Author: Jason Goroncy

April stations

Reading:

Listening:

Watching:

‘How To Kill’, by Keith Douglas

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.

The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

– Keith Douglas, ‘How To Kill’ in Keith Douglas: The Complete Poems (ed. Desmond Graham; London: Faber & Faber, 2000), 119.

To Mend the World: a confluence of theology and the arts

The sixteenth-century Jewish mystic, Isaac Luria, made much of the notion of tikkun olam, a phrase which we might translate as ‘to mend the world’. Luria believed that the Creator of all things, in deciding to create a world, drew in – contracted – the divine breath in order to make room for the creation coming into being. In this enlarged space, the Creator then set vessels and poured into them the radiance of the divine light. But the light was too brilliant for the vessels, causing them to shatter and scatter widely. Since then, the vocation given to human person has consisted of picking up and to trying to mend or refashion the shards of creation.

Tikkun olam is also the theme of a conference and exhibition that I’m involved in organising, and which will take place in Dunedin this July. It is shaping up to be a very exciting twin-project, with an impressive line-up of speakers and artists. Registration for the conference has exceeded expectation for this stage so far out from the date, is still open, and there’s still some time to get in on the ‘early-bird’ rate.

‘Not the empty tomb’, by R.S. Thomas

Not the empty tomb
but the uninhabited
cross. Look long enough
and you will see the arms
put on leaves. Not a crown
of thorns, but a crown of flowers
haloing it, with a bird singing
as though perched on paradise’s threshold.

We have over-furnished
our faith. Our churches
are as limousines in the procession
towards heaven. But the verities
remain: a de-nuclearised
cross, uncontaminated
by our coinage; the chalice’s
ichor; and one crumb of bread
on the tongue for the bird-like
intelligence to be made tame by.

– R.S. Thomas, Counterpoint (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1990), 37.

Community of the Transfiguration: a commendation

Paul Dekar’s book, Community of the Transfiguration: The Journey of a New Monastic Community (Cascade Books, 2008), maps the historical, theological, liturgical, and missiological life of Holy Transfiguration Monastery [HTM], or what many of us know better as The Breakwater Community – a Baptist monastic community in Geelong, near Melbourne. HTM was birthed in the early 1970s and bound together by ‘a common calling to contemplative prayer, simplicity, a Eucharistic focus, and the nurture of monastic spiri­tuality’ (p. 33). How this birth happened, and the shape that the life birthed has taken, and is taking, is a focus of this book; it is, however, by no means the only focus.

Dekar, who is Professor Emeritus of Evangelism and Mission at Memphis Theological Seminary and (as I understand it) a ‘Companion in identifica­tion with HTM as a spiritual home’, locates the story of the Breakwater Community among the wider stories and history of Christian monasticism in both its ancient and contemporary forms: ‘HTM exhibits many generic traits of its monastic forebears and of the new monastic communities. These include the centrality of Jesus Christ, communal life under a rule of life, vital worship, use of the visual arts, care for youth, care for the natural world; and ministries among marginalized persons. In this sense, the life of Community mem­bers is neither unique, nor original, perhaps only “newly born … a spirit and an endless trying, changing and beginning again”’ (p. 57). That the members of the Community have sought to explore and live out of traditional monastic spiri­tuality for over thirty-five years has, in Dekar’s words, ‘made the Community somewhat of a working model, or bridge, between past and contemporary forms of monastic religious life’ (pp. 61–62).

Dekar believes that ‘the radical love Community members have extended to lay people, pastors, denomi­national leaders, critics, and even enemies is perhaps its greatest gift’ (p. xvi). That I can count myself as one among many who has been, on more than one occasion, the recipient of the hospitable love of this extraordinary and permission-giving community (once in the form of home-made lemonade and a pumpkin – food for the journey, so to speak), is but one the reasons that I was so keen to read this book. From my brief experience and observation as a pastor in the Baptist Union of Victoria, among the greatest gifts bestowed by the Breakwater Community to the wider Church is the centrality, rhythm, and theological maturity afforded to gathered worship, and the attendant invitation to live all of life as an expression of and participation in the One who gives himself in the eucharist. It is, I believe, appropriate, then, that Dekar devotes a significant portion of the book to introducing readers to some of the liturgical resources and prayers authored by the Community, and to outlining the theology and practice of HTM’s worship, the shape that a community in which ‘the nurture of warm, personal intimacy with the Holy Trinity’ (p. 89) lies at the heart of common life.

On occasion, Dekar gets sidetracked from the main story and expends ink on some of his additional interests which, although loosely related to the book’s subject, disrupt its flow. Still, this moving and challenging book records a fascinating and important – albeit small – chapter of the story of Victorian Baptists, and locates that story in both a wider and more grassroots ecumenical and catholic context. Those already familiar with the inspirational life and witness of the Breakwater Community and its relationship with the Baptist family in Victoria, and those interested in hearing a more detailed account of one community that religion sociologists might locate in a movement known as ‘New Monasticism’, will find much of interest here.

John Pilger on Anzac Day

‘Anzac Day has been appropriated by those who manipulate the cult of state violence – militarism – in order to satisfy a psychopathic deference to foreign power and pursue its aims. And the “legend” has no room for the only war fought on Australian soil: that of the Aboriginal people against the European invaders. In a land of cenotaphs, not one stands for them. The modern war-lovers have known no street of screams and despair. Their abuse of our memory of the fallen, and why they fell, is common among all servitors of rapacious power …’. – John Pilger, ‘Julia Gillard leads the march for Anzac in the 51st state’.

Easter Eucharist, a conversation with a five-year old

Here’s a snippet of a wee conversation that took place this morning between my daughter and myself – in church:

‘So why do we eat bread and drink wine today?’, I asked.

‘The wine is God’s life, and the bread is God’s skin’, she said. ‘We eat and drink so that we won’t die. When we eat and drink, God’s life and our life is joined together’.

Impressed by this young anti-Zwinglian (a description she embraces with some enthusiasm), I enquired: ‘Since when have you been reading Ignatius of Antioch?’ (Ignatius once referred to the Eucharist as ‘the medicine of immortality’).

And she said, ‘Ha? Can we have our chocolates soon?’

The Risen Truth

‘The resurrection of Jesus, then, is not simply the raising and the restoration to the world of his past identity (though that is a vital component in the situation … ). Equally importantly, it is the ‘raising’ of the past identity of those who have been with him. The risen truth shows us the self-deceptions which have drawn us into the vortex of destructiveness. “Look”, says the risen Christ, “and see that, whatever your hopes and your longings, you were still trapped in fantasy, in blindness to yourselves and to the reality confronting you. Look how you trapped me and handed me over to death. Learn the depth of your resistance to the truth.” And yet the whole of that past that is shared with Jesus is now to be transformed: as we learn the truth of its tragic character, we learn also that the tragedy is interwoven with hope. The truth incarnate, present in the human world, is instantly, inevitably, entangled with the luxuriant tendrils of human fantasy and self-deceit. Throughout the ministry of Jesus, we are reminded of the longing of disciples and “multitude” alike for a saviour congruent with their projections and aspirations. There is no breaking-free from this web, because entanglement in it is inseparable from human being – the conditions of imperfect knowledge and imperfect communication, combined with the urge to structure and subdue the world and tame its contingency. And thus truth in this world is a stranger, essentially and profoundly vulnerable (so the Fourth Gospel reiterates again and again): its connection with or participation in the world involves rejection, crucifixion outside the city gates. Yet it has entered the world, it has allowed itself to be linked with the sphere of destructive untruth; and even if rejected, it cannot be annihilated. If Calvary shows the links between truth and untruth pulling the former down towards extinction, Easter shows us those same links, the same interconnectedness of the human world, reversed, so that truth draws untruth up towards the light. Our connection with truth, with Jesus, has led to the cross; his connection with us remains, indestructibly, to assure us that our betrayal is not the ultimate fact in the world. We may betray, but the world characterized by betrayal is now interwoven with a reality incapable of betrayal. God’s faithfulness has worn a human face, through Calvary and beyond. The incarnate truth, “risen from the dead”, establishes that faithfulness as the ground of inexhaustible hope in the world, even in the midst of our self-deceits’.

– Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), 41–2.

Holy Saturday, the Son who is held in oneness with the Father

‘If it is hard to understand how the Father-Son relationship is maintained when Jesus is among the god-forsaken, it is even harder to understand how it could be maintained when at the end of his passion he is among the dead. What can it possibly mean to say that the eternal Son of God has died? … The Nicene creed within its second christological answer affirms that he of whom it speaks is “of one Being (homoöusios) with the Father” and also that as part of his work “for us men and our salvation”, “he suffered death and was buried”, but it does not tell us how we are to understand these statements in their relationship to each other.

Hans Urs von Balthasar warns against failing to face up to the stark fact of Holy Saturday, the fact of a dead Christ. We can rush on too quickly to the joys of the third day; we can, with the Greek iconographers, picture a living and active and glorious Christ invading the world of the dead, raising Adam and Eve from their coffins in a pre-resurrection triumph. All that has its place, but it must not be allowed to displace or distract attention from the fact that from Good Friday to Holy Saturday the Son of God lies dead. His identification with us will be incomplete and his saving act insufficient if he does not share with us the ultimate consequence of our subservience to evil, either as its victims or its servants. Hebrews is quite clear that it belongs to the redeeming act of God’s grace that Jesus should experience the death that all of us have to experience and that this is the way he must go in order to reach his glorious destination: “… we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb. 2.9).

Death, whatever function it might be designed to fulfil in the purpose of the Creator, becomes for those who are the sinful victims of evil the dreaded ultimate moment in which the destructiveness that is endemic to the sinful situation finally has its way. When we die all our relationships with God and with people are severed and we are carried from being to non-being: “The wages of sin is death.” Jesus dies, to quote Hebrews again, to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Heb. 2:15).

The illusion of death as the automatic transition from an imperfect to a perfect heavenly state, deceptively propagated at many semi-Christian funerals, is untrue both to scripture and experience. Death can be more biblically and realistically described as the “ultimate enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26) and our reluctance to contemplate the reality of our own death only goes to prove the point.

There must therefore be no mitigation of the awfulness of death either in Jesus’ case or our own. As von Balthasar puts it:

It [death] is a happening which affects the whole person, though not necessarily to the point of obliterating the human subject altogether. It is a situation which signifies in the first place the abandonment of all spontaneous activity and so a passivity, a state in which, perhaps, the vital activity now brought to an end is mysteriously summed up.

Death is the collapse of all relationships into unresponsiveness. Those who are dead can neither speak nor be spoken to, they can neither receive love nor return it, they can neither initiate nor participate in all the activities and concerns in which our relationships are expressed and by which they are nourished. “I have lost my husband”, says the widow, and exactly that is the source of her grief. All that makes up life is lost to the dead and they are lost to it.

And so it is with Jesus, as his body is lowered from the cross and carried to Joseph of Arimathea’s dark garden tomb. No more parables, no more healing, no more praying to his Father; he has offered everything and he has nothing more. It looks as if all the hopes he roused are now reduced to mocking illusions, his promises become retreating echoes fading into nothingness: The Son of God is dead.

As Alan Lewis puts it, we are “compelled to confront the possibility that God’s own Son is dead and buried among the transgressors, and that God himself has failed in his fatherhood and deity” and as a consequence “the world is delivered up to godlessness and negativity”. That is the reality of Holy Saturday and we must give it its own space and its own meaning before we hurry on to Easter Sunday, not least because Holy Saturday is a day that both individuals and the Church have to live through again and again. We shall all have to confront the day of our dying when resurrection may seem a distant hope rather than an imminent reality.

The Son of God is dead; his death is our death. It is an evil undoing of the work of the Creator which looks like the final triumph of all the powers of darkness that have brought him to the cross. He is dead and unresponsive to his friends and he is dead and unresponsive to his Father. This is the ultimate disruptive attack on the unity of Father and Son, this is the permitted intrusion of death into the Trinitarian life of God.

Nevertheless … in his furthest absence from the Father, the dead Son is still in profound unity with the Father. His passivity and unresponsiveness are still the expressions of his obedience that hold him in oneness with the Father in his execution of the Father’s redeeming purpose. That fact alone makes his death different from ours and, even before the resurrection, full of hope for ours. This dead man is indeed bearing the death of the victims and perpetrators of evil, but he is bearing it as the loved and obedient Son of the Father’.

– Thomas A. Smail, Once and For All: A Confession of the Cross (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2005), 137–40.

Around the traps: under grey skies repatriated

Friday, and Sunday: Easter according to a five-year-old

‘Anyway’, she said, ‘it’s all about Jesus’.

‘But what about the empty tomb?’, asked her theologian father.

‘We don’t worship the tomb, daddy’, she said. ‘Jesus is the bit that matters’.

‘So why is there a cross?’

‘Because people always seem to forget about that bit, and because that’s how Jesus remembers himself to us’.

‘But what about the yellow bit?’

‘Ah. That bit is just to make it pretty, silly’.

The Wisdom of Stability: A Review

In The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture (Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2010), Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove seeks to write a book about ‘staying put and paying attention’. In a culture characterised by unprecedented mobility, he believes that ‘the most important thing most of us can do to grow spiritually is to stay in the place where we are’ (p. 1). The author insists that the life of Spirit is, in Rowan Williams’ words, impossible ‘in abstraction from the actual business of living in the body of Christ, living in concrete community. The life of intimacy with God in contemplation is both the fruit and the course of a renewed style of living together’. Or, in Wilson-Hartgrove’s words, ‘Apart from stability in the life of a community, the songs of Zion quickly begin to sound like wishful thinking’ (p. 63).

Drawing from the experiences of the monastic fathers and mothers, and from his own journey now as a minister of St. Johns Baptist Church and member of Rutba House, Wilson-Hartgrove properly argues that the practices of stability cannot be ‘reduced to a quick fix for the spiritual anxiety of a placeless people’, and that ‘if our feelings of rootlessness are what drive us to the practice, we’ll need something more than an immediate sense of relief to help us stay’ (pp. 110–11). He turns then to consider three ‘midday demons’ which require resistance if we are to be serious about not being perpetual pot plants but being planted in soil where our roots have room to reach deeper. These are ambition, boredom and vanity.

He writes of ambition: ‘ambition tempts us to forsake the mundane for the sake of unlimited growth – or, at least, new opportunities. We are so easily unimpressed by the ordinary, longing for the feeling of excitement that comes with a new task to take up, new people to engage, new challenges to face (p. 114). And of boredom: ‘Whereas ambition pushes us toward perpetual motion, boredom paralyzes, leaving us unable to love our neighbors or even take care of our own basic needs. Though different in character, these midday twins tempt us to the same lack of care. In their grip, it is impossible for us to find joy in community’ (p. 118). And of vanity: ‘Vainglory comes midway along our journey to suggest that all our care is best directed toward self-preservation … Vainglory will try to persuade us that there is nothing more important in the world than our own stability, encouraging us to defend it at all costs against any potential threat’ (pp. 122, 123).

There is wisdom in these words, and there’s much to like about the book. Still, I have two reservations about commending it: First, it’s nauseatingly repetitive, yet another example of a standard article-length piece being padded out to make a book. Second, and more substantially, there is, surprisingly, a drift towards an unearthed nostalgia here which works to undermine the author’s basic thesis. (It may be, of course, that my cultural eyeglasses are simply the child of a different prescription to those of Wilson-Hartgrove’s.) Walter Brueggemann once observed of memory that it is that which ‘may be enmeshed in a nostalgic longing for normalcy and “the good old days,” when life was simple and agrarian, settled, and well-ordered. That nostalgia is all intertwined with evangelical memory, so that the nostalgia has a vague religious feeling about it. There is a need to sort out the normative memory from this other vague yearning’. I’m unconvinced that Wilson-Hartgrove (in this volume) succeeds fully in doing the kind of sort out that Brueggemann, rightly to my mind, calls for.

For me, the highlight of the book was this poem (on p. 106):

The house was built in ’98,
prior to my arrival.
And a big maple tree at the corner of the porch
was run over and buried lots of times by wagons
moving in materials to build the house.
And the other maples what Daddy had planted,
they had no trouble at all.
But they all died and this one lived that had such rough treatment.
And there’s a saying
“Rough weather makes good timber.”
It may be
that the trouble with folks today
is that they’re raised like hothouse flowers,
and they don’t have much to go on
at the end.

‘Scottish Seeds in Antipodean Soil: the development of Presbyterian worship in Aotearoa New Zealand’

Recently, I drew attention to a public lecture that Graham Redding would be giving on the development of Presbyterian worship in Aotearoa New Zealand. Last night, to a crowded room, Graham delivered what was a fascinating lecture in which he traced the contours and patterns of worship trends in NZ Presbyterianism from its Reformation and Scottish roots, through its early colonial characteristics, to the modern era.

Drawing upon a host of indigenous examples and personalities, notably Harold Turner, Helmut Rex, John Henderson and John Dickie (pictured left), Redding concluded that ‘there is a desperate need for a revitalisation of worship in the Presbyterian Church. In my view, if such a revitalisation is to be of enduring significance, it is unlikely to take place independently of a recovery of core liturgical principles that undergird and inform the practice of Christian worship. Our church needs ministers and liturgists committed to this fundamental task’.

A copy of the full lecture, ‘Scottish Seeds in Antipodean Soil: the development of Presbyterian worship in Aotearoa New Zealand’, is available here. I’ve also uploaded a copy of the audio which can be downloaded from here.

And while I’m drawing attention to lectures, here are the links to three lectures by Walter Kaufmann on existentialism:

William Cavanaugh interviews

The Centre for Public Christianity has made available a three-part video interview with William Cavanaugh:

1. The myth of religious violence

2. Consumerism and Spirituality

3. The Post GFC World

Also, around the traps:

Around the traps: To the memory of ulcers scraped with a tin spoon

The Presbyterian Research Network: Scottish Seeds in Antipodean Soil

The next meeting of the Presbyterian Research Network (14 April) will see Graham Redding speak to us on Scottish Seeds in Antipodean Soil: the development of Presbyterian Worship in Aotearoa NZ.

We meet at the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, Knox College, for drinks and nibbles at 5pm for a 5.30 talk, and are away by 7pm. All are welcome.

Subsequent meetings will consider the following topics:

  • 9 June 2011. The Demon Drink and the Christian: Yesterday and Today. Speaker: Geoff Troughton
  • 8 September 2011. How patterns of congregational life are changing. Speakers: Kevin Ward and Sarah Mitchell
  • 10 November 2011. The Challenge of Changing the Justice Landscape: how do we do justice honourably with victims, reduce recidivism and change public attitudes? Speaker: Janet Sim Elder

A Wretched Man: A Novel of Paul the Apostle – a review

I remember the first time I read Gerd Theissen’s The Shadow of the Galilean. It was the early 90s. The book is an outstanding achievement. Interweaving the latest in biblical scholarship with an imagination fuelled by Scripture’s heart and with an evangelical zeal to simply tell the story, Theissen helped to bring the Gospels, and their central character, to life for me. And he reinforced for me what I think I first learned via a deep immersion in the liturgical practices of my faith community – that the communication of divine truth demands the work of the very imagination it is determined to sanctify. So Jonathan Edwards: ‘Unless you use imagination, unless you take a truth and you image it – which of course is art – you don’t know what it means’. Or, as Nicholas Lash puts it in Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God, and citing John Henry Newman first up:

‘It is not reason that is against us, but imagination.’ … The ways in which we ‘see’ the world, its story and its destiny; the ways in which we ‘see’ what human beings are, and what they’re for, and how they are related to each other and the world around them; these things are shaped and structured by the stories that we tell, the cities we inhabit, the buildings in which we live, and work, and play; by how we handle – through drama, art and song – the things that give us pain and bring us joy. What does the world look like? What do we look like? What does God look like? It is not easy to think Christian thoughts in a culture whose imagination, whose ways of ‘seeing’ the world and everything there is to see, are increasingly unschooled by Christianity and, to a considerable and deepening extent, quite hostile to it.

In such a situation, continuing to hold the Gospel’s truth makes much more serious and dangerous demands than mere lip-service paid to undigested information. Unless we make that truth our own through thought, and pain, and argument – through prayer and study and an unflinching quest for understanding – it will be chipped away, reshaped, eroded, by the power of an imagining fed by other springs, tuned to quite different stories. And this unceasing, strenuous, vulnerable attempt to make some Christian sense of things, not just in what we say, but through the ways in which we ‘see’ the world, is what is known as doing theology.

This is precisely why I welcomed reading Obie Holmen’s A Wretched Man: A Novel of Paul the Apostle. Holmen seeks to do with the Apostle to the Gentiles something like what Theissen did with Jesus ‘the Apostle and High Priest of our confession’ (Heb 3.1) – situate Paul in his geographical, social, historical and psychological landscape, and gift us with a creative way of hearing afresh the letters that make up the bulk of the New Testament.

According to Holmen, prior to his fire-side conversion-encounter with Yeshua (Jesus), ‘Paulos (Paul), the defender of orthodoxy, had acquired a proud identity and a status; self-righteousness became the dressing for his wounds, masking his inner torment’ (p. 75). Indeed, ‘the wretched man wandered the streets of Tarsos, lost and alone, accursed and condemned’ (p. 54). Thereafter, Holmen paints Paulos as one who is seeking to carve out the implications – for Torah, for Jewish privilege, for our understanding of God, etc. – of this radical encounter with Yeshua. The entire story takes place, markedly, against Paul’s own conflict – the ‘inner torment’ – between his inherited (and then reconstituted) theology and his homosexuality, the latter manifest in his relationship with Gentile friend Arsenios. Augustine once suggested, to the shock of some of his fellow bishops, that St Paul may have been ‘greatly tainted by sexual desires’. In his portrait of the gay Apostle Paul, Holmen exploits this suggestion beyond what the old bishop of Hippo may have had in mind, and some readers may well lay the book down because of such. But such action would, in my view, represent a premature judgement.

A Wretched Man is no The Shadow of the Galilean, to be sure, but Holmen is a gifted writer, and his well-researched yarn is certain to encourage readers to read the Bible in a new light, with a deepened awareness of the groundedness of its message, with a new appreciation of the real humanity of its figures, and – I suspect most importantly for the author – a renewed wonderment of the magic of divine grace.

An annotated name index would help the reader. The book has a dedicated website here.

Conference on The Bible and Baptists

The Australasian Baptist Research Forum, in conjunction with Whitley College, Melbourne, is organising a conference for 27–29 June, 2011 on the theme The Bible and Baptists: Readers, Teachers and Preachers. Here’s the official lowdown:

2011 is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Authorised Version of the Bible.  Such an anniversary provides an excellent opportunity for reflection on the place of the Bible among Baptists.  How have we and do we interact with the text of the Bible as ‘lay’ readers, professional teachers and preachers?  Papers are invited that explore this theme historically, theologically and pastorally, or provide examples of how Baptists are currently undertaking any or all of these tasks.  The audience at the Forum will hopefully include not only those engaged in theological study, teaching and ministry, but also thoughtful Christians ready to participate along side the ‘professionals’.

Keynote speakers will be Professor Sean Winter, graduate of Bristol Baptist College and Professor of New Testament at the Uniting Church Theological College, Parkville, Victoria; and Dr George Wieland lecturer in Biblical Studies, Mission and Cross-cultural Field Education at Carey Baptist Theological College, NZ.  We are also negotiating to have an academic from Asia present at the Forum.  It is proposed that a book of papers from the Forum will be published as the third ABRF publication.  Presentations at the Forum will be no more than 20 minutes long with 5 minutes question time.  Final papers should be no more than 5000 words including footnotes and written for thoughtful Christians.

A call for papers has also been issued:

Abstracts due: 15 April , 2011

Confirmation of Papers Accepted: 30 April , 2011

Final Papers Due: 3 June, 2011

For further information, or to submit abstracts, please contact Dr Graeme Chatfield (email or +61 02 92627890).

 

School(s) for Conversion – a commendation

On 14 January 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned the following words to his brother Karl-Friedrick: ‘… the restoration of the church will surely come only from a new type of monasticism which has nothing in common with the old but a complete lack of compromise in a life lived in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount in the discipleship of Christ. I think it is time to gather people together to do this …’

Whether we are thinking about explicitly religious, or of broader, expressions of new ways of being human community, the birthing of new types of monasticism has long been a feature of ecclesial existence. While having at times drifted in and out of neomonastic communities, and while wrestling frequently with the kingdom-foreignness of the way of being-in-communion that my own introverted default setting reboots to, I’ve mainly been an intrigued onlooker who has read very little in the last decade or so that has come from within the movements themselves that articulates in any depth the intentionalism of such life together. (Whether or not all such communities characterise the ‘new type of monasticism’ for which Bonhoeffer longed is not the point here.)

But I’ve been eager to read and think more. I was delighted, therefore, to discover Wipf and Stocks’ New Monastic Library Series, of which School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism, a book edited by The Rutba House, is a part. (I’m also currently reading Community of the Transfiguration: The Journey of a New Monastic Community by Paul R. Dekar, and “Follow Me”: A History of Christian Intentionality by Ivan J. Kauffman, both of which I’m enjoying immensely.)

The ‘new’ monasticism differs from the ‘old’ in a number of ways. Here are three, for example: (i) vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience are relatively rare; (ii) while geographic proximity of members is preferable, it is not necessary; and (iii) distinctive religious habits have been largely replaced by non-distinctive Levis.

The movement of the Spirit from which this book is birthed sees itself as characterised by the following twelve marks:

1) Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire;

2) Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us;

3) Hospitality to the stranger;

4) Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation;

5) Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church;

6) Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the community along the lines of the old novitiate;

7) Nurturing common life among members of intentional community;

8) Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children;

9) Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life;

10) Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies;

11) Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18; and

12) Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.

This book attends to these marks, one chapter on each, exploring each theme drawing upon Scripture, contemporary examples, and personal experience.

Taking up Alasdair MacIntyre’s challenge to construct ‘local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us’, the contributors to this volume believe that when such longing as this instructs the church, ‘the local forms of community for which MacIntyre calls are no longer primarily for the sustenance of intellectual and moral life. Nor are they communities that withdraw from the world to insure their own survival and the flourishing of their members. Rather, within the life of the church a new monasticism exists to sustain knowledge of the gospel of the kingdom that was proclaimed, embodied, and accomplished in Jesus Christ. And the communities of the new monasticism exist for the sake of witness to Jesus Christ who is the life and hope of the world’.

This book is written not by theoreticians or monasticism-virgins cutting their idealistic and yuppie teeth in a utopian wilderness for a while before retreating back to ‘the real world’. Rather, these challenging essays betray a maturity and realism that one might expect from those who have the runs on the board, so to speak, whose commitment to embodying the kingdom which is truly the life of the ‘real world’ is humbling and utopia-destroying, and who love the church as God’s community in travail and often so slow to be on the way.