Tom Wright
describes how '
Leslie Newbigin, whose name you will know, a wonderful man I was privileged to know in the latter years of his life, was once asked whether he was optimistic or pessimistic about some issue. He said, "I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead."'
I am not too well so I am in bed with my laptop, not an uncommon thing, reading some articles on Schleiermacher and Barth and various blogs and a bit about Stanley Hauerwas, whose name I keep coming across.
I am thinking about my father's theological insights, we have quite an email dialogue going on. Reading Schleiermacher is helping me to understand my dad's doctrine of God. I am also thinking about my recent conversation with David
Ould and all of this in light of the last essay I had returned, which they are asking if they can put in the library (!) and whether I will always think what I articulated in that essay.
Such are the rambling thoughts of a woman with a horrible cold and too many things to read. I am trying to decide whether my perception of God's action in the world and in the lives of those who do not worship him, is shaped by theology, doctrine, or is also, in part, the product of an optimistic nature (mine).
You see Stanley Hauerwas seems to propose something rather less than an optimistic view of the world. In my last blog-post, I rather carelessly asserted that the world recognised the equality of women before the church. In a statement like this - world, equality and church all need expanding upon. It is too crass. It includes thoughts that Jesus broke social taboos to promote an equality between people which had the Roman Empire unsettled to no small degree and that the early church had its female preachers and teachers but then the later church, as we know, promoted a theology of womanhood leaving a lot to be desired. In fact female desire was what it obsessed over and blamed women for.
See here.
But I digress...a little. In David's response he cited a world that 'does not know Christ nor has no desire to please him'. I wonder whether I can confidently claim such a thing. Theologically, I think that I should and I suppose if we return to desire again, the 'world' does desire many things and many are not about pleasing Christ, however, it would seem that unconsciously some of the actions of this very world do please him, or at least that has been my experience. I remember being a discordant voice in a bible study group once for voicing what I perceived as the progression we had made in the last 50 years in terms of our treatment of one another. I was pleased to read in Tom Wright's 'Simply Christian', "People sometimes talk as if the last 50 years have seen a decline in morality. But actually these have been some of the most morally sensitive, indeed moralistic, times in recorded history. People care, and care passionately, about the places where the world needs putting to rights."
Over the summer I developed much reason to believe that the world, as I hint, even if rather naively with my reasoning about women, can exhibit the compassion of the God that created it, even if it does not attribute such action to God. With an open attitude to the idea that God's grace is at work in the world and through people who do not yet submit to Christ's Lordship, I worked with a ministry seeking partnership with secular care agencies who might not proclaim the faith, but do exhibit the behaviours of a compassionate God by his common grace. Spina explores the biblical narratives where, 'outsiders... do something that promotes the agenda of [God], their outsider status notwithstanding... and magnify the emphasis on God’s sovereignty and grace.'2
But it would seem that Hauwerwas entertains that:
“The world” is a culture of unbelief, hatred, and violence. The church is a gathering of people constituted by the death and resurrection of Christ in such a way that they lead lives so altered by the sanctifying power of the cross that they live by the law of forgiveness and the perfection of virtue. They are ruled by the Sermon on the Mount, and, since the church is the embodiment of the eschaton in time, it achieves the perfection there required of it. It is a “Messianic community” where the kingdom of God “takes visible, practical form.”
Karl Barth writes
proposing that 'the power of God can be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men.'3
However Barth goes on to believe that the church can be the inner circle of the Kingdom of God, and the state the outer.4 During my summer ministry experiences, I learnt that with a creation-centred theology, I could enthusiastically pursue relationship with secular agencies as I reflected on ever-increasing circles of community and God's grace in the world. I was left hope-filled.
Pleasing God? Common grace? At work in the world - yes.
I still have much to learn about how I articulate these things.
1 Tom Wright, Simply Christian
2 Spina, The Faith of the Outsider, 10
3 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 36
4 Green, (ed.), Karl Barth : theologian of freedom, 265
