From Here To Eternity

This phrase has been in English poetry, prose, comedy and film since 1892. It was first penned by Rudyard Kipling in his poem, “Gentlemen-Rankers.” The poem was about enlisted men who came from upper class backgrounds but had been demoted to the ranks in disgrace. They were cavalry troopers of the British Imperial Army during the Victorian era. As early as 1902 students at Harvard and Yale Universities made fun with the chorus of Kipling’s poem as the “Whippenpoof Song.” The later book and film of that title told of American sailors at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in1941.

It isn’t just an idle phrase. Kipling’s poem referred to with the deadly business of war: “To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned, to my brethren in their sorrow overseas.” Soldiers of any nation who served in Afghanistan or Iraq in recent years would recognize the bitterness it expresses, perhaps as the prelude to PTSD.

Poetic phrases and titles can be turned to other uses - redeemed, as it were, from the cruel bitterness to the beautiful hope of life beyond death. Alister McGrath has done so. Trained as a molecular biologist and a theologian, he is now Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, Oxford, as well as the Andreos Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, and the President of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. In his writings, lectures and interviews as well as an associate priest in Anglican parishes in the Cotswolds, McGrath speaks of death and our Christian hope of life beyond death as the dramatic passage from the realm of space-time to eternity. That is exactly what the words and images of heaven and eternal life in our Christian scriptures were trying to convey.

As soon as we were conceived we began to live in the realm of time and space. But do we also at that moment begin life as an eternal soul? That is often claimed by traditional Christian doctrines, but it isn’t a scriptural idea. The Greek philosopher Plato was the first to use the term psyche, usually translated by the Anglo-Saxon word soul. Plato stated that the soul could be liberated from its imprisonment in the body by philosophy. Greek mystery religions believed that the immortal soul, imprisoned in the material body, was liberated by death. The early Enlightenment philosopher, Descartes (1596-1650) held a similar view of human nature as a physical body and an immortal soul. That concept of human nature became popular as biblical scholars read Paul’s letters with references to ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’. Many scholars now believe that Paul meant that ‘to live according to the flesh’ meant no more than to live on a purely human level without any spiritual dimension.

Alister McGrath puts current thinking about personal identity and hope of life beyond death in relational terms. In his latest book Inventing The Universe: Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Science, FaiTh and God, “(This) is a way of thinking that is rooted in the Bible and sees the believer’s identity as rooted in and sustained by their relationship with God…. Whether you think Christianity is right or wrong, there is now way of getting way from one of its core ideas – that we are in some way hard wired to think about, even long for God.”  (Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.) As Augustine of Hippo put it in his Confessions ca. 400 CE: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

As both my wife of nearly sixty-five years and I move into our nineties during the coming year, these issues are becoming of supreme importance to us. In these precarious times, it isn’t merely the elderly who may voice such concerns - and not just for Christian believers like us. People of every age of differing religious traditions, or vague, uncertain faith, or even no faith at all, may surely give thought to similar concerns. What is most important to remember as we turn into a new year is that we were born into the realm of time and space. Eternity, or whatever happens when we pass from this realm is not in our control. 

A Challenging Thesis

The thesis submitted by Philip McCosker for the doctor of philosophy degree at Cambridge University is a challenge to even the most skilled theological scholar. He ploughs deep furrows in the field of philosophical theology and more specifically the area known to theologians as Christology, also known as the study of the person and work of Christ. The topic is indeed mysterious, mystical and paradoxical.

McCosker stated his hypothesis thus: “that one textual marker of the mysteriousness of the mysteries of Christianity – one of the expressions of the theological mystery – can be loosely described as its paradoxicality.” The mystery of which he writes is the true nature of Christ as both divine and human, as contained in the Chalcedonian Creed, “truly God and truly Man…. Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis.”

Without doubt this is a very abstruse discussion with which few will wish to grapple. To provide a theological basis for his argument McCosker looks to the work of several late mediaeval and renaissance theologians in the Roman Catholic tradition with mystical attributes, namely Bonaventure (c.1217-1274), Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-c.1327), Nicholas of Cura (1401-1474) and Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629). 

By no means limiting himself to these “base authors” (McCosker’s term), he also refers frequently to the ancient Greeks like Plato and Aristotle as well as Church Fathers of the early Christian Church in both its  Eastern and Western traditions. It was the participation of these so-called Church Fathers in the many church councils that led to the formulation of the historic creeds of Nicea (325 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE). These creeds determined the fundamental Christian doctrine of the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit - held by most Christian traditions to this day.

McCosker’s concern is the paradox that persists in the context of this doctrine and especially as related to the difference and identity of the relationship between God and Jesus Christ. His discussion begins with a definition of paradox in its many forms. Then he analyses four distinct “configurations” or “models” of paradox related to the nature of Christ: Mixture of the divine and human; Middle, Centre and Circumference; Enhypostasia; and Kenosis. 

None of these models fully satisfies our human need (or McCosker’s theological referents) to describe exactly what we mean when we say, as many New Testament authors assert, that Jesus Christ was at one and the same time, both divine and human. McCosker’s purpose is to analyse the core issue in what we mean by the connective and.

If McCosker has any preference for the above four models, it is enhypostasia. He feels that his base authors “will show the intrinsic connection between this doctrine in chistological expression and its expression in theologies of the Christian life. (McCosker’s italics) It directly and explicitly relates to and deeply influences our lives in the everyday world as Christians.

The term enhypostasia is a Greek word that denotes how “the Son and the Father have some kind of reciprocal … existence whereby they can be said to be ‘in’ each other.” At the start of his chapter on enhypostasia McCosker lists two quotations from the New Testament exemplifying the term: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me.” (John 14:11) and “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. (Gal. 2:20)

After searching the writings of the Church Fathers without much success, McCosker turns to his ‘base authors’. There he found that “this christological model yields a christological account of the christian life in various ways in Eckhart, Nicholas and Berulle with their different accents.” However, McCosker also found that with regard to his investigation of the various models of paradox, “that paradox appears to involve two senses of opposition. The divine is characterised by a peculiar kind of opposition such that it can assume humanity ‘within’ its own hypostasis.”  One would therefore conclude that the true nature of Christ in inevitably bound up with the nature of God. This places the whole subject of the nature of Christ as both divine and human in the realm of a mysterious and mystical reality we name “God.”

McCosker’s least favoured model is kenosis which he sees as prominently held by modern Protestant theologians from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries. McCosker found no evidence of kenosis (based on Philippians 2:5-11) in the writings of the Church Fathers and rarely in his select “base authors.” Even in the title of his chapter on kenosis: “a wrong turn: divine or human?” his conclusion regarding this model is “at base – an exclusive, displacing one. This model did not display the parsings which the other models, especially mixture and middle, did. God and humans are conceived in this model as in competition: in the theories of the modern kenoticists this model is of the “or” kind, even though most of the kenoticists only gingerly dip a toe in the corrosive waters of this logic, not diving in as Gess does.” (W.F. Gess was a German theologian of the 19^th century “who thought that God straightforwardly desisted from being divine when human and … gave up inessential attributes while incarnate.”)

Our Christian doctrine of Christ rests finally on our doctrine of God. By also sounding his base authors’ doctrine of God, McCosker finds that “most of the authors we have looked at reveal a paradoxical core of the descriptions of God…. All our authors share a view of the unity of God which is dynamic and overflowing; for none of them is God static, fixed, and definable…. An adequate christology depends on an adequate doctrine of God, and vice versa.”

McCosker realizes that his analysis does not exhaust the subject. His final words are prophetic: It preserves, we may say, an open wound in the craft of theology. It encourages us not to lose our sense of wonder at the newness of the Gospel and the person it reveals, and to discipline our theology to that wonder, and make our theology appropriately and precisely humble.

It would have been a thrilling experience to have been present when Philip McCosker faced his examiners who listened to his presentation of his thesis and defended it against their challenges. His aunt and uncle live in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, and were the source of McCosker’s thesis for my review. Educated at both Harvard and Yale Universities, McCosker is Research Associate to the Norris- Hulse Professor of Divinity and an Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge University. He is currently engaged in the preparation of a book based on his thesis with the title, Christ the Paradox: Reconceiving Ressoucement Theology. 

WHAT IS SCRIPTURE?

In our Bible study sessions as a group of seniors, we never did answer that question. The late Professor Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, former distinguished scholar of comparative religion, at McGill and Harvard Universities, openly acknowledged that whatever else it may be, scripture is a human activity. In his final work, What Is Scripture?  (Fortress Press, 1993) Smith also asserted that no one tradition, religious or secular, no one civilization is adequate to do justice to our modern awareness of the multiplicity of scriptures. Smith further questioned whether for all practical purposes today “scripture” is a viable category.

One of the basic functions of scripture throughout the ages has been to make real for religious people at least that God has something to say to humanity. For those non-theists who insist that there is no God, scripture in the sense of some literature having existential meaning might say that the universe has something to communicate to us.

One of Smith’s conclusions is worth quoting: One might wonder whether any theist today, confronted with our vaster diversity of scriptures throughout the world and the diversity of readings of those scriptures over the centuries might emulate these Buddhist theorists by speculating that God has in fact remained (verbally) silent, yet has set up the human situation in such a way that diverse peoples in diverse conditions would have scriptures capable of letting Him/Her/It enter their lives and capable of guiding them to Him/Her/It and to spiritual richness.

Secularists would argue that the universe is silent and scripture is a strictly human function. Yet that does not explain why there is a nearly universal human propensity to create scripture and to find in them inspiration, nurture and moral guidance that makes sense for their daily living.

Is the age of scripture coming to an end? Some would say that it is. Yet the fundamental historicity of scripture over several millennia suggests that humanity has not yet reached that point. There is as yet no historical evidence that the transcendent dimension of human thought has disappeared. To quote Smith again: It has been one until now standard element, yet only one, in the complex patterns in and by which human beings  have lived…. The basic question is not about scripture, but about us.

A daily devotional posting on the internet by the United Church of Christ (USA) has been given the title, God Is Still Speaking. The assumption of these daily readings based on brief excerpts of the Christian Bible assumes that the religious practice of opening to the transcendent spiritual reality we call God is still valuable in the present world with all its violence and vicissitudes. But as is so much else today, making use of the scriptures of any religious tradition in any way is still a matter of individual choice.

PAUSE AT THE THIN PLACES.

 “Thin places – where heaven and earth come closer.” That was the heading of a New York Times article three years ago. “This column will change your lives,” roared another article in the usually sedate Guardian in London, UK.   “We’re in the territory, here, of the ineffable: the stuff we can’t express because it’s beyond the power of language to do so.” Ireland is littered with these places a writer on travel in Ireland wrote.

So what are they, these places where the veil between our earthly – or earthy – existence and a transcendent, spiritual existence vanishes?

To me they are not places so much as experiences.  Totally unexpected moments of delightful ecstasy when one sees and hears and knows that one is closer to the infinite, transcendent reality we call God. An experience we simply cannot have in the hurly-burly of everyday life.

And yet I had one such experience recently in, of all places, a hospital emergency room. No, it wasn’t a room; it was a warren of corridors where patients like me waited endlessly for attention from a nurse or a doctor or someone to transport us to another part of the hospital for more extended care.

I lay in that place for forty-eight hours before being moved to the RAZ, a large room - called a zone not a ward - where one waited in a bed slightly more comfortable. Sooner or later one would be assessed more completely while waiting for a bed in the medical or surgical ward where more extensive treatment could be given.

This thin place had happened earlier during a sleepless night as the business and desperate noises of emergency medicine went on all about me. I was in pain but not as severely as others nearby. Not like the young man in the throes of withdrawal from drug addiction and had lost his methadone. Or the older man like myself calling out endlessly for someone – anyone - to help him find his wallet then finally demanding to see the police to lay charges on whoever had stolen it.

In the midst of this cacophony of an emergency department in crisis, I suddenly felt how grateful I was for the care I was being given in such hectic circumstances. My immediate need for pain relief had been met by a young nurse with a hypodermic needle applied to my left buttock.

Perhaps it was the morphine taking effect that launched me into the ecstasy I experienced. I felt lifted beyond my immediate situation and wrapped in the warmth of a presence I had rarely experienced before. I realized that I needed to make some changes in how I was living toward the end of my ninth decade. My communication of faith and the religious life available to anyone would henceforth have to be in a different form. With means like this blog I could reach beyond the circle of a few friends who gathered on Tuesday mornings for coffee and conversation about scripture passages I had pointed out in some preliminary notes posted online a few days earlier.

Furthermore, my wife’s declining health was a major factor in whatever changes I had to make. This revelation of future possibilities reminded me of another moment all of sixty- four years ago when another thin place experience had made me realize how marriage would involve endless sacrifice reflecting the sacrifice of Christ himself. So I proposed marriage to the young woman. She accepted and our lives together since then have fulfilled for both of us all that thin place prophesied.

When the momentary ecstasy dissolved into the reality of my surroundings, I knew that I had been richly blessed by my stay in that emergency ward. My experience could only be described as being given the best of care in the worst of circumstances.

Thank God we can pray daily that the new hospital we can see from the windows in our senior residence suite will be opened as promised by the end of this year. In the meantime, we can pause to experience the richness of spiritual life in those thin places.

The Apostles' Quarrel

Some of Paul’s early letters to the Galatians and Corinthians tell us of a bitter dissension between Paul and the Palestinian apostles, especially James and Peter. How severe was this conflict and what were its consequences?

Only if we accept the narrative of Acts as historically accurate, does there appear to have been some compromise between the Palestinian Christian community on the one hand, and Paul (Acts 15:1-31; 21:17-26). Paul appeared to confirm this compromise in Galatians 2:1-10.

The conflict was long in developing. Scholars often quote a statement by the Roman historian Suetonius that such a serious controversy about one “Chrestus” among Jewish citizens that Emperor Claudius banished them from Rome in 49 CE. According to Acts Paul arrived in Rome about 58 CE and continued teaching under house arrest, presumably until his death.

As he reported in Galatians Paul had met James, Peter (Cephas) and John in Jerusalem and agreed with them that he would minister to the Gentiles while they continued to minister to Jews. (Gal. 1:18-19; 2:8-10) Subsequently he confronted Peter and others in Antioch about their withdrawing from eating with Gentiles when delegates came from James in Jerusalem. (Gal. 2:11-14).

Paul did admit in 1 Corinthians 9:20-21 that while with Jews he lived as a Jew and with Gentiles as a Gentile. Yet in Galatians 5:2-6 he charged that anyone accepting circumcision as a condition of belonging to Christ was actually cutting him or herself off from Christ. Any inconsistency of his views disappeared in writing 2 Corinthians 10 to 13 where his language implied that he would brook no interference from other apostles with his work among Gentiles. (2 Cor. 11:1-5, 12-15; Phil. 3:1-7)

Today leading Roman Catholic scholars no longer believe that either Peter or Paul were the founders of the Christian community in Rome. In the 2^nd century the tradition arose that both apostles died during Nero’s persecution in the mid-60s CE. In later centuries, the Church ignored this controversy between them. Tradition associated Peter and Paul so closely that their names were remembered together in ancient and modern church art and architecture all over the world.

James D. Tabor is certain that in the end Paul won the struggle for dominance among the Greek-speaking congregations of the Roman Empire. Toward the end of the 1^st century it was either the community in Antioch or Ephesus that began to circulate Paul’s authentic and attributed letters. Tabor further claims that Paul’s teaching also greatly influenced the writing of the gospels, especially the three earliest, Mark (ca. 70 CE), Matthew (ca. 80 CE) and Luke (ca. 90 CE).

Thus, by the end of the 1^st century Paul’s views were dominant in Christian communities all over the Roman Empire. The first true Christian historian, Eusebius (ca. 260-340 CE), stated that at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Christians there fled to Pella, east of the Jordan River. At the end of the 2^nd century, a Christian sect there, the Ebionites, were condemned as heretics by Irenaeus (ca. 120-200 CE). Paul’s triumph coloured Christian history thereafter.

The Torah of Christ

A continuing debate among scholars rings changes on Paul’s real view of the Torah. James Tabor is no different, but seems to go further than most. He declares unequivocally that Jesus is the “second” founder of Christianity in that he so radically severed his relationship with the Torah of Judaism that he can be truly said to have founded a new religion.

Paul broke with James, Peter and the other apostles in Jerusalem to the extent that while they continued as practicing Jews, as a Jew himself Paul made possible the spread of the gospel of the resurrection throughout the Gentile world by refusing to force his Gentile converts to follow the Torah. Within fifty years of Paul’s death, the Christian Church was almost exclusively Gentile.

As a descendant of Abraham, a Jew is a Jew by birth. Or one can become a Jew by conversion but must follow the Torah, especially its outward symbols like male circumcision and prescribed dietary laws. From the Jewish perspective, Jews always remained Jews and Gentiles remained non-Jews unless they had adopted these requirements. Paul had a new vision of what anyone’s religious affiliation could be. To quote James Tabor:

In Paul’s new vision of things, a non-Jew, in order to be ‘saved’ from God’s judgment, must turn from idols to the one God and also bow the knee in worship to Jesus as Lord – something Jews would be forbidden to do…. This single move, in which a human being is considered equal to God and thus worthy of worship, separates Paul’s version of Christianity from Judaism and effectively creates a new ‘religion’ separate from most mainstream Judaism.   (Tabor, James D. (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012.)

To every Jew’s astonishment, this Jewish follower of Jesus denounced those who shared his own Jewish tradition as “Jews according to the flesh.” By their refusal of Jesus as Lord, he claimed, they had separated themselves from God’s purpose for Israel and had been replaced as the true Israel. Paul believed God had never intended that the Torah of Israel should be permanent. The death and resurrection of Jesus had led both Jews and Gentiles to Christ. The ancient Torah had been superseded. (See 1 Corinthians 8:4-6; Philippians 3:3; Galatians 3:23-25, 6:15; Romans 10:4).

Paul did not regard being free of the Torah of Israel as freedom to live an immoral life. Quite the contrary, he advocated strict sexual behaviour and how to deal with food offered to idols, especially where blood was involved. He displaced the Torah of Israel with the “Torah of Christ.” But he did so for a special reason: the expected transformation at the imminent return of Christ.

Try as he might Paul could never solve the very human problem of living in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual. To quote Tabor again: According to Paul there is no solution, no victory to be won over the flesh until the body is shed at the resurrection and one becomes wholly transform. Not that he was indifferent to moral living. It all has to do whether one is in Christ or outside. The Law of Christ, which operates by the Spirit of Christ dwelling within a person, is a strategy of resistance activated by ‘yielding’ to the Spirit and not to the flesh.

That is the way to live until the kingdom of God comes. But the kingdom for Paul was not on earth but in heaven, where God’s holy will is fully done. (Philippians 3:20)

Already But Not Yet

Without doubt Paul and his disciples were faced with a perplexing quandary. He believed passionately that they were living in the last days of human history. The great transformation heralded by the death and resurrection of Christ was about to occur. Yet the relentless passage of time indicated that the expected moment had not yet come and the promised end of their suffering followed by their eternal glorification had not arrived.

More – or perhaps worse – for Paul and his followers the end time (eskaton) had already begun, but its conclusion had not yet arrived. They were living in two worlds. As Tabor puts it: Paul’s gospel said that the chosen ones were already in the kingdom of God, by being in Christ even while waiting for its arrival…. Since (God’s) reign was a heavenly one, the kingdom of God had already arrived and would shortly be manifested to the surprise of the whole world. (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. Simon & Schuster, 2012)

This meant that while they were even now living in God’s realm, they would continue to suffer as Christ himself had suffered until “Christ had put all things under his control.” The final result would be Christ’s heavenly exaltation when “every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” (Philippians 2:10-11)

In the interim until that joyous day arrives, Christians would face opposition and persecution. So “the challenge, and the insurmountable problem, was to work out the conflict between the intersection of the old world and the new in the present.” (Tabor, 160) This called for a totally different behaviour than that of the general populace among whom they lived.

The early 20^th century theologian Albert Schweitzer said what they and we are living an “interim ethic.” He meant that Christian ethical behaviour makes sense only if God does bring about justice in the real world. The social justice movement espoused by many of the mainline churches in the 20^th century hoped and worked for this ethic to be applied by all humanity. So did many secular and political institutions.

Paul’s daring exclamation in Galatians 3:27-28 would have made news in any society, not least in the Graeco-Roman society of his time. It set a standard that many countries still struggle to achieve today. Most fail, including our own.

Paul himself neither fully achieved the new standard in his correspondence nor in his own behaviour. He used the Hebrew scriptures to justify some interpersonal activities we regard as unacceptable today: an inferior place for women in the church and society, and the abomination of human slavery.

On the other hand, Paul believed that “the present form of this world is passing away.” (1 Cor. 7:29-31) He was not challenging the present systems such as slavery because he earnestly expected Christ’s return to bring all such evil relationships to an end.

What Paul advocated has raised numerous objections from different sectors of the Christian community as well as societies still coping with their ancient cultural heritage. Evangelism among some cultures has been very difficult if not legally banned by political authorities.