"The Eucharist is a celebration of plenitude; it is a recognition of God's provision. It is a challenge to all politics of scarcity. Here at this table, the truth about God's world is told: there is enough. We need not hoard out of fear that there will be too little. We need not fight to get what others have. There is enough. God will provide. God will redeem."--Scott Bader-Saye
When we ask in the Lord's Prayer for "our daily bread," we are asking for more than physical sustenance, for our subsistence is found in a constant renewal of revelation. This revelation is found in both word and table. The Table of the Lord, the Lord's Supper, should be far more central to Protestant Free Church worship than it most often is. God freely offers to reveal himself, and the heart of this revelation is in the Word of God, who is Christ, offered in preaching (as well as all aspects of scripture) and in the Lord's Supper. The Supper is one place that Christians can learn greater discernment of the presence of Christ in his people, and this extends out by implication to the project of a Christian college.
P. T. Forsyth has quipped, "Memorials are meant for heroes who have perished," but this is a bit mean perhaps. A memorial is also a biblical remembrance. The Greek word for remembrance, anamnesis, can be translated "recall by making present." To "remember something" in this way is not to treat it as something that no longer has any relevance to our lives. When the Jews remember the Passover; when Christians remember the Lord's Supper, we are not saying, "Oh well, that was then; this is now." No, when we recall the deeds of God, we are making them present. Or better said, the Spirit is making them present in our discernment. The act of remembrance is a prayer of sorts that God might re-member us. We are no longer spectators outside of a performance. We are worshippers; we are participants in some sense in the drama of God's salvation.
The great Jewish Rabbi Gamaliel said, "In every generation a man must so regard himself as if he came forth himself from Egypt. [. . .] And you shall tell your son on that day saying, "It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth from Egypt." As Scripture exhorts us, "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes." Christ's sacrifice upon the cross, "once for all time" as the Book of Hebrews tells us, is ever present in us his people. This participation mediates to us profound truths, especially the spiritual unity of Christ in his people, and this is deeply important to Christian pedagogy. As a professor, for example, I must learn to discern the Lord's presence in other Christians in the classroom, as well as in any truth or truth-telling that takes place.
The Baptist preacher C.H. Spurgeon reminds us, as well: real presence means spiritual nourishment, the experience of being filled. I would contend that regular partaking of communion prepares us all for academic and intellectual nourishment--present in the gathered community of Christian learning, as well as in the content of that learning. Am I saying that the regular taking of communion will prepare the student for intellectual discernment? Yes, if rightly received and discerned: "Man is what he eats" (Alexsander Schmemann).
Now, of course, we can and often do resist this. I am not professing a kind of pedagogical or ethical ex opere operato. It is important to remember that grace is everywhere but that it is not available under all conditions, and the nourishment of Christ's presence in the Eucharist opens us up to the gifts of discernment that we need in order to recognize the voice of God in other aspects of our daily living. Eucharist means "thanksgiving," and we need to recall that learning should be possessed by gratitude. Teaching and presence go together, as the gifts and creatures of Supper and Water remind us:
The Eucharist is the site at which the community of the baptized and the work of the Holy Spirit are joined to effect the transformation of persons into an image of the divine fellowship of the Triune God. The Eucharist produces a people who live out of the giftedness of their creatureliness, who make actual the love and generosity, fellowship and freedom that characterize the life of God (1 Corinthians 11). Baptism initiates us into and the Eucharist sustains us in the life we were created for; participation in the ceaseless flow of caritas between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This passage by Debra Dean Murphy teaches that the Eucharist is at the heart of the Trinity's engraced world--the words of institution call us to remember that all matter is finally God-dependent. Just as there should be an open table in learning, so should the partaking be open. This, then, is at the heart of interpersonal and interrelational learning. As the Lord's Supper offers a different polis from our world's, so should the politics of the Christian classroom be a different politics. Communion is a sign of community. The love affair of the Trinity imparts to us the grace we need to love each other in the academic life.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Baptism, Renunciation, and Renewal
"Therefore, my dear friends, flee from the worship of idols. I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." (I Cor 10: 14-17)
In light of Graham Ward's point about our agency and action as individuals being embedded in spiritual practices, I wold like to focus for several posts on some of the spiritual practices of the Church and ask what they have to say to our lives as Christian educators. It is impossible to live liturgy alone. Let me return here to Dulles' notion of the Church as sacrament, arguing as well that Christian education is sacramental.
First, a few caveats: I am not terribly interested in engaging the debate between what makes something an ordinance or a sacrament of Christian worship and what makes something sacramental in the larger more open-ended sense. Nor am I particularly interested in investing the term with an inviolable necessity. I am only too aware, as my friend David Stricklin has observed, that the word "sacrament" does not easily roll off many a Baptist tongue. What the word does impart is a historical Christian sense that God can use the physical things of creation to point to and impart a measure of his gracious presence and help. Finally, I am not very uptight about whether we should number the official church sacraments as two, three, or seven. Instead, I would propose a charitable overview that allows for some ambiguity in the exact definitions and resources because I want to examine in brief how the sacramental nature of being Church does have an impact on our students' pedagogical development and is, therefore, worthy of examination in a Christian philosophy of teaching.
Let us begin, then, where we begin in the Christian life. Faith and obedience are at the heart of our baptisms. Baptism is a public sign of our entrance into Christ's church, a renunciation of the devil and all his works, and a passage from one world to the next. Paul in Romans speaks of it as the joining of our identity with Christ; our life is now added to the narrative of the cross, burial, and resurrection of Jesus:
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Rom 6:3-5)
Baptisms, then, are a commitment to a worldview embodied in a particular socio-cultural context, and therefore, for Christians they can also remind us of a commitment to an academic and/or liturgical community differing in fundamental ways from the secular academy. Yet stated simply this way, it is tempting to overlook that in baptism the action of grace is not something that we do but something that God imparts. As my former teacher Ralph Wood puts it:
A baptism by total immersion makes ever so vivid, this is God's act: we are drowned with Christ in a watery grave, plunged into the aboriginal chaos out of which God fashioned the cosmos, in order that we may be raised with Christ as new creations, emerging wet-haired from the waters of life like new-born babies.
The radical and decisive nature of our baptisms is ideally renewed each time we witness another's baptism.
Of course, the position I am advocating here is more familiar to British Baptists, who see baptism as the sacramental and normative act of conversion (e.g G.R. Beasley-Murray); this is a position admittedly alien to the experience of many U.S. Southern Baptists, who tend to let the altar call and commitment card serve as the initial public testimony. (The exception to this is the rush of excitement I’ve seen in congregations when noted sinners have turned to Jesus and been baptized.)
Nonetheless, I believe seeing baptism as sacramental is something that Baptists of all stripes in education can learn from. As John Colwell observes, sacraments are the sign of God's promise of grace; they function as seals of the divine freedom to act as he will yet the assurance that he always keeps his promises. Baptism is our pledge based on God's pledge to us that we are his, joined to Christ and his Body. We come to "indwell the gospel event." Pedagogically, our baptisms are reminders that the gospel is a call to martyrdom, to being a witness with its suffering, and this includes the "white martyrdom" of a life of costly service through study.
We must embrace, even if we also despise, the shame that may come with taking on the name of Christ in the larger academy, but also the general athletic striving of learning. The suffering, even humiliation, involved in learning mediates to us aspects of Christ's own suffering. The burial and birthing of baptism brings us close to the outpouring of love that Jesus gave us, so that we may enter into what John Milbank has called "the circularity of gift" that is the profound cruciform shape of the Christian life--a shape that Christian pedagogy cannot escape.
In light of Graham Ward's point about our agency and action as individuals being embedded in spiritual practices, I wold like to focus for several posts on some of the spiritual practices of the Church and ask what they have to say to our lives as Christian educators. It is impossible to live liturgy alone. Let me return here to Dulles' notion of the Church as sacrament, arguing as well that Christian education is sacramental.
First, a few caveats: I am not terribly interested in engaging the debate between what makes something an ordinance or a sacrament of Christian worship and what makes something sacramental in the larger more open-ended sense. Nor am I particularly interested in investing the term with an inviolable necessity. I am only too aware, as my friend David Stricklin has observed, that the word "sacrament" does not easily roll off many a Baptist tongue. What the word does impart is a historical Christian sense that God can use the physical things of creation to point to and impart a measure of his gracious presence and help. Finally, I am not very uptight about whether we should number the official church sacraments as two, three, or seven. Instead, I would propose a charitable overview that allows for some ambiguity in the exact definitions and resources because I want to examine in brief how the sacramental nature of being Church does have an impact on our students' pedagogical development and is, therefore, worthy of examination in a Christian philosophy of teaching.
Let us begin, then, where we begin in the Christian life. Faith and obedience are at the heart of our baptisms. Baptism is a public sign of our entrance into Christ's church, a renunciation of the devil and all his works, and a passage from one world to the next. Paul in Romans speaks of it as the joining of our identity with Christ; our life is now added to the narrative of the cross, burial, and resurrection of Jesus:
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Rom 6:3-5)
Baptisms, then, are a commitment to a worldview embodied in a particular socio-cultural context, and therefore, for Christians they can also remind us of a commitment to an academic and/or liturgical community differing in fundamental ways from the secular academy. Yet stated simply this way, it is tempting to overlook that in baptism the action of grace is not something that we do but something that God imparts. As my former teacher Ralph Wood puts it:
A baptism by total immersion makes ever so vivid, this is God's act: we are drowned with Christ in a watery grave, plunged into the aboriginal chaos out of which God fashioned the cosmos, in order that we may be raised with Christ as new creations, emerging wet-haired from the waters of life like new-born babies.
The radical and decisive nature of our baptisms is ideally renewed each time we witness another's baptism.
Of course, the position I am advocating here is more familiar to British Baptists, who see baptism as the sacramental and normative act of conversion (e.g G.R. Beasley-Murray); this is a position admittedly alien to the experience of many U.S. Southern Baptists, who tend to let the altar call and commitment card serve as the initial public testimony. (The exception to this is the rush of excitement I’ve seen in congregations when noted sinners have turned to Jesus and been baptized.)
Nonetheless, I believe seeing baptism as sacramental is something that Baptists of all stripes in education can learn from. As John Colwell observes, sacraments are the sign of God's promise of grace; they function as seals of the divine freedom to act as he will yet the assurance that he always keeps his promises. Baptism is our pledge based on God's pledge to us that we are his, joined to Christ and his Body. We come to "indwell the gospel event." Pedagogically, our baptisms are reminders that the gospel is a call to martyrdom, to being a witness with its suffering, and this includes the "white martyrdom" of a life of costly service through study.
We must embrace, even if we also despise, the shame that may come with taking on the name of Christ in the larger academy, but also the general athletic striving of learning. The suffering, even humiliation, involved in learning mediates to us aspects of Christ's own suffering. The burial and birthing of baptism brings us close to the outpouring of love that Jesus gave us, so that we may enter into what John Milbank has called "the circularity of gift" that is the profound cruciform shape of the Christian life--a shape that Christian pedagogy cannot escape.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Individual Action is Relational Action
Graham Ward in an essay entitled "A Christian Act: Politics and Liturgical Practice" sets out a model for describing human action. His terms are similar to Kenneth Burke's dramaturigal model. Ward suggests that Christians begin with the principle "Your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col 3:3). He then asks, "What kind of act is a Christian act?" He examines this question from six perspectives, all of which overlap to a large extent:
- Agent: The actions of the Christian are not those of an autonomous individual who claims self-sufficiency but of an individual who is wrapped in a vinculum caritatis, a bond of love. The Christian act is one that abides in Christ, that imitates Christ. The Christian agent is one who sojourns in this world, even while claiming it for Christ. This journey is traveled within the koinonia fellowship of the Church and experienced in the unity of the Lord's supper. As such, each Christian is called to resist individual privitization of his or her life and recognize the "interrelationality" of being a being on his or her way to a "final recognition of who she is in Christ."
- Nature of the Action: Our actions, then, are Christological in orientation; they are discovered to be such at the level of our practices. We reach an understanding of them by participating in the Christian practice, which God names us through. We cannot name the nature of the action ourselves, for it is God who decides this as we participate in his will.
- Evaluation of the Action: We are limited in our ability to judge our actions, though we must attempt to do so even as we are aware of our limitations. "We name and judge far better the more we are subject to God," and this happens as we enter into his eschatological expectations. We orient ourselves to his end purposes.
- Object: We truly discover the object of our actions as we submit all things to Christ. The object of our actions is to be situated within the economy of redemption; thus, we learn to pursue the good , true, and beautiful as God intends. When we do so, our objects become worship. "In such a labouring, the agent is priestly, the act liturgical, and the object sacramental."
- Effect of the Act: The effect of the act upon object and agent is transfiguration: to be obedient and desire what God desires. We learn that we are not truly transparent to ourselves even as we obey and grow in obedience.
- Dispositions and Affections: These operate within a Christ-centered form of reasoning; we become more and more inclined to a direction of discipline, that inclined to the way of Jesus.
All of this suggests that our motives and intentions are mixed and failable and only become less so through the actions of grace upon us even as we enter in and seek to obey. We cannot truly act in a free manner as God intends without the relationships of Church and Triune God.
Road to serfdom
This article in Bloomberg News says, Microsoft is considering moving multiple jobs out of the US because of the many new anti-business policies being enacted in the US. One thing people often forget is that no politician can 'force' a business to operate in their city, state, or country, so we have to be careful when talking about increasing corporate income taxes or burdensome regulations.
The article also reminded me of the oldie but goodie - Hayek's Road to Serfdom, cartoon version (2 minute read).
EXIT QUESTION: Which of the pages in the cartoon do you think best represents the June 2009 USA?
Monday, June 8, 2009
Taxing Health Care Benefits
This should get interesting pretty quickly!!!
The Obama Administration is getting serious about health care reform. There are several concerns to deal with but the administration is focused on reducing the number of uninsured Americans.
The solution includes taxing employer provided health care benefits. Obama hammered Senator John McCain during the general election for proposing such a heinous idea. It could become law.
The Obama Administration is getting serious about health care reform. There are several concerns to deal with but the administration is focused on reducing the number of uninsured Americans.
The solution includes taxing employer provided health care benefits. Obama hammered Senator John McCain during the general election for proposing such a heinous idea. It could become law.
Ratio et Fidei -- part 3
Stephen K. Moroney has attempted to offer a more complete model of the ways in which sin and rationality impact the Christian:
Rationality begins with the disciple's trust that the master has something to offer, and this trust is absolutely necessary to develop the skills intrinsic to ever understanding the truth in practice. Critical thinking that never trusts in authorities is incapable of anything like critical realism. There is no engaging the reality that is there until the capacity to embrace both theory and practice is in place. Not even this committed involvement suggests a uniform pedagogy for all learners. As Paul Griffiths points out, a teacher cannot adopt "identical argumentative strategies" for differing persons with different stages of "catechetical preparation" (152). This is especially a disturbing question when we deal with resistant learners, ones who have a "volitional depravity" that robs them continually of the humility necessary to undertake the discipline in question. The psychikos are not neutral but rebellious, even when willfully blind to that interior antagonism.
Nonetheless, as Reinhold Hütter has reasoned, our mental judgments can be redeemed. This restoration comes about alongside a "metaphysics of creation: "[a] knowledge of creatures that is not directed to its dutiful end, namely, the knowledge of God, is a distorted, sinful knowledge. . . . sinful knowledge by its lack of reference to and reverence for the One who grants being in the first place."
Curiosity is not always a virtue; it sometimes kills the cat when he takes to sniffing poison. A reorientation of our desire to answer questions must be directed to the contemplation of God and God's good creation, including the creaturely component called humanism. A metaphysics of creation and an ordering of our loves centers upon the contemplation of God and the signs of his goodness.
When Christian education does this it resists the critical distance so prized by the modern university; instead, it enters into a divine dance of desire, partaking of the proximity and distance of the lover, ever drawing into delight, not curious, but committed and ecstatic. The offering of God's presence and the offering of his perceived absence are both acts of one who would seduce us with his own divine, The triune community of love, and approaches to God and his truth are both intertwined as freedom and obedience are always mixed in love.
In such a vision of education, nihilism is replaced with laughter.
- Our minds engage knowledge in both subjective and objective ways, though perhaps the two are finally intermingled.
- God, humanity, and creation can all be treated as both subjects and objects.
- The regenerate mind or new nature, the communities which shape our knowledge, and individual traits of our personalities all have a part in this rational engagement.
Rationality begins with the disciple's trust that the master has something to offer, and this trust is absolutely necessary to develop the skills intrinsic to ever understanding the truth in practice. Critical thinking that never trusts in authorities is incapable of anything like critical realism. There is no engaging the reality that is there until the capacity to embrace both theory and practice is in place. Not even this committed involvement suggests a uniform pedagogy for all learners. As Paul Griffiths points out, a teacher cannot adopt "identical argumentative strategies" for differing persons with different stages of "catechetical preparation" (152). This is especially a disturbing question when we deal with resistant learners, ones who have a "volitional depravity" that robs them continually of the humility necessary to undertake the discipline in question. The psychikos are not neutral but rebellious, even when willfully blind to that interior antagonism.
Nonetheless, as Reinhold Hütter has reasoned, our mental judgments can be redeemed. This restoration comes about alongside a "metaphysics of creation: "[a] knowledge of creatures that is not directed to its dutiful end, namely, the knowledge of God, is a distorted, sinful knowledge. . . . sinful knowledge by its lack of reference to and reverence for the One who grants being in the first place."
Curiosity is not always a virtue; it sometimes kills the cat when he takes to sniffing poison. A reorientation of our desire to answer questions must be directed to the contemplation of God and God's good creation, including the creaturely component called humanism. A metaphysics of creation and an ordering of our loves centers upon the contemplation of God and the signs of his goodness.
When Christian education does this it resists the critical distance so prized by the modern university; instead, it enters into a divine dance of desire, partaking of the proximity and distance of the lover, ever drawing into delight, not curious, but committed and ecstatic. The offering of God's presence and the offering of his perceived absence are both acts of one who would seduce us with his own divine, The triune community of love, and approaches to God and his truth are both intertwined as freedom and obedience are always mixed in love.
In such a vision of education, nihilism is replaced with laughter.
Ratio et Fidei -- part 2
As Colin Gunton and Robert Jenson observed, to know that the Logos, the divine structure of rationality, has become incarnate is to recognize that nothing that can be said of reason itself that can violate the revelation of God in Christ. We have beheld rationality himself. Jesus is the Torah, the Reality, and the Energeia, that is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of all existence.
Rationality does not begin in a preconceived pattern by which we then put God in the dock for judgment. Instead, the revelation of God's self is the beginning place for our measure of epistemology. This claim does not mean that we can insist on an imperialist set of claims that are closed off to examination by others, but it does imply that rationality itself does not operate in a neutral space. Any set of warranted beliefs will contain the logical assumption that they are the beginning point of evaluation. Alan J. Torrance puts it this way:
[I]t is also the case that one may not be able to demonstrate one's reason's to be valid or properly basic to people operating on the basis of other incompatible basic beliefs. To expect this to be possible would itself be a contradiction of the perception that God's self-disclosure includes his self-identification. It would be to deny that not only the propriety but also the perception of that propriety derive from and are carried by the divine self-communication itself. In other words, the very nature of our "properly basic" beliefs is that they do not acknowledge the assumption that other suppositions constitute a more basic Archimedean point from which we can assess the proper basicality of the beliefs communicated in and through God's self-communication. To insist that any "information" communicated must be ratifiable, confirmable, and hence discernible with recourse to basic beliefs quite independent of the divine address constitutes, of course, a return to the Socratic! (45)
Torrance's radical point is that rationality is not an uncommitted, context-free matter. It is not a Socratic midwivery in which we uncover what is already present and suppressed in the student. Rationality occurs within what Wittgenstein called a Bild, a way and form of life. The critical immmanentism of Socrates is the notion that reason's evidentialisms arise from within us, that is, from within a supposed self-evident criteria. But Christian teaching would seem to show that rationality is a capacity that has been damaged by the fall. Instead, rationality must begin within a practice, but that practice--an offering of participative grace in Christ's church--must cultivate and reform the damaged psyche. For the Christian, the way to the redemption of our rationality is to recognize that our rational abilities must "be interpreted as the gift of participating by the Spirit in the incarnate Son's epistemic, noetic, and semantic communion with the Father" (Torrance), that is with Jesus' full connection with the Father in all matters involving understanding, rational and verbal.
This line of reasoning is not meant to imply that non-Christians are capable of true reason. Just the opposite! But, nonetheless, it is to reason that Christians should know who the source of rational ability is. Likewise, it is also not to deny that Christians are capable of great irrationality. History is full of such testimonies. Nevertheless, we must ask if "the mind of Christ" implies a differing order of thinking--a cruciform or baptismal epistemology:
[A]mong the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. . . .we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual (pneumatikos).--Those who are unspiritual (psychikos)-- do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are discerned spiritually (I Cor 2:6-7, 12-14).
Lois Malcolm has observed in this passage that the psychikos, those dependent on the self-serving practical mind, and the pneumatikos, those who transcend the practical mind for the mind with access to the Spirit's understanding, are two differing ways of understanding the world. To have the mind of Christ is to be given a new Triune perspective on the nature of reality.
Rationality does not begin in a preconceived pattern by which we then put God in the dock for judgment. Instead, the revelation of God's self is the beginning place for our measure of epistemology. This claim does not mean that we can insist on an imperialist set of claims that are closed off to examination by others, but it does imply that rationality itself does not operate in a neutral space. Any set of warranted beliefs will contain the logical assumption that they are the beginning point of evaluation. Alan J. Torrance puts it this way:
[I]t is also the case that one may not be able to demonstrate one's reason's to be valid or properly basic to people operating on the basis of other incompatible basic beliefs. To expect this to be possible would itself be a contradiction of the perception that God's self-disclosure includes his self-identification. It would be to deny that not only the propriety but also the perception of that propriety derive from and are carried by the divine self-communication itself. In other words, the very nature of our "properly basic" beliefs is that they do not acknowledge the assumption that other suppositions constitute a more basic Archimedean point from which we can assess the proper basicality of the beliefs communicated in and through God's self-communication. To insist that any "information" communicated must be ratifiable, confirmable, and hence discernible with recourse to basic beliefs quite independent of the divine address constitutes, of course, a return to the Socratic! (45)
Torrance's radical point is that rationality is not an uncommitted, context-free matter. It is not a Socratic midwivery in which we uncover what is already present and suppressed in the student. Rationality occurs within what Wittgenstein called a Bild, a way and form of life. The critical immmanentism of Socrates is the notion that reason's evidentialisms arise from within us, that is, from within a supposed self-evident criteria. But Christian teaching would seem to show that rationality is a capacity that has been damaged by the fall. Instead, rationality must begin within a practice, but that practice--an offering of participative grace in Christ's church--must cultivate and reform the damaged psyche. For the Christian, the way to the redemption of our rationality is to recognize that our rational abilities must "be interpreted as the gift of participating by the Spirit in the incarnate Son's epistemic, noetic, and semantic communion with the Father" (Torrance), that is with Jesus' full connection with the Father in all matters involving understanding, rational and verbal.
This line of reasoning is not meant to imply that non-Christians are capable of true reason. Just the opposite! But, nonetheless, it is to reason that Christians should know who the source of rational ability is. Likewise, it is also not to deny that Christians are capable of great irrationality. History is full of such testimonies. Nevertheless, we must ask if "the mind of Christ" implies a differing order of thinking--a cruciform or baptismal epistemology:
[A]mong the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. . . .we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual (pneumatikos).--Those who are unspiritual (psychikos)-- do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are discerned spiritually (I Cor 2:6-7, 12-14).
Lois Malcolm has observed in this passage that the psychikos, those dependent on the self-serving practical mind, and the pneumatikos, those who transcend the practical mind for the mind with access to the Spirit's understanding, are two differing ways of understanding the world. To have the mind of Christ is to be given a new Triune perspective on the nature of reality.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)