"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).]