Christian perfection

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Haecceity, the Concrete, and Love

Last week I was reading in Richard Rohr’s Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (2014). Toward the end of the book he is talking about John Duns Scotus and St. Bonaventure. He says this:

‘Scotus is fully an incarnationalist, which is our great Christian trump card. The universal incarnation always shows itself in the specific, the concrete, the particular, and it refuses to be a mere abstraction. No one says this better than Christian Wiman: “If nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time ravaged self.”  The doctrine of haecceity is saying that we come to universal meaning deeply and rightly through the concrete, the specific, and the ordinary, and not the other way around, which is the great danger of all the ideologies (overarching and universal explanations) that have plagued our world in the last century….

(In those ideologies) it is then easy to “love humanity, but not any individual people.” We defend principles of justice but would not put ourselves out to live fully just lives ourselves.

….In fact, this is often quoted as the essential difference between Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. For the Franciscan School, before God is the divine Logos (“rational pattern”), God is Eternal Outpouring (“ Love”). The divine pattern is first and itself Love, as opposed to thinking that God can be rationally understood, and that this God then orders us to love. Love is then a mandate instead of the nature of being itself. For Scotus, as for Bonaventure, the Trinity is the absolute beginning point— and ending point too. Outpouring Love is the inherent shape of the universe, and when we love, only then do we fully exist in this universe…. (However, most often in Western theology) truth was equated with knowing instead of loving. Josef Pieper, a Thomist scholar himself, rightly said that “The proper habitat for truth is human relationships.”  Ideas by themselves are never fully “true,” which is Platonism and not incarnate Christianity. At that level, we just keep arguing about words, and this keeps us from love.

….This intense eagerness to love made Francis’ whole life an astonishing victory for the human and divine spirit, and showed how they can work so beautifully together. That eagerness to love is the core and foundation of his spiritual genius. He encountered a love that just kept opening to him, and then passed on the same by “opening and opening and opening” to the increasingly larger world around him.’

Rohr, Richard (2014-07-27). Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (p. 181-183; 191). Franciscan Media. Kindle Edition.

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The Point of Holiness

NT Wright has expended considerable ink in saying that the point of Israel was not for Israel itself, but for the whole world. Israel was chosen by God to be the vehicle through which He blessed the Gentiles with the knowledge of the One True God. Copious amounts of OT scriptures can be cited. Most Christians and Jewish folk themselves agree with this reading of the OT. Israel did not exist as an end in itself – all nations were to be blessed through Abraham’s descendants. Israel was called for the sake of the Gentiles.

In the same way, Christians living a holy life  – a human living as the kind of creature she or he was made to be – is not an end in itself. It is for the sake of the whole creation: reflecting the image of God into the world around, something the entire Creation is standing on tiptoe waiting expectantly for according to Romans 8:19. As Wright says of 8: 26-27 “…this is no incidental reference to prayer and the work of the Spirit. The whole point is that when we pray we are not merely distant or feeble petitioners. We are starting to take up our responsibility as God’s image-bearing human beings, sharing God’s rule over creation.”*

Paul’s climax in Romans 8, overlooked in the Western tradition for a thousand years, is not that we are holy and get to go to heaven, but rather that God’s plan is coming together: holiness as humans finally leading the way expressing God’s rule to the whole creation as His stewards in the way it was always meant to be. Holiness is not an end in itself, in the sense that it is for itself; no, it is for the sake of the whole Creation. God’s world can only be put right when its masters are right. And saying we can’t finish the job of New Creation is no way to shirking our calling and duty, anymore than saying I can’t resurrect my own body so it doesn’t matter what I do with my body!

The holiness tradition that I grew up in, and I think our Pentecostal & Charismatic cousins, missed something vital here. Holiness, as I was growing up, was a goal in and of itself, something you aimed at for its own sake. Once you had it, you had sort of arrived, and now just needed to help other people get it. It was because God wanted people to follow a certain standard… this is how God is, this is how you should be. But the why and for what sake was often left out. Connecting it to the larger story in Scripture was left out… or just seen as part of getting to heaven… we were good at quoting “without holiness no man shall see the Lord”. In the end it was self-serving. That’s because we had virtually no theology of the Creation and ecology. Back then people would have laughed out loud at the thought that holiness was for the sake of the planet. That’s because our Hal Lindsay / Left Behind theology had us thinking God intended to burn the planet up and throw it in the trash. Yes, God’s “very good” Creation extolled throughout Scripture.

Instead of repeating the latest idiotic responses of the Far Right, US evangelicals need to read and consider carefully the theology they will learn when Pope Francis releases his encyclical on the environment. It’s time for us to grow up. Just as Jesus-generation Jews mistaked their calling thinking it was only about Jewish folk rather than the nations, so modern Christians need to stop the mistake of thinking our calling is only about humans, rather than the whole created order.

 

*Wright, N. T. (2014-06-03). Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues (Kindle Locations 1364-1366). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.