The Lambeth Conference brings questions of identity forward in our lives. We are with people of many different ethnicities, cultures, and languages. In the presence of great diversity our easy assumptions of identity are unsettled, and deeper ways to ground our identity can emerge. We can begin to see our life in Christ as the ground of our being, our identity.
As we are drawn deeper and deeper into relationship with one another we find that the descriptors that may catch our attention at first, those associated with ethnicity and culture, rich and capable of being explored in depth as they are, do not begin to sum up human life. Gender, sexual orientation, economic status, all these are important too. And then we begin to learn the personal histories of people, certainly conditioned and connected to all the above, but articulated in unique ways having to do with the inner life of people, their gifts and aspirations.
At some point we may come to understand, as we perceive the deepest aspirations of another person, their courage and hopefulness in the face of their own life challenges, that we are seeing Christ in that person. Christ speaks I AM from within all life, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see.
“What Jesus, when he speaks of himself without metaphoric mediation is about is affirming the goodness of creation and the apprehension of the depth of human beings within that creation. He reminds us that we are all ‘offspring of the divine,’ and have the divine image planted within us.”
So what does Jesus mean in the “I Am” statement-without-metaphoric-mediation in John 8:24: “I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins” (ESV)?
William Shontz
Did Jesus come to tell us that we are Ok and He was our cheer leader, or do we have a sin problem from which we needed salvation?
Brother Michael, you have hit the nail on the head. Rather than bringing together different traditional expressions of the same faith, Lambeth is now trying to bring together two different religions. But a House divided against itself cannot stand…
This emotional pablum is precisely what I meant by the language of affect. WE know how he feels and how others feel and his feeling about others feelings. This is virtually nothing cognitive here, little sign of analysis, of induction and deduction, of objective classification, of rational concepts……. just affect, which is more than mere emotionality or sentimentality, but a world constructed of personal color and impression. L
What’s especially striking is that he never mentions theology. Indeed, one might deduce from his words that theological differences are simply derivative of these cultural or economic or ethnic differences.
“Christ speaks I AM from within all life, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see.”
If I understand this concept correctly, it is that God expresses himself in all aspects of his creation (general revelation). The problem, as I see it, is not concerning all life in general, but concerning man in particular. Man is fallen from God and incapable of redemption without the salvation of God done of Christ, wherein we are saved by grace through faith. But what are we to say of those men who have not this faith in Christ? Does Christ speak “I AM” from within them? What of those men who call on his Name, but are correctly discerned not to bear good fruit (that is, not to follow the Gospel, not to truly follow him with amended lives)? Don’t they put Christ to shame (in reference to Hebrews 6:4-6)?
“What Jesus, when he speaks of himself without metaphoric mediation is about is affirming the goodness of creation and the apprehension of the depth of human beings within that creation.”
Oh. Did Jesus affirm the goodness of creation? I believe He addressed the fallen nature of the world and the need for redemption of all men through repentance and acceptance, upon which we are promised forgiveness and amendment of life.
The last part of his sentence strikes me as strange. I believe he’s saying that man’s apprehension of his place in the goodness of creation is affirmed by Jesus. IOW, man is apprehensive that he is good, though part of God’s good creation, and when Jesus speaks to us of himself, he seeks to affirm us so we may overcome that apprehension. If this is the right reading, this is once again at least a partial denial of the Fall.
“And each metaphor is theologically mysterious, capable of infinite meaning.”
I had a very short exchange with someone on StandFirm about the mystical dimensions of the Christian faith. What troubles me about this mysticism is not that it’s a valid part of the faith (as evidenced by some of the early church fathers), but that it can be used and twisted just as Andrus does above. By seeing each “I AM” statement as theologically mysterious and capable of infinite meaning, it’s impossible to attribute to them *any* absolute truth. This denial of absolute truth… well, we’ve been ’round Robin Hood’s barn many times before on this point of discussion….
cmsigler, I’m not quite as concerned about a denial of the Fall as you are. I think he is reacting too strongly, as is commonplace these days, against a Calvinistic (and even sometimes catholic) view of the depravity of Creation that is at odds with Genesis 1. It’s too strong because surely no Anglican holds such a view, but it doesn’t per se deny the Fall. Now, I’m willing to suspect that he doesn’t take the Fall seriously enough, but I think that is another matter.
The sentence about metaphor, however, does catch my eye, and it is hopelessly sloppy, at least to this mathematician. Metaphor does not free rhetoric from particularity of meaning; in general, one can rule out most of the terrain of meaning when following the map that metaphor and other figures of speech give us. The only infinity thereof is trivial, as trivial as the multiplicity of positions that a navigational system can give as we try to fix our position on the globe. Those errors are bounded; indeed, they can be represented statistically. Likewise, the meaning of metaphor is bounded. His statements do not give me hope that I could engage in real theological dialogue with him.
C. Wingate, you and I are perhaps both strangers amongst friends. Mathematics meets engineering/physics in the Anglican church world :^) A possible statistical analysis of deviation in derivation of meaning from scriptural metaphor — I’d venture that would require some depth of work.
To be disgustingly blunt, I don’t see much theology in this man and his statements — if our theology is based upon the Word, that is. And I do seem to hold a more Catholic view of the Fall. IMHO, everything was “good” and right in the Creation. Then man brought sin into the world by his willful disobedience of God’s law, and we’ve been messed up ever since.
Once again, it the variation on the old theme of I am dysfunctional, you are dysfunction, but we are all OK as it is whatever it is and so on. Please!
[blockquote] What Jesus … is about is affirming the goodness of creation and the apprehension of the depth of human beings within that creation. He reminds us that we are all “offspring of the divine,†and have the divine image planted within us.
The Lambeth Conference is reminding me of the life Baptism has drawn me into and prepares me for each day. I am trying to look for Christ in each person here. [/blockquote]
Bp. Andrus is expressing exactly what I find so troubling about what Baptism seems to have become for the revisionists: we’re all “offspring of the divine” just as we are, thank you very much, and we’ll just have a nice little water-sprinkling initiation rite to affirm ourselves in recognition of that fact.
Whatever happened to “none can enter into the Kingdom of God, except he be regenerate and born anew of water and the Holy Ghost”?
This guy is THE most entertaining bishop in the entire Anglican Communion, bar none. This is a BS tour de force!!!
Brs. Win and Mike and Cal….
You have it right. It is the one world government, one world religion crowd as promulgated by BA’s predecessor, BS. You know a United Nations of governments and religions. We are trying so hard to move away from truth and inclusivity to moral and religious relativism accompanied by an iron fist demanding compliance.