You are currently browsing the daily archive for November 13th, 2008.
While Nashville was fawning over its well-managed and manipulated “country” stars, the Orthodox Church in America selected a new Metropolitan, Bishop Jonah Pauffhausen. He had only been bishop in Ft. Worth for 12 days prior to his election. His writings suggest a profound Christian faith and deep love for Christ. The OCA is in the midst of some turmoil and scandal, and his vision for their communion appears most appropriate. Here is an excerpt from one of his published editorials. I wish the leaders in our own church body spoke in such ways:
“But how, exactly, is this (new vision for church) to happen? Is there a specifically churchly way to go about this task? For we are not a corporation or secular organization, and in this instance we cannot take recourse to secular models. Our identity, vocation, and mission-both as individual members of the Church and together as the one Body of the Church-derive from the Church’s vision. Her vision is not that of any particular leader but is shared by the whole Body of the faithful.
Our task is to turn away from our petty individual worlds, causes, and dreams-the delusions of our own reasonings. And our leaders’ task is constantly to call us back to this repentance. This they must do so that we can share the vision given by the grace of the Holy Spirit and accept our calling from Christ to be the Church, His Body, which constitutes the very core of our personal and corporate identity….
We do not need the ways of the corporate world (vision-and mission-brainstorming, etc.) to determine this. Rather, we need prayer and discernment-together as the body of the Church, and in particular on the part of our Holy Synod of archbishops and bishops-in order to renew the vision of the Kingdom and to preach and proclaim the unity that exists in Christ by the Holy Spirit and constitutes us as the Church.
Wow. The depression is for real. It is hard to distinguish the CMA show from the CGM. The drama and music is shoddy. Jesus usually gets an honorable mention in both.
Chris Knight is my antidote to the CMA. He is a brilliant songwriter. Enjoy.
I am working on a paper that examines de-ritualization in the LCMS. Depressing. As part of my research, I have been studying David Martin’s “Two Critiques of Spontaneity,” which was published in 1973. He had an almost prophetic understanding of the destruction that contemporary sociology and philosophy would have on social institutions such as the family, education, and church. Specifically, the rejection of tradition, forms, rules, regulations, etc. in favor of the immediate and spontaneous would result in nothingness, the person becoming an anarchic monad, left to their own ignorant devices. Here is a quote from his essay that encapsulates the problems with both the liturgical renewal movement and the church growth movement:
“Stripping down to the kerygma, stripping off the historic encrustations of the Church’s involvement in culture, stripping away all the culture might impose on the naked self, is to destroy both root and flower. In this context radicalism means the destruction of the root. Christ Himself becomes no more than a paradigm of a free man. Yet Christ was actually of the root of Jesse…. To forget that genealogical table is to conceive of the Incarnation outside the cumulation of history and away from the particularities of time and place. Christ Himself was bounded…. Those who attempt to strip off the successive layers of the onion do not find a true noumenal self at the centre but nothingness: out of nothing nothing comes. Only God creates ex nihilo.”
The Church cannot recreate itself any more than it can create itself. We are bounded by our historical, sacramental, liturgical context. We cannot, and should not, think we can free ourselves into something more authentic. We only create something in our own image, a Babel. The arrogant intrusion on historic liturgical rites and forms from reformers, specialists, and egotists that seek “pure” worship or “authentic” liturgy actually threatens the Eucharistic life of the Church as it distances us from our root, which is Jesus Christ. Of course, many might ask if He is really necessary to meet our felt need for immediate, oceanic religious experience. Who needs Jesus when an MC, a band, and banal sentiments will do just fine?
