A Nominal Anglican Responds
The Venerable Edward Michael George posts a long quotation from Soren Kierkegaard on the need to work for one’s bread. You can read it here.
The short form was elucidated by Bob Dylan:
Well, God said to Abraham “Kill me a son”
Abe said “Man, you must be putting me on”
God said “No”
Abe said “Wha?t”
God said “You do what you want to, Abe but
The next time you see me coming, you’d better run”
Abe said “Where do you want this killing done?”
God said “Out on that Highway 61″
Mr. George and I have rather different conceptions of God. It appears he is inclined towards importing the Old Testament’s vengeful Lord into the New Testament’s new dispensation. “‘labour and be heavy laden’” quotes Mr. George.
My own sense is that Mr. George fails to understand the meaning of the great day we are about to celebrate. If Easter has one great meaning it is the radical and overwhelming redemption of our sins embodied in the Resurrection. The Old Testament, not withstanding St. Paul’s best efforts, was firmly closed and a new world begun.
Jesus brings a burden of an entirely different sort than that imposed upon Abraham. One which it is possible to lift with joy rather than carry in fear.
Written by jay on March 20th, 2007 with
10 comments.
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jay
#1. March 20th, 2007, at 9:28 PM.
My apologies, from the outset, for my use of ‘nominal’. I meant to say ‘notional’ as per our last exchange–I was trying to be cheeky–but got mixed up. I’ve changed it, blog etiquette be damned (in a fiery, Old Testament hell)!
In my defense (and Kierkegaard’s, as I’m certain that he’d agree with me), my deference to the continuing authority of the Old Testament is informed by this: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17). Which is to say that the new dispensation informs/affirms the old. To suggest then that the Old Testament has been ‘closed’ by Christ, that it is obsolete, is simply wrong.
The Roman Catechism puts it this way: “The Old Law is a preparation for the Gospel. ‘The law is a pedagogy and a prophecy of things to come’ [St. Irenaeus]. It prophecies and presages the work of liberation from sin which will be fulfilled in Christ …” Article 7 of the 39 Articles (to be found in the Book of Common Prayer–or did Bishop Ingham make you throw yours away?) says: “The Old Testament is not contrary to the New: for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ … Wherefore they are not to be heard, which feign that the old Fathers did look only for transitory promises … No Christian man is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral.”
As for your remark about Easter, I do take your meaning, but I think what you yourself have failed to recognize is that the Resurrection was proceeded by the rather important event of the Crucifixion. (A detail that has long made many Anglicans uncomfortable–which might account for the absence in most of our churches of the body of Christ upon His Cross.) Two things, of equal importance, do we take from this event: one, that Christ died for our sins, that in his cross lies our salvation; two, that this was the very cross he referred to when he said “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and and take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34). That is to say: our salvation through the Paschal Lamb is not a done deal, it requires of us the sort of sacrifice implied by the cross (hardly a simple one, as it wasn’t even for God himself apparently).
And while, again, I take your meaning in your distinction between burdens of joy and burdens of fear, I think joy has a distinctly different meaning when applied to Christ’s Passion, then it does when applied to the sort of joy (if it can even be called that) we feel when we are told that society has been given a mandate to approve of us. The burden is neither joy nor fear, I think. It is a kind of transcendental ecstasy, that might, for the purposes of our discussion, be better understood through some consultation with the mystics.(But along these lines: one wonders what the point of Christ’s death and resurrection could ever have been if, post facto, we make it so that the sins for which he died were never sins in the first place.)
And … Oh, yes. The great theologian Bob Dylan. Touché! I’m lucky on this one, actually, as the introduction to my copy of “Fear and Trembling” deals directly with Bob’s song, so I’ll let Alistair Hannay address this. He says:
“For a modern consciousness the story is likely to be read as an anti-social parable of destruction and raw power. The opening verse of Bob Dylan’s song concludes, ‘God said, you can do what you want, Abe, but next time you see me comin’, you’d better run. Well, Abe said, where you want this killin’ done? God said, do it on Highway 61′. Faith, obedience, and mercy have here given way to disbelief, arbitrariness, and intimidation.
” … K’s focus, as originally, is on Abraham; Isaac is little more than a foil to Abraham’s greatness. Yet this greatness is not, as in the traditional reading, Abraham’s willingness to be an instrument of God’s omnipotence. K’s Abraham is great because of what he suffers in a trial of faith. And far from epitomizing social virtues, this Abraham’s suffering and greatness seem to isolate him in a very radical way from his society and its social ways.”
… Which is, I can’t help thinking, a rather tidy way of bringing us back to the first things of our argument. Christianity is a beautiful religion, full–as you say–of joy. But, to put it bluntly and without the qualification that it deserves, it is not, nor has it ever been a faith that can be acquired without serious work, serious personal sacrifice. Even He, after all, “became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”