Thérèse and Luther

One would have to be blind not to see that Thérèse's [of Lisieux] doctrine of the little way answers point by point the program outlined by the Reformers and that she presents the Church's bold, irrefutable answer to Protestant spirituality. One can find innumerable points of contact between Thérèse and the Reformers: the rejection of Old Testament justification by works; the demolition of one's own ideal of perfection to leave room for God's perfection in man; the transcendent note in the act of faith, the center of which remains in God; the existential fulfillment of the act of faith, which means more than a mere intellectual assent to the content of faith and involves utter personal fidelity toward the personal truth of God; and, finally, disregard for one's own failings—even for that joy over them that says felix culpa. But the contrasts between Thérèse and the Reformers are equally striking. Thérèse's little way is a way to perfection, a way for those who have courageously resolved to love and do nothing else but love. And the faults of which she speaks are not the sins that Luther had in mind; they are "faults that do not offend God". What divides Thérèse from Luther is that the drama of sin never entwines itself round her soul. She recognizes the drama of God's descending into the nothingness of the creature and the flame of love with which the Absolute, God, unites himself to his creature's nothingness….It is Luther's error to have profaned mystical truths, which presuppose an intimate exchange of love between God and man, by treating them as general formulae for the sinner's relation to God. – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit

Love and Life

"It seems to me that love can substitute for a long life. Jesus takes no account of time, since there is none in heaven. He must take account only of love." - St. Terese of Lisieux, in Two Sisters in the Spirit by Hans Urs von Balthasar


Thinking of the brevity of some of the lives of the saints (Terese only lived to be 24), I got to thinking, maybe some people burn so brightly with love for God that they burn out the wick of their lives early, while others of us sputter along. God's grace gives us long lives so we can at least return some of his love to him, however meager. Not a hard and fast rule, I know, but there have been so many holy people (canonized and not), that died young (Pier Giorgio, virgin martyrs, and others whose stories I know but names I can't remember), but there have been so many that you just wonder if maybe they just "burned out", in a very good, heavenly way.

Our Weakness Calls For God's Strength

My son sent me an interesting article by Michael Buckley on the need for priests (all of us have a priestly call) to value the experience of weakness as an entry into the priestly ministry of compassion. Buckley quoted St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10: "I will all the more gladly boast of my weakness that the power of God may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong." Of Christ, Paul said, "He is not weak in dealing with you, but powerful in you. For he was crucified in weakness; but lives by the power of God." 2 Cor. 13:3-4.

Buckley says, "Weakness relates us profoundly with other people. It allows us to feel with them the human condition, the human struggle and darkness and anguish that call out for salvation."

I am reminded of Terese of Lisieux who practiced humility and accepted denigration as gifts of suffering with the suffering Christ.

It seems that I can't enter into the suffering of others (suffer with them) if I can't accept my own suffering, my own limited circumstances of life. But it's pretty difficult not to opt for a grand life (that BMW!), or a life walled off from inconvenience and pain. (After all, what am I working for??) Problem is, how then can I answer the call of my vocation to enter into the suffering of others, to be com-passionate as Christ was (is)? The distance I maintain from my own suffering separates me just as much from others'. If vocation is a call to be for others, then it can't be about my own self-realization, how I hope to prove myself in the face of the crowd. Essentially, my "performance" is only before my God who made me, my sole director and critic!

Right Understanding as a Springboard to Action

In an interesting review, Stanley Fish described the modern state as holding itself "aloof" from any and all worldviews, and therefore having "no basis for judging [their] outcomes. . ." It therefore "cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost 'its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole'. . .".

This reminds me of Kierkegaard's criticism of modern rationality as endlessly commenting, and never committing. He argues for a type of understanding that promotes, not obstructs, action. In Training For Christianity, he writes (at p. 158): "in relation to action the right understanding is like the spring-board from which the jumper makes his leap. The clearer, the more exact, the more passionate (in a good sense) one's understanding of a matter is, by just so much does it lighten one's weight for action, or just so much easier is it for one who has to act to render himself light for action."

It's a good image: Jumping on a springboard lifts you into the air, lessens your weight, and makes it easier to adopt the form of the dive (the leap). The springboard is right understanding. Working towards right understanding is the key to right action. But the conscious decision of the modern state NOT to make a decision about world views, which most of us mimic, prevents us from reaching the right understanding needed for taking the action we must in order to be "saved." It's like the frog that perishes because the water it's in increases in temperature only degree by degree. Kierkegaard's response is to try to inflame fear at our inaction and the perdition we flirt with.

Stanley Rosen doesn't think Reason "gets it," i.e., knows what it's missing. According to Kierkegaard, only as individuals can we take action in the face of a culture that endlessly "discusses."

A Third World Close Moment

I had a "close moment" with students at Duke University whom I accompanied last month on a service project to Guatemala. Mitch, the student leader, sent me a post-trip reflection he wrote in which he mentioned a remark made by a fellow student who said, "It's nice that, here, our presence is enough." Mitch continues, "She said that at Duke, we are required to be intelligent, to present ourselves well, to be organized, to be extremely busy but not quite so busy that we can't handle it, and to be good at everything we do. In Lagunita Salvador, we did not need to be any of those things. Simply being present and showing our love meant everything. . ."

I got to thinking, and replied to Mitch, "I read your reflection, which was touching. I very much agree that being "present" is what counts. Learning that early is good, because being present to others helps us to be present to ourselves too, i.e. to appreciate that we can be ourselves and don't have to be somebody else. The third world dislodges us from our normal stance at the center of our own world, and helps us be happier (less pressured to be at the center) and more available to God's plan. There's the game of life in a nutshell, I would say!"

I was happy to be a part of their experience of growth, and Mitch's reflection was a welcome reminder to me of I need to go on these trips. It also reminded me of Guadium et Spes 24 (see below), which says that we discover ourselves by going out of ourselves to others.

(24. God, Who has fatherly concern for everyone, has willed that all men should constitute one family and treat one another in a spirit of brotherhood. For having been created in the image of God, Who "from one man has created the whole human race and made them live all over the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26), all men are called to one and the same goal, namely God Himself.

For this reason, love for God and neighbor is the first and greatest commandment. Sacred Scripture, however, teaches us that the love of God cannot be separated from love of neighbor: "If there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.... Love therefore is the fulfillment of the Law" (Rom. 13:9-10; cf. 1 John 4:20). To men growing daily more dependent on one another, and to a world becoming more unified every day, this truth proves to be of paramount importance.

Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may be one. . . as we are one" (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.(2))"

Solving the Faith-Works Question

Soren Kierkegaard, not a Catholic, stresses the importance of works ("works are required of a human being"), but not as a means of "earning heaven." ("Good works in the sense of meritoriousness are naturally an abomination to God.")

Kierkegaard then draws a very apt analogy: we should think of good works "as when a child gives his parents a present procured, however, with what the child has received from his parents; all the pretentiousness which otherwise resides in giving a gift disappears when the child has received from his parents the gift which he gives to the parents." Quoted in Works of Love (Harper Perennial), p. 378.

Sounds like a good solution to the Faith-Works question, doesn't it?

Wright Thoughts: Jesus

This year's Theology Conference at Wheaton is called "Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright", a kind of festschrift honoring and interacting with Wright's work. Wright is the Bishop of Durham, England in the Church of England, prominent in the conservative evangelical wing of the CoE.

I had always heard Wright was a great theologian, and had written a definitive book on the historicity of the resurrection, which was on my 'want list' of books to check out. I was first prompted to pick up one of his books (one of his newest, Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision when I heard he was part of the "new perspective" on Paul. I first got interested in the new perspective when I heard a somewhat glib summary of its thesis: the Protestant reformers read Paul wrong. As a former Protestant, now Catholic, I was intrigued.

Now I'll admit to not knowing too much about the new perspective (theology being more my avocation than what I was trained in, and being unable to find a good summary), so my only real basis is the one book of Wright's that I read, but Justification was very good, so I was very interested in this year's conference. The setup of the conference is focused on Wright's work on the historical Jesus on Friday and his work on Paul on Saturday (call it the "Search for the Historical Paul", perhaps).

Now, the so-called search for the historical Jesus has some serious criticisms that can be leveled against it (Jesus Seminar: Marbles? Seriously?), but Wright's is one of the most orthodox reconstructions of Jesus. I'm going to try and hit some of the things in each talk that stuck out to me.


Richard Hays: "Knowing Jesus: Story, History, and the Question of Truth" dealing with Wright's book Jesus and the Victory of God (JVG).

Hays is a good friend of Wrights and studied under him. He's currently at Duke University. He went over Wright's methodology. Some highlights:

*Hypothesis and verification – Wright differs from most historical Jesus scholars, rejecting their reductionist approaches. He takes the whole of the canonical evidence and formulates a hypothesis that will include the maximum amount of data. A 'hermeneutic of trust', if you will.

*Double similarity vs. double dissimilarity – Jesus Seminar (and others) tend to say the more Christ looks like his Jewish background or early Christian conceptions of Jesus, the less likely he is to be authentic. Wright flips this around.

*Skepticism of form and redaction criticism

*Extensive use of Second Temple Judaism material – this was fascinating to me, the way he firmly grounds a Jewish Jesus in his Jewish context.

Hays raised some concerns with Wright's methodology, however:

*Exclusion of the Gospel of John – Wright responded that this was a necessary self-limitation to even get the book a hearing, given the a priori assumptions of the academy to the historicity of John. It's essentially fighting them on their own ground.

*The relation of Wright's reconstruction of Jesus to the Church's confessional tradition. – Wright tends to avoid Christian creedal/confessional conceptions of Jesus, keeping them at arm's length from his historical assessment. Wright did make a good point in response, however, in that the confessions, written to defend the divinity and humanity of Christ in Hellenistic thought-forms, tend to screen out/obscure the kingdom-preaching, messianic-thinking, Jewish Jesus of history, as well as the political repercussions of Jesus.


Marianne Meye Thompson (Fuller Theological Seminary) – "The Gospel of John Meets Jesus and the Victory of God"

Thompson deals with the lacuna of the John in Wright's book and I thought she had some valuable insights. Essentially she says that Wright's synoptic-only reconstruction of Jesus is essentially Johannine. Wright tended to agree, again stating why he felt he couldn't use John more. Thompson made some good comments about Jesus as the Temple from the Gospel of John.

Interesting take away on the story of "doubting Thomas": Thomas' mistake lay not in his empiricist refusal to believe what he could not see but in his historicist refusal to believe the apostolic witness.


Wright then gave the chapel address from Ephesians. One of the things I like about Wright is his refusal to bracket out Ephesians, Colossians and other books as being deuteron-Pauline. He believes the books attributed to Paul are by Paul.


Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat (University of Toronto) – kind of fell asleep during this one. Been up since midnight. Led off with a Phil Ochs song (I enjoyed that). Didn't so much like their style of presenting in dialogue with each other. Not too sure how it related to Wright. It was trying to pull out some social ethical implications of his work but focused mostly on criticizing the financial market economy crash. Eh.


Nicholas Perrin – "Jesus Eschatology and Kingdom Ethics: Ever the Twain Shall Meet"

Perrin is a professor at Wheaton and a good friend/student of Wright and helped get him here/organize the conference. Didn't take too much away from this, though. He was a bit rushed to me and it was a bit over my head. He laid out some themes in Wright's work that I'm really interested in:

*Jesus as Israel – Jesus embodies the whole historical trajectory of Israel

*Continuing exile – Jews of Jesus' day viewed themselves as still in exile and Jesus saw himself as bringing them back.

*Integrative biblical theology – bridges OT and NT – Israel and Jesus-as-Israel

*Synthesis of soteriology and ecclesiology. Salvation is corporate and personal (complimentary and mutually strengthening, as opposed to collectivist and individualist, which are opposed) – basically, bringing an emphasis on the community back into soteriology.

*Wright eschews ahistorical positivism and historical skepticism – countering a docetic tendency in Protestantism

*Wright extends Jesus' mission to the historical-political sphere.

I did take this clever little bit away:

Western Protestantism often reduces the church to Jesus' Facebook friends.

:D

(And just for fun: Scott Hahn is attending the conference! I said hi and shook his hand.)


Will probably have more later. Right now I need to get to the evening keynote address by Wright about Jesus.