Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Bradley Jersak, "Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction" (pre-orders)

Now available for pre-order!

OUT OF THE EMBERS: 
FAITH AFTER THE GREAT DECONSTRUCTION

by Bradley Jersak foreword by Brian Zahnd

CLICK HERE to order now

Description:

Deconstruction: Trendy brand name for falling away from belief in God? Or a process essential to authentic faith? Liberation or trauma? Prison break or exile? It’s complicated. Just like you. Christian history records a Great Reformation and a Great Awakening. But today’s “Great Deconstruction” will surely leave an equally profound impact.

In Out of the Embers, Bradley Jersak explores the necessity, perils, and possibilities of the Great Deconstruction—how it has the potential to either sabotage our communion with God or infuse it with the breath of life, the light and life of Christ himself.

In this collection of vulnerable memoirs, philosophical memos, and candid provocations, Jersak resists both the hand-wringing urge to corral stray sheep and the exultant desire to play the happy-clappy Ex-vangelical cheerleader. He employs the wisdom and expertise of the great deconstructionists—Christianity’s ancient influences (Moses, Plato, Paul, and the Patristics), “beloved frenemies” (from Voltaire to Nietzsche), and the masters of deconstruction (Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Weil)—to double down and deconstruct deconstruction itself. Where is faith after deconstruction?

The author’s heart is to engage and empathize with the bereft and disoriented, stoking the brittle ashes for live embers. In this quest for the resilient gospel of the martyrs, the marginal, and those outside the threshold...inexplicably, in this liminal space, life stirs.

A Light shines through the ashes. We find, often for the first time, that living connection Jersak calls “presence in communion.” There is a sea change occurring across the Western church and civilization. Whether we’re watching a radical course correction or a complete collapse remains to be seen, and how it pans out will likely depend on how we see what’s happening, who we are becoming, how we live in response—and, most important, where we find Christ situated in this storm.

CLICK HERE to order now

Foreword to Alvin Kimel's "DESTINED FOR JOY" - by Bradley Jersak

AIDEN KIMEL, DESTINED FOR JOY

Foreword by Bradley Jersak, Ph.D.

With great joy, I have for a decade followed Fr. Aiden Kimel as he forged a path of inquiry that unveiled answers, advanced an exploration that yielded discovery, and posited a hope that became deep conviction—for me and in many others. His biblical, historical, and philosophical posts have completely convinced me that the apokatastasis panton (the restoration of all things) is not merely a doctrinally tolerable idea—it is, as Kimel says, “the gospel of Christ’s absolute and unconditional love sung in an eschatological key.”

As he has faithfully posted his treasury of findings, I have come to believe without reserve in Christ’s bold claim that through his Passion he will indeed draw all of humanity and the entire cosmos to himself. For that reason, I now see apokatastasis as intrinsic and indispensable to proclaiming the ancient gospel in this fraught and faltering century.

In Destined for Joy, Kimel has gathered a “best of” collection of his insights that, together, paint a vista I cannot unsee, and wouldn’t ever want to!          

Even for those who follow Fr. Aiden’s posts regularly, Destined for Joy is well worth reviewing and having on hand as a definitive resource. The book faithfully and creatively reflects the faith of those great saints of the past (Origen, Macrina, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, Maximos the Confessor, Silouan the Athonite, and yes, George MacDonald) and the boldest minds of our era (Sergius Bulgakov, Robert W. Jenson, Thomas Talbott, Ilaria Ramelli, David Bentley Hart, John Behr). It also offers essential and sometimes startling corrections, revealing, for example, how the fifth-century anathemas against Origenism—long thought to have decisively condemned universal salvation—were never conciliar or even synodal. Kimel demonstrates that they amount to nothing but an imperial edict that has no doctrinal authority. He has at last firmly closed the door on centuries of misconception, divorced the anathemas from the Fifth Ecumenical Council, and removed them from the Infernalist arsenal. 

But by far, his most powerful contribution to me personally (by accumulated 'convincement') was guiding me to this very simple question: Does the New Testament foresee the salvation of all or doesn't it? Clearly, it does. Repeatedly. Unequivocally. And all the “But what about . . . ?” counterpoints fail to address these Scriptures directly. Regardless of the difficulties we have interpreting judgment texts or harmonizing them with ultimate redemption, Christ and his apostles tell us how it all ends: "God will be all and in all.” But nothing. Full stop. Amen and hallelujah!

The issue of 'the End' now boils down to these questions for me:

a. Do the Scriptures require a free and willing faith response to Jesus Christ? Yes! Many times.

b. Do the Scriptures forecast a final judgment? Yes! Many times.

c. Do the Scriptures foresee the salvation of all? Yes! Dozens of times.  

How can all three of these statements be true without marginalizing any of the pertinent biblical texts? They can only all work if: 

a. Death has been defeated so that a free and willing post-mortem response is possible.
It has been. 

b. The judgments of God are restorative and penultimate rather than retributive and ultimate.
They are.  

 c. The human will is healed and freed from its delusions so we can freely respond to perfect Love when we see Christ face to face. I call this a 'freed will' response. 
It will be.

While we can pile Scripture upon Scripture to verify these truths, I repeat, we have Jesus Christ's overt claim in John's Gospel: "If I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself." 

And we have the End described in expressly inclusive ways . . . every eye shall see him, every knee shall bow, every tongue will confess, God shall be all and in all. What others regard as exclusive conditions to this outcome, apokatastasis enfolds as the necessary means. The Incarnation, the Cross and Resurrection, faith in Christ, restorative judgment according to the first Christians—these are the means by which the foretold glorious, all-inclusive End will surely come about.

I can make these audacious assertions without presumption because whatever warrant our faith needs to embrace them, Destined for Joy offers in abundance. Over to you, Fr. Aiden. 

CLICK HERE TO ORDER AIDEN KIMEL, DESTINED FOR JOY

Review of Monika B. Hilder's "Letters to Annie: A Grandmother’s Dreams..." by Ron Dart

Monika B. Hilder, Letters to Annie: A Grandmother’s Dreams of Fairy Tale Princesses, Princes, & Happily Ever After (FriesenPress, 2022).

Review by Ron Dart

“And I must say, girl, I can’t think of a more exciting field of study than the one of theology, imagination, and the arts”—and so ends Monika Hilder’s beauty of a book, Letters to Annie, 33 letters written by Omi Barbara from the time Annie was born to her 25^th birthday, Omi being eighty-eight when the final missive was penned.

There is a wise and generous, gracious and kindly way that Monika weaves together the perennial wisdom of multiple fairy tales, the layered life lessons packed into such tales, and the careful knitting together of Biblical insights and fairy tales in this must-read of a book.

I was reminded, as I sat with each letter, in a different way of more than Erasmus’ 4000 adages (with commentary and annotations) and Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes by Louis Markos. Both Markos and Hilder draw deeply from the grace-filled wisdom of myth and fairy tales, and both are substantively grounded in the mother lode of the Inklings (mentors and friends), MacDonald, Lewis, Sayers, Tolkien, Chesterton, and L’Engle, given their needful nods and due. We are also, given their significance in the fairy tale genre, walking side by side with Grimm, Andersen, Wilde, and Perrault, and the timeless beauty of Shakespeare and Milton offering us their epic vision in tales told.

There is an underlying theme and thesis in Letters to Annie that needs to be pondered and unpacked in a needful way. We dwell in an ethos of much cynicism and deconstruction—such a path walked too far can and does lead to soul and life paralysis and impotence. Most cynics are not cynical of cynicism just as most deconstructionists lack the courage to deconstruct deconstructionism. The epic vision of life that myths, fairy tales, Shakespeare, Milton, the Inklings, and the Bible offer has been marginalized and is held with a great deal of suspicion in our ethos. When we turn from the large macro-vision of the human journey, we often shrink to micro-tales in the culture wars just as when the secular negates the sacred, the secular becomes the sacred—therefore the human soul, mind, and imagination, shrinks and goes round and round in the smallest circle turns, as Rilke rightly noted when such moves are made. Letters to Annie comes as a challenge to such an approach to thought, word, and deed, and does so as a thoughtful grandmother kindly and sensitively shepherds her ever-growing granddaughter throughout her first 25 years of life, a dream vision of enchantment via fairy tales: the sacred and magic key.

There is in fairy tales, as in myths, the notion that the journey is fraught with challenges and perils, “Agon” is the Greek word from which we get agony, protagonist, antagonist, or Milton’s Samson’s Agonistes. The future path of each protagonist and antagonist (princesses, princes, witches, ogres, dragons, etc.) in fairy tales and myths is about growing into the challenges (“agon”) of the journey and, for the most part, overcoming, and in the overcoming of the challenges becoming a fairer, finer, and more mature princess and prince, “happily ever after,” the oft contested ending when real life meets fairy tale. Monika, to her credit, visits, again and again, this “happily ever after” ending to many fairy tales, such approaches more comedic than tragic. There is much massaging of such an approach to the life-fairy tale tension as more nuance and refinement is pondered in Letters to Annie, no flinching from the hard questions of sadness, suffering, and the tragic on our all too human journey. Letters to Annie does cover many of the disappointments, betrayals, and confusions of the faith and life journey and the dangers such challenges pose to the aspiring (or not so aspiring) princesses and princes—many discerning insights can be gleaned, when read wisely and well, from fairy tales—Monika certainly asks of her readers much deeper and layered reads of such classic tales, tales sadly so domesticated and sanitized by the Disney industry.    

I worked with Amnesty International for about 15 years, and in those years I met many a noble princess and prince who for a variety of reasons faced into the unjust political context of their time and suffered terribly (some tortured to death, others years of solitary confinement, some freed from their cells but psychological damage for the rest of their years)—in short, decidedly no “happily ever after”. I’m married into a family of German Roman Catholics who opposed Hitler in the 1930s, many within the family were sent to death camps and exterminated, some slowly starving to death, others housed with those who had multiple illnesses and diseases—good people but goodness crucified with no resurrection in time or history.  Most of us have favourite novels—Doctor Zhivago is in my top ten. The finale to Zhivago is Zhivago’s tender poems, and a poem that is repeated is “Fairy Tale” about the perennial prince who is meant to slay the dragon and rescue the princess. “Fairy Tale” by Zhivago, though, has the dragon unseating the prince, the horse charging the dragon, both damaged beyond repair, prince and princess, future unclear and unsure, in an ambiguous place—certainly no “happily ever after”.  I have also watched many dear friends die slow, slower and sad deaths, years of physical suffering, drugged to prevent intense pain.

I agree with Monika that cynicism is a cul-de-sac, and it is essential when facing into the dire tragedies that war, poverty, political conflicts, and much else create that we seriously know how to tell fairy tales that discern how to live within the comedic-tragic tension, God the Shepherd and Father (to use but two classical Biblical metaphors) often silent, eclipsed or seemingly absent. And we can’t only explain the tragic by a flaw in the character of those who suffer as did Aristotle or many of Shakespeare’s tragic characters.

How do we, in short, infuse the tragic into the “exciting field” of theology, imagination, and the arts that includes the comedic and the tragic, that includes “happily ever after,” but prevents such a position from becoming a bromide that ignores the stubborn and obstinate nature of the tragic? Such is the future of fairy tales and myths.

Ron Dart               

Salvation: Love's Restoration - Craig Stephens

 

Salvation: Love's Restoration - by Craig Stephens

 

"Love is everything."

William Booth (Founder, Salvation Army)

 

Revelation

 

Here is the revelation that is shaping my life today: love does everything to recapture my heart, with the purpose of doing everything to restore my heart.

¹³ We always have to thank God for you, brothers and sisters, for you are dearly loved by the Lord. He proved it by choosing you from the beginning for salvation through the Spirit, who set you apart for holiness, and through your belief in the truth. ¹⁴ To this end he handpicked you for salvation through the gospel so that you would have the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

-2 Thessalonians 2:13-14 (TPT)

Observation

Salvation comes as you receive the good news that you have always been loved, and that Love has already saved you. The proof that you are loved is in Love's choosing you and declaring ‘saved’ over your life. Salvation that has already happened (past-tense salvation) restores me to an intimate relationship with God. This is gifted to me by Love. I don’t earn, deserve it, or play any role but receive the good news that Love has loved me back into Love's arms. And that these arms of Love will hold me safely in salvation's story forever.

This is not a provable fact. Rather, it is a faith-truth, a truth I receive with questions, doubts, and mystery firmly present. It’s an encountered, experienced truth that is written by Love on the lining of my heart. Don’t ask me for empirical proof or look for an intellectual argument from me. I won't try and convince you. I will only invite you to your own personal encounter with Love. For Love speaks to the heart, and the heart knows truth and meaning even beyond reason.

Salvation ongoing (present tense salvation) is Love's ongoing presence restoring me into... ME! This is the glory of love, the “so that” of Love: to see me become the lover I have always been, and then reflect this love into a world desperate for me to be ME, to be the lover-me. Love created me in Love's image, and Salvation has an ongoing purpose in my life, in that I am transformed by the presence of Love, as I experience all the glory of love from that personal encounter. This is the “so that,” the “to this end,” of salvation: Me experiencing Love's glory and then becoming Love's glory, then reflecting Love's glory. 

Past-tense salvation makes me right positionally and relationally. It gives me the identity, security, and significance of being loved by Love. Present-tense salvation restores me through relational proximity into the intended “end” of salvation's purpose, the restored lover-me, reflector to the world of Love itself.

Application

I will stand in the completed work of my past-tense salvation all my life. It will never be challenged in my thinking by shame, condemnation, or unworthiness. I will accept and live in the verdict of “I am Love's beloved.” I am forgiven by Love, restored to Love's table, restored to Love's embrace, forever and always.

I will walk in the invitation of present-tense salvation to live in Love, from Love, for Love. I will allow the fullness of love to enable me to be the fullness of me. Past-tense salvation positions me in love; present-tense salvation propels me in Love, to love.

Is there a more beautiful story? Is this not the summary of the story that all humanity is desperate to make theirs personally? Thank you for restoring me to Love and restoring me to ME. Thank you, Love, for all the identity, security, and purpose this now shapes for my life. I am at last seen and loved as the real me. I am safe to be me, and I am significant as me. Thank you, Love. I love being loved, and I love being love. I love this story of Love's salvation that is mine.

 

Craig Stephens (Territorial Envoy)

New Expressions Coordinator

NSW Central Coast

The Salvation Army, Australia Territory

Peter's Predicament - A Dramatization of Matthew 16 - Bryn Morris

A dramatization of Matthew 16:13-23

The fresh afternoon air filled Peter’s lungs deeply before he exhaled in a sigh of contentment. The satisfaction of vindication. Oh how good it felt to finally have the Master approve of his position among the other brothers. Not that he’d ever questioned it, of course, but it was good to at least have everything clarified and out in the open now. For months they’d been quietly talking behind his back. He wasn’t worried—he’d just concluded that they needed to comfort each other in light of the obvious: he was clearly Rabbi’s favourite.

The writing was on the wall, after all. He was the only one among them who would willingly step out with courage—except maybe James and John, but they usually got rebuked for their stupidity, and rightly so. It’s not just courage that leaders need, you see, but wisdom, and when the moment came, it was not they but Simon son of Jonah who had proved his more mature perception.

You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

Peter reflected on the moment. He had delivered the line well too, as he’d practiced.

Sure, maybe he had had his doubts—nothing compared to Thomas mind you—but he’d known that Jesus was the Messiah for a while now. With the healings, the new Torah, and the precise selection of twelve students, it was obvious that Jesus was starting a revolutionary movement styled off the stories of the forefathers. And to think that, for all those years, all the innumerable sons of Israel, all the great prophets and mighty kings of old, Jesus had chosen Peter to rule his kingdom on his behalf. I mean, only one of Jacob’s children can be Joseph, right? And a good David needs a better… or, a similar Jonathan. It just all seemed right.

“The rock … build his church on me,” Peter whispered softly to himself as Jesus and the other disciples walked on ahead. “The gates of Hades will never overpower …”. He shook his head in bewilderment at the prospect. “The keys to the kingdom of heaven will belong to me ...”. These words felt good.

“Peter!” Jesus’ call arrested him from the depths of his thoughts; by the tone of Jesus’ voice, it sounded like he’d called Peter’s name several times before he had noticed.

Download the full PDF of Peter's Predicament

The Entropic God - Allison Miller

Allison's study of entropy and creation reveals a Paschal pattern in the cosmos that is beautiful and encouraging, and I believe it is relevant for what it means to nourish faith in postmodernity.

 

The Entropic God: Christian Theology Confronts the Second Law of Thermodynamics

When it was first introduced in the mid-1800s, the concept of entropy—which states that systems in nature move spontaneously from order to disorder, from lesser to greater randomness—triggered intense ideological debate in the West, testing the cosmologies of both theists and atheists alike. This paper examines three contrasting ways Christian theologians have confronted the second law of thermodynamics over the centuries: by questioning its relevance to Christianity outright, by identifying it with negative forces like sin and death, and (finally) by embracing it as vital to a new paradigm of faith—one that recasts disorder as divine possibility.

 

Download Allison Miller

 

Mystical Theology - Lazar Puhalo

Mystical theology deals with the inner person, with his spiritual development and growth toward the ultimate goal of theosis. It cannot deal with the natural world. The natural world is its own mystery, but the spiritual development and transformation of the "inner person," must ultimately be dealt with and mystical theology, in the meaning of spiritual struggle and the chosen will to make this inner evolution take place, toward a transformation of the spiritual man, without ever making a sharp divide between the spiritual and the physical in mankind. Being religious in itself will not accomplish this. We see highly religious people doing incredibly wicked things and justifying them on the basis of their religion.

Orthodox Christian mystical theology deals precisely with that problem, and it deals with it in a personal, person-by-person, manner. At the same time, it calls upon Orthodox Christians as a community, nor its collections of communities, to strive toward that inner transformation. The inner transformation of communities is powered by the liturgical cycle, preeminently the Divine Liturgy, but matins, Vespers, and all the other liturgical services. First and foremost, it calls upon us to strive to acquire unselfish love and to move from there to Co-suffering love. We must be led away from the common and sometimes meaningless use of the word "love." Sometimes we use the word "love" as an excuse for hating people or declaring them outcasts and subhuman.

When we talk about the transformation of the inner human person, we are not talking about mystified moralism. Rather they struggle to become truly moral persons by nature. This does not mean becoming "as miserable as possible" as is often presented. This takes place in the spiritual realm but should be directly manifested in our outer relations with the humanity around us and the world in general.

Other forms of theology, our anthropology and understanding of the way culture and society actually work, and our understanding of the natural world must be on a different plane and cannot always be informed directly by our mystical theology. A theology of anthropology and of the natural world that does not take the principle of evolution into account is really not worth very much, but rather serves only to obfuscate reality. The evolution of the species is a fact which, in the words of the late Archbishop Vitaly (Ustinov) "can be denied, but not successfully."

Any cosmological or anthropological theology which denies evolution is simply false and likely ideological. A theology that does not recognise the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis as allegorical and revealing about the human nature but not the origins of the cosmos, cannot be taken seriously any longer. Perhaps 1500 years ago, it could be seen as historical, but now a presentation of it as factual and historical is simply mythological, and those who try to perpetuate it as literal are simply the ones who are mythologising it.

We need to approach our theology of the cosmos and our anthropology free of ideology – and religious doctrines can quite easily become ideology – and in the context of what is not known for certain through science, otherwise, we are doing the Faith itself a great disservice and doing a great disservice to the faithful.

Any cosmological or anthropological theology which denies evolution is simply false and likely ideological. A theology that does not recognise the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis as allegorical and revealing about the human nature but not its origins, cannot be taken seriously any longer. Perhaps 1500 years ago, it could be seen as historical, but now a presentation of it as factual and historical is simply mythological, and those who try to perpetuate it as literal are simply the ones who are mythologising it.

We need to approach our theology of the cosmos and our anthropology free of ideology – and religious doctrines can quite easily become ideology – and in the context of what is not known for certain through science, otherwise, we are doing the Faith itself a great disservice and doing a great disservice to the faithful.

Before Tolkien 1: Richard Wagner's THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG: Then and Now - Ron Dart

You might be a Christian nationalist if... by Kenneth Tanner

You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that one nation on earth has a special vocation to be a Christian nation as an example or sign for all other nations.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that God founded your nation as a superior nation among the nations to uniquely enact his will in the earth.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe the founding documents of your nation reflect the teachings of Scripture accurately, that God was involved in their creation as in the creation of Scripture, that the writers of those documents were primarily interested in expressing Christian principles, and that, like Scripture, they are timeless. [With my regards to Jim Eisenbraun]

You might be a Christian nationalist if your church removes the national flag of the nation in which it is located, and that removal makes you anxious or angry, or if its services fail to offer a venue for displays of national patriotism, and that absence disturbs or alarms you.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you have a low tolerance for an honest assessment of your country’s national sins, or when pastors do the difficult, necessary work of identifying those sins (for sin is personal, familial, and tribal) you refuse their humble discernments.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you’ve never questioned your nation’s offensive or defensive military operations or if you are tempted to trust in your nation’s temporal powers rather than God for salvation from enemies.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you believe that God cares about the survival of your nation’s particular political order or “way of life” or economic status rather than the persons and living things within its borders, its language and culture, its natural treasures.

You might be a Christian nationalist if the prospect of your nation’s end unmoors your trust in providence.

You might be a Christian nationalist if the orienting realities of your life or your family’s life are not the apostles’ teaching, a table of bread and wine, fellowship with the poor, and the prayers but your partisan loyalties, and the so-called thought leaders of that loyalty.

You might be a Christian nationalist if you do not recognize that the gospel is pan-national, encompassing all peoples everywhere, all cultures, all languages, where all armaments become gardening tools, where the peace won by the weakness of the human God on the cross reigns.