Juengel

Eberhard Juengel:

"The truly human person is the person who is definitively recognized by God, and in that way one who cannot be discredited by anything or anyone, not even by him- or herself; a person who is, however, liberated by just this irrevocable recognition for ever more human activity...The most human kind of conduct is probably still that which is truly natural or self-evident, or which at least ought to be self-evident, however inconspicuous it may be."

He is inspired in this by Martin Luther, who saw the truly human person as the righteous person - in our case therefore the justified person.

Thoughts anyone?

Imitating Christ

Interesting stuff by Hans Conzelmann in his 1 Corinthians commentary (p.179-80):

"His (Paul's) exemplariness consists in the fact that - in himself, objectively, on the basis of his calling - he is nothing. In all the passages on the imitatio Pauli the paradox of this exemplariness appears... The imitation of Christ takes its bearings not on the person of the historical Jesus, not on his way of life, but - in the sense of Philippians 2:6ff - on his saving work."

Paul never knew the earthly Jesus, as far as we know: at least, not as a disciple. While he quotes teachings of the Lord not found in the Gospels, what drives his sense of his own calling and his instructions to his followers is rooted in Paul's gospel - the gospel of the crucified and risen Messiah. His "principal norm" is the gospel itself, and for Paul this means that the self-sacrifice and suffering of the cross and the exaltation (by the Spirit) of the resurrection. It also means the binding of the Corinthians into a new set of relationships, with God and with each other.

So: the imitation of Christ in 1 Corinthians takes place in not only in echo of his sacrificial and suffering work on the cross but also proleptically, in advance of his return, in terms of his resurrected, "second Adam" identity.

In 1 Corinthians both flanges of the gospel are prominent in response to "ethical" or sociological issues. Their imitation of Paul and Jesus takes place in the context of their new identity as Jesus body/the temple of the Holy Spirit...

Oh, and it involves their bodies...

The question of the day is:

What does Paul mean when he invites the Corinthians to imitate Christ in 1 Corinthians (4:16-17 and 11:1)?

What specifically is he enjoing the Corinthians to do or be in this imitation?

Some (Michaelis) have said that "imitation" here actually means "obey" not "mimic". "The call for an imitatio Christi finds no support in the statements of Paul".

However, I think you can make a good case here that Paul actually points to Christ's example of suffering self-sacrifice, of laying down of rights. That is what is going on in 1 Cor 8-11:1, where Paul is urging the Corinthians NOT to insist on their rights but to conisder the rights of others a priority. This theme is what you see in Phil 2 and Eph 5: an imitation especially rooted in the incarnation and cross...

This discussion is relevant because it bears on the shape of the fulfilled or truly human life modelled for us by Christ... so what is it particularly about that life that we ought to resemble?

Well I hope the formatting is more readable!

Pannenberg goes on to argue that in each of these we need to inquire as to the relationship of the conceptions of man’s essence to the historical figure of Jesus himself. So, for example, Paul’s use of the Adam typology in 1 Cor 15 and Romans 5. What happened to Jesus - the resurrection - happened with the horizon of universal human hope found in apocalyptic literature (though P says "the experience of Jesus as risen occurred within the horizon of universal human hope", carefully hedging his historical bets). In Paul there was a shift of course: he took the pattern of true humanity found originally in the distant past and threw it into the eschatological future, picking up what had already been hinted at in Daniel 7 and so on. Jesus is the “last Adam” – in other words, the “last-first”… a future-type, not a prototype...

The NT certainly picks up traditional (not necessarily OT) anthropologically related themes/titles and relates them to Jesus – especially the idea of the image of God. P. thinks also the Johannine logos idea is true here, though what OT provenance this has he doesn’t mention.

WP positively evaluates Luther’s “Jesus as prototype of justifying faith” model, by claiming that it best reflects the reality of Jesus “perceived behind the Synoptic tradition.” That word "behind" is revealing...

Intriguingly he also points out: “Our understanding of man today is deeply stamped by the centuries-long influence of Biblical thought, and especially of the figure and message of Jesus…the correspondence of anthropology and Christology has been operative in the whole history of ideas in Europe since the rise of Christendom” p.203

This would be an interesting thesis to develop: that is can the correspondence of anthropology and Christology be demonstrated from an analysis of secular anthropologies? Where would one go to find out? The classical humanist tradition? The Enlightenment? What would be the most interesting period to isolate, or who would be the most interesting figure to study in this regard?

How is Jesus exemplary human?

Just to follow on from Byron's mention of Karl Rahner in an earlier discussion, an interesting quote from him:
Rahner: “Christology is the beginning and the end of anthropology, and this anthropology in its most radical realization, namely Christology, is in all eternity theology”. Schriften zur Theologie (1960), Vol IV, p.151

Wolfhart Pannenberg (in Jesus- God and Man) lists these ways in which Jesus’ humanity has been held to be of exemplary significance for humanity in general:
a. the incarnation of the Logos consummates the nature of man as living being having the Logos. Only through the incarnation of the Logos does the true man come into existence. (Irenaeus, Athanasius)
b. Jesus is the man who brings the universal striving towards an imitation of God – ethical perfection – to its goal. Ethical perfection, in other words. (Paul of Samosata and the Antiochenes)
c. Jesus fulfills the duty of obedience incumbent on all human beings and the duty of satisfaction through his death. (Anselm and the medieval church)
d. Jesus is the prototype of God’s dealings with humanity and thus of justification by faith. On the cross he upholds the right of God who judges and yet remains righteous before God. (early Luther)
e. Jesus realizes true humanity in that in him the consciousness of god that establishes the unity of human existence is dominant. (Schleiermacher)
f. Jesus is the prototypal man who as the one completely obedient to God was completely dedicated to his fellow man. (Barth)
g. As the Son, Jesus is in a prototypal way what all people ought to be: the reality of sonship that it intended for all in trusting obedience to the Father and in free responsibility for the inheritance of the creation entrusted to him. (Gogarten)
h. Jesus is eminently the believer who exposes himself directly to God’s future. Jesus is the essence of faith and faith is the essence of what he did. (Ebeling)
i. Jesus is the highest perfection of the human: he is the fulfillment of that unlimited openness which is constitutive for being human and whose truth is openness for God. (Welte, Rahner)

An intriguing list, with several of the items overlapping somewhat...
Pannenberg asks: in all these “is the change of Christological conceptions perhaps explained as a change in the image of man?” Haven’t the universal ideal images of man hidden the uniqueness of Christ? At
MJ says: yes, isn’t the trouble here that we begin with some idea of what human aspiration and destiny and meaning is and then determine how Jesus fulfils that? Is this valid? Does the Bible do this? Shouldn’t we rather decide what Jesus is and so see what humanity ought to be from there?

Enhypostasis/Anhypostasis

Classical Christology has described the relationship of the two natures of Christ by using the rather arcane-sounding terms anhypostasis and enhypostasis. What does this mean? Well, firstly, the human nature of Jesus has no hypostasis, or “person”, of its own, but subsists only as the human nature of the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. His human nature is anhypostatic in that it has no personhood, or independent reality of its own (the word ‘subsists’ is used rather than ‘exists’ to indicate this dependence): rather it is hypostatized in union with, in (so, enhypostasis), the person of the Logos. This is how Chalcedon is explained: we have in Jesus one person in two natures. The subject of this human nature is divine.
Now, all of this seems impossibly abstract. Also, how can it be possible to have a true human nature that is not personal, or whose person is not human? Is the human nature of Jesus then merely an outer shell, or a disguise perhaps? These are good questions to which I do not have an immediate answer. But in fact something rather important is being said here: that Jesus is not a man who merely fulfilled the potential of human beings better than others have done; he is real man only as the Son of God (so Ivor Davidson). Barth says: “God and Man are so related in Jesus Christ that He exists in Man so far and only so far as He exists as God, i.e., in the mode of existence of the eternal Word of God.” (CD I.2.163) In other words, Jesus’ humanity is the humanity of God.
Why does this matter? I want to inquire as to how Jesus’ humanity relates to, and so identifies or prescribes, the humanity of the rest of us. This description of J’s human nature may actually compromise this as a possibility, because it sounds like his humanity is only the generalized humanity of the human species and not that of an individual: in which case is it real humanity? Real humanity is only ever instanced as individual. In addition, it sounds like this formulation makes J’s human flesh only a passive recipient or instrument of divine power. Perhaps we need to think of it the other way round… Any suggestions?

The Bible and Theology...

In one of the discussions Craig S asked about a comment I made about the reluctance to use the Bible in modern academic theology.

I guess I mean that in general in the academic practice of theology the Biblical scholars have tried to do their work with as little reference to systematic theology as possible AND vice versa. IN short, it's a turf war. The NT and OT guys and girls say to the theologians "you can't do that - that's our job" when the theologians start to do some exegesis of the text! Even quite conservative Biblical scholars seem reluctant to allow a place for a theological use of the Bible.

From the other side, the Bible is just not regularly seen as the authoritative source of the knowledge of God by academic theologians: partly I think because they fear that their use of their Bible is trespassing on another's field of expertise, as I said...Theology is held to more akin to philosophy and distant from the historical nitty-gritty of Biblical studies. And perhaps this is reflected in the differance between continental, rationalist thinkers and Anglo-Saxon empirical scholars. (It's a bit like Sydney and Melbourne...cultural differences do shape us more than we think!)

Writers like Francis Watson (NT scholar) and John Webster in Aberdeen as well as NT Wright and OO'D have reacted strongly to this in the contemporary British scene. They think this seperation of the departments of theological knowledge is disastrous. I agree! But of course, this begs the question of how the Bible ought to be related to theology...
What do people reckon?

A sermon preached in Moore College Chapel, Tues 6th Sept 2005

Judge not
Do not Judge, that you may not be judged!

We cannot not judge.
Judging is a human necessity; and when we’re told we must not judge we risk losing something irreplaceable. You cannot have justice without judgment; we must not imagine that by, refraining from acts of judgment, justice will be delivered and good order upheld. That simply is not possible.
And to have judgment, you must have a judge, or judges: judgment, which is necessary for justice, depends on the activity of judging: naming things as they truly are, discriminating between right and wrong, rewarding, and punishing. There needs to be a business of judging done by people who judge – whether it be officials appointed to the task of administering the court system or the primary teacher awarding grades to her students.
And yet, right now, where we live, judging smells very badly.To judge is understood in the vernacular as to condemn: and as such, it is the activity of bigots and hypocrites. It carries the flavor of a generation now thankfully sitting out their days in nursing homes with blankets over the knees. It is the opposite of “open-mindedness”, that great contemporary absolute. “A mind is like a parachute”, as the bumper-sticker says: “it works better when it’s open”.
People fail to distinguish between judgment and prejudice, in other words. Judging – as it is currently misunderstood - puts the judge in a position of superiority and places the judged under them; and feeds all our worst fears of power and abuse. Judging applies the private preferences and choices of one individual to another, and so threatens to compromise the individual’s sacred right to judge for him- or herself.
And perhaps worst of all: judging breeds hypocrisy, the great sin of politicians and churchmen alike. Isn’t the person who readily judges, we suspect, ignoring or, more than likely, covering for some deficiency in their own character?
The Jerry Springer Show is a fine example of this bizarre desire to show reserve in judgment at all times. He parades before his audience the most ugly and contorted freaks he can find and has them unravel their twisted lives toe-to-toe with each on stage. And then he delivers a little homily at the end, having remained impassive throughout; and his little homilies say nothing other than “emotions do run high when love is concerned, don’t they?” He would never say “infidelity is wrong and these people are messing up their lives and the lives of those around them”: it wouldn’t cross his mind to be so, well, judgmental.
We might expect more help from Jesus. But he says: “do not judge, so that you will not be judged”. No teaching of Jesus has been more often turned on his disciples by those outside the church. This verse has been graffitied on Moore College’s walls. People who were not Christian feel that here they have a good case against those that are in accusing them of not following the teachings of their Lord; for Christians have been very good at judging. By asserting that there are objective, even God-given, moral standards of human behaviour Christians are implying that those who do not share those standards are to be judged. Instead, in this teaching, direct from the Sermon on the Mount, we have a Jesus who appears tolerant and accepting. We judge: he says do not judge.
But what is Jesus actually saying? Is he really warning against any human decision that might privilege one way of looking at the world over another, or one way of behaving over another? Is he really advocating indiscriminate acceptance?
Certainly, the people of Israel had been given authority to judge civil disputes and an office of judge to enact judgment (Lev 19:15; Deut 17). And it was lack of judging that was held against Israel in the prophets – Jeremiah 5 provides one example of many. It was neglect of the function of justice in their community that was so culpable: the distorting of justice lead to the distorting of the community of God’s people – the neglect of orphans and widows for example.
And Paul adds his voice to the call for God’s people to judge, and judge soundly. In 1 Corinthians 5 and 6, he says that Christians ought to judge one another as those who will one day judge the world. Sound judgment is needed to maintain the purity of the people of God, lest they be corrupted by the appalling behaviour of the man who was living with his father’s wife - on whom Paul himself pronounces judgment.
But Jesus says, do not judge. Can he really mean this? I am well aware of the tendency of Christian interpreters to take shortcuts with Jesus’ radical teaching in the Sermon on the Mount – like the preacher I once heard who said “this is the standard we can’t keep; just as well justification by faith comes in and makes up the difference”; or the school of commentary which seems to be designed to show how Jesus is not saying really what he is saying actually. It will not do to let us off the hook so easily.
But we ought to remember what target Jesus has in his sights here. He takes aim at the kind of stony-hearted legalism that admits of no give or take, the judging that is self-righteously punitive and applies standards to others that are different to the standards applied to the self. This is the kind of judging that results in the bizarrely comical picture of the person with the log in his eye pointing out the speck in the eye of his neighbour. It is judging in its condemnatory aspect that it is on view here: the kind of judging that writes the other person off on the slightest pretext without subjecting itself to the same scrutiny. It is the attitude of the Pharisee who sees the wretched Tax Collector at the temple and says “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”
Funnily enough, despite all the fear of judging in our culture, we actually delight in this sort of judging. On Saturday I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is a remarkable movie of a terrific book. Enjoyable as the story was, it was an old-fashioned morality tale, where we are free to enjoy the horrible fates meted out to horrible kids such as Augustus Gloop, the great big greedy nincompoop, who was sucked up into a pipe while drinking from a river of chocolate – as well he might be. It makes us feel so good to know there is someone morally inferior to us because they are fat. The pleasure of the story is the self-righteous pleasure of siding with the innocent Charlie in condemning all those awful children who get their just deserts.
The Mobile Phone has become the instrument of judgment as we given the chance by reality TV to judge the moral behaviour of contestants and have them ritually humiliated and removed from our screens. The crowing of the media vultures over the carcass of politician John Brogden was another example. Who among us is not guilty of making a tasteless remark? Clearly the Telegraph would have sold a lot of papers if they had followed through on the story by publishing yet more rumours after his resignation; clearly readers take great pleasure in the moral collapse of a person. Brogden’s suicide attempt brought an end to that caper. But the disturbing reality is that the media’s actions were a reflection of the readiness to judge without mercy that lurks within the soul of this community. We love to judge; but we are without a public mercy.
And yet the eschatological consequence of this type of judging is perfectly clear: do not judge, so that you may not be judged. Your condemnation of others is ultimately the reason for your own condemnation. It is this sort of judging that brings down the judgment of God, for it usurps the judgment that belongs to God. As Jesus goes on:
For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.
The promise of the measure is that, by judging, you are building your own gallows. There is an ultimate judgment and this is performed by the ultimate judge. And if you think to treat others severely and without remorse, then so shall it be for you too. If you are unable to forgive another, then don’t think that forgiveness will be accorded to you. If you are unable to exercise grace in your judging, then don’t imagine that grace will be shown you. It’s the lesson of the ungrateful servant of Matthew 18 who is forgiven a small fortune, yet presses the debt of one who owes him a tiny amount.
The other side of the coin is given to us in the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples: “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” A sign of receiving the gospel is the preparedness not to judge, but to forgive. Of course, forgiveness involves a kind of judging itself; it discriminates between right and wrong and good and evil. As ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain writes: “ ‘Judge not’ is…not an injunction to spineless acceptance but a caution against peremptory legalisms that leave no space for acts of compassion and witness.” Jesus’ command transcends the false dichotomy that our culture has of judging and tolerance, and exposes its hypocrisy.
Which is the point: judging begins with God and is delegated temporarily to us. We do it imperfectly, but necessarily. All human judging takes place in anticipation of God’s final judgment and recognizes that human judges are to answer for their judging. And so Jesus’s warning is well given: before you pass judgment, hesitate. Pause and consider that you will face the divine judge who judges perfectly – the judge who has no favourites. Human judging ought to begin with a judging of the self: attending to the speck - all is it a log – in my own eye.
We cannot not judge. It is our calling as human beings to judge in the sense of “properly discriminate”. In fact, life is filled with thousands of daily discriminations. Judging preserves and builds individuals and communities. But human judgment takes place as a delegated task and recognizes its own provisional nature ahead of the final judgment.
As pastors who hold out the hope of the gospel we ought to model this judgment with mercy. There are many people in our community who would not dare darken a church building because they are divorced, or living in a de facto relationship, or homosexual, or smokers, or whatever, and they reckon they would feel judged by the people in church. Can we wield the word of God in such a way as we show that we too are subject to it and that discriminating between right and wrong does not mean condemning someone like a disused building? The messages we church people send to our community is that we are in the business, not of pursuing good, but of reveling in our condemnation of other people. What are we doing to counter this impression?
We would do well also to listen to James, who writes:
11 Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12 There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbour?
How quick we are to condemn one another. How soon we forget that ultimate judgment is not our domain. How long we hold grudges. How soon we declare, even just to ourselves, that someone is beyond the pale. I say this of course looking at you through several logs in my own eye. Jesus’ warning is for us to heed: though we cannot not judge, and must judge, we must do so as those who will be judged and whose only hope is the perfect mercy shown us by the Judge himself. How could we who have been shown grace not show that grace to others?

notes: I got some stuff from an article by Jean Bethke Elshtain. in First Things.

Ashes to ashes...

Well, we face the unhappy prospect of arriving in the UK the day after Australia loses the Ashes for the first time in 17 years... or to face the massive disappointment of the Poms if they don't win... oh well.

I am reading: NT Wright's book on Scripture. It is very good indeed: because he recognises that theology and biblical studies need to be friends. So little theology is done with any bible in view at all. That's one of the reasons I am going to work with Oliver O'Donovan, because he conspicuously DOES use the Scriptures in doing theology. I guess the trouble is, that using the bible in theology involves being a non-specialist somewhere. I'll admit it, my Hebrew ain't great... Collaboration is perhaps the answer.

A paper for the NSW Ecumenical Council Theological Reflection Panel:

PROCLAMATION: An Anglican View
by Rev M.P. Jensen

One of the greatest of Anglican preachers, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral John Donne, once wrote:
“if there be discounting or slackening of Preaching, there is the danger of losing Christ”.
Would it be fair to say that across the churches there is just such a “discounting or slackening”? Certainly, within the Anglican Communion there is a trend against the proclamatory aspect of the Christian gathering. The sermon has been shriveled to a perfunctory few minutes and has become instead of a proclamation of the word of God a mere moral rumination or a piece of self-help or the ponderous giving of the preacher’s opinion, a kind of Sunday oral version of Saturday’s newspaper column.
Perhaps it is for the best: if you haven’t got anything to say, then you are probably better off not saying it, or saying it very briefly. Anglican preaching has become a standing object of derision – one thinks of Peter Cook’s famous lampoon or Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no longer, or very rarely, are the best sermons printed and read. (I was however intrigued to see that the new IPOD technology is being used by church members to listen to recordings of weekly messages downloaded from the church’s website.)
I suspect there are several reasons for the general decline. Certainly, one of them is that there has been an awful lot of boring, overlong, self-indulgent and incompetent preaching! Another is that the evident humanity of most preachers leads us to suspect whether their words could possibly be “God’s words”: they are someone whose frailties we know too well, whose lack of skill with oratory we suffer and who is as susceptible to tears and tiredness as we are. In the midst of a beautiful liturgy filled with sonorous ancient words and majestic music in a glorious building, the utterance from the pulpit feels like a prosaic interruption. With Eliza Doolittle we say “words, words, words, I’m so sick of words.”
But if the humanity of the preacher is not enough to make us doubt the value of proclamation, the contemporary suspicion of words themselves increases the threat to the sermon. This of course resonates with apophatic tradition, and it is no accident that Derrida, Foucault and others were attracted to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus and others. Words are too susceptible to become the instruments of power or spin; words are too slippery, too inexact, too imperfect an instrument; words are too limited to contain the transcendent Almighty. As Gregory of Nazianzen once prayed:
you remain beyond the reach of speech.
All that is thought stems from you,
But you are beyond the power of thought.

Archbishop Peter Carnley, former Anglican Primate of Australia, pointed out in his recent book Reflections in the Glass that the theology must start from a core Anglican – indeed Christian - belief in the unknowability and sheer transcendence of God. Yet Christian belief must not overbalance in this direction such that God’s revelation of himself in the gospel of Jesus Christ is lost. My observation of Anglican discussions is that there has been a growing embarrassment at speaking about God directly as if he could be known – as if to talk of knowing him implies mastering him in some way.
However: Christian worship is never of a God unknown, but of a God who speaks about himself to us. Have we, or have we not, a gospel: a message that originates from the divine? The contrast between the paganism of the Athenians and Paul’s message in Acts 17:23 is apposite:
23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim (katagge,llw) to you.
These are presumptuous words indeed, if human words cannot meaningful speak about the divine. And yet Paul is not presenting his message as yet another attempt fitfully to describe God from the human side, but as a decisive intervention from God in Christ Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord.
The sending of the Logos into the realm of women and men - the incarnation, in other words - is often described as the central theological theme of Anglicanism. The incarnation of Son in the likeness of sinful flesh means that that enormous gulf between God and humanity has been overcome. It means that human flesh is an entirely possible dwelling place for divinity. It also means that human words are entirely possible as vehicles for divine self-communication. Gnosticism – which decried the flesh and emphasized the concealment of a mystery rather than its revelation – has been rejected consistently by Christians since the time of Irenaeus as anti-human. Body is not to be played off against the soul; neither is the intelligible to played off against that which is beyond reason. Paul’s preference for intelligible words over ecstatic tongues in the Christian meeting in 1 Corinthians 14 is instructive.
In the gospel of Jesus Christ men and women are addressed by the God who creates with a word. This mustn’t be understood reductionistically, of course, as if God could be contained or captured by human words. The prologue of John’s gospel sums this up well:
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart who has made him known. (John 1:18)
God is beyond us and our words. But we are not beyond him and we are not beyond the sound of his voice. Nor is it beyond the people of God to pass on what we have heard God say. As the apostle Peter writes:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim (evxaggei,lhte) the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).
Those who have heard the call of God are commissioned to proclaim his works to the nations as a priestly duty. Just as Jesus himself came to proclaim a message of good news about himself – “the Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18-19) - so his apostles were commissioned to rehearse the life, death, resurrection and glorious return of their Lord in the hearing of the nations. And it is this repetition of the mighty deeds of God in Christ that forms the basis of the act of proclamation that features so strongly in Anglican worship in its Reformed Evangelical expression.
The Anglican tradition, especially in its Evangelical form, has always, therefore, had a very high view of Scripture as the authoritative, God-breathed (qeo,pneustoj 2 Tim 3:16), witness to Christ. This is not the place to present a full-blown description of that theological step; however, this helps us understand John Donne’s comment. Proclaiming the word of scripture is the way for the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16). In his framing of the Anglican liturgy, Thomas Cranmer put a priority on the reading of the whole Bible in the vernacular language once a year; so that
the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves, and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of the Holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion. (The Book of Homilies)
At the ordination of every Anglican minister, the Bible is given as a symbol of their authority and task: to minister in word and sacrament. The Bible, not the cup, is the symbol of the ordained ministry for Anglicans.
The ministry of proclamation, therefore, is not merely the giving of opinions or perspectives. It is a recital of God’s word to human beings, and in this derivative sense may properly be called “the word of God”. It therefore requires an attitude of fear and trembling from the one who would so preach. It asks for an unlearning of the hermeneutics of suspicion and for the forming in the proclaimer an attitude of receptive and humble listening. The pulpit in the Anglican church is not merely the preserve of the priest or even of Anglicans: it may be perfectly appropriate for a layperson or even a non-Anglican to speak, as in fact happens frequently. But the pulpit ought to be guarded with some jealousy as the place from which the word of God is proclaimed and taught to the people of God. The Lord our God uses the proclamation of his Word to remind us that his word is
living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

HR McIntosh again:
“The manhood of Jesus, then, is a manhood essentially one with ours.” p. 400.

"Everywhere the integrity of Jesus’ life as man is clear. His body was flesh and blood like ours. It capacity of pain, of privation, of fatigue; its tears and agony and cries; its shrinking from the hour of death; its sensitiveness to the contact of other men; its susceptibility to the influence of nature, felt the thrill of gladness begotten by the sunlight and the flowers, - all this is authentically human."

I am caught right now in that spider's web of contemporary life, the on-hold telephone enquiry... I look at my bank account and see that three companies are helping themselves to our funds because we have never closed this or that or because they can't get it in their heads that we don't want their life insurance anyway!!! ARGGHHH!! Vodaphone, Optus, St George Bank... curse you! (actually spoke to a very nice man called Tristan at St George) I wonder what it must be like to work on the other end of the phone, given that NO-ONE is happy with these institutions...

Oh boy do we need somewhere to store our stuff!!!

In any case:
just sent off a paper for publication in which I argue that God's mode of speaking in scripture is characterised by gentleness... I fear it has truck-sized holes, but there you go.

Also, thinking about the human nature of Christ: how is it representative of humanity in toto? Does it work as a kind of depersonalised "humanity"? Cyril in the fifth century set forth the doctrine of anhypostasia as a way of saying that J's humanity was impersonal.

R.C. Moberly writes:

"human nature which is not personal is not human nature." Atonement and Personality, p. 92

"If he might have been, yet He certainly was not, a man only, amongst men. His relation to the human race is not that He was another specimen, differing by being another from everyone except Himself. His relation to the human race was not a differentiation, but a consummating relation [interesting language here - MJ]. He was not generically, but inclusively, man." Atonement and Personality p. 86

"Inclusively" and "consummating": that's an interesting way of conceiving the relation of Christ's humanity to the humanity of the rest of us...

Here is John Baillie in reply:
"Surely, whatever else Jesus was, He was a member of the human race, the human species, a man among men, or one man among others. However true may be the conception of human solidarity, or of the solidarity of Christ with mankind, or of Christ as the 'representative Man' through whom we come to God, it remains true that He was a man among men." God Was in Christ p. 87

Finally finished marking the 80 doctrine 2 papers that came my way. Whew!
It was actually a really good experience (mostly), because I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do theology (and how not to do it, too...).
But also it is frustrating because of how impossible it is to do a decent job...

Well this is about as scary a photo of me as I can find...

blog begins

well here goes:

Today I have been reading Frei's The Identity of Jesus Christ in preparating for moving to Oxford University on 12th Sept to start my DPhil. It's pretty interesting:

I want to think about how/whether Jesus is a paradigm for humanity. Perhaps that means "how people have seen him as this". I have a hunch that the Garden of Gethsemane is going to be a key facet of my thinking somehow...