Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Augustine's City of God and JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings - Ron Dart

Augustine's City of God vs. Christian Zionism - Ron Dart

Augustine's City of God vs the Constantinian Fall Thesis - Ron Dart

The Anchors within the Historic Liturgies - Fr. Kenneth Tanner

The liturgies of the first Christians, the historic patterns of worship, inherited also from the synagogue and temple, are our best chance not to end up worshiping the dollar, or the idea of America, the angry (or the coddling) gods of human projection—even of well-meaning Christian projection—or ourselves.

When we submit to the anchors within the historic liturgies—readings from Scripture, the confession of sin, baptism, creeds, the cry and lament of "Lord have mercy," apostolic preaching and teaching, premeditated prayers for the world, the chanting or singing of psalms, the Eucharistic table set by God in the presence of our enemies—their great collective gift is connection with Jesus Christ: the true image of God, the true image of humanity, and the one by whom we can learn to love all things that exist.

And yet they are not capable of anything apart from the Spirit of God, as is often everywhere observable. It is my experience that when the liturgies are handled without humility and reverence, without passion, and without the authentic investment of the gathered worshipers as a community that seeks to love God and their neighbor in risky and costly ways, these sacred practices that are supposed to be a fruit-bearing tree of life can be or can become withered and lifeless.

These parts of worship—prayer, confession, teaching, baptism, lament, praise, Eucharistic fellowship—can LOOK very different from church to church but they cannot be absent. They are not distinctives of one church, like candles instead of spotlights, or organs instead of guitars, or "traditions of men," like vestments for clergy or name tags for members or holy water fonts, but essentials.

Their absence is a significant debilitating handicap for any group of persons striving to be the church, whether they meet in living rooms or around kitchen tables, in cathedrals of stained glass or drywall, in storefronts, or in schools, in an open field, beneath a shade tree, or underground.

And yet these practices are meaningless and a dance without music or choreography if those who practice them do not yield to the Spirit of God, do not live out self-sacrificial community, do not walk in the humility that attends these mysteries because, after all, they are boundless, gracious gifts of the divine and human Humility who called all things into existence from nothing and who keeps all things in life.

In the absence of what we might call 'those who bear crosses,' the historic liturgies are not entrances to the kingdom, as Schmemann wisely understood, but exercises in archaeology.

A sure sign that one has not embraced the historic liturgies with the humility of the God who became flesh to wash our feet and take our nails is the self-assurance and pride that you are worshipping God in spirit and in truth while all other Christian worshippers "just don't get it."

THE SATAN - by Michael Hardin - episode 3 - "God the Creator and The satan"

Editor's Note: Clarion will be posting Michael Hardin's 20-episode series (excerpted from What the Facebook? vol. 1) on The Satan as a weekly release, each Thursday. CLICK HERE for the full pdf or kindle document.

When it comes to the devil, we must first disabuse ourselves of the mythology that has overlain the concept. Evil is not a reality, it is an unreality. It has no being of its own. It is not real in the same sense that God is real or as theologians might say, it has no ontology. It does not exist in and of itself. The devil, or I should say, the concept of the devil has a history. Jeffrey Burton Russell has written four major books (Devil, Satan, Lucifer, and Mephistopheles) that demonstrate that the concept of the devil is one that develops over time.

The idea of an agent of evil was first introduced into the history of ideas around 800 B.C.E, in Persia by Zoroaster. Zoroaster was a reformer of religion and taught that there were two competing principles, one of light, the other darkness; one was a good god, the other a bad god. These two principles were in an eternal battle. Sometimes in human history, the good god had the upper hand, at other times the evil god seemed to be winning. Back and forth this struggle between the gods went, playing itself out in the arena of human affairs. This principle lies behind the oriental notion of yin and yang, and of karma as well. When the Jewish people were exiled in Babylon in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C.E., they encountered this way of thinking.

Judaism also needed to account for evil in the world. In the Jewish traditions prior to the exile (found primarily in Torah), evil was a purely anthropological datum, that is evil was a purely human phenomenon. The story of the serpent in Genesis 3 shows that the man, the woman and the satan are all part of a matrix focused on the problem of desire. The talking serpent in Genesis 3 is a mythical figure. Snakes don’t talk. When we look at Genesis 3 in a future post we shall see how the snake is a metonym for desire. The important thing here is that the serpent is not some fallen angel in the guise of a snake. There are no traces of the Enoch myth in Genesis 1-3.

It was during the time of the exile that the first creation narrative was produced (Genesis 1:1-2:4). Everything about this creation was good; all seven days were beautiful in God’s sight. There is no evil in this creation story, in fact the story (or myth) is in distinct contrast to the myths espoused by the Babylonians whose gods needed and used violence to beget the creation. The Creator in the first creation story created all things with a word, that is, without violence, and that is what set apart this story from that of the cultural myths of origin from the surrounding civilizations. In my book The Jesus Driven Life I even said that this first creation story is not so much about beginnings as endings; in God’s creation all things end up as “tov, tov”, very good!

In the post-Exilic era, as this Persian dualism was imported into Jewish thinking a certain type of language and literature came into being that sought to explain the problem of evil in the world which we know as apocalyptic. This way of thinking divided the world into two ages, this age and the age to come. The way to account for evil in the world was to say that this age was evil and ruled by an evil power while the age to come was ruled by God.

The second creation narrative was another attempt to tell the story of the creation but this time, rather than express a hopeful vision, the author of the second creation story beginning in Genesis 2:5, seeks to also explain why there is trouble in the world. Notice that there is no seventh day in the second creation narrative. Why is that? Because everything after that is the sixth day: Adam/Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Babel. The second creation account names the real problem of evil, it is not abstract. Over and over again the problem of evil is named as violence. Violence is a human issue, not a divine problem. When we are able to recognize this, when we are able to shoulder the burden of our predicament on our own shoulders and not blame it on another worldy “being”, we will have come a long way toward understanding an essential part of the satan. The satan is violence, violence is satanic and both are human.

Next Episode (4) Is The satan a Person?

"Do not label" - Interview with Richard Rohr (pt 3)

The Charm of Beauty in an Ugly Age - Brian Zahnd

Artwork by Justyna Kopania

“It is the prerogative and charm of beauty to win hearts.”
–Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

It’s an ugly time right now. Especially in the public discourse in the land in which I live. Politicized and polarized, public discourse has devolved into the polemical napalm of give-no-inch, take-no-prisoners, burn-it-all-down flaming rhetoric. Ugly “Us versus Them” ideology goosesteps across the American stage. Hysterical screams of fear-infused hatred are heard in this nation of immigrants.

Deport ’em all!
Build a wall!
No refugees!
Don’t tread on me!

I was in New York last week and saw the Statue of Liberty. I think she had a tear in her eye…or maybe it was just in my eye. The tired and poor, the wretched refuse, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free…are basically given the finger these days. For the sake of honesty maybe it’s time to commission a new statue.

Are we entering a dark age where the only thing we can build is a wall and where nothing is sacred but a gun? I wonder.

Yet it’s not for America that my heart is most heavy these days, but for the church. Are we just a religious version of our ugly age or can we actually be the alternative counterculture of Christ? Can we develop enough spiritual maturity to be a Christlike community of radical love and mercy? We must! If not, we will become as superfluous as a Blockbuster video rental store…and suffer the same fate.

If the church in America is to recover any relevance, it won’t be through a public emphasis on the true (though there is a place for Christian apologetics), and it won’t be through a public emphasis on the good (though there is a place for Christian ethics), but through a public emphasis on the long-neglected third prime virtue — the beautiful. What we desperately need is a renaissance of Christian aesthetics. In a post-Christian culture adverse to truth claims and suspicious of assertions to a superior morality, it is still the prerogative and charm of beauty to win hearts. If we can be so formed in Christ that we begin to live beautiful lives, we will gain a new hearing; if not, we deserve to be ignored.

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Jesus: Forgiving Victim - Webcast with James Alison and Richard Rohr (July 12)

Jesus: Forgiving Victim

A webcast with James Alison and Richard Rohr

LIVE: Tuesday, July 12, 2016
4:30-6:00 p.m. US Mountain Daylight Time (MDT)

 

Words such as "sacrifice" and "atonement" have twisted our understanding of Jesus' death on the cross, contributing to a culture of scapegoating. James Alison and Richard Rohr help us see Jesus' death and resurrection as an archetype for our own journey. Instead of violence and shame, we find freedom and healing.

 

Register for as little as $1 at cac.org.

 

Registration for the webcast includes access to the replay, which will be made available through Sunday, August 14, 2016, starting shortly after the live broadcast. Register no later than 4:00 p.m. US MDT on July 12, 2016, to participate in the live webcast and/or to view the replay. You must register online prior to the webcast to gain access to the replay. CAC is unable to accept phone registrations for webcasts.

THE SATAN - by Michael Hardin - episode 2 - "Hollywood, the Bible and The satan"

Editor's Note: Clarion will be posting Michael Hardin's 20-episode series (excerpted from What the Facebook? vol. 1) on The Satan as a weekly release, each Thursday. CLICK HERE for the full pdf or kindle document.

Hollywood has a bit of a fascination with the satan. Films have depicted it as a horrid monster, as an angel with wings and horns and as a human being (Al Pacino no less). Films like Constantine or The Exorcist owe little to the canonical scriptures and more to the second Temple Jewish literature, medieval speculation and fear, Dante and the writings of the Puritans. I say this to show that while there is a lot of speculation about the satan, there is little that we can actually say for the devil is not a prominent figure in the Bible.

Other than the prologue to the book of Job, a reference in Chronicles and one in Zechariah one does not find much in the Hebrew Scriptures. Even the serpent of Genesis 3 hardly qualifies. The Henochic (= 1 Enoch) myth of the fallen watchers has to be imported somewhere between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 much like dinosaurs have to be read back into the creation narrative. The devil does just not play a major part in Israel’s story.

When we come to the New Testament, there is a definite change. Jesus casts out demons and the world seems enthralled and under the power of evil. This is all due to the influence of apocalyptic watcher myth of I Enoch. In this literature the satan goes by many names including Beelzebub, Samma’el or the ‘diabolos.’ It is at the head of a hierarchy complete with generals, lieutenants, colonels, sergeants and minions.

One of the striking elements of the Henochic (I Enoch) myth is that after the rebellion of a certain number of angelic beings, judgment is passed and they are all consigned to eternal punishment. However, they send an emissary to God pleading that a small percentage of them may remain behind to plague humanity, and worse still, God seems to acquiesce to their request. One has to ask, what kind of a God, having passed such a judgment would then turn and allow this to occur. It would be like a person who had cancer being cured but because the faith healer felt sorry for the cancer allowed some cancer cells to remain and reinvigorate the disease! Strange.

Hollywood’s depiction of the devil owes more to popular cultural experience and ancient and medieval speculation than it does to Scripture. Films often depict the satan as an almost-god; one with extraordinary powers that rival God’s powers and in some films even outdoes God’s power. The devil is a virtual equivalent of God, a most powerful being complete, not only with armies, but with personality, something the Bible never ascribes to the satan.

This dualistic approach to the satan, creating a worldview of some divine yin and yang, or equal opposites of good and evil in the universe is not that of Scripture. If in the Hebrew Bible, there is very little mention of the satan, in the New Testament, the satan is most frequently mentioned in contexts of defeat. So how is it that entire Christian traditions can make such a fuss over the devil? Entire industries have arisen and there is a lot of money to be made off of the devil. Exorcism schools, like that of Bob Larson, movies, books, websites, music and even the so-called satanic church all profit off of a myth, yet people continue to believe that there is some virtually omnipresent, omniscient being capable of making us all spin our heads and vomit pea green soup.

I am not mocking those who have had genuine encounters with evil. I will discuss these in upcoming posts. For now I simply want to debunk an unhealthy emphasis placed on the satan in certain Christian circles. Christians do not believe in the devil, they believe in Jesus, conqueror of all evil, in all of its forms, including whatever we may understand by the satanic. Christians need not fear “the satan” anymore than they fear a thunderstorm. Perfect love not only casts out the demonic, it also casts out all of our irrational fears.

Next Episode: (3) God the Creator and The satan

The Return of the Scapegoat (Luke 8:26-39) - Russ Hewett

The story, recorded in Luke 8, of Jesus casting out a Legion of demons from a man is surely one of the most remarkable exorcism stories in history. The man had been living in the tombs, howling and bruising himself, chained and under guard for a long time.  Jesus sent the demons into a herd of some 2000 pigs, which then ran headlong over a cliff to their death in the Sea of Galilee. This is the literal reading of the story.

Humans speak and write in various ways.  We sometimes speak literally, but we often speak or write in a literary way that invites the hearer to seek meaning behind the words of the text.  For instance, if I were building a house and I asked my helper to cut me a 2X4, 48-3/4” long, I wouldn’t expect my helper to ask, “what do you mean by that?”  The request is a literal request and there is no need to seek some deeper meaning in it.  This is how many people approach the Bible.  They expect the Bible to only be speaking literally.  I think however, that the story of the Man of the Gadarenes literally begs to be interpreted in a literary way – like how you might read literature.

This is not to say that the story should not also be understood literally; just that the story might have more to tell us if we approach it as a piece of literature, like how you might approach something written by Shakespeare.

We might begin by looking for symbols – words that held a particular meaning at the time the story was written.  In this story, four words in particular are freighted with meaning – sea, cliff, pigs and stones.

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No Wrath in God - excerpts from T. J. Rynne's "Jesus Christ, Peace Maker"

Editor's Note: The following excerpts come from Terrence J. Rynne, Jesus Christ, Peacemaker: A New Theology of Peace (Mayknoll, NY: Orbis, 2014), 29–31 for promotional purposes. They reflect an Orthodox theology similar to the 'theology of consent and participation found in Brad Jersak's A More Christlike God.

No wrath in God

Another way of saying there is no violence in God is "there is no wrath of God." The threatening, great God, Jehovah, coming on the cloud of judgment of the wicked is not found in Jesus' reading of the scriptures. The lust for punishment of the bad guys is not God's; it is a human reaction projected onto God. There is judgement, but the judgement of evil is in the evil itself playing itself out to its own demise. Humans who refuse the offer of goodness judge themselves by the measure with which they judge others. That leads to complete self-aborption and can descend into what can only be called hell. ...

Forgiveness doubled

"God is always in himself the kind father who meets sinners with anticipatory love; only if sinners, despite the experience of grace, cling to their own criteria of judgement do te imprison themselves," Schwager writes. Even the murder of his own son did not provoke the reaction of vengeful retribution. The risen Jesus appeared with the message of peace and forgiveness--even to those who had reject the offer the first time. Forgiveness doubled. In the events after the resurrection we clearly see the nonviolent face of God....

God's response to human obduracy is to deliver humankind to ourselves. We do make our own beds and lie in them. We do indeed make our own hells. God does not break in to punish us; we do it to ourselves. God's so-called wrath consists in granting full respect for our freedom. The possibility exists that humans could resist even redemptive and unfathomably forgiving love.

Only unfathomable love

Jesus' concern was focused on the here and now, the events of history and where those events lead. He used language that is "apocalyptic," that is, taking historical and political events metaphorically to demonstrate the built-in trajectory of those events into the future. As James D. G. Dunn describes it: "Apocalyptic language has to be understood metaphorically in reference to historical and political events rather than literally in reference to the end of the world. ... Neither Jesus nor his contemporaries were expecting the end of the space-time universe."

No wrath in God. No violence. Only unfathomable love. With that understanding of the God of his forefathers, Jesus could not countenance a political order built on exclusion, separation, and hatred of the enemy--in the name of religion, in the name of their God. If there is no violence in God, that undercuts the age-old tendency of humans to label those who are outside the privilege circle as threats, as enemies, as evil--to dehumanize them and then make them objects of righteous, sacralized violence.

CWR Video: Richard Rohr Interview pt 2 - What do we mean by "dualistic thinking"?

02 Richard Rohr - What do we mean by "dualistic thinking"? from Plain Truth Ministries on Vimeo.

The Gathering Storm of Fundamentalism - Greg Albrecht

It is one of the most explosive issues facing our world in the early years of this 21st century. Political and religious agendas around the world are bullied and coerced, reacting to a virus-like spiritual plague of religious fundamentalism. The Islamic fundamentalist reaction to Western imperialism and decadence is said to be a counter-attack on the "great Satans" of our culture (materialism, immorality, secularism, humanism, science and technology), all of which are blamed for taking our world to hell in a hand-basket.
Though the eyes of the world are currently focused on Islamic fundamentalism, the seeds of radical religious fundamentalism are found in virtually all of the world's major religions. 

Fundamentalism, whatever its outward attire might be, is convinced that society wants to wipe out its faith and practice. Fundamentalists tend to see the world as "them" and "us"—they feel trapped, with their backs against the wall, and obligated to fight for their faith under their fundamentalist flag. 

Extreme Islamic beliefs and practices are, without a question, a dangerous, turbulent storm of fundamentalism that overshadows our entire western world. But while it lurks in the shadows, extreme fundamentalism in the name of Jesus also portends a clear and present spiritual danger. Fundamentalism is fostering dramatic changes, forcing us to rethink our moral priorities, whether we like it or not.

When Calls for Peace Are Dismissed

Hate-filled rhetoric and passionate appeals for bloodshed in the name of God are the manipulative interpretations of teachers who are war-mongers thirsting for blood, yearning for revenge and violence. Terrorists who torture and maim, fueled by anger and lust (James 4:1-3) hide like cowards behind the skirts of God (or Allah), desperately trying to remake divinity into their own violent image.

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The Moral Grief and Co-Suffering Love of Christ in Gethsemane - Lazar Puhalo

Editor's note: This article is a follow-up to Bearers of Co-Suffering Love

Some have asked me to explain "moral grief," looking at the Holy Fathers.

The best example of Moral Grief is Christ's prayer in Gethsemane just before his betrayal. As the fathers tell us, Christ had no fear of death. He certainly knew who He is. What then, was the "chalice" that He suffered from so greatly and wished to have it removed?

He was referring to His grief over the conditions and bondage of humanity. As the great Russian father, Antony Khrapovitsky says, "Christ suffered more greatly from His moral grief for humanity than He suffered physically on the cross."

Christ expressed no outrage over mankind's sins, which He had come to bear away. Even when critiquing the self-righteous, He was sharp and stern, but without outrage. With the woman taken in adultery, we do not see any moral outraged in Christ, rather, being concerned for her healing and salvation, He demonstrates a moral grief toward her accusers who were, despite of their own moral outrage, were immoral and full of sin themselves.

Moral grief never seeks the punishment or degradation of another, but feels grief over their bondage and inner human suffering. Moral outrage wallows in the desire for punishment, and rages against the other rather than feeling a deep sense of humble grief over their condition. I hope this will explain to some degree.

St Antony Khrapovitsky once wrote:

“In the garden of Gethsemane the Lord demonstrated the ultimate degree of co-suffering with the sins of every person, when He began to be oppressed by them to such a degree that He asked the heavenly Father to deliver Him from the agony. 'And was heard because of His reverence" as the apostle says (Heb.5:7), as an angel appeared and strengthened Him.'

"... How can I benefit from the Saviour's grief over people's sins, in the way that a corrupted person's soul is filled by a friend's co-suffering love? Only if I am convinced of the certainty that I too, I personally, as an individual, was and am encompassed in the heart of Christ Who grieves over my sins. Only when I am aware that He beholds me, stretches out His supporting hand toward me and encompasses me with His co-suffering love: only then is He my Saviour, pouring new moral strength into me, He "Who teaches my hands for war" (Ps. 17:34) against evil.

"This is possible only when He is not foreign to me, not a historical example of virtue, but a part of my being or, more correctly, when I am a part of His being, a participant of the Divine nature, as Apostle Peter says (Pt.1:4).T

PATRISTIC REFERENCES: CHRIST WAS NOT GRIEVED IN GETHSEMANE ABOUT HIS OWN SUFFERING AND CRUCIFIXION:

St Hilary of Poitlers devotes several paragraphs to refuting the idea that Christ felt fear in Gethsemane. He says that Christ's words, “My soul is sorrowful unto death” cannot mean that He was sorrowful because of His own impending death. He was sorrowful unto death in that He sorrowed so greatly over fallen humanity that He came unto death over it. “So far from His sadness being caused by death, it was removed by it.”

Concerning the words, “Let this cup pass from Me,” St Hilary says,

For this prayer is immediately followed by the words, ‘and He came to His disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter; could you not watch one hour with Me?...the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh Is weak....' Is the cause of this sadness and this prayer any longer in doubt?...it is not, therefore, for Himself that He is sorrowful and prays, but for those whom He exhorts.

The saint points out that Christ had no need to fear His passion and death, but that even those who were committed to Him would so fear it that at first, on account of it, they would flee and fear to confess Him, and that Christ was sorrowful over this. The whole passage is well worth reading. (See On the Trinity, Book 10:30—40).

See also:

• St John Chrysostom, Against the Marcionites and Maniceans
• St Cyril of Alexandria, On Luke, Sermon 146, 147
• St Ambrose of Milan, On Luke, Book 10:56—62

Both St Cyril and St Ambrose directly confirm Metropolitan Antony's interpretation of the cause and significance of Christ's agony in Gethsemane, and the “cup” which He asked to have removed from Him.

On Fearing God - Rob Grayson

Today I’d like to talk a little bit about God and fear. Specifically, about how the two are often deeply intertwined in our thinking.

It seems to me that fear is closely associated with our default understanding of God. Indeed, we might even say that for many people, fear is the instinctive emotional response to thoughts of God. Long-established expressions like “to put the fear of God into someone” illustrate just how intimately the emotion of fear is connected with the idea of God.

And, of course, those wishing to draw on the Bible to support the notion that fear is an appropriate response to God can do so with ease. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, we are told in Proverbs 9:10. And there’s no shortage of accounts throughout the text of scripture where God or his angels appear to strike fear into people’s hearts.

So, fear is typically quite ingrained in our psyche as a response to God, and many assume that the Bible validates its appropriateness.

And yet…

The writer of the first epistle of John, shortly after telling us that God is love, has this to say:

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.” (1 John 4:18)

And so we have a seeming paradox: on the one hand, fear of God is something appropriate and even valuable and necessary; but on the other hand, God is love, and as such, there is no place or reason for fear in him.

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Bearers of Co-Suffering Love - St Antony Khrapovitsky

BEARERS OF CO-SUFFERING LOVE
MINISTERS OF REDEMPTION

We have spoken about the action of co-suffering love, but now let us direct our attention to its bearers: in what feeling, in what experience is it expressed? It is evident that it is found in inner suffering for others, in co-suffering. And so we have come to the concept of redemptive co-suffering. The door is now open before us to a feasible understanding of the redemptive power of Christ's sufferings.

The Church clearly teaches those who would partake of the Holy Mysteries that the grace of regeneration is given from the co-suffering love of Christ the Saviour. This is expressed in the words of St Symeon the New Theologian, in the seventh prayer before Communion:

Neither the greatness of my offenses nor the multitude of my transgressions surpasses the great longsuffering of my God and His exceeding love for man, but with the oil of co-suffering [compassion] dost Thou purify and illumine those who fervently repent, and Thou makest them to partake abundantly of the light and to be communicants of Thy Divinity.

These are precious words which explain the mystery of redemption and expand the significance of Paul's words: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to co-suffer with our weaknesses" (Hb.4:15). The fourth antiphon of Great Friday Matins clearly says that Christ's sufferings were His co-suffering for mankind: "O Thou who dost suffer for and with mankind, glory be to Thee."

Speaking of himself as a servant of regeneration, Apostle Paul clearly expresses the truth that co-suffering (compassion) which is filled with love and zeal for the flock is a regenerating power, which gradually instills spiritual life into those hearts where it had not previously existed, just as a child receives life in the birth sufferings of the mother: "My children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ is formed in you" (Gal.4:19; Jn.16:21,22). In another place, the apostle writes that the spiritual life of the flock increases according to the measure that their teacher dies physically in his pastoral suffering: "Thus death is actively at work in us, but life in you" (2Cor.4:12; cp.1Cor.4:10-16).

In the prayer for accomplishing the mystery of the consecration of bishops, the successors of the apostles, the regenerating power of their service is also described as suffering (that is, co-suffering with the sinful flock), in which the hierarch represents, to the people, Christ the true Teacher and Redeemer:

As it is not possible for the human nature to bear the Divine essence, by Thine ekonomy Thou hast appointed teachers for us having a nature like our own, subject to passions, who stand before Thy throne...make this appointed steward of the episcopal grace an imitator of Thee, the true Shepherd, Who has laid down Thy life for Thy flock....May he stand unashamed before Thy throne and receive the great reward which Thou hast prepared for those who have suffered for the preaching of the Gospel.

The co-suffering love of a mother, friend, a spiritual shepherd or an apostle is operative only when it attracts Christ, the true Shepherd. If, however, it functions only in the sphere of human relations, it can, it is true, evoke tender attitudes and repentant sentiment, but not a radical regeneration. The latter is so difficult for our corrupt nature that not in vain did Nikodemos, speaking with Christ, liken this difficulty to an adult person entering again into his mother's womb and being born for a second time. The Lord replied that what is impossible in the limits of human life is possible in the life of grace, in which the Holy Spirit descends from heaven and operates. And to grant us this gift, Christ had to be crucified and raised, as Moses raised the serpent in the wilderness, that all who believe in Him should not perish, but have life eternal (see Jn.3:13-15).

So that which grace-bearing people can do only in part and only for some people, our Heavenly Redeemer can do, and does do, completely and for all. Filled with the deepest compassion for sinful humanity during His earthly life, He often exclaimed: "O faithless and perverted generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I endure you?" (Mt.17:17). He was oppressed with the greatest sorrow on the night when the greatest crime in human history occurred, when God's ministers — with the complicity of Christ's own disciple, the former through envy, the latter through greed — decided to put the Son of God to death.

This oppressive grief possessed His most pure soul for a second time on the cross when the cruel masses not only were not moved to pity by His terrible physical sufferings (they could not come close to grasping His moral sufferings) but also maliciously mocked the Sufferer. One must suppose that during that night in Gethsemane, the thought and feeling of the God-man embraced all of fallen humanity — numbering many millions — and wept with loving grief over each one individually, as only the all-knowing divine heart could. Our redemption consisted in this. This is why only God, the God-man could be our Redeemer, and not an angel or a man. It was not at all because a more valuable sacrifice was necessary for the satisfaction of Divine wrath. Ever since this night in Gethsemane and that day on Golgotha, every believer, even one who is just beginning to believe, recognizes his inner bond with Christ and turns to Him in prayer, as to an inexhaustible spring of moral regenerating strength. Few are able to explain exactly why they so easily assimilated faith in the possibility of receiving new moral energy and sanctification from turning to Christ, but no believer doubts this, nor do even the heretics.
Having suffered in His loving soul over our imperfection and our corrupt will, the Lord poured into our nature a wellspring of new, vital strength, available to everyone who has ever or will ever desire it, beginning with the wise thief.

One may ask: "How does this happen? Upon what does the causal bond between suffering and regeneration depend if the latter is not an external gift of God as a reward for the merits of the One? How can one explain this transmission of moral energy from a loving heart into the hearts of the beloved ones, from the Sufferer to those for whom He had co-suffered? You have presented to us factual proof that it is thus; you have confirmed it with the words of the prayers of the Church and the words of the holy fathers and the Bible. Finally you wish, from this point of view, to explain the death agony of the Saviour, evidently ascribing only a secondary significance to His physical sufferings, the shedding of His blood and death. But we still desire to know what law of existence causes this communion of the Redeemer with those being redeemed, and the influence, which we ourselves have observed, of the co-suffering will of one man upon others. Is this merely a result of a conscious submission of the will of a loved one to the will of the one who is loving, or is there something taking place here that is deeper — something objective, something that takes place in the very nature of our souls?"

"Of course," we would reply to the latter. I have always been very dissatisfied when a collocutor to whom I had explained redeeming grace, responded from the point of view of scholastic theology, to this effect: you are expounding the subjective, moral aspect of the dogma, but you do not touch upon the objective, metaphysical (that is, the juridical) aspect. "No," I would reply. "In the transmission of the compassionate, loving energies of the Redeemer into the spiritual nature of a believing person who calls upon His help, we find manifested a purely objective law of our spiritual nature revealed in our dogmas, but which our dogmatic science has not noticed."

(St Antony Khrapovitsky)

Experiencing Brokenness - Rob Grayson

Last week I wrote about how it is in our collective brokenness that we find our true humanity. Today I’d like to continue exploring the idea of brokenness a little further.

First, it might be useful to unpack what we mean by “brokenness” (or, at least, what I understand it to mean).

We often think of brokenness as a place we come to either when we’re faced with the consequences of our own actions or when the actions of others, or events beyond our control, leave us wounded and in pain. This is, I think, an entirely valid and appropriate use of the word “brokenness”: sometimes we are broken by the disastrous consequences of our own poor choices, by the actions of other people, or by a host of other seemingly random causes collectively known as “life”.

However, there is also another sense of the word “brokenness”, and it is simply this: that we are all wounded, and so we are all broken in various ways.

Some of the wounds we carry we are well aware of, maybe because we sustained them in some terrible experience that we will never forget, or perhaps simply because the pain of them is so great that it continues to dominate our world. Other wounds are buried under many layers of self-protective armour. Either way, and however well we might appear to mask it, there is brokenness in all of us, deep down.

So, all of us are or have been broken in some way. The only difference is that some of us know it and others don’t.

Often, it takes an experience of the first kind of brokenness to bring us to a place where we can acknowledge the second kind. In other words, it often takes an intensely painful crisis to bring us to a place where we become aware of – or are prepared to recognise – the underlying low-level brokenness we’ve been carrying around like heavy baggage for years. For me, it took the painful and humiliating admission that I had developed a drink problem to drag me to a place where I was open enough, and my defences were lowered far enough, for me to begin to be able to see and name the wounds I’d been nursing, some of them since childhood.

This brings us to two more things I think we can say about brokenness.

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It's Time to Evolve - Rob Grayson

It is time for the human species to evolve.

According to the theory of evolution, when a species encounters a crisis that threatens its very existence (for example, some kind of significant change in its physical environment), it must either adapt or risk extinction.

I believe the human species is facing a crisis that threatens its very existence. I’m not talking about a crisis arising from a change in the physical environment (though, of course, manmade climate change may well present such a crisis). I’m talking about the crisis that arises from a lethal combination of two factors: first, our ongoing inability or unwillingness to tolerate difference, and second, the increasingly easy availability of deadly technology.

Simply put, if we as a species do not learn to get along, sooner or later some group or nation is going to unleash destruction on an unprecedented scale. It’s a question of when, not if. If that happens, the best case scenario is that we will move (or rather regress) into an era of harsh authoritarianism in which the freedoms we cherish will be removed from us in an effort to enforce some kind of artificial “peace”. The worst case scenario is that it will be game over for the human race. Perhaps small pockets of humanity will survive here and there, but as a civilisation we will be back to the drawing board. Maybe that’s what it’s going to take for us to finally learn to live together.

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THE SATAN - by Michael Hardin - episode 1 - "Why this series on the satan?"

Editor's Note: Clarion will be posting Michael Hardin's 20-episode series (excerpted from What the Facebook? vol. 1) on The Satan as a weekly release, each Thursday. CLICK HERE for the full pdf or kindle document.

(1) Why this series on the satan?

I am often asked about the devil or the nature of evil or why there is evil in this world. Some folks would prefer that I do not talk overmuch about this. They say, since Jesus has defeated the devil, we should not give it too much air time. They are correct. As Karl Barth observed, the Bible only mentions the devil to dismiss him. However, the Bible does mention the devil so we too, even as we dismiss its/his presence and work. We must first clear away some misconceptions in the first few posts and note that the concept of the devil has a history.

Before I begin, however, I will lay my cards on the table so that as you follow along you will not be too surprised at what you will see. Primarily what I will be doing in these posts is seeking to work out an understanding of evil from a human perspective. If you are familiar with my writings you will know that the mimetic theory of Rene Girard informs how I read the Bible. I read it first as an anthropological text and then (and only then) as a theological one. The cross before the resurrection as it were.

As we begin this journey I hope you will find that reframing our understanding of the devil contributes greatly to our understanding of just what it is that is overcome in the life of Jesus. I hope you will find the courage to “cast out the satanic influences and impulses” in your own life. We who live in the light of God’s great liberation in Christ are already aware of the power of the gospel to deal with our sin, our addictions and the way sin manifests itself in the structures of our life. The devil is not an elusive concept nor a free floating spirit, nor a power to be feared. The satan had been crushed, laid low in the death of Jesus, never to rise, destined to doom.

You will notice that I do not capitalize the word satan. There are several reasons for this. Satan is not a name but a function (it means accuser). Second, the satan is not a person but a principle (more on this as our studies evolve). Third, the satan has been given way too much press in the Christian faith as a virtual equal or peer of God, as though God was a good eternal principle and the satan an evil eternal principle. Not so! Christians are not dualists; we are those who recognize that only Jesus has been given all authority and power (Matthew 28:16-20, Phil. 2:5-11).

Yet, it is also true that while Jesus has overcome the satan in his death and resurrection and ascension, it is also true that we still live between the times; we live as those who share in both this age and the age to come. We are still bounded in this life by sin, death and the devil, but even as we are bounded by such we are freed from fear of any of them. We are liberated from fear of judgment, for Jesus has forgiven us all of our sin. We are liberated from fear of death for we live in the promise of the resurrection of our bodies. We are freed from fear of the satan and freed from its authority over us by virtue of Jesus overcoming of the satanic principle. This is the gospel and it is good news indeed.

So while we will discuss the devil and at times it may appear as though the devil has the upper hand in human history, nevertheless we do so knowing that there is a world coming where sin, death and the devil will cease to exist. We live, as the theologians put it, with an ever expanding eschatological horizon opening up for us.

Next episode: (2) Hollywood, the Bible and The satan

Light Alone Defeats This Darkness - Kenneth Tanner (w. John the Beloved and Brad Jersak)

Final conversation from True Detective (full video link - language warning).

Marty: “Didn’t you tell me one time, dinner once, maybe, about how you used to ... you used to make up stories about the stars?”

Rust: “Yeah, that was in Alaska, under the night skies.”

Marty: “Yeah, you used to lay there and look up, at the stars?”

Rust: “Yeah, I think you remember how I never watched the TV until I was 17, so there wasn’t much to do up there but walk around, explore, and...”

Marty: “And look up at the stars and make up stories. Like what?”

Rust: “I tell you Marty I been up in that room looking out those windows every night here just thinking, it’s just one story. The oldest.”

Marty: “What’s that?”

Rust: “Light versus dark.”

Marty: “Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”

Rust: “Yeah, you’re right about that.”

 

Rust insists that Marty help him leave the hospital, Marty agrees.

As they head to the car, Rust makes one final point to his former partner.

Rust: “You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing.”

Marty: “How’s that?”

Rust: “Well, once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.”

Rust stares at all of the stars in the midst of the darkness.
 

Kenneth Tanner (FB post 15 June 2016):

It was always there in Psalm 23:

God does not visit evil on humanity, and God does not prevent the evil that men and the dark angels do.

Rather, God is *with us* as we endure the evils our departures from his light and life bring us.

And by his co-suffering with us, he alone is able as God and as man to defeat the darkness that sets itself in opposition to his love.

And this is not a great cosmic battle for God, though it may seem like one from the human vantage, for we humans do wrestle with principalities and powers, as Christ struggled with these powers in his humanity.

But all God has to do to defeat evil is to die in Jesus Christ—to touch death—and death vanishes like darkness when you switch on a lamp. There is no contest between God and darkness.

"Even though I walk through of the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for you are with me."