Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Becoming Orthodox: From Foxhole to Harbor - Brad Jersak

Becoming Orthodox: From Foxhole to Harbor 

By now, most of my social networks and some of my readership have heard of my move into the Eastern Orthodox Church. I was ‘chrismated’ at the end of June this year (2013) and ordained as a ‘reader’ for the All Saints Monastery in Dewdney in October. You might wonder why I—an evangelical / charismatic / Anabaptist—would don a cassock and take up incense and chanting. If you’re curious, here’s the short version.    

Why did I become an Orthodox Christian? 

Theology

First, because in my theology, I already was Orthodox for over ten years. When I say ‘theology,’ don’t think of stuffy, religious hair-splitting. I’m referring to the basic questions of who God is, what God is like, why Jesus came and died, what salvation is and how that happens. On these questions, I feel most at home in the Orthodox tradition, and I finally decided to make it official.

I experienced this as a move from my foxhole to a harbor. Allow me to summarize:

The ancient Orthodox vision as I know it proclaims the saving power of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, and the ever-enduring mercies of the Father—the same Gospel I have always believed, but came to understand more clearly and preach more overtly a decade ago. To me, it’s the same Good News, but now even more so. I have experienced Orthodox theology as more evangelical—i.e. better news—than what I had known and taught in the context of popular Evangelical-ism. 

Of course, there are growing enclaves and popular movements among Evangelicals where theologians of hope are hunkering down and discovering what other Christians have taught all along. But they also endure a barrage of hostilities from members of their own tribe, those who marginalize them with hateful labels and even believe God has called them to the attack. So on the one hand, Evangelicalism continues to morph and mature, while on the other, some of her popular streams still cling to a retributive image of God -- and its most zealous gatekeepers are quick to brand those who don’t as false teachers and heretics. Lord, have mercy.

No Enduring City - David Bentley Hart

Editor's note: One of our contributors, Brian Zahnd, declared the following article the best thing he read in 2013. He says, "It's awards season and on Christmas Eve I'm prepared to declare David Bentley Hart's essay No Enduring City the best thing I read in 2013. In this brilliant piece DBH shows us why Constantinian-Christendom was both an inevitable mistake and always destined to fail. I especially appreciate his shout-out to René Girard. Enjoy." We've chosen to repost it here for that reason. To link to the original through your local library: http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/89014671/no-enduring-city

No Enduring City

David Bentley Hart

First Things | Aug/Sept 2013

 

One of the temperamental advantages to be gained from a belief in divine providence is serenity in the face of history’s ambiguities. This may be one of the more subdued and unheroic expressions of faith, but for Christians trying to make moral sense of the story of Christendom—from its once quite unpredictable rise to its now quite indubitable collapse—it is an absolutely indispensable one. For, if indeed God became incarnate within history in order to reconcile time to eternity, then it only stands to reason that the event of Christ should be one that never ceases to unfold in time, with discernible consequences and in substantial forms. And yet the actual historical record of Christian society hardly encourages confidence: marvelous cultural and ethical achievements, of course, but almost all of them inseparably associated with innumerable institutional betrayals of the Gospel.

Hence the need for a generously indeterminate trust in the mysterious workings of God’s will sub contrario. Otherwise the believer is apt to become trapped at one pole in a tedious dialectic of indignant rejection and credulous celebration, indulging either in sanctimonious denunciations of “Constantinianism” or in triumphalist apostrophes to the spiritual greatness of “Christian” culture, in either case reducing the very concept of grace to an empty cipher. A little prudent providentialism, however, relieves one of the anxious urge to pronounce some absolute verdict on Christian history as a whole, or to pretend to understand how the Holy Spirit might or might not reweave the tangles of human sin into unexpected occasions of charity or truth. It allows one simply to accept the inscrutable complexities of a world that, if it has been redeemed, nevertheless still groans in anticipation of a glory yet to be revealed, and so of a world in which all good is inextricably bound up with moral failure.

Plato’s Cave: A Christmas Story -- Brian Zahnd

 

Plato’s Cave: A Christmas Story
Brian Zahnd

Four hundred years before the birth of Jesus, history’s greatest philosopher gave the world an enduring allegory. I’m talking about Plato and his famous allegory of the cave. Plato said we are like prisoners chained in a deep cave lit only by dim torches, so that we exist in darkness watching shadows on the wall. We are imprisoned in deep untruth. What we need is someone to free us from our chains, to lead us out of the dark and into the day. In simplified form that’s the allegory Plato gave to explain the human predicament four hundred years before Caesar Augustus decided to take a census and thereby set in motion events that we remember every December.

You know the story. Joseph and Mary are compelled by imperial degree to travel from Nazareth to their ancestral home in Bethlehem — a little hilltop village five miles south of Jerusalem. A town that would have been utterly inconsequential if it had not been for a bit of historical trivia: a thousand years earlier Bethlehem was the birthplace of David, Israel’s greatest king. To further endow tiny Bethlehem with significance, the prophet Micah in his poems of hope dreamed of the day when an even greater king would be born in Bethlehem — a king whose reign of peace would cover the earth and lead to the abolishment of war.(See Micah 4:1-5; 5:2-5)

Click HERE to read the rest of the article

Contemplative Responses to our World - Part 3 - Jeff Imbach

Editor's Introduction -  This article represents part 3 of a 3-part series by Jeff Imbach, a founding member of Soulstream, a dispersed contemplative community that offers training in spiritual direction and 'living from the heart.'  This series was addressed to the Soulstream partners and Clarion has asked permission to post them on Clarion for the broader public.

CONTEMPLATIVE RESPONSES TO OUR WORLD 

PART THREE

 Question Repeated:

 How Do We Integrate Our Contemplative Action Both At The Level Of Interpersonal Relationship And At The Level Of The Larger Institutions of Society?

So far in these reflections I have tried to integrate our contemplative responses to the world around us as we live with openness to our real experience.  I have tried to bring these together by emphasizing that:

1. The life of the Trinity is the web of all of creation. 

We aren’t just dealing with people or even just with the environment.  It is God’s life that we cherish.  God lives in the goodness and beauty of the world.

2. We have a two-fold response to our awareness of God’s presence

When we are aware of God’s loving presence in our lives creating goodness and beauty, we dance in wonder and glory.  And when the web of God’s life in creation is broken or torn, it is cause for sorrow and weeping.

3. We respond to the awareness of God’s presence both within the personal and the structural levels in which we live. 

At both the individual level and the systemic level, it is the same presence of God that we are paying attention to.  This awareness – that it is our response to God’s presence – changes the perspective immensely. 

The Sheep and Goats - or - "Get the hell away from me!" - by Caleb Miller

Matthew 25:31-­33 -­ When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.

This passage has been used over and over again, especially if we’re involved in any evangelical style church or ministry gathering, as a teaching for eternal separation. The typical offering gives us the following prognosis based on the evaluation of the text.

• The sheep are the believers

• The goats are the unbelievers

• The believers go to heaven

• The unbelievers go to hell

  These four conclusions are cemented in many minds, but if we are willing to (as Christ often did) play with the text a little, take a breath and a step back from it, and look at it a more intently, I believe we’ll see something a little more that Christ is offering than a simple issue of eternal destination. Jesus rarely offered a simple sermon without dressing it up in metaphor. Even Matthew says that Christ spoke nothing that wasn’t in parable form to the crowds1. Obviously we can see at first glance that Jesus isn’t referring to literal sheep and goats, but is making a play to the people He’s speaking with. But to whom is He speaking? Jesus tells us in Matthew “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”2 Is Jesus telling us that His salvation is only for the Jews? No, He’s telling us His ministry on this earth was first to them. His teaching and healing ministry, though at times encompassing Samaritans and surrounding gentile peoples, was first and foremost to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But who were those lost sheep? 

To read the rest of this article, click: Download The Sheep and the Goats

The patriarch and the pope: the real difference between Phil Robertson and Pope Francis - Ben Irwin

Editor's Note: One of our Clarion Readers/Contributors suggested we post Ben Irwin's response to the "Duck-Phil-A Wars" as a balancing piece to the 'I'm second' interview with Phil we had posted earlier. Here it is:

The patriarch and the pope:the real difference between Phil Robertson and Pope Francis - Ben Irwin

By now, enough has been said about Duck Dynasty to make Sir Tim Berners-Lee sorry he invented the Internet.

Kristen Howerton of Rage Against the Minivan shared what I felt was the best response so far. Also worth considering: a valid question from Time about A&E’s suspension of Phil Robertson and this Atlantic piece arguing the “real scandal” is what Phil said about blacks who lived during the Jim Crow era. Also, Preston Sprinkle demonstrates what a conservative response to this controversy ought to look like.

So I have just one thing to add, and it’s about this meme, which circulated on Twitter yesterday, shaming “liberal logic” for its alleged duplicity.

On one level, just about every word is true. Both men believe sex between two individuals of the same gender is sinful. Pope Francis wasnamed Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. And while Phil was suspended rather than fired, many would say it comes to the same thing.

To read the rest of this post, click here:

Or here: https://benirwin.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/phil-robertson-and-pope-francis/

Eric Voegelin and the ‘Gnostic' Temptation - by Ron Dart

Voegelin is a lodestar to thinking men who seek a restoration of political science on the classic and Christian basis.

- Anthony Harrigan    

Modest doubt is a beacon of the wise.

- Shakespare   

When I was doing my undergraduate studies in the 1970s, I was quite fortunate to be able to take courses on traditional reads of Gnosticism in the early church and revisionist reads of Gnosticism. The traditional approach to Gnosticism was that it distorted the more integrated and wholistic Jewish-Christian tradition by either idealizing spirit and denigrating matter (the former good, the latter evil) or subordinating matter to spirit. The healthy integration of spirit-soul-matter that Christian theology inherited from Plato-Aristotle and the Jewish Prophetic traditions was dimmed and thinned out by the Gnostics (crude and subtle types).

The revisionist approach to the gnostic tendencies in the 1^st-4^th centuries CE as embodied in someone like Elaine Pagels (who was on the avante garde cutting edge of revisionist Gnosticism in the 1970s) took the opposite approach to the Gnostics. Pagels and tribe took the position that the Gnostics were at the forefront of speculative theology, feminism, anti-hierarchy, spirituality versus theology, and dynamic community versus dead institutions. Needless to say, the negative and positive approaches had and have their blind spots, but, for the purpose of this essay, something significant was missing in the analysis.

West of Shinar - by Blindman at the Gate (Brian Zahnd)

West of Shinar
by Blindman at the Gate

God said, “Let there be.”
Existence. Life. Awareness.
Good, very good.
A man called Mankind.
A woman called Mother-of-All.
They bore and wore the Imago Deo.
Walked in the Garden with God.

Then something went wrong.
Paradise lost.
Moved to an apartment east of Eden.
They had babies.
Called them Cain and Abel.
Farmer and Shepherd.
But the landed gentry murdered the nomadic herdsman.
The killer lied to God (and himself) about what he had done.
“I didn’t murder my brother — I just killed an enemy. It had to be done.”

Oh, Cain.

2 Corinthians 5:21 — Panel discussion with Andrew Klager, Michael Harden and Brad Jersak

2 Cor. 5:21 – Andrew Klager, Michael Hardin, and Brad Jersak

Andrew Klager is an Orthodox historian and theologian who teaches at a number of schools in British Columbia, including the University of the Fraser Valley and Trinity Western University. Among his many other contributions to current scholarship, he offered an article to Stricken by God? Non-violent Atonement and the Victory of Christ (Eerdmans, 2007) entitled “Retaining and Reclaiming the Divine: Identification and the Recapitulation of Peace in St. Irenaeus of Lyons’ Atonement Narrative.” 

Michael Hardin and his wife Lorri—Anabaptist teachers par excellence—lead a ministry called Preaching Peace (www.preachingpeace.org). Hardin is a Girardian scholar who co-edited Stricken by God? and whose seminal work, The Jesus Driven Life, has just been released in an expanded 2^nd edition.

Brad Jersak teaches New Testament and Patristics at Westminster Theological Centre (Cheltenham) and serves as Associate Editor of The Plain Truth and CWR Journal with PTM.org. Brad is also general editor of Clarion.

*    *    *    *    * 

Brad Jersak: I frequently field questions about the meaning of 2 Cor. 5:21, especially from those who, like me, initially inherited a particular penal substitutionary lens through which to read it. The text reads as follows:

²¹ He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (NASB).

In the popular Calvinist interpretation, on the Cross, God the Father imputes the sins of the world onto Christ, such that in bearing our guilt, Jesus literally ‘becomes sin,’ or ‘became a curse’ (Gal. 3:13) on our behalf. Since a holy God cannot look on sin, the Father must turn his face away, forsaking his Son and pouring out all the wrath of God against sin upon him. Sin is thus punished in Christ in our place. Thus the wrath and justice of God are satisfied and God can justly forgive all those for whom Jesus died (i.e., the elect, given Calvin’s limited atonement). I believe this is a fair summary of the traditional Reformed position. Indeed, I once held this precise position (as a careful five-point Calvinist) in my MA thesis, “The Nature of Christ’s Suffering and Substitution” (BBC, 1988).

Of course, penal substitution does not offer the only understanding of this passage. The dominant Eastern Orthodox view, for example, holds to a more restorative view of justice and therapeutic vision of the Cross. In that scenario, the Father is seen in Christ (Zech. 12:10)revealing his love and mercy through the Son (1 John 3:16). Rather than satisfying his wrath through punishment, we see God-in-Christ pouring out forgiveness on the world (the whole world) for our salvation.

Contemplative Responses to our World - Part 2 - Jeff Imbach

Editor's Introduction: This article is part two of a three part series by Jeff Imbach, a founding member of Soulstream. Soulstream is a dispersed contemplative community that offers training in spiritual direction and 'living from the heart.'

CONTEMPLATIVE RESPONSES TO OUR WORLD

 PART TWO

 

Question Repeated:

 How Do We Integrate Our Contemplative Action Both At The Level Of Interpersonal Relationship And At The Level Of The Larger Institutions of Society?

Thank you so much for your wonderful responses (both to me separately and to all the partners).  They have been very honest and so true to our real experience.  Many expressed fear that facing into the systemic and structural evil of our world will destroy us.  Steve put it well in his response, “I tend to feel overwhelmed with the vastness and impossibility and will rationalize my way out of involvement.  I easily excuse myself from involvement and getting caught in the heaviness of burdens that seem beyond my reach of attentiveness and action”

When we move toward attending to our responses to the world of systemic power we need to look at ourselves with a deep compassion.  This journey is not easy.  It is like looking at our false selves for the first time.  We would rather look somewhere else, maybe anywhere else!  It is important to allow the Spirit to lead us and care for us in this journey and not get down on ourselves.

1.  Fear of Being Overwhelmed

First of all anybody, with any kind of heart at all, has to feel like they are being torn apart by the kind of evil in things such as human trafficking.  The magnitude of the scope and the horror of such evil would easily crush anyone.  We are very sensitized to the helplessness of children, and that kind of evil fills us with crushing horror that makes us wonder if we can survive.

Contemplative Responses to our World - Part 1 - Jeff Imbach

Editor's Introduction -  This article represents part 1 of a 3-part series by Jeff Imbach, a founding member of Soulstream, a dispersed contemplative community that offers training in spiritual direction and 'living from the heart.'  This series was addressed to the Soulstream partners and Clarion has asked permission to post them on Clarion for the broader public.

CONTEMPLATIVE RESPONSES TO OUR WORLD 

Part 1

Question: How Do We Integrate Our Contemplative Action Both At The Level Of Interpersonal Relationship And At The Level Of The Larger Institutions of Society?

Our SoulStream community is growing very beautifully in our desire to link our contemplative posture with very practical responses to life around us.  It has been hugely important to focus on opening our hearts to receive the love of God so richly present in our lives.   We have come to realize that it is not only in the good times but also in times of great suffering that our hearts are opened up in this way – sometimes even broken open into God as the Jewish tradition says!  It seems now that, by a wonderful grace of the Spirit among us, we are hungry to deepen our contemplative posture and practice in our responses to the world in which we find ourselves.  As we say in Living From The Heart, the fourth pillar of the Way of the Heart is, “Contemplative Transformation Leads to Compassionate Living”

In this reflection I will attempt to bring two themes of our contemplative responses to the world into a unified perspective.  It is not easy and we may all have resistances somewhere along the way, but if this reflection can spark more conversation and deepened trust in God then the stumbling words will have been well worth while. 

In recent SoulStream conversations we have talked about dancing and weeping in the face of our present world situation.  The imagery comes from Dorothee Soelle’s book, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance.  It is a great image to help us process the whole spectrum of responses.  Let’s look at both sides of the image.

I am Second® - The Robertsons

Review of Adam Nicolson's 'God's Secretaries' - by Henry Smidstra

ADAM NICOLSON. GOD'S SECRETARIES: THE MAKING OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.2003. Some reflections by Henk Smidstra.

This book is about the creation of the King James Bible, but has some interesting insights on authority, ecclesiology, and history. The King James Bible, also known as the Authorized Version was begun soon after King James IV of Scotland assumed the British throne as James I in 1603. The author profiles the translators and describes the Jacobean world in which the translation was made. I wish to highlight an item, and focus on an important justice issue that caught my attention; justice, though, is not a central topic in the book, the main theme is that of English translators creating a Bible, balancing opposite world views and combining majesty and simplicity.     

Begun in 1604, the translation arose and was influenced by a culture in change and conflict; “It is the product of its time and bears the marks of its making.” “It is a deeply political book,” the author notes in the introduction. There existed antagonistic divisions between Catholics and the Church of England; there were the disputes of radical separatists and the Puritans within the Church of England; there was a new sense of rationalism challenging the traditional and ceremonial in the church, as well as competing with its authority; there arose new ideas of the relationship of the individual and the community to the state and church. It was an era that began to assert the sovereignty of the individual over the sovereignty of the state or church. One could say that sovereignty was moving toward being primarily a matter between the believer and his (or her?) Bible.  "The Jacobean period [1603- 1625] was held in the grip of an immense struggle: Between the demands for freedom of the individual conscience and the need for order and an imposed inheritance: between monarchy and democracy; between extremism and toleration"(p. xiii).

Nelson Mandela: from prisoner to president - by Brian Zahnd

 

Nelson Mandela
1918—2013

Genesis comes to a close with the story of a prisoner who becomes president and gives a nation a future based on forgiveness. But it’s not a story which must be relegated to ancient history. These things still happen. Injustices still occur and occasionally great souls still rise up to lead people out of the dead-end of retaliation into a future only reconciliation can create. The story of a prisoner who becomes president and gives his people a future based on forgiveness is the story of the Hebrew patriarch Joseph. It’s also the story of Nelson Mandela.

The history of South Africa is one of the saddest stories in the shameful saga of European colonialism. Before the story of South Africa would give rise to hope, it would first give rise to a racist regime that lasted until the final decade of the twentieth century. After centuries of colonial exploitation, in 1948 the all-white Afrikaaner National Party instituted a government policy of segregation and discrimination based on race — a system which legally extended and institutionalized the already long existing practices of racism. The system was known as apartheid— a Dutch word meaning “separateness”. (Interestingly, the words apartheid and Pharisee both mean the same thing!)

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Marriage as Prophecy and Revelation - Lazar Puhalo