Hans urs von Balthasar on the task appointed to the “guardians of thought”:

This is the ultimate truth: that Christians, as guardians of a metaphysics of the whole person in an age which has forgotten both Being and God, are entrusted with the weighty responsibility of leading this metaphysics of wholeness through the same fire [1 Cor. 3, 13]. But metaphysics is not a ware which can be bought and sold ready-made: we must ourselves think…for there is no ‘neutral’ metaphysics. Either one sees the mystery of the ultimate oscillation or one does not, and becomes blind. It is in no way a question of facilitating or sparing oneself thought on the basis of a theology that one already knows, and then of juggling with systems ab extra. This has often been the view of Christians, who have donned and stripped off metaphysics like a form of outer clothing; and this has been the cause of part of the historical tragedy…If they are called to be the guardians of thought, then they will note the extent to which pre-Christian thought in all its complexity preserved an advent-like openness of the coming of something greater than itself by which it could be determined, and how much post-Christian thought, whether it will or not, has been determined by that which is greater than itself. The Christian sees this but does not become arrogant. As a man among men, he is involved with the destiny of all. It would given rise to a false idea which would be difficult to dispel if we were to say that the metaphysician can only ‘ask questions’ of Being whereas the Christian brings read-made answers from revelation, which surpass the act of thinking and destroy it from within…the Bible [does not] primarily exist in order to toss ready answers down to ascending thought (655-6, italics mine).

Lurking within these closing remarks to The Glory of the Lord, Vol 5 is a subtle critique against theologies based upon ‘pure’ or positivist accounts of revelation. Because von Balthasar refuses to regard Being as a formal and empty concept, opting instead to see the radiating doxa of God saturating all existence, there remains an absolute concern for the whole; not as a ready-made totality, but as an “advent-like” openness to the eternally donating Triune God, ultimately revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Christ.

Some thoughts on Richard Norris’s “Trinity” in The Holy Spirit: Classical and Contemporary Readings.

Christians do not “worship” the Trinity in the sense that they stand, as it were, off from it and gawk reverently from a safe distance. On the contrary, their worship is a kind of participation in the relations among the members of the Trinity. Otherwise, what is to be made of the words of one reasonably representative eucharistic prayer, which has believers ascribe “all honor and glory” to God the Father “through Christ and with Christ and in Christ” and “in the unity of the Holy Spirit” (20-1)?

Norris goes on to discuss how the baptism of Christ, especially for Irenaeus, forms the basis of early Trinitarian thinking. The scene recorded in all four Gospels is the perfect image of the Trinity “doing its thing” (23). According to the earliest Christians, this specific narrative depiction shows that the work of the Trinity is not hermetically sealed within the relations of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; rather, it extends to all humanity and creation. This begins with Jesus’s baptism. States Norris:

What Irenaeus says about the baptism of Jesus, however, indicates what is to be the fruit of Christ’s work. It is the lifting-up of human beings into the life of God, their “sharing through grace” – not merely or even primarily as individuals but as a common body – in the identity and the destiny of Christ (23-4).

On the basis of baptism it’s clear that participation is not some supererogatory category imposed upon the message of the Gospel, but derives from it. This is especially the case in the letters of Paul. On the basis of Gal. 3 and 1 Cor. 12, Norris writes that, “The baptism that disciples receive dresses them up, collectively and individually, as Christ. It so identifies them with him that other identities, ethnic identities, for example, or gender identities, tend to have their importance discounted” (24). So strong was this identification with Jesus’s identity through the grace of baptism that Irenaues could refer to Christians as “gods” (24). The only people scandalized by such a view were the Gnostics and the later Neo-Arians.

I think a recovery of deification or consummation is not possible without a livelier doctrine of the Spirit, whose intratrinitarian office it is not just statically to represent but personally to witness or glorify the love between the Father and the Son ( 9).

By “a livelier doctrine,” Rogers no doubt means a recovery of the Spirit’s materiality and how this bears on doctrine. This is the argument he makes in his Introduction to The Holy Spirit: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Rogers argues that we tend, good moderns that we are, to treat the work of the Spirit as ‘spiritual,’ floating free of matter and as ultimately superfluous to the work of the Son. As Jesus has already saved us, what exactly is the Spirit for, especially since “anything the Spirit can do, the Son can do better”?

In order for us to escape this cul-de-sac of modern thinking, we need to recover the incorporative pattern of the Holy Spirit’s work of introducing humanity into the divine life (2). This is, however, a thoroughly material affair: “to think about the Spirit it will not do to think ‘spiritually’: to think about the Spirit you have to think materially” (AS, 56). In other words, the modern image of the Spirit working by osmosis – penetrating the epidermis until it at least reaches the relevant part of our body, presumably the intellect – is seriously compromised by the biblical text and tradition. Rather, something material comes to pass. In light of the church’s witness throughout the centuries, Rogers states that,

In many [all?] cases, the Holy Spirit does not float free of bodies, but befriends and accompanies them, paraphysically as it were, coming to rest on holy places, holy people holy things. In baptism, the Spirit alights on the body of a person. In the Eucharist, it inhabits the body of Christ as the fire in the bread and wine. In unction, it covers a body by means of oil. The Spirit hovers over the waters of creation, of Mary’s womb, of the Jordan, of the font, resting on the body of Christ in the world, in the womb, in the river, and in the church. The Spirit befriends the body as light, fire, incense, wine, and song. The Spirit transcends things, so that it can also inhabit them (3-4).

Such a view will rattle our modern conceptions of the Holy Spirit and perhaps even raise our ire when it comes to specters of ecclesial triumphalism. Yet as Rogers demonstrates again and again, both the biblical text and the long history of Christian thought all indicate a sense of the uncompromising materialness of the Holy Spirit’s work.

 Zealous Christians who could listen to other Fathers besides Saint Augustine, to other Apostles besides Saint Paul; men who could praise God in other measures besides those of the psalmist and learn of Him from other lips besides those of the prophets and wise men; men who refused to identify the culture of the ancient world with its blindness, and who rejoiced in their new knowledge of the Hellenic tradition without a sense of guilt. To such mean the Fourth Gospel spoke in friendly terms. For this reason it has ever since exerted a powerful and creative influence upon the theology of the Church of England (5).

In this light, it’s easy to see why the English Reformers were more careful when it came to delineating sin, righteousness and justification theories. Davey drastically contextualizes the strict privileging of Romans a la Luther (“the door and key to Holy Scripture”) and effectively demonstrates how the “positive idiom” of the English Reformers by contrast could allow for further theological focus on deification, ascension and relationship between sacraments and the church as Christ body.

This bit from Whichcote’s famous sermon is particularly telling, as quoted by Collins:

The Gospel is nothing else, but God descending into the World in Our Form, and conversing with us in our likenesse; that he might allure, and draw us up to God, and make us partakers of his Divine Form…God was therefore incarnated and made man, that he might Deifie us, that is, (as S. Peter expresseth it) make us partakers of the Divine nature (155-6). 

In Moral and Religious Aphorism Whichcote writes:

I will not make a Religion for God: nor suffer any to make a Religion for me.

Religion doth not destroy nature; but is built upon it.

Religion in the subject is not a Notion; but the Frame and Temper of our Minds, and the Rule of our Lives: a man is not well settled in his Religion until it is become the self-same with the Reason of his mind. 

Part of my Lead Acolyte duties for this First Sunday of Epiphany called for me to participate in today’s baptismal service. Although having experienced a few baptisms now, I was for some reason especially moved by this service. And so, upon returning home, I reflected again on Craig Hovey’s, To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church. In chapter called, “The Waters That Drown,” Hovey notes the following about Baptism:

Since the church is a creation of the Holy Spirit, the human acts of washing, of wetting, of lowering and raising are made more than merely human acts. The actions of John the Baptist and the descent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus establish the joint work of human and divine agency.  This is what it means to call Christian baptism a sacrament. God acts in our acts. Human movements and significances are transformed and lifted up into the divine life, renewed, repaired, and put to use in the service of God (30).

About the significance of this mutual divine-human activity, Hovey continues:

God adds to the church in the ritual of adding to which we continue. Participating with the work of God in baptism, the church attest to the way that God’s promises invite the work of his people. Such promises are not enacted apart from human agency, God doing God’s own work in front of a passive world. Nor are such promises activated only when a corporate human will becomes decisive enough to act in the space and time inhabited by its neighbors. The former is a passive church, while the latter mistakes the nature of that agency. Each mistakenly assesses its own work. Instead, God’s promise to be present to sacramental actions like baptism welcomes the human effort to join in the divine drama. The tentative, fragile, and misunderstanding involvement of the church relative to its own continued existence is met with the power that created the universe and continually upholds it (31).

Overall, Hovey highlights what moved me today: the profound awareness of the  “joint work of human and divine agency” occurring in baptism, and the fundamental reality of participating in Christ’s body.

“We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. In it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit…”

They used to think of Christ as an isolated historical figure (“after the flesh”); now they think of Him as the inclusive head and center of a new humanity, wherein a new creation of God is at work. The implication of this passage is far-reaching. Christ is here defined not as the isolated figure of Galilee and Judea but as one whose people, dead and risen with Him, are His own humanity. The fact of Christ includes the fact of the Church. And this is not a novel speculation added to the original Gospel; it springs from that Gospel. They synoptic record is unintelligible except the disciples share in it, and by sharing in it through the baptism of the Spirit they and all believers know the death and resurrection as a present fact. Thus when St. Paul describes the Church as the “Body” of Christ, and the “fullness” of Christ, he is not indulging in mystical adventures of his own; he is describing facts inherent in the Messiah’s work from its commencement. “One died for all, therefore all died”; to know this is to know “the Church which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.”

The Gospel and the Catholic Church, 29-30.

Ramsey’s conclusion is this:

Turn away from the realm of professional Christianity, of religious practice, and find God in the midst of the suffering world, in the care of man for man and in the courage wherewith a man will stand alone. Thither Bonhoeffer points us. But where God is found man, his child and creature, will not be silent. Words will come, and the words are likely to be in part those of a man himself and in part those derived from the company of those through the ages have loved God and spoken to him. Thus Bonhoeffer’s own ineradicable religion seems to answer powerfully his own theory of Religionless Christianity. But he shows us that there is a world of difference between a faith which is ruled by the ethos of religious practice, and a faith which finds religion as its medium and servant (53).

Here stands a wonderful Augustinian, Thomistic, Wittgensteinian and Mystical gloss on the grammar of faith. To be sure, Religionless Christianity can serve as a practical tool for breaking up ossified institutional structures. Yet there is more to the story and certainly more to the concept of religion itself. That is, there’s something poetic about religion, such that our acts of poises have something to do with the cooperative work of grace. Since “words will come”, “religion is to the relation of God and man as pen and brushes are to artists; they could not exist without them and equally they would never call ink and paint their goal” (55). To jettison our religion is to jettison our humanity as language bearing creatures (a point shared by Herbert McCabe). Religion as practice, as route memorization, mechanistic gestures, etc. is distinguished from religion as “medium.” The latter, then, is not about religion, but about religio, a habit or ascesis of deification so that we may join with “the company of those who through the ages have loved God and spoken to him.” Our just practice and worship do not primarily stem from obedience, but spring from the well of our common telos, as the Fathers knew so well. On the basis of language and human cultural activity, the thesis of Religionless Christianity fails for Ramsey (55).

I find this argument convincing. Ramsey resists the urge to offer a facile critique on the basis of ‘use and abuse.’ Rather, he goes deeper and looks to language and communio, whereby the language of religion as medium implies the concrete realization of a common and social life. And not just a common life here and now where the church circles the wagons around an institutional structure, but a common life that crosses the boundary between heaven and earth, extending to the whole company of heaven and the choir of angels.

Human redemption comes through divine involvement, and not by an act of divine magic. The incarnation is the narrow point in which the large claim of universal salvific validity stemming from a particular life and death must balance. The human condition is such that it cannot be dealt with simply be an authorized representative (the Hebrew idea of shaliach), however inspired, but it requires actual divine participation. It is therefore essential, if Jesus is Savior, that God is fully present in him throughout. In Athanasius’ words, ‘He became man that we might become divine,’ so that we might share in the life of God and consequently that the life of God might be in him. Yet the Redeemer is not a gnostic Christ imparting the secrets of divine wisdom, who could indeed be a heavenly figure in human disguise. The mystery of our redemption is something altogether deeper than that. It proceeds, not from the outside by illumination, but from the inside by participation. We need transformation, not information.

John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicists, 135.