christ more or less accomplished.  The first thing we can learn from the use of collects, lectionaries, and a church calendar is that Christ, as the one who is the revelation of God by the power of the Holy Spirit should always be the focus of our teaching of God’s people.  Beware of turning our Christian faith into a mere academic exercise.  Jesus told the people of his day, “You search the Scriptures thinking that in them you have eternal life, and it is they which testify of Me.”

            The second benefit I see in using a church calendar, lectionary, and collect was that Christians were taught how to pray through the use of the collects.  The disciples asked Jesus, during his ministry to teach them to pray.  Jesus gave the disciples the Lord’s Prayer in response to that request.  In Luke 11:2 Jesus says of the prayer he had taught them, “When you pray, say.”  Luke writes of the Lord’s Prayer as if the prayer was to be recited and repeated by Christians.  Matthew, on the other hand, in Matthew 6:9 is described as saying, “After this manner, therefore pray ye.”  These introductions to the Lord’s Prayer are compatible.  Yes we should make a habit of praying the Lord’s Prayer.  It is a good prayer to pray and to repeat.  But we also ought to pray our own words of prayer based on the form of the Lord’s Prayer.  We should be creative and not merely rote in our prayers.

            I think the leaders of the Ancient Church, in writing collects as prayers to go with the Scripture texts being preached upon on the varied days of a church calendar, were helping Christians to learn to pray.  These collects were designed to be prayers fit and appropriate for the aspect of Christ’s life or teaching that were being set forth on a particular day in the Church prayer.  Thus on the day of Pentecost, wherein the Church recognizes the importance of God’s sending of the Holy Spirit to indwell the Church, one of the collects on that day teaches us to pray a prayer that is a fitting response to God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church.  The Collect says, “Almighty and Most merciful God, grant, we beseech thee, that by the indwelling of thy Holy Spirit, we may be enlightened and strengthened for thy service; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end.”

            These collects taught the early church that prayer is both a proper preparation and a proper response to hearing the truths about Christ presented in the Gospel.  These prayers, expressed in the collects were formed to make use of our most exact words of praise in an expression of beauty as well as praise.  Yes it is true that God hears our grunts and groans and speedily processed prayers during the day but should it not be the response of someone who believes that God in Christ is the lover of our souls, of our entire beings for us to desire to express ourselves in praise to him with the highest sense of expression we can muster?  That is the writers of the collects sought to do.  They kept the amount of words in these prayers few, but the meaning was as exact and expressive as they could truthfully present these words.  So even if these collects are not used in a modern worship service, it should be the desire of every Christian to learn to stretch themselves, their vocabularies, their passion, and their devotion in the words they use to express their need of God and their gratitude for his mercy bestowed upon them in and through holy worship.

            There is one last lesson I think that every member of a church and every minister should consider.  In the early Church there were few members that had copies of the Holy Scriptures.  I think we have a hard time realizing what a privilege and honor one who was recognized as being called to the ministry had in the early church.  Imagine if other leaders in the church and the people of the church had determined that God seemed to be showing one person for the ministry of the Word of God in the church.  St. Paul writes to St. Timothy as a leader of the church to look for faithful men who will be able to be entrusted with the Scriptures and will be able to teach others also.  So imagine in a setting where only a few people have copies of the Scriptures, St. Timothy approaches someone and says, “I want to entrust you with the scrolls of the Word of God in our church’s safekeeping.  You are to faithfully learn them, and then you are to faithfully teach them.  Will you do this for the people of God, will you be faithful in this to God?

            That is why when it comes time to install someone to handling the Word of God, the foremost quality to be found in the servant who is to handle the Word of God is his faithfulness.  His insights may become tainted and turned aside.  His wit, his sense of humor, his speaking qualities, his ability to attract people must be minimized in comparison with one quality, is this person a faithful servant unto God and God’s people?

            In this regard I love the story of how St. Ambrose was selected to become the Bishop of Milan.  The Bishopric in Milan was vacant and the church was deeply divided by the Trinitarian battles of the fourth century.  Approximately half of the church was Aryan and half of the church was Trinitarian.  It appeared likely that the next Bishop might literally be selected by a riot in the streets inside or outside of the church.  Ambrose was a respected governor of the territory, a political leader.  He had not yet been baptized.  He was a catechumen in training for baptism.  Reportedly it was a child who said “Let Ambrose be Bishop.”  Whoever recommended the idea, both sides decided Ambrose was a good choice.  He was known as a fair and just man, dignified and judicious.  In a mere week Ambrose was baptized, made a deacon, ordained into the office of presbytery, and consecrated as a Bishop.”  He set out to learn the issues and led virtually the entire church of Milan to a Trinitarian understanding of the faith.  He later became the one who probably most influenced St. Augustine to becoming a Christian.  But perhaps his greatest moment in which he proved the church of Milan correct for selecting him to the Bishopric was when he dealt with the Emperor Theodosius.  The Emperor had near absolute authority.  He had ordered the execution of some Christians in Thessalonica.  Not long following this execution Theodosius came to Milan, and as the Christian Emperor expected to be served Holy Communion by Bishop Ambrose.  Ambrose refused the Emperor the communion, saying he needed to repent of his sin, for he had blood on his hands.  It was the sort of stand that could get a Bishop beheaded or executed by an Emperor.  Instead Theodosius confided with someone that he had just met the first man he ever felt deserved to be called a Bishop.  Theodosius created an edict declaring that no one was to be executed for a set period of time after his conviction to give the Emperor time to determine if he had been hasty in his judgment.  When Theodosius came to his deathbed he requested Ambrose to attend him.  Ambrose was selected for the right reason by the people of Milan, he was a faithful man.  He handled the word of God with faithfulness.  He dealt with his parish faithfully.  He dealt with his Emperor faithfully.  For some reason the church decided to recognize him as a saint.

Early Church, Why a calendar, lectionary, and collects?

Why Did the Early Church adopt a Church Calendar with a Lectionary of Proper Scripture Readings?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            A blogger, whom I follow on Twitter, asked his readers for possible advice on his desire to do a blog using the Episcopalian lectionary.  I gave him a recommendation, pointing out that traditionally one of the ways Episcopalians were trained to handle the lectionary readings was to connect the weekly collect to the Scripture readings.  Having spent most of my life in non-liturgical churches I imagine some readers are wondering what a lectionary and a collect is.  I will begin by defining those terms and then I will show how the early church came to making use of such strange things as lectionaries and collects.

            There are three concepts (calendar, collect, lectionary) important to understand in simplicity for this blog to make sense.  First, this blog relates specifically to churches that make use of a calendar, marking various seasons of a church year.  A church calendar takes a yearly journey through the central redemptive events of Christ’s life and the basic teachings of his ministry.  I will describe more on the concept of a church calendar shortly.  Within the church calendar there are differing focuses of attention presented on each Sunday.  Thus during Christmas, the focus is on the incarnation, on the Biblical accounts surrounding the birth of Christ, etc.  During Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter, there are a number of services observing the partaking of the last Supper, Christ’s betrayal, his arrest, trial, Good Friday and the Resurrection.  Appropriate prayers and reading are assigned to focus the church’s attention in these particular times of worship.

The prescribed prayers are called collects.  For example the collect for the past week, beginning the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity reads “Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace, that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.”  The early church, within a relatively short time had assigned Scripture readings from what is known as a lectionary to guide the gathering church’s meditation especially at times when the gathered church met to partake of the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, Eucharist or the Divine Liturgy, depending on what your tradition names the observance.  The scheduled readings from the Lectionary came to be described by the church as Proper’s.  They were the proper, or at the least the preferred texts for those sermons based on the teaching being done in accordance with the church calendar.

I am sure this all sounds very terrible to someone accustomed to a minister getting to choose his own sermon text as the Spirit leads him.  But if we pause to consider how this practice began to take shape and what it meant for the early church I think we can begin to see how the practice benefitted the early church; which was in many ways more united in word, doctrine, and practice than at almost any other time in Christian history.

First the early church probably needed something like the church calendar.  There were no modern printing presses, no modern inexpensive ways to put literature in people’s hands, and no mass production of Bibles.  Bibles were not nearly as available for everyone to have and own as they are now.  A Bible would cost as much as a free laborer might earn in an entire year.  The typical Roman in the first or the second century was likely not even as fortunate as a free laborer.  Probably half of the Roman Empire’s inhabitants in the earliest Christian era were slaves, and not many masters were going to buy high priced Bibles for their slaves.  The early Christian church was often filled with slaves and they had no Authorized Version sitting on their desktop, nor even a Gideon’s Pocket New Testament to bring to worship services.  They generally relied on someone teaching them from a copy of a portion of the Scriptures at a church service.

A second reason the early Church had for using a Church calendar with assigned Scriptures and prayers, is that this was how worship had been done within Judaism.  The Christian Church was at first a Jewish sect that became independent of Judaism after large numbers within the Jewish population did not embrace the Gospel of Christ.  But for the Apostles, including the Apostle Paul, proclaiming the Gospel meant preaching first to those who were Jewish and then also to those who were Gentiles.  Within Judaism there had been a yearly calendar with holy days; including days of feasting and fasting.  There were holy seasons like Passover, the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement), and the Festival of Lights (Chanukah).  Early Christian leaders quickly recognized that as Christ came to fulfill the Law that the Hebrew calendar of religious observances could be easily converted to a Christian calendar in which such seasons as Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day and Pentecost could be observed and explained to the Church through the Bible readings describing the life of Christ around such seasons in the first half of the Christian year.

This was how an early church with little opportunity to own the Scriptures came to learn of the life of Christ.  The gathered church worshipped Christ with a focus based on a church calendar.  It had prayers it learned to pray for the week in conjunction with the message they heard based on the Scripture passages for the week.  They joined the singing of Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to what they had heard and what they learned to pray during the week.  For example of a hymn associated with the church calendar listen to the music and look at the words found on the link of this favored hymn “O come, O come, Emmanuel” which continues to be sung during the season of advent when the Church was taught to consider how in the times of the Old Testament God’s people were called upon to wait for Israel’s great redemption in Christ.  So Israel learned to wait, watch and hope, and so the church was called upon to remember how that had been the case as we experienced the Advent season prior to the celebration of Christ’s birth on Christmas Day.

The church learned the life of Christ by observing Advent, Christmas, then about how Christ was manifested through certain events from the coming of the Wise men to his baptism by John the Baptist, in the season known as Epiphany (which means a revelation).  We learn of how Christ suffered for us and sought to hunger for our righteousness in his Wilderness experience during our observation of Lent.  We then see Christ in holy week as he comes to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, has his supper with the disciples, is betrayed, arrested, deserted, crucified, buried, and then risen from the dead according to the Scriptures.  We then rejoice in his resurrection and then we learn of how he ascended into heaven after forty days of being seen alive by witnesses after his resurrection, and then we learn that he is united to the people of God by the gift of the Holy Spirit to the believer within the Church on Pentecost.  Pentecost is the final Sunday of the first half of the church year.  In that first half of the church year we journey week by week to see and hear in the Gospel proclaimed the great events of Christ’s redemptive life.

In the second half of the church year we learn the basic teachings of Christ.  We are taught about the the purgation of sin (or in Protestant terminology, reckoning your selves as dead to sin); and of illumination or discovering the way of a holy life in Christ, and ultimately we are taught of how all this is accomplished and is brought to completeness though our union with Christ.  We are led by Christ's teaching to repent from dead works, to being enlightened to see and learn the way of the true life in following after him, and to be able to see our identity and the fullness of our sanctification in our eternal union with Christ.

This was how the early Church taught slaves, illiterate, and the poor to be wise, rich, and full in Christ.  It was how a Roman Empire that enslaved half of the people living under its domain was turned upside down by a Lord who was put to death; but whose followers gathered together on the morning of the first day of the week to celebrate how their Lord had died and now lived.  Many of our Lord’s redeemed were in Roman eyes mere women, children, and slaves; the nobodies of the earth.  But a few were wealthy and wise, and some had even believed within Caesar’s own household.  In a short time, it was being said that they were turning the world upside down.

In our next blog we will consider if this method is outdated when we have Bibles in every home to be read at our leisure, or if there is something in this model of ancient worship that may well be able to be commended to our modern age.

The One Holy Church within Tradition

The “One Holy Church” within Tradition

The Ecclesiality or “Tserkovnost” of Pavel Florensky

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            This is my third blog on tradition, somehow loosely trying to grapple with our relationship to the Bible and tradition as Christians.  In my first post I looked to words from a Protestant F.F. Bruce regarding the relationship of Scripture and tradition.  In my second post I quoted from Louis Bouyer, a Roman Catholic theologian who was involved in the changes instituted by Vatican II.  I am pretty sure I don’t much understand the Eastern and Russian Orthodox perspective concerning tradition, which is why I am probably drawn to consider it like a physicist is drawn to a phenomenon his laws of physics have not yet been capable of explaining.  Today I am going to try to write of a mystery of tradition, I found in the pages of Russian Orthodox priest, linguist, mathematician, scientist, inventor, art historian, and martyr Pavel Florensky.  Florensky described tradition by a term translated “Ecclesiality”.  In Russian the term was “tserkovnost”.  Ecclesiality is a term derived from the Greek word “Ekklesia” which means “called out of”.  It is the Greek word used to describe our being drawn out of the world so as to be gathered into and together as the church.  In response to God’s divine liturgy we are called out from our lives of unbelief to hear and respond to God and to be called together for his purpose as we are brought to him around the table of the word and sacrament of the divine liturgy, the holy communion, the mystical body of Christ gathered together as one people partaking of one baptism, partaking of one holy food, united to be one people in union with God through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit.

            In Florensky’s mind Ecclesiality is a term foreign to Protestant and Catholic theology.  He says the Protestant misses it because Protestants define tradition as expressed in a Scripture, a confession of faith, or a creed; whereas Catholics define tradition as a pope, a system of functions, and a hierarchy.[i]  It is not clear whether Florensky believes we non-Orthodox are not able to understand “ecclesiality” because we have taken up the wrong way of faith, or because our systems cause us to miss what is right in front of us.  He believes that ecclesiality is something of great importance, even of cosmic importance for the entire creation which God is calling back to himself through Christ’s redemption, through the redemption of the Church, to the reordering of creation to be called out of darkness and back into reconciliation and a gathering unto God in Christ.  This gathering of all that is - - back into union with God, so that God would fill all things is in Florensky’s mind something being done in coordination with Christ’s redemption of his church.  The entire creation is being called back into its relationship with God, and this calling of creation awaits the glorification (in Orthodoxy, the deification) of the sons and daughters of God.  Because life is being extended to mankind through the redemption of the church it is being extended to the entire Cosmos.  Thus tradition is not just a historical lesson about what has happened in the church but an eschatological expectation of what God is doing, building, planning, and bringing together out of the tradition of the Spirit’s work in the Living Church.

            Florensky finds it necessary to distinguish the description of human thinking between “the rational” and “reason.”  For Florensky, if I understand him correctly “the rational” is humanity’s determination to explain things autonomously based wholly and solely upon our thoughts and experiences.  But reason is a spiritual exercise occurring in the mind of man as he absorbs truth under God’s tutelage in the Holy Spirit.  This can be a study of physics as well as Scripture, but it occurs as a man is made increasingly conscious even into his unconscious condition that apart from God, from Christ, from the Holy Spirit he is and knows and understands nothing.  If I must take a stab at what Florensky means by “ecclesiality” it is life experienced in union with God so that in that union with God we are granted to escape the temptation to define life apart from our union with God, so as to absorb life and truth and reality in our union with God in Christ.  I will in a moment let Florensky’s words speak for themselves, so ponder his words as they lead to a conclusion of understanding truth in and through the Church, which is called in I Timothy 3:16 “the pillar and ground of the truth.”

            Florensky writes:  “Ecclesiality – that is the name of the refuge where the heart’s anxiety finds peace, where the pretensions of the rational mind are tamed, where great tranquility descends into our reason.  Let it be the case that neither I nor anyone else can define what ecclesiality is!  Let those who attempt such a definition dispute one another and mutually refute one another’s formulas of ecclesiality.  Indeed, do not its very indefinability, its ungraspableness by logical terms, its ineffability prove that ecclesiality is life, a special, new life, which is given to man, but which, like all life, is inaccessible to the rational mind?  And do not divergences in the definition of ecclesiality, the variety of incomplete and always insufficient verbal formulas for what ecclesiality is, empirically confirm what the Apostle told us: namely that the Church is the body of Christ, “the fullness of him that filleth all in all” (Ephesians 1:23)?[ii]

            If as a Protestant I may enter into something of what Florensky is saying and might venture to dialogue with his understanding I would say from him this is what I have begun to grasp.  The Gospel has come in both life and words, and the church is expressed in both life and functions, and the tradition that was given to us through Christ and the Apostles is the communication of spiritual life granted by the Word, through the sacraments, in the church and it is God’s reach into a world that he is redeeming through His Son Jesus Christ and calling to himself through the Holy Spirit who has been given unto us.

            I can remember when the concept of the creation began to take on a new dimension for me from the Book of Genesis.  I was fascinated how God originally created the heavens and earth so that darkness covered the earth; and the earth was described as a void without form and covered in darkness.  But then God, in the stages of the six days as reported in Genesis spoke to creation and creation responded to God and soon there was life, beauty and order where there had been only darkness and void.  But now we are participants in the formation of a new creation.  It is a creation where once more God is calling out to his creation this time beginning with his children, men and women to be grafted into one holy living church, but the goal is not merely to get as many individuals saved as possible, but to have Christ fill all things until the whole of creation is redeemed in the redemption of mankind in Christ.  Thus the meaning of tradition is that God intends to restore life, beauty, and order to the entire cosmos and to that end he has come to redeem humankind through Christ and has purposed in Christ to fill all things in and through him.  This is truly beyond anything we could imagine, comprehend, explain, or even ask to be done.  This is nothing less than a new heavens and earth formed and shaped in the redemption that has come into our lives and into which we have been called to know the rest and peace of God, a new world where the shalom (peace, tranquility) of God shall cover the earth.  Because God is recreating the earth even in the outworking of this form of Christian tradition, we may pray without ceasing, “Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done.  On earth as it is in heaven.”  We shall see him and shall be like him, and this world around us will be gathered to become the clothes and garment of a universe in oneness of shalom (peace) with God.  Then we will understand this tradition in which we are involved.  We will understand that this tradition we are a part of is something grand, glorious, the redemption of the entire cosmos in Christ.  We are being called out of the darkness of a fallen creation to be gathered into the total unity of a new heavens and earth.  Perhaps the physicist’s dream of discovering a unified theory is as much an eschatological dream as it is a scientific dream.  Perhaps we shall know the unity of the Creator and his creation in fullness at the same moment whether we wait as believers to see the face of Christ, or yearn to complete the book of physics as we see the unified theory of all things in the same face of Jesus Christ.

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[i] Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, translated and annotated by Boris Jakim. Princeton University Press; Princeton, New Jersey, 1997, pp.7-8.

[ii] Ibid.; P.7.

The Holy Spirit in Tradition

The Holy Spirit within Tradition

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            In the closing days of Jesus’ earthly ministry, he sought to prepare his disciples for his sufferings unto death, and for what was to become of them when he would depart from them.  He promised them how after he would go to the Father, that the Holy Spirit would come unto them.  The importance of a living tradition to the Church has always been in large part an acknowledgment that Christian tradition is not merely a history of the Christian’s response to a book of Scripture, but the history of the Holy Spirit’s work among, in and through the people of God.  As the Scriptures of both Old and New Testaments are regarded as “inspired by God through the work of the Holy Spirit” there is no reason to doubt that the Scriptures have a central role in guiding and defining the people of God.  The history of God’s people through the centuries is itself to a large degree the history of the work of the Holy Spirit.  It is for that reason that tradition, whether recognized or unrecognized by God’s people almost always shows itself in the life of God’s people.

            Consider for example how a church that says it has no tradition but the Bible; nevertheless will almost always have its favorite Bible teachers who get quoted in sermons, and whose books are handed out to people interested in what this church says, or by the men and women of this church who want to win others to their version of the Bible’s teaching.  Whether one has the tradition of an ancient church, a Reformation church, or a few decades of a Christian movement there are some men and women quoted as insightful, some recognized as living especially commendable lives worthy of our imitation, and others whose prayer and devotional habits inspire us in a devotional life before God.  Rather than accusing such churches as being inconsistent in accord with their principles, we might well say that whatever their declared principles are, their practice is to understand in some innate manner that the Holy Spirit distributes various gifts of God to various people, for the purpose of encouraging God’s people in all times and places.

            This tradition, rooted in the Holy Spirit, can be frightening to some people.  It would seem that among those whose Christian life is characterized by a fortress mentality that tradition instead of being viewed as something living capable of being developed and used to encourage zeal and growth and freshness, becomes something of a fixation on the proven past.  Thus the Christian community characterized by a fortress mentality tends to dig into a proven past and receives nothing but that which conforms to their defensive mindset.  We must see the continuity of tradition to teach us both that the ancient in the faith is never remote in its lessons for the present, nor is freshness for the present and future to be regarded as contrary to the spirit of the tradition we recognize as Christians.  The lesson of the tradition, rooted in the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit is that there is something fresh and living to be experienced by every individual, faith community, generation, and era.  The Spirit will surely be with us in each of our lives, communities, times, and eras.  He will be in the midst of us wherever two or three are gathered together in Christ’s name.  He will provide in each setting a faithful insight, a holy life, and a memory to be used to instruct and challenge the future.  The Bible as the shared word and message to the Christian community in all eras, times, and places will be central in the work of the Holy Spirit; but around that gift of the Holy Scriptures within the Church, the gifts given to God’s people will build a fresh layer of a continuing tradition upon the proven layers of the Holy Spirit’s work in past generations.

            I would like to conclude this blog with some remarks by Louis Bouyer from his book entitled Liturgy and Architecture, printed by the University of Notre Dame Press in 1967.  He was one of the scholars relied upon during the time of the Second Vatican Council and expresses what he felt was needed by the Roman Catholic Church at that time.  I believe his words may well strike a chord with modern Protestants and Evangelicals, and especially among those of us who have had, at times, a tendency to ignore anything a Catholic might have to say.

            Bouyer speaks of how detrimental a fortress mentality often becomes to a church or Christian community’s ability to make full use of its tradition.  He writes:  “For the last centuries, with the ‘siege’ mentality of the Church of the Counter-Reformation, hardening itself to resist external attacks or temptations, there has been an unconscious or subconscious tendency to reduce tradition to a merely external handing of some practices and formulae, to be kept unchanged in their materiality, with little or no attention paid to their meaning.  This was a dangerously distorted view of Christian tradition.”[i]  If I understand Bouyer, he is saying to us that when we feel our faith is threatened we have this tendency to turn tradition into a fortress mentality.  We easily hold on to the past and begin to lose the ability to dialogue with the present or to bring the fruit of our past and our heritage to bear upon the modern scenarios pressing against us.  Tradition is not simply a reverence for the past, but a recognition that the Holy Spirit who has been teaching Christ’s people since Christ’s ascension to the throne of grace; continues to teach us and has already left us a heritage and a treasure to make use of in our dealings with the present.  He will also faithfully provide for us in our future dealings when we will face challenges we cannot begin to contemplate in the present.

            Bouyer describes Christianity as “tradition”.  How does he equate the single word of tradition with the full reality of the faith?  He says:  “For Christianity, authentic Christianity lives only by tradition, not a tradition of dead formulae or mechanical practices, but a tradition of life, a life, that is to grow organically, in and through some embodiment.  In the continuity of its body, as well as in its ever renewed aspects, both the permanence and ever creative power of the same Spirit have to be constantly manifested and exercised.”[ii]

            The Christian should not regard tradition as merely learning a lesson from history.  The Christian concept of tradition resides in our affirmation that when Christ went to the Father that the Father and Son commissioned the gifting of the Church with the Holy Spirit based on Christ’s finished work on behalf of the Church.  Since that time the Spirit has been calling out the people of God, giving them gifts and insights, and sanctifying them to be holy as our Father in heaven is holy.  The Holy Spirit has forged a growing and living church which spans the boundaries of borders, including the boundaries of the borders of time.  Those who have finished their earthly lives are now in the presence of Christ, and when he prays as our intercessor and mediator, those who have gone on before us are praying and agreeing in his prayers.  The Holy Spirit is able to bring before us their words, their insights, their holy lives, as remembrances to encourage and refresh us in our challenges at this moment in our lives.  There is but one living church, for which Christ died, and which is composed of the Apostles and all who have heard their holy word and have been granted to believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ, unto the glory of God the Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  This tradition should be a constant comfort to us.  It should free us to know that nothing in this era coming against us is beyond the power and wisdom of the Holy Spirit who has been with us since Christ ascended into the heavens as he passed out of the sight of the Apostles.  He passed out of their sights not to be taken from them, but to be given back to them in the person and presence of the Holy Spirit.  This Spirit has been with those who have heard the Apostles’ Teaching ever since our Lord went to the Father.  This Holy Spirit is now able to remind and encourage us in each generation both from the Scriptures and from all that he has brought forth in his two thousand years of work among the people of God, since his time of especially being given as a gift of the Father and Son to being the comforter, instructor, encourager, and shared presence of God among God's people within the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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[i] Louis Bouyer; Liturgy and Architecture, University of Notre Dame Press, 1967; pp.2-3

[ii] Ibid., p.3

"Sola Scriptura" and Christian Traditions" - #1 Introduction

“Sola Scriptura” and Christian Traditions:

#1 Introduction

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I posted a tweet which probably appeared snobbish to other readers.  I wrote:  “I suspect that Truth is always absolute, and that our explanations of truth are always limited and incomplete conceptions of the Truth.”  I believe that Truth is worthy of our pursuit, but we must be cautious for our explanations of truth seldom do Truth or Wisdom the honor she deserves.

            I am an Evangelical Protestant, but I am suspicious of promoting “Sola Scriptura” even though I think there is a good case for holding to the primacy of the Holy Scriptures in matters of the faith.  But believing in the primacy of the Holy Scriptures is historically a way of saying that one believes the Scriptures are understood in a context in which both tradition and reason have their say.

            I want in this blog to review the writing that first began to shape how I now view the relationship of Scripture and Tradition.  My thinking on these matters began to be reshaped and clarified by the final essay in a book entitled A Mind for What Matters by F.F. Bruce.  In the final essay of the collection F. F. Bruce discusses the relationship of “The Bible and The Faith”.  Bruce gave an address on this subject, which he admitted he accepted partly as a way of studying so as to refine his own perspective on the matter.  He was not an unlearned man on the subject for he was a Bible scholar and was on the editing board as well as a commentator in some of the commentaries published through the New International Commentaries on the New Testament.  He was the sort of man who maintained fellowship with many diverse groups of Christians.  He became an advocate for women in the ministry before his death in 1990.  He was a man who remained within the Plymouth Brethren Church movement in which he was born and raised, even though he disagreed with his own church’s perspective regarding Dispensational and pre-tribulation perspectives.  In essence F. F. Bruce belonged to the whole of Christ’s Church and that is where his allegiance took him.[i]  Perhaps part of the reason F.F. Bruce could remain with a church with whom his beliefs had come to differ, and could serve so many in his own dealing with Christian truth is due to his perspective on “Tradition” that I want to introduce my readers to in this blog.

            F.F. Bruce asked his readers to consider what would have happened if Rome’s last great persecution had wiped out the church and the Scriptures.  He says, “The living tradition, the continuity of Christian existence and witness, is indispensable.  Without it, the interpretation of Scripture would lose its context.  Suppose the church had been wiped out in the last imperial persecution at the beginning of the fourth century and all her scriptures had been lost, to be rediscovered in our day like the Dead Sea Scrolls, what would their effect be?  Would their witness prove even so to be God’s power for salvation, as we know it to be in our own experience, or would the Scriptures, like the scrolls, be little more than an archaeological curiosity and a subject for historical debate?  It is a question worth pondering.”[ii]

            This statement by F.F. Bruce served as a lightning rod to transform my perception of the importance of tradition.  Most of us, upon entering the Christian faith, become participants among a group of Christians.  We enter that faith community and are shaped by it.  We learn from it and in time we contribute to it.  We are never shaped by the Bible alone, for we have models for our Christian understanding in lives of men and women who are part of a living faith community.  Such a community invariably has its weaknesses, but it is in such weakness that God works in our lives.

            This is not contrary to God’s purposes for the Church.  We understand that God, speaking through the Apostles ordained faithful men to teach and train other faithful men, who would teach others also.  God called upon the church to set apart servants (deacons), elders (presbyters) and overseers (Bishops).  The Church was to teach by word and by example of faith.  So faith communities began to live out the teachings of Christ.  When you or I entered the Christian life, we invariably became part of a Christian community, likely flawed, and sometimes deeply flawed.  That is how God began to work in our lives through the people of a Christian church and community.

            The Bible and the faith are connected, therefore it is hard to imagine how the Bible’s message to us could have ever had the impact it did upon our lives apart from the lives of Christian believers that helped model and set forth Christian truth in human lives for us to see and imitate when such lives were worthy of imitation.

            The Scriptures in Bruce’s view are also meant to serve Christian communities that have lost their way.  Bruce says: “On the other hand, the living tradition without the constant corrective of Scripture, without the possibility of “reformation according to the Word of God,” might have developed in such a way as to be distorted beyond recognition, if it had not slowly faded and died.”[iii]

            In conclusion, Bruce helped establish for me an understanding of how the Spirit of God has prepared both of these wonderful witnesses for instructing us.  The Holy Spirit gave us the Scriptures to correct our ways when we have lost our way; but the Holy Spirit also gave us a tradition invested in living faith communities so that we were taught not in word only, but through the examples of human epistles written in flesh and blood to shape our lives.

 

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[i] Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.F._Bruce  Consulted for general biographical purposes

[ii] F.F. Bruce, A Mind for What Matters, p. 277; (Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1990)

[iii] Ibid., p. 277.