Monthly Archives: January 2006

Sleep More

Sleep is sanctification, read more here.

It’s not just that a countercultural embrace of sleep bears witness to values higher than “the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desire for other things.” A night of good sleep—a week, or month, or year of good sleep—also testifies to the basic Christian story of Creation. We are creatures, with bodies that are finite and contingent. For much of Western history, the poets celebrated sleep as a welcome memento mori, a reminder that one day we will die: hence Keats’s ode to the “sweet embalmer” sleep, and Donne’s observation, “Natural men have conceived a twofold use of sleep; that it is a refreshing of the body in this life; that it is a preparing of the soul for the next.” Is it any surprise that in a society where we try to deny our mortality in countless ways, we also deny our need to sleep?

Live Liturgically

In A History of Private Life II, Revelations of the Medieval World, George Duby writes of the church at the beginning of the fuedal era:

The Church invited ordinary laymen to adopt an attitude toward the sacred not unlike that previously limited exclusively to the clergy. It called upon individuals to take full responsibility for their personal progress toward perfection.

I have been thinking lately that one of our best moves as Christians in the busy West is to embrace the hours of prayer at work and integrate our lives into the daily regime of the church. That way, not matter where we are, we can commune with God and each other in a disciplined way. I like the Jesus prayer, and also I am trying to pray the morning and evening family prayers from the 1928 BCP.

signs and wonders

 

The beginning of Cyril’s Episcopate was marked by the appearance of a bright Cross in the sky, about nine o’clock in the morning of Whitsunday, the 7th of May, 351 A.D. Brighter than the sun, it hung over the hill of Golgotha, and extended to Mount Olivet, being visible for many hours.The whole population of Jerusalem, citizens and foreigners, Christians and Pagans, young and old, flocked to the Church, singing the praises of Christ, and hailing the phenomenon as a sign from heaven confirming the truth of the Christian religion.

Being as Communion by John D. Zizioulas

Zizioulas writes that “The hypostasis of ecclesial existence is constituted by the new birth of man, by baptism. Baptism as new birth is precisely an act constitutive of hypostasis.” Essentially what he is saying is that baptism creates a new person, a new you. Your destiny is no longer bound up in your biological origin, or your family history, it is now tied to the family of God, living and dead. He continues, “…new birth from the womb of the Church has made him part of a network of relationships which transcends every exclusiveness…salvation is not a matter of moral perfection, an improvement of nature, but a new hypostasis of nature, a new creation.”

Moving to the eucharist, he writes: ‘…the eucharist is first of all an assembly (synaxis), a community, a network of relations, in which man “subsists” in a manner different from the biological as a member of a body which transcends every exclusiveness of a biological or social kind…The ecclesial hypostasis, as a transcendence of the biological, draws its being from the being of God and from that which it will itself be at the end of the age…liberated from individualism and egocentricity and becomes a supreme expression of community—the Body of Christ, the body of the Church, the body of the eucharist.

getting in….staying in

A friend of mine writes:

The Jews did not view their covenant markers as earning them right. These markers were just that, markers. The Jew was already a rightful heir by birth, by being a Jew, so argued the Jew. The markers only served to mark them off from the non-Jew, viz., those outside the covenant. The Jew was not in a position to earn what was already the state of affairs, but only to be marked off,identified as being in that position. That state of affairs was a matter of having been born a Jew.

Markers, works, law, these refer to position, the position of the Jew by birth. The Jew was in covenant membership by birth, and by birth the Jew then possessed the law. As we recall, Jewish election came first, the law was subsequent. Jewish elect status could not be earned by law, markers, works. This elect status was already the Jewsh state of affairs. Hence the infamous “not getting in.” NPP in general takes works as a matter of “staying in.”

The Jew “got in” the family by birth. The Jew maintained good standing in that covenant by obedience. The Jew would not be arguing, as 16th c RCC is said to have argued, that covenant entrance is earned. That is inconceivable.

Protestant Prof converts

Insights here:

He signed Wheaton’s faith statement, which asserts that the Bible is “inerrant,” meaning without error, and “of supreme and final authority.” Wheaton President Mr. Litfin asked in a job interview how Mr. Hochschild understood that passage, according to their later correspondence. Mr. Hochschild said he agreed, but added that the Bible should be read in light of “authoritative traditions,” an example of which would be church councils. Although that view is closer to Catholicism than evangelical Protestantism, the president approved the appointment.

Mr. Hochschild got on well with colleagues and students, and University of Notre Dame Press agreed to publish his revised dissertation. “He was excellent on every score,” says Wheaton’s philosophy department chairman, Robert O’Connor.

Joshua Hochschild had to leave his assistant professorship at Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian college located in Illinois, after he converted to Catholicism.

Yet a question nagged Mr. Hochschild: Why am I not a Catholic? As he saw it, evangelical Protestantism was vaguely defined and had a weak scholarly tradition, which sharpened his admiration for Catholicism’s self-assurance and intellectual history. “I even had students who asked me why I wasn’t Catholic,” he says. “I didn’t have a decent answer.”