Rahner vs Balthasar: martyrdom in contemporary Roman Catholicism II

Balthasar’s small work specifically on martyrdom relates to grander themes in his entire oeuvre; however, it particularly reflects Balthasar’s dismay at Rahner’s famous ‘anonymous Christian’ idea. Balthasar points out that is precisely at the point of martyrdom that this notion becomes untenable. Rahner stands accused of switching the moment of decision for the Christian from the encounter with the crucified Christ which demands our faith to the moment when one is – as any human person is – met by the need of the neighbour for love. That is not to say that Balthasar is opposed to the works of love that might result in a bloody martyrdom: only that this is not the point of decision for the Christian, the Ernstfall which generates the life that follows. That belongs only to the cross and resurrection of Christ. It is only from these events that the Christian life truly springs:

What then should a Christian be? He should be one who offers up his life in the service of his fellow man because he owes his life to Christ crucified.

While Rahner and others might be right in urging a broadening of the concept of martyrdom, they do not sufficiently ties it back in the events that gave it birth. Witness-bearing, for Balthasar, may take a variety of forms, granted. What Balthasar wants to re-assert is that martyrdom is an ‘act’ of faith – and that faith as faith in the God of Jesus Christ:

Man becomes aware of the nature of his particular mission in life when he calmly puts his trust in God. But whatever particular Christian state the believer may live in, he lives as one who has died and been resurrected, because his while existence is an attempt to make a loving and thankful response to God ‘by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal 2:20).

Balthasar’s suggestion helps not to foreclose the possible range of consequences of a life of authentic Christian witness (which is the concern of Rahner and Boff); but also ties it inextricably to the work of Christ in the believer, such that it could never be said that martyrdom anything other than a divine act.

Waddesdon - The Rothschild estate

Words, for preachers

That's my brother, Lt David Jensen, 2RAR, setting the East Timorese straight. He's not a gorilla by the way.

With speech, humanity is a bit like a gorilla with a loaded pistol: the explosive weapon is in the hands of someone who has an uncertain control of it. While on the one hand we know that our words have immense power to harm or to do good, we are not always masters of what we say. The connection between words and things has become slippery: not because of some philosophical problem but because those who wield them are deceitful and prone, not just to experience human limitations, but to mistakes.

However, God chooses to use human words in his salvation of the world: not overcoming their creaturely limits, but sanctifying them for his purposes. The paradigm is the calling of the prophet Isaiah (in Isaiah 6): terrified by his vision of God’s glory and holiness, he is rightly a reluctant prophet. As he says: ‘I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips’. But an angel brings a burning coal to touch his mouth. God in calling him purifies his speech so that he can use it to address his people.

It ought not to be surprising then, that with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit after the ascension of Jesus, God enables people to talk about him with their limited human words. In fact, more than just talk about him: it ought not be a surprise that God uses the words of human beings to bring about his mighty purposes – to advance the redemption of the world and to give life to the dead. Pentecost is a miracle of redeemed human speech, a reversal of the divisions of Babel. The gospel of Jesus is a word of new creation with its own new grammar: it is a whole new language to learn.

The clergy family and the Reformation

Diarmid MacCullough, the doyen of Reformation historians, writes this intriguing paragraph:

The clergy wife, from being abused and despised by conservatives in the parish, came to provide a new model for all the wives of Protestant Europe: she was now without any female rival for iconic status since nuns and achoresses had been banished from Protestant society. Following the Bucerian ideal, she was of course obedient to her husband, but she was also a calm and experienced companion, ready to give advice and help to parishioners - also to sustain the cheerfulness of her spouse and her children in a publicaly enacted life which made them all potentially rather lonely objects of the curiosity and envy as well as the emulation of others. And so the parsonage or the manse, not so well-supplied with spare cash as with books, high ideals and high thinking, negotiated its way through a social position which was continually poised self-consciously and uncertainly between gentry and people. It took its place as one of the great cultural forces in Protestant societies, both in the Old World and the New. In the upheavals of the Enlightenment and after, it produced some of the most eloquent and troubled voices to face up to doubt and unflinching reassesment of the family business: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzche and Karl Barth were all the sons of pastors... p. 653-54

MacCullough can speak so acutely here because he, too, was a child of the vicarage! It has always been my contention that we clergy children have punched above our weight, for good or for ill. Here are some others:

Alice Cooper (rock musician)
Bob Hawke (Australian Prime Minister)
The Bronte Sisters (novelists)
Manning Clark (Australian myth-maker)

Not quite of the rank of the three already mentioned: can we suggest some others?

A new campus for Moore College?

The view is certainly spectacular, and the monks wouldn't get in the way too much...

An Afternoon at the Cricket in England - a photo essay

1. The Worcester College ground is found by walking around the lake... ...over the bridge...
   ...under the trees...
   ...and there you are: an English cricket ground guarded appropriately by...four DUCKS.
   After five overs, our team was 2-34, and the rain started...
   ...early tea was taken, but it the end to no avail and play was abandoned for the afternoon.
   Better luck next week I suppose!
   

Changing Photos: Mum didn't like the other one

Hart on impassability

At Wittenham Clumps, Oxfordshire, in the dead of winter...

The doctrine of the impassability of God has been something of an embarassment for modern theology. For Anglicans, it stands very prominently at the head of the 39 Articles: God is 'without body, parts or passions'. The suspicion is that this is yet another piece of Greek metaphysics entering into the doctrine of God, a metaphysics that should be scoured from its surface immediately and forthwith.

Not so fast, says David Bentley Hart:

...I should observe that the widespread impatience among theologians with the language of divine impassability, always fortified by the prejudice that such a doctrine represents an unreflective 'hellenization' of the gospel, has too often served to obscure the real question at issue, the doctrinal concerns that the teaching of divine impassablity answers, and the real philosophical revision - utterly consistent with itself and Scripture - that the teaching underwent in the hands of the greatest of the patristic theologians... p. 158

Which is to say, the 'oh, its Greek' accusation is far too simplistic. The doctrine protects us from imagining God as somehow dependent or interdependent on the creation. The absence of creation (says Hart) would no way alter God as God... Hart especially has a go here at the Teutonic Hegelianism of Moltmann, Juengel, Pannenberg and co. God, he says, does not require creation to fecundate his being or to determine his personality.

Islam and the martyr's rewards

Photo: Nantes Cathedral

Frequently in media discussions of Islamic martyrdom rather shocked mention has been made of the prospect of heavenly rewards offered to those who are martyred in Islam. According to the account by David Cook called Martyrdom in Islam this description is probably not unfair: the Islamic tradition gives special prominence to the rewards reserved especially for martyrs. He writes:

The rewards for the martyr described by the Muslim jihad literature are very lurid. Althought it is popular in anti-Muslim polemic to concentrate upon the sexual rewards of the martyr - and there can be no question that these are important - it is interesting to note that probably the most frequently cited tradition listing these rewards is entirely devoid of such content...However, no one who read the jihad and martyrdom literature can avoid the frequent and graphic descriptions of the sexual delights of paradise. Although it is impossible to be certain, the fact that this material is so well attested and descriptive suggests that along with the spiritual aspects of being a martyr, there was a strong sexual pull as well. p. 37

The criticism that usually arises here is, does not the reward corrupt the very idea of martyrdom? Certainly, Augustine fought very hard against a similar tendency in Christianity (not the sexual nature of the rewards, but against the reward mentality). There is a prize that awaits us in heaven; but, our treasure is God himself. That changes everything.

Rowan Williams and Orthodoxy

Of course in thinking about heresy (see previous post), it is worth thinking about what orthodoxy is. Rowan Williams has a very influential view which he established in his book about Arius: that heresy actually arises from the attempt to go further than our talking about God ought to go; that it results from rationalism - any 'attempt to clean up or rearrange Christian language which results in a major reduction of available resources of meaning.' It usually results when theologians value 'conceptual economy and precision over richness of symbolic resource' (as Higton puts it) 'when they make the attempt to tie things down too neatly, to control the various and excessove language of worship and devotion too closely.'

So, orthodoxy for its part is actually a refusal to go further in explaining, a deliberate drawing of the doctrinal circle in a wide rather than a narrow way. It is a victory for poets over bureaucrats: for those who want language that generates new possibilities of meaning over against those that would close them down and specify and deaden. The Nicene formulae (and their later Chalcedonian counterparts) refuse to explain how their may be a Son and Father who are equally God; or a person who is God and man. For Williams, then, the job of doctrine is to teach us silence as well as to circumscribe and guide our speech. Orthodoxy becomes then the steel framework around which Christians in each generation must build and rebuild, with considerable effort and not a little pain.

Now, parts of this vision strike me as problematic and a kind of postmodern retrojection back on the 4th century (he does this, bizarrely in my opinion, with Cranmer as well!) It could easily be caricatured as a very Anglican, very English approach to doctrine - i.e., the English are happy for minimalist view of the role of laws and constitutions because so much of their culture proceeds by convention and agreement. Notably, in the US, the opposite is true: laws and conventions have to do what they say on the packet. Americans (and other colonials!) find the vagueness of the English not liberating but rather frustrating, and a little dishonest (it isn't, but that is how it is perceived). Williams (showing his Hegelian colours) does rather focus on the agonising process of deliberation as an end in itself over against the decision/s of any such debates, too.

BUT: there is also something very appealing about Williams' notion of orthodoxy too. Earlier, for example, in talking about the atonement we struck an attempt to exclude the very old and certainly biblical idea of sacrificial substitution from an orthodox understanding of the atonement; and on the other side, Vanhoozer's warnings about rationalism and reductionism as tendencies in evangelical theological thinking. Both pitfalls are avoided if orthodoxy is practiced as Williams would have us practice it, certainly.