A Hymn for Ascensiontide

This is a Latin hymn of unknown origin, translated into English in 1861, according to the BCP.
The fourth verse is most striking:

O Lord most high, eternal King,
By Thee redeemed Thy praise we sing;
The bonds of death are burst by Thee,
And grace has won the victory.


Ascending to the Father’s throne
Thou claim’st the kingdom as Thine own;
Thy days of mortal weakness o’er
All power is Thine forevermore.


To Thee the whole creation now
Shall, in its threefold order, bow,
Of things on earth, and things on high,
And things that underneath us lie.


In awe and wonder angels see
How changed is man’s estate by Thee,
How flesh makes pure as flesh did stain,
And Thou, true God, in flesh dost reign.


Be Thou our Joy, O mighty Lord,
As Thou wilt be our great Reward;
Let all our glory be in Thee
Both now and through eternity.


All praise from every heart and tongue
To Thee, ascended Lord, be sung;
All praise to God the Father be
And Holy Ghost eternally.

Feast Day of St Athanasius

Today is the feast day of St Athanasius in the Western tradition, and I am reminded of how highly T. F. Torrance regarded this Father of the church, particularly for his insistence that the Holy Spirit, like the Son, is homoousios (consubstantial) with the Father. A friend who studied with Torrance in Edinburgh said that Torrance's practice was to set up an icon of Athanasius at the front of the classroom when he lectured, and it became difficult to tell who was speaking--Torrance or Athanasius! (There's a Torrancian/Barthian parable here re: witnessing to what is other than ourselves . . .)

Dead or Alive?

Jeff Clarke outlines 4 reasons that he chooses to remain in the Pentecostal tradition. I resonate to a large degree with Jeff's perspectives in his blog postings, particularly his analysis of where the tradition needs to address some serious areas of concern. I can appreciate his 4 reasons for staying, too, but I can't help but wonder, when I read an aside at the end of reason #2, if some of the less-than-positive features of the tradition's shaping influence are peeking through in spite of Jeff's best efforts to set them aside. Specifically, he characterizes a service he attended at a church of another denomination as "dead," as "lifeless and irrelevant."

Here's how I take issue with that bit of Pentecostal baggage:

1. This is irretrievably a subjective judgment. What one person pronounces dead will be seen by another as appropriately sober-minded.

2. What is the assumed opposite of "dead"? (I'm sorely tempted to reference Mad Max in "Princess Bride" here, and fellow fans already know what I mean.) I get the impression that the adjective/antonym is not "alive," in the sense that the Holy Spirit is actively bringing the life of Jesus to the congregated saints, but something more like "lively," which translates as, "I really feel the presence of the Spirit here today." The former is a matter for us to affirm as God's work in and among us, the latter is about the level of our emotional engagement; which of these two is more in line with the otherwise very helpful tenor of Jeff's usual posts? I attempted to make a similar point in a reply to Andrew Gabriel when he spoke of "a living experience of the Spirit."

With Jeff and Andrew, I recognize the value in a truly Pentecost-shaped theology. At the same time, though, I expect that nothing short of a Pentecostal-type miraculous intervention is what it will take to move the tradition to shed some of this kind of baggage. Sadly, I think, features such as the appetite for emotional stimulation are the sorts of things that 20th-century Pentecostalism has "bequeathed" to the wider church, when the bequest could and should have been--and still can be--so much richer.

So, kudos and blessings to scholars like Jeff who are staying. The tradition needs you and your input. May the positive influence of the tradition in your direction be strong and the negative rub-off be minimized through the gracious work of the Spirit, who is--and who makes the church of the Lord Jesus, including its worship services--most certainly alive!

The Name of Jesus

At the Name of Jesus, every knee shall bow,

Every tongue confess Him King of glory now;

’Tis the Father’s pleasure we should call Him Lord,

Who from the beginning was the mighty Word.

Mighty and mysterious in the highest height,

God from everlasting, very light of light:

In the Father’s bosom with the Spirit blest,

Love, in love eternal, rest, in perfect rest.

At His voice creation sprang at once to sight,

All the angel faces, all the hosts of light,

Thrones and dominations, stars upon their way,

All the heavenly orders, in their great array.

Humbled for a season, to receive a name

From the lips of sinners unto whom He came,

Faithfully He bore it, spotless to the last,

Brought it back victorious when from death He passed.

Bore it up triumphant with its human light,

Through all ranks of creatures, to the central height,

To the throne of Godhead, to the Father’s breast;

Filled it with the glory of that perfect rest.

Name Him, brothers, name Him, with love strong as death

But with awe and wonder, and with bated breath!

He is God the Savior, He is Christ the Lord,

Ever to be worshipped, trusted and adored.

In your hearts enthrone Him; there let Him subdue

All that is not holy, all that is not true;

Crown Him as your Captain in temptation’s hour;

Let His will enfold you in its light and power.

Brothers, this Lord Jesus shall return again,

With His Father’s glory, with His angel train;

For all wreaths of empire meet upon His brow,

And our hearts confess Him King of glory now.

Church and culture

Paula Huston, in an interview with The Other Journal, speaks of monasticism, Lenten disciplines, and community. What struck me is her assertion that

if we are going to be effective witnesses for Christ from within culture, whether as cultural critics or culture shapers, we must be willing to look with a clear eye at the habitual patterns of behavior and thought that dominate our society. If we’re to avoid hypocrisy, however, we must first be willing to turn the same assessing gaze on ourselves.

In a course I'm facilitating, students are reading Timothy Gombis, Eugene Peterson, and Jamie Smith and how they work through the same themes in Ephesians. The assignment on these is due tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to their reflections.

Jesus is Lord, and I am not

I just came across Penelopepiscopal's blog, and I followed rabbit trails to this post from two years ago. I really like her closing line, very appropriate for Annunciation Day: " To let go of being in Planning My Life mode long enough to allow oneself to be visited by angels and surprised by joy."

Ellen Charry on happiness (and the church)

Ellen Charry says that “all persons are blessed by God to enjoy themselves and their life in him. Believers learn this through the ministrations of the church that orient people toward their proper identity. When believers properly grasp that identity, they should want to become in practice who they are in God by definition” (162, emphasis added).

This is an excellent combination of the personal and the corporate in practical, spiritual theology. I'm instructing a course in Spiritual Disciplines (halfway through) and decided at the outset to focus on just such a combination. (The course used to be two courses--last time I led them, the first focused on personal spiritual formation, the second on the same in the church; this time, since the two courses were reduced to one and also because I think this is a crucial stance, I've worked to make it an exploration of both personal--not individual!--and corporate.)

She goes on, “Christian theology, eager to inculcate humility, has at times failed to encourage the natural skills and strengths humans possess for executing their calling as God’s emissaries in the world. . . . Trust in these may be construed as lack of complete trust in God, as though God and self are in competition. However, the opposite is true: failing to be confident in the freedom and creativity that become skills for building the world betrays distrust in God. Confidence in forwarding God’s purposes for creation advances humility in a robust way, a way that uses the self for the sake of divine enjoyment. Trust in one’s obedience to who one is in God is both properly humble and properly proud to be God’s faithful and successful servant” (163). Again, this fits with what I'm trying to do; the course starts with "our position in Christ" and the final project is a paper on vocation.

Charry, Ellen T. God and the Art of Happiness. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010.

Paying attention to critics

I'm sold on the usefulness of the Web for education, so it's important that I hear a different perspective once in a while. So . . . I checked out Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains and Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen from our provincial library system. I was really disappointed with the former; Carr just kept saying that the way the Internet is shaping the way we learn is bad because it's not like learning according to a modernist view of what it means to know. I've just begun the latter, but I'm already enjoying it more, despite its being published in 1995.

"Flipping" instruction

Funny--I was calling this a "flip" before I knew that others are. In a small way it's what we're doing with a course I'm now facilitating, and it's what I'm proposing as the heart of our Distance Ed program at Horizon.

The idea? That we take the risk of dividing what we've worked so hard over the past few years to integrate--content and interaction--and use the web to "deliver" content, reserving class times for discussion, "unpacking" and applying what students have (ideally) already taken the time to work through. Of course, this system means that they can always go back and review after class, seeing the content with new eyes, and if they catch on to blogging, the conversation can continue, too.

How's it working so far? Well . . .

A Calebite!

I was reading along in 1 Samuel, finding it all quite familiar, and suddenly came upon 25:3--

His name was Nabal and his wife’s name was Abigail. She was an intelligent and beautiful woman, but her husband was surly and mean in his dealings—he was a Calebite.

Wow! For all the sermons I've heard and preached about Caleb and his godly, faith-filled character and about Nabal and his surly godlessness, I have never seen this--Nabal was a descendant of Caleb! How did he come to lose sight of his ancestor's faithful example?

How time has flown

I knew it had been a long time since the last posting, but good grief--back in May? Since then I've finished the PhD and graduated and started a new job and moved . . . phew!

I'm trying to inspire students to use blogging in a course I'm teaching and, as part of that effort, am blogging with them--using edublogs but not as a class blog, just for my own contribution.

Besides that, though, it's probably way past time to start putting my money (effort, actually) where my mouth is and begin thinking out loud via this blog.

I've been reading lots on theology themes of participation and analogia entis and most recently Gary Deddo's Karl Barth's Theology of Relations: Trinitarian, Christological, and Human: Toward an Ethic of the Family. Most likely my random thoughts will be loosely organized around such ideas, so I suppose I've now lost any readership I might have had . . .

Barth and Christian joy

On Friday, we read this rather uncharacteristic bit from Barth:
He talks about the oxymoron of a “gloomy, morose and melancholy Gospel” and then says, “A troubled Christian is per definitionem not a Christian, because as such he is definitely not in a position to be a witness of Jesus Christ. To be sure, it is not his personal joyousness which makes him a witness. For this is not what makes his witness true. But he can be enabled to give the true witness entrusted to him only when its content, which makes it true witness, gives him personal joy, making him a bright and merry Christian” (CD IV.3.2, 662).
I told the story of an older Christian gentleman in my first church who confided in me that, ever since a former pastor had preached on Revelation 21:8--that the fearful (KJV) will have a place in the lake of fire--and claimed that "fearful" includes "worried," he had been really worried! I was trying to make the connection that telling Christians who aren't "bright and merry" that they aren't real Christians isn't likely to make them any more joyous.
Then on Sunday, Nigel preached about joy from 1 Peter 1, and he made a really cool connection:
Our joy--and Barth would clearly agree--is dependent on the One in whose power we are securely held.

Barth on Fridays

Barth made me mad today. That’s a good thing, because it means 1) he’s making me question some basic things that I most likely have uncritically assumed, and 2) some of my thoughts are beginning to gel re: these important issues. In today’s reading, from IV-3-2, pp. 568-76, Barth takes on Quietists, Pietists, and assorted others for whom I have come to have a great appreciation (not least of which is Zinzendorf, whom I think Barth seriously misrepresents in this passage). As long as he was bashing existentialists and liberals, I could follow along, but now he’s cutting too close to my cherished assumptions. (First, I should say that I agree with his main point, which seems to be that Christianity is more about Jesus Christ than about my experience of or relationship with him.)
I’m afraid I dominated the conversation this morning with my strenuous objections that Barth is mistaken in looking (particularly in scripture) for the one main thing—in the good word that Allen used in deconstruction of my claim, a foundation—that characterizes true Christianity. (I’d just finished Kathryn Tanner’s Theories of Culture and I was ready for a fight, not least because of my disappointment that in the end she reverts to “obviously, the only tenable position is mine.”) I said this morning that scripture gives us instead a many-faceted picture that in its coherence portrays what it means to be a Christian. I came to realize this evening that my objection can be formulated in terms of what I’m trying to say in my thesis. One of the main things I see in Torrance is his insistence that relationality means holding things sufficiently apart to allow for distinction-in-relation and thus avoid dualism or the collapse of one into the other (or both into some kind of monad). Applied to Barth’s contention that the one thing that being-a-Christian is about is witness, I think it makes better sense to see that as only one side of a complementary relation. I’ve begun working through Kelso and Engström’s The Complementary Nature and, although they may be overly enthusiastic about their formulation, I think there is a lot to be said for their claim of complementarity’s ubiquity, and I have even begun to use their style of designation in my notes to self, with the tilde (~) expressing the relation between two contraries/complementaries: as in being “called to witness ~ called to belong.” (Leonard Sweet is on to something, I think, in his “MRI” (missional, relational, incarnational) in So Beautiful.) In fact, drawing on Jamie Smith’s contention in Desiring the Kingdom (does Jamie know that amazon is attributing his work to someone else?) that worship is more basic than either reason or belief, I think the complementary call to witness ~ to belong should be set under an even more “fundamental” designation gleaned from differing translations of Rom 8:1—present your bodies in spiritual worship ~ reasonable service.
There’s something further, though, and it’s the focus on conversion that I’m taking from Lonergan. I agree with Gelpi that it needs expansion—I’d say by way of what Jesus came preaching—and I’d express it as being called to repent ~ to respond (follow-in-allegiance). That, I think, requires another complementary pair, often expressed as movement from below ~ from above, and I think what bothers me in Barth is that he’s so vehement about the priority of the latter and the disequilibrium and non-reciprocal nature of the relation that he comes across as dismissing anything that “begins with” the Spirit’s work in our hearts. OK, I feel better now.

Advent

I'm thoroughly enjoying the Advent meditations from Goshen College. Today's posting is from Lisa Guedea Carreño, director of the Good Library. She writes,

"Preparing the way of the Lord doesn’t end when Advent ends, but begins anew and continues – until all flesh shall see the salvation of God."

. . . and all the members of our Barth reading group said, "Amen!" We read about union with Christ this morning, from CD IV 3.2, in the context of Barth's emphasis on vocation. We are always called on by the One who has gone/is going ahead, a thought that summons up C. S. Lewis's image of Aslan bounding on before, calling, "Come higher up and farther in!" (My poor paraphrase--apologies to Lewis.)

Conversion

We've been exploring some things at our Barth reading group lately that are resonating deeply with me and related closely to my studies. D. W. Horstkoettker at flying farther explains his reservations (not strong enough?) about evangelicals' focus on conversion as the central paradigm/narrative for Christian faith. I'd be surprised if DWH doesn't get some feedback from his Lonerganian friends at Marquette out of that blog post. A big part of my project involves looking at conversion in Lonergan, something that is central indeed to his thought (and, in a certain way, I argue, in his experience/history). There's a helpful summary/extension in Happel and Walter, and Donald Gelpi builds on this in Lonergan: here, for example.
Anyway, we ran short of time at the reading group this am, or I would have put forward a suggestion. David has at other times spoken of Barth's method in terms of two concentric circles and a back-and-forth movement between them such that their positions as inside & outside are exchanged. (Putting this in terms of background and foreground might be helpful.) I see this as very helpful applied to conversion.
When I push students in my Distance Learning course on evangelism & discipleship to explore what conversion is (something I do regularly), asking, among other questions, "Is conversion a point or a process?" I often (interestingly, not always) hear them speaking in linear terms, where "sanctification" is the process that continues after the point of "justification," or something similar. I think we would be much better served by 1) defining conversion simply as transformation, and 2) thinking in terms of a metaphor/analogy/model of concentric circles rather than (narrative and spiritual-life-as-journey) linear progression, building on the idea of centered sets in Paul Hiebert, for example (nice summary here).
What Barth's method adds is this: I have come to think of conversion, from my human perspective, in terms of point-within-process, but there is also the flip side where, in Christ, the process of my conversion is completely taken up within the point of Jesus' faithful obedience to his vocation (so I was converted, as Barth & more than one prominent student of his are reported to have said, on a hillside outside Jerusalem about AD 30--even more, I was converted when the Father chose the Son before the foundation of the world).

Assessing Intellectual Virtue

David Scobey, in his article, "Meanings and Metrics", Inside Higher Ed, March 19, 2009, notes the challenge that assessment poses when the goals for learning go beyond "informational content in a sub-discipline, performance of competent analyses according to check-listed rubrics." He calls for "a 'slow food' model of evaluation" via portfolios. What he has to say resonates to a great extent with the claim I am making about intellectual virtue.
There couldn't be a bigger contrast with the book I am trying to read now: David Ausubel's The Acquisition and Retention of Knowledge: A Cognitive View (2000). The title says it all--learning is about acquiring and retaining information, and that is so, and therefore learning can be assessed, only by equating knowing with remembering. According to the author, this escapes being labeled rote learning if students are able, and are expected, to express the propositions that they have been taught (think transfer) in their own words. Further, he believes in his model: he proceeds as if constant repetition = a convincing argument. The book is a "revision" of his 1963 work, but I can't imagine that he's not just warming over (and at that only very lightly) his almost half-century-old ideas. Dismissing dissenting voices with the oddest arguments, he labels Gagne and Bruner behaviourists and says that those who criticize his position misrepresent it and set up a straw man to attack. Who needs a straw man when such a position and argument are so obviously weak?

Competing vs. Collaborating

Clarence at Remote Access is thinking about the negative side of competitive learning. I agree totally when he says,

I would argue that it is more likely that global cooperation and collaboration are the skills we should be aiming at promoting in schools and classrooms. Students who can think through problems with others, who know where to go for information and understanding, and who have the ability to see things from the perspective of another culture will be far more valued as employees; but more importantly as informed citizens, [than] the lone wolf who doesn't work well with others.

He notes that collaborative efforts are much more difficult to assess, but concludes,

Competitive learning reduces hundreds of hours of hard work to numbers, rankings and sorting charts. It dehumanizes and standardizes. . . . . We need to begin working more WITH the students in our classrooms and stop trying to do things TO them.

This is the kind of perspective that I really appreciate in the bit of the blogosphere that I follow, but I wonder--are Clarence and I on the same wavelength because we have similar personalities, or because we both live and work in areas remote from the competitive big city (he rather more than I)? Maybe it's also true that there's a big, bad competitive world out there and teaching for collaboration and cooperation is sending lambs among wolves . . .

Analogy

My friends and family regularly hear my confession that anything that has to do with numbers makes my head swim, so it's interesting to me how I find something like Dale Harris's latest post so fascinating. I think it's the power of analogy, and the fact that, without being able to comprehend all the details, I can get so caught up in the general idea when it's explained by a master teacher like Dale.
I've been reading Kieran Egan on education (The Educated Mind, 1997; Getting it Wrong from the Beginning, 2002; The Future of Education 2008). While his work is uneven in places and often quirky, he does provide a nice summary of the state of education in the West (not only his West at Simon Fraser U) when he depicts it as a struggle among those who see education as socialization, the traditionalists who see it as passing on academic knowledge to the next generation, and the progressivists who see it as learner-centred, focusing on individuals' development. I think he makes too much of, and is inconsistent in, his claim that it is a mistake to try to keep-in-tension the three perspectives, and it seems to me that he could rework his schema of the "cognitive tools" of somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophic, and ironic understandings to fit both lists into the framework of Activity Theory's subject/object/community with tools/rules/roles (division of labour) as put forward by Yrjö Engeström.
All of that to say that I think there's something correct about the current theological interest in participation, embodiment, analogy, etc. and it funds a keeping-in-tension of these aspects of education for the sake of preserving a sense of wonder in learning, arising from the created order, certainly, but at its heart generated and guided by the Spiritus Creator.

The Social Net [at] Work

Something important occurred to me as I was thinking about key parts of my research project, and I wondered how I might go about finding out whether I was on the right track. So, I turned to my (very informal) network. I'm not a dues-paying member of the T F Torrance Fellowship because their online payment system doesn't accept $ from Canada, and I noticed that the Fellowship's blog hasn't seen much action lately. But I've received valuable help before from Dr. Gary Deddo and Dr. Elmer Colyer, who are founding members, so I emailed with this question:

I admire TFT's strong position on the contingent nature of creation and there is a lot to be said in favor of his stance re: creation's intelligibility, but I just realized that I can't remember him making the connection that would seem to (necessarily) follow: that creation's intelligibility is contingent. I have read him as saying that, because of creatio ex nihilo and because in Christ all things hold together/he sustains all things by his powerful word, creation has an inherent intelligibility. Would contingent not be more consistent here than inherent? (It certainly could be simply that I am mistaken in my reading; the distinction has just now occurred to me, so I haven't been reading with that in mind.) In other words, would I be challenging, extending, going beyond, or drawing upon TFT by claiming that creation has no voice of its own but contingently depends on the Holy Spirit to (moment-by-moment) give to those seeking understanding what is needed to recognize the intelligibility of its internal structure?

It wasn't long before I heard from both. Here is Dr. Colyer's reply:

You are correct that Torrance should conceive of the intelligibility of the created order as contingent. However, Torrance does acknowledge and develop this explicitly. See my book, HOW TO READ TFT, pp. 168-73 for a summary and notes to the primary sources in Torrance's publications. You are also correct that this contingent order (rationality in human beings, intelligibility in creation) is dynamic and sustained continuously by the Word and Spirit of God, indeed, via Trinitarian perichoretic coactivity. However, it is also INHERENT in the created order by God's continuous activity. This is what provides creation with its stability, consistency, lawfulness that makes creation "open" to human rational investigation, so that scientists can be "priests of creation" who bring the contingent intelligibility of the contingent, free and spontaneous creation to orderly articulation in praise of the Triune Creator, the vast theater of the Glory of God!

I responded with

Thank you very much; this is very helpful. The both/and speaks to the idea of "knowledge"as both ontological, something in the world, and epistemological, something in the mind.

So this exchange relates to my thesis on at least a couple of levels: the social affordances of the internet made possible my asking the question of someone who knows and (combined with the gracious kindness of Drs. Deddo and Colyer) my receiving such a quick reply; also, this experience confirms the idea that knowledge is both verb-like ("knowing") in individuals' minds and noun-like (an object?) as distributed over a network.
Now, since I'm working away from home, I don't have access to How to Read T. F. Torrance. Had I bought anything from amazon.com, I could have searched inside and found the pages that Dr. Colyer is referring to. Alas, that feature isn't enabled for this book on amazon.ca (where, much to my wife's dismay, I'm a valued customer!), and Wipf & Stock, who have recently republished it at a very good price, don't offer "search inside." I notice, though, that I can check out a few pages of The Promise of Trinitarian Theology and also of The Nature of Doctrine in the Theology of T. F. Torrance.
So all the knowledge to which I need access isn't as easily available as the answer to my question above, but, if copyright issues are ever resolved (right, Tom?), a lot more could be!

Epistemology

Wow--a long hiatus! I've been working hard to try to understand and express what's central to my project, but nothing has ended up here for a long time. So here are some random thoughts (ok, not quite so random): On his blog, “Just in CASE,” Trevor Cairney responds to Tim Clydesdale’s “Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I'm a little surprised by Trevor's linking of what he calls the position of the "deconstructive postmodernist" with the Eden temptation re: knowledge and with constructivism in the context of authority. I'm also very interested to see who has been linking to this YouTube video on a very similar topic. Where is the delicate balance between accepting (participating in) things because they are put forward by an authority and questioning/challenging those same things, perhaps for the same reason? I've been exploring in my own way the idea of "triangulation" that Kevin Vanhoozer is working on in his "On the Very Idea of a Theological System," a chapter in Always Reforming: Explorations in Systematic Theology, edited by A. T. B. McGowan (IVP Academic, 2006), and I hope to be able to put together something similar "toward a theology of learning" for my project. Meanwhile, I'm struck by this from Clydesdale's article:

We need to teach as if our students were colleagues from another department. That means determining what our colleagues may already know, building from that shared knowledge, adapting pre-existing analytic skills, then connecting those fledgling skills and knowledge to a deeper understanding of the discipline we love. In other words, we need to approach our classrooms as public intellectuals eager to share our insights graciously with a wide audience of fellow citizens.