The Nature of the Keys

With the Church of England’s decision to elevate women to the episcopate, there has been a lot of discussion about the nature of Holy Orders, especially the role of bishops and the life of the church. This is not of immediate concern to me, or at least, why I am spending time reflecting on this.

I am currently discerning a call into the “ordained ministry” and what that would look life for myself. For the past few years, whenever I told pastors that I was interested in becoming ordained, they would usually make a comment about how I should take time to pray and make sure it was my calling. Solid advice, but I was/am pretty sure that it is my calling. And I feel like Im making progress with pastors because they are now asking me instead “why the ordained ministry?” “Why not teach as a layman, the church has lay pastors and lay theologians. Why not do that?”

Its a valid question, and it got me thinking. I have absolutely no idea no idea what it means to be ordained, and what makes it different from a lay ministry?

Martin Luther, in his Small Catechism, states that…

The Office of the Keys is that special authority which Christ has given to His church on earth to forgive the sins of repentant sinner, but to with-hold forgiveness from the unrepentant…

Thus the job of the pastor is to ensure that the forgiveness and absolution of God is administered and realized on the congregation. Fair enough.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, I choose you…

The ministerial priesthood differs in essence from the common priesthood of the faithful because it confers a sacred power for the service of the faithful. The ordained ministers exercise their service for the people of God by teaching…, divine worship…, and pastoral governance…

Yes, I did open that up with a reference to Pokemon. The CCC affirms this sacred-power approach, but expands it to other things besides absolution of sins: teaching, leading worship, and sacred bureaucracy.

Next we turn ordination serive for Priests found in the book of common prayer

In all that you do, you are to nourish Christ’s people from the riches of his grace, and strengthen them to glorify God in this life and in the life to come.

Priests are to carry out a sacred lifestyle for the benefit of others.

Finally, for the win, the bible…

So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God.

There were a few other verses pertaining to the mission of the church, but that one cut to the heart of the matter.

It seems that there is a mystical otherness attached to ordination. With the laying of hands, an ontological change occurs. So the change between lay ministry and ordained ministry is that lay ministry proclaims truth; ordained ministry administers truth.

Thus going back to the original question “Why not lay ministry? Why not Ordained ministry?”

I really do not have an answer that that. I really cant answer that. I can say that I want to take part in the secret things of God, but that doesn’t mean that I’m cut out for it. It almost sounds arrogant.

All I can say is that I “feel called” to it, which seems just as out there as the concept itself.

+Alex Resurgent

Hermeneutics In Life By Tim Perry

Suppose you’re traveling to work and you see a stop sign. What do you do? That depends on how you exegete the stop sign.

1. A postmodernist deconstructs the sign (knocks it over with his car), ending forever the tyranny of the north-south traffic over the east-west traffic.

2. Similarly, a Marxist sees a stop sign as an instrument of class conflict. He concludes that the bourgeoisie use the north-south road and obstruct the progress of the workers on the east-west road.

3. A serious and educated Catholic believes that he cannot understand the stop sign apart from its interpretive community and their tradition. Observing that the interpretive community doesn’t take it too seriously, he doesn’t feel obligated to take it too seriously either.

4. An average Catholic (or Orthodox or Coptic or Anglican or Methodist or Presbyterian or whatever) doesn’t bother to read the sign but he’ll stop if the car in front of him does.

5. A fundamentalist, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop sign and waits for it to tell him to go.

6. A preacher might look up “STOP” in his lexicons of English and discover that it can mean: 1) something which prevents motion, such as a plug for a drain, or a block of wood that prevents a door from closing; 2) a location where a train or bus lets off passengers. The main point of his sermon the following Sunday on this text is: when you see a stop sign, it is a place where traffic is naturally clogged, so it is a good place to let off passengers from your car.

7. An orthodox Jew does one of two things:
1) Take another route to work that doesn’t have a stop sign so that he doesn’t run the risk of disobeying the Law.
2) Stop at the stop sign, say “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast given us thy commandment to stop,” wait 3 seconds according to his watch, and then proceed.
Incidentally, the Talmud has the following comments on this passage: R[abbi] Meir says: He who does not stop shall not live long. R. Hillel says: Cursed is he who does not count to three before proceeding. R. Simon ben Yudah says: Why three? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. R. ben Isaac says: Because of the three patriarchs. R. Yehuda says: Why bless the Lord at a stop sign? Because it says: “Be still, and know that I am God.” R. Hezekiel says: When Jephthah returned from defeating the Ammonites, the Holy One, blessed be He, knew that a donkey would run out of the house and overtake his daughter; but Jephthah did not stop at the stop sign, and the donkey did not have time to come out. For this reason he saw his daughter first and lost her. Thus he was judged for his transgression at the stop sign. R. Gamaliel says: R. Hillel, when he was a baby, never spoke a word, though his parents tried to teach him by speaking and showing him the words on a scroll. One day his father was driving through town and did not stop at the sign. Young Hillel called out: “Stop, father!” In this way, he began reading and speaking at the same time. Thus it is written: “Out of the mouth of babes.” R. ben Jacob says: Where did the stop sign come from? Out of the sky, for it is written: “Forever, O Lord, your word is fixed in the heavens.” R. ben Nathan says: When were stop signs created? On the fourth day, for it is written: “let them serve as signs.” R. Yeshuah says: … [continues for three more pages]

8. A Pharisee does the same thing as an orthodox Jew, except that he waits 10 seconds instead of 3. He also replaces his brake lights with 1000 watt searchlights and connects his horn so that it is activated whenever he touches the brake pedal.

9. A scholar from Jesus seminar concludes that the passage “STOP” undoubtedly was never uttered by Jesus himself, but belongs entirely to stage III of the gospel tradition, when the church was first confronted by traffic in its parking lot.

10. A NT scholar notices that there is no stop sign on Mark street but there is one on Matthew and Luke streets, and concludes that the ones on Luke and Matthew streets are both copied from a sign on a completely hypothetical street called “Q”. There is an excellent 300 page discussion of speculations on the origin of these stop signs and the differences between the stop signs on Matthew and Luke street in the scholar’s commentary on the passage. There is an unfortunately omission in the commentary, however; the author apparently forgot to explain what the text means.

11. An OT scholar points out that there are a number of stylistic differences between the first and second half of the passage “STOP”. For example, “ST” contains no enclosed areas and 5 line endings, whereas “OP” contains two enclosed areas and only one line termination. He concludes that the author for the second part is different from the author for the first part and probably lived hundreds of years later. Later scholars determine that the second half is itself actually written by two separate authors because of similar stylistic differences between the “O” and the “P”.

12. Another prominent OT scholar notes in his commentary that the stop sign would fit better into the context three streets back. (Unfortunately, he neglected to explain why in his commentary.) Clearly it was moved to its present location by a later redactor. He thus exegetes the intersection as though the stop sign were not there.

13. Because of the difficulties in interpretation, another OT scholar emends the text, changing “T” to “H”. “SHOP” is much easier to understand in context than “STOP” because of the multiplicity of stores in the area. The textual corruption probably occurred because “SHOP” is so similar to “STOP” on the sign several streets back that it is a natural mistake for a scribe to make. Thus the sign should be interpreted to announce the existence of a shopping area.

14. A “prophetic” preacher notices that the square root of the sum of the numeric representations of the letters S-T-O-P (sigma-tau-omicron-pi in the Greek alphabet), multiplied by 40 (the number of testing), and divided by four (the number of the world–north, south, east, and west), equals 666. Therefore, he concludes that stop signs are the dreaded “mark of the beast,” a harbinger of divine judgment upon the world, and must be avoided at all costs.

Hat tip to Stand In Faith

Unity in Essentials…

Time For a Christian Truce

I really do not want this to become one of those “religious political” blogs, where i sling mud at the right or left. Ill sling it wherever it needs to be slung. So I don’t want this post to be critical of Mr. (Rev.?) Grabiec’s person, or even his logic.

In his article “Time for a Christian Truce”, Mr. (Rev.?) Grabiec states that we can never truely know anything about our faith, and that it is time for Christians to settle their differences and preach the gospel. I could not agree more with him on this point. In specific he referenced the dispute between the Anglican Church in Canada and the Anglican Network in Canada. Indeed I would love it if Anglicans, or Christians for that matter, would stop warring over minute things and propagated the gospel. But I do have a problem with his thinking, and it is a very common train of thought, and it can have very real effects on the message that we preach.

In the article, Grabiec uses the example of the Arius controversy in the 300’s. Arius argued that Christ was a created being that God the Father gave some sort of divinity. This was condemned as heresy, and rejected. Grabiec seems to say that such beliefs are secondary to the bigger message of God.

I disagree. I think that if we are going to preach the Gospel, we should be fairly clear about what we believe, and make sure that it makes sense.

Arius’ argument didn’t check with the facts. There are two ways that Christ could have been a created being (please tell me if there are others). Way 1: He was a normal human whom God enabled to be sinless and amazingly wise, possessing healing powers. Way 2: He was below God, but above humanity, a sort of Angle or super angel. Each sounds plausible, but each makes it impossible for salvation to work.

We are told that the wages of sin is death, and the only way to atone for sin is through a Human sacrifice. If this is the case, than a Divine-Human Christ’s death would have atoned for the sins of one man. (I swore earlier tonight, sorry guys). A super-human being Christ would have saved no one but himself, because it is clear that what is to be saved, must be assumed. Thats why it must be a human sacrifice, nothing else would have legitimately worked.

This is why Arianism was rejected, it did not fit the understanding of the faith. This is just a small example amongst the myriad of disputes. My point is that we as a Christian community do need to have some unity in the faith that we profess. Its a shame that so many disagreements have divided us so much. But If we say that “anything is possible, really don’t know” to everything, we won’t have much of a faith to profess.

And That would be a larger shame unto itself

+Alex Resurgent
Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

Anglican Theology per N.T. Wright on The Colbert Report…

Great Interview, I encourage watching it at the Colbert website, but it isnt quite what I want to address.

About Two Thirds of the way into the interview, Bishop Wright defines all of Anglican theology in a nutshell:

The great thing about Anglicans is that we have no theology of our own; if something is true, then Anglicans believe it… or that’s the theory anyway.

Bishop Wright did two great things in that sentence, one is that he defined Anglicanism in a brevity that I have tried to achieve when explaining it to my friends.

Secondly, in the disclaimer he addressed the strain occurring within the communion right now, and what is causing it. There a dozens of theories as to what is at the heart of the mini-schism between the Episcopal Church and the Wider Anglican Community. The media blames it on homosexuality, many Anglicans would argue that it hinges on ‘the authority of scripture’, others would attribute it to fear of change, selling out to society, or a myriad of other things. But, whether Bishop Wright agrees to it or not, it all comes down to truth. What does it look like, where do we find it, what do we do with it.

The Anglican method for finding truth is the “three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason.” And, unfortunately, the Homosexual issue has pitted the legs against each other. The “traditional marriage” argument invokes scripture (after all Christ is the way, the truth and the life” and tradition (its never been done before), while the “pro SSM” side invokes reason (homosexuality is natural, how can it be sinful?) coupled with the scriptural principal of equality (for there are no more Jews and Gentiles in Christ).

What I hope we find with Gafcon and Lambeth is a further exploration into what us confessionless Anglicans define as truth. Perhaps if we cant agree on this, its time for us to split, and thats a suggestion I dont make lightly.

+Alex Resurgent