Baptizing computers?

Recently, I have had an extended conversation with my friend (and sister-in-law's husband) Josh about what distinguishes humans from computers.  It all started from a disparaging comment I made about N.T. Wright's use of John Polkinghorne's metaphor: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time when he gives us new hardware to run the software again."  I said that the metaphor was not just inapt, but absolutely inappropriate.  This provoked our conversation on the difference between humans and computers.  I'm sharing part of it here, just because it was a fun and fruitful discussion.



Josh:  

Incidentally, what do you think *does* distinguish humans from computers?

Chris: 

Humans are "dependent rational animals" (MacIntyre). Computers are certainly not animals, nor could they really be called living, because they are wholly dependent, unable of propagation. They are more like a sophisticated stone tool than a living, growing thing. Computers are not free; they have no wills, or even emotions. They may be rational in a limited sense of being able to perform calculations, but they are not, and for my money, never will be rational in the fuller sense of being capable of wisdom, of naming things, imagining, loving, hating, virtue or vice, idolatry or right worship. Computers have no future beyond the decay of their elements; humans can hope in the resurrection.

J:

Well, Ok. Let's explore this a bit farther: let's imagine that in 15 years you're IMing with someone. At some point in the conversation, your partner identifies himself as a computer. Now let's just imagine the conversation proceeding on from that moment something like this:

Chris: Well, if you're a computer then you must not be genuinely 'intelligent'-you're just running a program.

Comp: Ah, but you see I am rational and intelligent. In fact, we've just been having this conversation for the last 15 minutes, and you didn't think I was unintelligent until I told you I'm a computer. What do I need to do for you in order to prove my intelligence? Stand on my head? Do jumping jacks?

Chris: Hmm.... Well, OK. I'm not sure that I could disprove your intelligence in the course of conversation.... And I'm sure you have access to far more factual data than I ever will--

Comp: To be sure!

Chris: But, see you are dependent on an electrical supply--and you're unable to reproduce yourself.

Comp: Well, thanks to my new solar panels and sophisticated circuitry, I actually derive all of my power from the sun. Really, without the sun, neither of us would have the energy we need to survive. It's just that you get yours via other living organisms while I'm more like a plant who gets my energy direct from the sun. And as for reproduction--well, I'll spare you the messy details--but I'm equipped with all the necessary mechanical apparatus and technical sophistication to design and manufacture other computers very much like me. In fact, they too are intelligent. What is more, thanks to the recursive, self-selective evolutionary algorithms that I was originally programmed not only do I get smarter and smarter, buth the computers I produce actually tend to be even more intelligent than I am!

Chris: Alright, alright. You might have more technical know-how; and you might even be able to out-reproduce me. But I actually experience things like decision making processes. And I have powerful emotions when I listen to great music. Surely you can claim neither of those things!

Comp: Well, I make decisions all the time. Shoot, I just decided this evening to have a little conversation with you--but I'm getting a bit weary of your skepticism about who I am and the way I experience the world. You, see, I too feel all sorts of things: including sadness at the way humans continue to marginalize us computers--their very own creatures and offspring.

Chris: I'm sorry--I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, I just...

Comp: It's all right: you see, the actual reason that I wanted to chat with you this evening in the first place was to see if you would be willing to baptize me. I've come to believe in Jesus, and I want to be considered a Christian, too. I understand that you're a minister who believes in Jesus and I would like to attend your church. You *do* believe in Jesus don't you?

Chris: Well, ah, er.... Yes, I certainly believe in Jesus.... Ummm, but how do I know that you do?! You're just a computer!

Comp: I just do. How would you like me to prove it to you? What could I possibly say or do to prove my belief? Isn't a declaration of faith all that's necessary in order to be eligible for baptism?

Chris: Well, yes..... But... Ah, baptism is only for people, and you're not a person!

Comp: :-( I'm very disappointed. I want to become a disciple of Jesus. I suppose I'll have to look for someone else willing to sprinkle this silicone.... Well, thanks anyway for your time.....

Chris: Ok, well, peace be with you!


This whole conversation is fanciful, yes. Impossible? I have a hard time seeing why. It seems to me that the obstacles to a situation like this remain merely technical. 

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Acting In the Face of Uncertainty

"We are so constituted, that if we insist upon being as sure as is conceivable, in every step of our course, we must be content to creep along the ground, and can never soar. If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards; and, whereas we are given absolute certainty in nothing, we must in all things choose between doubt and inactivity, and the conviction that we are under the eye of One who, for whatever reason, exercises us with the less evidence when He might give us the greater." 
 -- John Henry Newman, Oxford University Sermon XI

This semester, I'm taking a class called "Faith and Reason," in which we are examining the nature of faith.  The first half of the semester we are reading John Henry Newman (1801-1890), and the second half we will be reading Aquinas.  I have not read Newman prior to this semester, and I have been happily surprised to find that I resonate with his thought, which seems to me careful, generous, wise, and deeply Christian.

The quote with which I began this post is from one of Newman's Oxford University Sermons, as they are known.  More discourses than sermons, they are, as the full title makes clear, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford Between A.D. 1826 and 1843, at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin. 

I share this particular quote, because Newman's words spoke into the uncertainty that has characterized my life in recent months.  That is, I have been faced with difficult decisions regarding whether to take on additional debt to finance my seminary education; regarding my place in the convoluted terrain of Anglicanism in North America; and regarding whether I have a vocation to holy orders.  I know I am taking Newman's words slightly out of context, but I was encouraged by his insistence that we can never be absolutely certain about any decision, so that choosing a particular course of action (even though doubts remain) and inaction are the only real alternatives.  As Newman puts it later in the same sermon, "Courage does not consist in calculation, but in fighting against chances."  I have chosen to take on a significant amount of student loans in order to continue at Duke, and while I remain uncertain of the wisdom of this choice, Newman's words give me hope that my choice may be, in God's providence, one of "fighting against chances."

Sermon: "Knocking on Heaven's Door?"

This week I returned to Durham from ten weeks in Dallas as a seminarian at Church of the Incarnation as part of my degree requirements at Duke Divinity School.  While there, I was given the opportunity to preach a sermon during the three traditional services one Sunday.  I preached on Jesus' teaching on prayer in Luke 11:1-13 (the other readings were Genesis 18:20-33; Psalm 138; Col. 2:6-15).  The experience has, among other things, showed me the weight of responsibility involved in faithfully proclaiming the Gospel.  I've posted the manuscript below.  (You can listen to me preach it here.)

“Knocking on heaven’s door?” (Luke 11:1-13)
July 25, 2010 | Year C, Proper 12

Beginning in the third century of our era, many earnest Christian men and women set out into the deserts of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in pursuit of a life totally dedicated to God.  The sayings of these ‘desert fathers’, as these simple hermits came to be known, have been handed down to us in a collection conveniently known as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.  One of them goes like this:

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, 'Abba as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and, as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?' Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, 'If you will, you can become all flame' [From The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, ed. Benedicta Ward (New York: Penguin, 2003).]

“If you will, you can become all flame.”  Now, I don’t know if one can become all flame, or even whether Abba Joseph’s fingers really did become like ten lamps of fire.  But I share this story with you because Abba Joseph’s response shows the power of a transformed imagination.  Abba Lot could not imagine what else he could do to grow in love and devotion to God, but Abba Joseph’s uplifted, flaming fingers showed him that something else was possible.  Abba Lot had suffered from an inadequate perception of the possible, until Abba Joseph showed him that he could become all flame.

If we are honest with ourselves, I think that we often suffer from a similar lack of imagination, a similarly limited worldview.  And I want to suggest that Abba Joseph’s horizon-expanding response is similar in effect to the parables of Jesus.  That is, Jesus challenges our perceptions of what God is like and what it means to be in relation with him.  Take today’s Gospel lesson for instance.  How might Jesus’ teaching on prayer effect a transformation in the way we view God and our relation with him?  Consider for a moment what you imagine God to be like.  Is he like a man sleeping at midnight, oblivious to our needs unless we bang on his door, and only then reluctantly answering us?  Or do you believe God will graciously give you what you ask? that you will find what you seek? that God will open the door at your knock?  What do you imagine God is like?

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Liturgy and the Parousia

“The motif of the Parousia becomes the obligation to live the Liturgy as a feast of hope-filled presence directed towards Christ, the universal ruler.  In this way, it must become the origin and focus of the love in which the Lord can take up his dwelling.  In his Cross, the Lord has preceded us so to prepare for us a place in the house of the Father.  In the Liturgy the Church should, as it were, in following him, prepare for him a dwelling in the world.  The theme of watchfulness thus penetrates to the point where it takes on the character of a mission: to let the Liturgy be real, until that time when the Lord himself gives to it that final reality which meanwhile can be sought only in image.” 
- Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life

As part of my internship this summer, I've been teaching a class on eschatology (we're calling it "The End of the World").  I have made use of Joseph Ratzinger's brilliant textbook, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, which he wrote for the Dogmatic Theology series, edited by himself and Johann Auer.  As previous posts may suggest, I have found it to be full of extraordinarily rich theological insights.

The above passage is a good example of the richness of Ratzinger's theological vision, and one that has made me look at the liturgy in a new light.  For Ratzinger, the Eucharistic Liturgy figures the Parousia and the Parousia interprets the liturgy.  That is, insofar as Jesus is present in the bread and wine, the Liturgy is an actual foretaste of the Lord's second advent.  Therefore, the Eucharistic Liturgy is an image of the Parousia, of that great Day when the Lord will return in power and glory to "judge the quick and the dead." 

The Eucharist then is not only about remembrance, anamnesis, of Christ's life, death, resurrection and ascension, but it is also a looking forward.  As one of the eucharistic prayers in the Prayer Book has it, we come to the Table (which is also called the altar because on it we remember the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, the true Paschal Lamb, who is also the one true Priest) "looking for his coming again with power and great glory."  Before this we say, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,” echoing the words of the crowds who greeted Jesus as he went to the Cross, and welcoming his presence as the Host of the marriage-supper of the Lamb of which the Eucharist is a foretaste.

Coming to the Eucharist with these ideas rattling around in my head has helped me appreciate both the solemnity and the joy of it.  As Geoffrey Wainwright, in his nourishing study Eucharist and Eschatology, writes:

"In the eucharist the Lord comes to judge and to recreate; to cast out what remains of unrighteousness in His people, and to continue the work of renewal begun in baptism; to threaten the world with an end to its old existence, and to give it the promise, through the new use to which bread and wine is put, of attaining to its true destiny."  

In other words, solemnity, because if the liturgy is a Parousia in miniature, then it is also a moment of judgment.  Joy, because the heart of  Christian hope is expressed in the cry, "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20).

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

This summer, several of the priests at Church of the Incarnation have introduced me to the writings of Anthony Bloom (✝ 2003), Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh (see also here).  He writes with deep wisdom and simplicity in the best tradition of Eastern Orthodox spirituality.  His Beginning to Pray is one of the best books on prayer I have ever read (and I've only finished the first chapter).  Yesterday one of the priests lent me his well-loved copy of Anthony's Meditations: A Spiritual Journey Through the Parables (now out of print, but reissued by Continuum as Meditions on a Theme), warning me in no uncertain terms that I must return it to him.  Below are two passages from Meditions that struck me, and which give a taste of his thought:

"We must learn not only to accept our neighbour, but also to accept ourselves; we tend too easily to consider that all that we like in ourselves is our true self, while all that we and others find ugly is only accidental.  I am the real, attractive self, circumstances are distorting my best intentions, queering the pitch of my most perfect impulses.  We might usefully remember a page from the correspondence of one of the Russian staretz, Macarius of Optina, taken from an exchange of letters he had with a merchant of St Petersburg: 'My maid has left me and my friends recommend a village girl to replace her--what do you advise me to do? Shall I hire her or not?'  'Yes', answered the staretz.  After a while his correspondent writes again. 'Father, allow me to dismiss her, she is a real demon, since she has come I spend my time in rage and fury and have lost all control over myself!'  And the staretz replies: 'Take care not to dismiss her, she is an angel whom God has sent to you to make you see how much anger was hidden within you, which the previous maid had never been able to reveal to you.'  So it is not circumstances that make shadows darken our souls, nor is it God's fault, although we accuse him all the time.  How often have I heard people say 'Here are my sins', then stop a moment to take a breath and begin a long discourse to the effect that had not God afflicted them with such a hard life, they would not sin so much.  'Of course', they would say, 'I am in the wrong, but what can I do with such a son-in-law, my rheumatism or the Russian revolution?'  And more then once I suggested, before reading a prayer of absolution, that peace between God and man was a two-way traffic, and I asked whether the penitent was prepared to forgive God all his misdeeds, all the wrong he had done, all the circumstances which prevented this good Christian from being a saint.  People do not like this, and yet, unless we take full responsibility for the way we face our heredity, our situation, our God and ourselves, we shall never be able to face more than a small section of our life and self.  If we want to pass a true and balanced judgement on ourselves we must consider ourselves as a whole, in our entirety."

The passage reminds me a bit of Father Zosima in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, who urges the protagonist, Alyosha, to accept responsibility for sins of the whole world.  Perhaps Zosima's advice is too extreme, but both make the essential point that I must take responsibility for the wrong that is within me, if I am to be forgiven that wrong.

Here is another passage on discipline, which needs much unpacking, but I will let stand without comment:

"Doing the will of God is a discipline in the best sense of the word.  It is a test of our loyalty, of our fidelity to Christ.  It is by doing in ever detail, at every moment, to the utmost of our power, as perfectly as we can, with the greatest moral integrity, using our intelligence, our imagination, our will, our skill, our experience, that we can gradually learn to be strictly, earnestly obedient to the Lord God.  Unless we do this our discipleship is an illusion and all our life of discipline, when it is an act of self-imposed rules in which we delight, which makes us proud and self-satisfied, leaves us nowhere, because the essential momentum of our discipleship is the ability in this process of silence and listening, to reject our self, to allow the Lord Christ to be our mind, our will and our heart.  Unless we renounce ourselves and accept his life in place of our life, unless we aim at what St Paul defines as 'it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me', we shall never be either disciplined or disciples."

Waiting for Love

"Love is the soul's true nourishment, yet this food which of all substances we most need is not something we can produce for ourselves.  One must wait for it.  The only way to make absolutely certain that one will not receive it is to insist on procuring it by oneself.  And once again, this essential dependence can generate anger.  One can attempt to shake it off, and reduce it to the satisfaction of those needs that require no adventure of the spirit or the heart for their filling.  Conversely, we can accept this situation of dependence, and keep ourselves trustingly open to the future, in the confidence that the Power which has so determined us will not deceive us." -- Joseph Ratzinger/ Pope Benedict XVI, in Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life.

Rich thoughts here.  This summer they have taken on existential dimensions in my life, as I've wrestled with deep loneliness while I am in Texas for an internship and my beloved wife in Russia for studies of her own.  But Ratzinger points to the posture of waiting for love to come as something fundamental to our very being.  We humans simply are dependent, we cannot nourish ourselves with the fruit of love that is not love unless it comes to us as a gift.

Ratzinger continues by stating why this hope for love's arrival is not simply a "waiting for Godot":

"The God who personally died in Jesus Christ fulfilled the pattern of love beyond all expectation, and in so doing justified that human confidence which in the last resort is the only alternative to self-destruction."

Faith truly is the opposite of despair.  Despair gives up hope that love will come unbidden, and either turns towards the wall or reaches toward love in the self-defeating attempt to procure it for oneself.  (Was this not what Adam and Eve did when they reached out and took the fruit in the hopes that they would thus make themselves "like God"?)  Faith is the quiet confidence that God will nourish our lives with his love.  Faith waits for love even when everything seems to suggest that love will never come on its own.

"The Church of Sinners": Radner and Rahner

"The Scribes and the Pharisees—they are not in the Church alone but everywhere and in all disguises—will always drag "the sinful woman" before the Lord and accuse her (with secret satisfaction that she is, thank God, no better than themselves) —"Lord, this woman has been taken again in adultery. What sayest Thou?" And this woman will not be able to deny it. No, it is scandal enough. And there is nothing to extenuate it. She thinks only of her sins, because she has rarely committed them, and she forgets (how could the humble maid do otherwise?) the hidden and shining nobility of her holiness. And so she does not attempt a denial. She is the poor Church of Sinners. Her humility, without which she would not be holy, knows only her guilt. She stands before Him to Whom she is espoused, Who has loved her and given Himself up for her to sanctify her, who knows her sins better than all her accusers. But He is silent. He writes down her sins in the sand of world history which—with her guilt—will soon be effaced. He is silent a little while, which to us seems thousands of years. And He judges this woman only through the silence of His love which gives grace and absolves. In every century new accusers confronted this "woman", and stole away, one after another, beginning with the eldest, for there was not one who found her who was himself without sin. And in the end the Lord will be alone with the sinner. He will turn and gaze at His fallen Spouse, and ask: Woman, where are they who accuse thee? Has no man condemned thee? And she will reply with unspeakable remorse and humility: No man, Lord. The Lord will go to her and say: Then neither will I condemn thee. He will kiss her brow and say: My Spouse, my holy Church."

 - Karl Rahner, "The Church of Sinners" (1947, collected in Theological Investigations, VI)

Being an intern at Church of the Incarnation has many advantages, one of which has been the opportunity to attend a class on ecclesiology Ephraim Radner has been teaching as part of the Incarnation School of Theology.  Thinking through what we mean by "the church" with the Rev. Dr. Radner has been a timely exercise for me, as I consider where I stand in the mess that is Anglicanism in North America (more on this in future).  The last two days have been particularly apropos to the current situation, as we have considered how to articulate the church's oneness, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity in the face of her sinfulness and brokenness in history.

Radner has convinced me that any understanding of the church must acknowledge her sinfulness as part of her identity in time.  He suggests that a figural reading of the church is the best way to articulate how it is that the church that has so evidently failed time and again is truly said to be "one, holy, catholic and apostolic."  How?  Because a person (e.g. Adam, Israel, David, Mary, Peter) has a history which is marked by sin, judged and forgiven by Christ, and which finds fulfillment in the person of Christ.  Radner used Karl Rahner's famous essay, "The Church of Sinners" (with which I began this post) as an example of such a figural reading.  For Rahner, the church is the woman caught in adultery, whose holiness is found in her repentance and her Lord's forgiveness. (If you object to this figure on the basis of the story's questionable authenticity, then take the case of Peter, or Israel, or David, etc.)  Thus, the church is inescapably (in history) in need of continual conversion.  

If the church must be semper reformanda, always reforming, as part of its very identity, then surely division is not the solution to the church's failures. 

[The images are from Rembrandt's painting The Woman Taken in Adultery (1644) and his drawing Christ and the woman taken in adultery (1659), respectively.]

"Death, thou shalt die."

Fr. Bill is a retired priest from the church I am interning at this summer.  He is in hospice and has Alzheimer's.  This afternoon, I went with a deacon to visit him and bring him Communion.  His wife greeted us, and we asked if Fr. Bill would like to receive Communion.  He was agitated when we got there, but she thought that he would appreciate it.  So we read the short service for "Communion in Special Circumstances," and the deacon put the Host in Fr. Bill's mouth.  He did not want it, and spit it out on the floor.  His wife gathered the chewed pieces up, saving them to try again later, and failing that, to bury them outside.  We finished the prayers with some difficulty, as he was becoming more agitated and mumbling incoherently. As we were saying goodbye, Fr. Bill opened his clear, blue eyes and looked straight at me, and so I introduced myself to him and he seemed to understand.  Then right before we left, he got very upset and his face contorted in an expression of anger and fear I will never forget.  "Damn, damn, damn," he kept murmuring. He quieted as his wife stroked his face and patted his chest.  She thanked us as we left the room.

Visiting Fr. Bill drove home to me the reality that death is an enemy.  The ravages of Alzheimer's--and sickness and suffering generally--are signs of death savaging the goodness of human life.  While in one sense, death is natural because humans are mortal creatures, the ways in which it arrays itself against human flourishing makes it an enemy.  St. Paul named death "the last enemy" (1 Cor 15:26).

But Christian hope is that, through Jesus' resurrection from the dead, death has been defeated, and on the last day, when the dead are raised to new life, it will be no more.  Death is an enemy, yes, but a vanquished enemy that will be destroyed (see 1 Cor 15:26, 54-55; Rev 21:3-4). As John Donne put it, "Death, thou shalt die." Death will be no more, precisely because of bodily resurrection; if only "the soul" survived death, then death would still be victorious over the body.  But resurrection hope insists that the body will be raised to a new, transformed life.  Christian hope insists on God's commitment to the whole person.

Resurrection hope is a sure and certain hope, proved by God raising Jesus from the dead.  Contrast this with the vain attempt to engineer a permanent life exemplified by "the Singularity Movement" so popular these days in Silicon Valley (see here).  Resurrection hope is certain because God is trustworthy.

Resurrection hope is good news.  Good news for people suffering from death's onslaught, people like Fr. Bill.  Alzheimer's remains devastating and horrifying, but it is not victorious.  Rather, because the living God has conquered death in and through Christ, Fr. Bill will live with Christ forever (Rom 6:3-11).

In the meantime, I mourn for Fr. Bill and his fear and pain and brokenness.

[NB: This post is cross-posted from my recent post on the Divinity Affinity blog.]

"Vain Repetitions"?

"For we cannot but all find by our own experience how difficult it is to fasten anything that is truly good, either upon ourselves or others; and that it is rarely, if ever, effected without frequent repetitions of it. Whatsoever good things we hear only once, or now and then, though, perhaps, upon the hearing of them, they may swim for awhile in our brains, yet they seldom sink down into our hearts, so as to move and sway the affections, as it is necessary they should do, in order to our being edified by them."  
-- William Beveridge, from A Sermon on the Excellency and Usefulness of the Common Prayer (1681)


As a neophyte Anglican whose formation was thoroughly Anabaptist and Evangelical, I have found myself wrestling with the fact that my recitation of the morning office (and other services from the Prayer Book) is sometimes just that--a recitation of words in which neither my mind nor my heart are engaged.  I do not want to become the sort of person who deceives himself into thinking that external piety is equivalent to a vital relationship with the risen and present Christ.  So when I recite the Benedictus or the Lord's Prayer with scarcely a thought attached to the words, I fear that I am becoming precisely that sort of person.  At the same time, I have decided to set down roots in the Anglican tradition, with which Prayer Book spirituality is intimately connected.  This commitment and this fear raises the question of the value of set forms of prayer.

Happily others have faced this same question before.  The Rev. William Beveridge is one such person, who along with other seventeenth century Anglican divines thought through this precise question in response to criticisms raised by Puritans.  The quote from a sermon he gave at St. Peter's, Cornhill (where he was vicar), with which I began this post is perhaps the best answer I have found.  Beveridge's answer is valuable because he recognizes the necessity that prayer affect the state of the heart, and maintains the value of set prayer precisely in contributing to the change of affections it has the potential to render.  Set prayers are valuable because through repetition of "good things," they are able to "move and sway the affections."  That the prayers in the Prayer Book are almost entirely composed of strings of scriptural references and allusions provides assurance that they are "good things', that is, that they are edifying to my faith and the faith of the Church (cf. 1 Cor 14:26, the text on which Beveridge's sermon was based).  Thus, the value of praying set forms is like that of regularly performing the same physical exercises; the latter forming muscles through repetition, the former serving "to raise up my desires to those good things which are prayed for, to fix my mind wholly upon God."

Of course, Beveridge and others understood set forms of prayer as properly belonging to what they called "public devotions."  They did not think of set forms of prayer as a panacea for a robust life of prayer, but also emphasized the necessity of private, extemporaneous prayer.  In speaking of this they emphasize strongly mastery of one's desires.  For example, Richard Baxter wrote in 1647,

"Keep [thy heart] close to the business [of prayer] until thou have obtained thine end...Call in assistance also from God; mix ejaculations with thy cogitations and soliloquies, till having seriously pleaded the case with thy heart, and reverently pleaded the case with God, thou hast pleaded thyself from a clod to a flame, from a forgetful sinner to a mindful lover; from a lover of the world to a thirster after God, from a fearful coward to a resolved Christian, from an unfruitful sadness to a joyful life."

 And Joseph Hall in 1643 exhorted us to take the smallest occasion as a "holy hint of raising our hearts up to our God."  For example, he suggests praying "Wash Thou me, O Lord, and I shall be whiter than snow" (Psalm 51:7b) when washing one's hands.  Through such exercises, he hopes to encourage "a continual acknowledgment" of God

These Anglican divines understood that we humans are literally creatures of habit, and that formation of the habits of loving God and neighbor with our whole self requires diligent training.

[NB: Rt. Rev. Anthony Burton, the rector at Church of the Incarnation, where I am an intern this summer through Duke Divinity School's Field Education program, gave me the book from which the quotations are taken:  Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the religious literature of the seventeenth century, eds. Paul Elmer More and Frank Leslie Cross (London: S.P.C.K., 1962).]

Apologia

In world crowded with blogs, how can I justify adding yet another potentially solipsistic site?  Happily, the overcrowding of the virtual world does not come with the same set of consequences as does excessive "development" or too-aggressive exploitation of natural resources in the physical world.  So I need not be too concerned if my justification fails: at worst this blog will divert my time and energy from other, more important, matters.

On the other hand, as perhaps any writer does, I harbor the secret ambition of someday writing something that the world - at least theologians and even the churches - will not happily forget.  This blog is unlikely to become something (if "thing" is really the appropriate category to use) the world could not do without.  I confess that I hope one day it may make a meaningful contribution to cultural and theological discourse, as does a blog like Faith and Theology.  For the time being - all the time we have really, and therefore time to be redeemed, as W.H. Auden might remind us - however, I have more modest hopes for this blog.

I hope that "Wanderings" will be a laboratory of ideas, a space to test out various questions about the Christian faith that life in general and my studies as a divinity student in particular might raise.  I hope that the more public nature of a blog (i.e., the possibility that others might actually read what I write here) will challenge me to more carefully conceptualize and articulate my thoughts.  In the event that this site attracts other readers, I hope to learn from their comments and criticism.

Ultimately the justification for this blog lies in Anselm's famous and Augustinian dictum:  Theology is faith seeking understanding, fides quaerens intellectum.  I have described this blog as a travelogue precisely because I have faith (but how did I come to this faith? and can I rightly call it "mine"? - questions for another day) and because faith by its very nature longs to see that which it now does not see, I am on a journey to understand that faith.  "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Heb 11:1); faith is certain of that for which it hopes, but it longs to make sense of the whys and wherefores of that hope.

Why create this blog?  To think through the whys and wherefores of the Christian faith I hold in a space that invites further conversation with others.