The purpose of the Israelite cult

What the congregation wants to achieve through the cult, and what the 'power' from God is to create, is life - in the most comprehensive sense of the word, from the fundamental material need: rain, sun, fertility, the continuation of the race, the strength and victory of the child, and so on, up to the spiritual, religious and ethical values that are the lifeblood of the society - life for everything that belongs to its 'world.' The Israelites expressed the same idea by the word 'blessing'. Blessing is to be created, increased, and secured through the cult; the office of the priest is to 'bless in Yahweh's name'. Both life and blessing have their ultimate source in the deity.

S. Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel's Worship, 18. You can read the whole of the first two chapters here.

Tabernacle and New Creation

A great quote:

"Exodus concludes with God’s coming to his tabernacle to dwell there (40:34–38). God’s occasional appearances to Israel have now yielded to his permanent presence in their midst. And the tabernacle moves with them wherever they go; God journeys with his people. But the tabernacle suggests much more than this: it is an emblem of the full restoration of God’s presence within the whole of his creation, just as he originally intended:

At this small, lonely place in the midst of the chaos of the wilderness, a new creation comes into being. In the midst of disorder there is order. The tabernacle is the world order as God intended writ small in Israel. The priests of the sanctuary going about their appointed courses is like everything in creation performing its liturgical service—the sun, the trees, human beings. The people of Israel carefully encamped around the tabernacle in their midst constitutes the beginnings of God’s bringing creation back to what it was originally intended to be. The tabernacle is a realization of God’s created order in history; both reflect the glory of God in their midst.

Moreover, this microcosm of creation is the beginning of a macrocosmic effort on God’s part. In and through this people, God is on the move to a new creation for all. God’s presence in the tabernacle is a statement about God’s intended presence in the entire world. The glory manifest there is to stream out into the larger world. The shining of Moses’ face in the wake of the experience of the divine glory … is to become characteristic of Israel as a whole, a radiating out into the larger world of those glorious effects of God’s dwelling among Israel. As a kingdom of priests, … they have a role of mediating this glory to the entire cosmos." [*] [**]

[*]Terence E. Fretheim, Exodus (Interpretation; Louisville: John Knox, 1991), 271-272.

[**]Bartholomew, C. G., & Goheen, M. W. (2004). The drama of Scripture: Finding our place in the biblical story (72). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.

An ancient theological exegesis of Psalm 24

On April 19 the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrated The Day of the Resurrection and, much to my surprise, has as one of its liturgical texts an extract from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. This Gospel provides us with a description of events in Jesus' career which are hidden from sight in the four canonical gospels: the moment between his crucifixion and resurrection, and the moment after the ascension, between his envelopment by the clouds and his enthronement at the right hand of the Father.

So how did the author of this Gospel find out what happened? He read the Old Testament, of course! In this case, Psalm 24 proved to be the main source of information. As Gregory of Nyssa put it, Psalm 24 is a supplement to the Gospels, providing us with additional information not contained in the canonical Four. The tradition that Psalm 24 (LXX Psalm 23) is about two events in Jesus' career (the Harrowing of Hell and the Ascension, corresponding to the two sets of questions and answers in the third strophe of the psalm) is relatively later, however. Originally the entire was read in relation to the Ascension. I will wait until Ascention Day itself (this coming Thursday) before posting more on the history of interpretation of this Psalm. For now, I share with you the Harrowing of Hell, replete with citation from Psalm 24 (underlined), kindly provided for us by Esteban of Vox Stefani:

And as the prince Satan and Hades spoke this together, suddenly there came a voice as of thunder and a spiritual cry: "Lift up your gates, O ye princes, and be ye lifted up, O everlasting gates, and the King of glory shall come in." When Hades heard that, he said unto the prince Satan: "Depart from me and go out of mine abode: if thou be a mighty man of war, fight thou against the King of glory. But what hast thou to do with him?" And Hades cast Satan forth out of his dwelling. Then said Hades unto his wicked ministers: "Shut ye the hard gates of brass and put on them the bars of iron and withstand stoutly, lest we that hold captivity be taken captive."

But when all the multitude of the saints heard it, they spake with a loud voice of rebuking unto Hades: "Open thy gates, that the King of glory may come in." And David cried out, saying: "Did I not, when I was alive upon earth, prophesy unto you: 'Let them give thanks unto the Lord, even his mercies and his wonders unto the children of men: for he hath broken the gates of brass and smitten the bars of iron in sunder; he hath taken them out of the way of their iniquity.'" And thereafter in like manner Isaiah said: "Did not I, when I was alive upon earth, prophesy unto you: 'The dead shall arise, and they that are in the tombs shall rise again, and they that are in the earth shall rejoice, for the dew which cometh of the Lord is their deliverance?' And again I said: 'O Death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?'"

When they heard all these things from Isaiah, all the saints said unto Hades: "Open thy gates: now shalt thou be overcome and weak and without strength." And there came a great voice as of thunder, saying: "Lift up your gates, O princes, and be ye lifted up, O gates of Hades, and the King of glory shall come in." And when Hades saw that they so cried out twice, he said, as though he knew it not: "Who is the King of glory?" And David answered Hades and said: "The words of this cry do I know, for by his spirit I prophesied the same; and now I say unto thee that which I said before: 'The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle, he is the King of glory.' And: 'The Lord looked down from heaven that he might hear the groanings of them that are in fetters and deliver the children of them that have been slain.' And now, O thou most foul and stinking Hades, open thy gates, that the King of glory may come in." And as David spake thus unto Hades, the Lord of majesty appeared in the form of a man and lightened the eternal darkness and broke the bonds that could not be loosed: and the succour of his everlasting might visited us that sat in the deep darkness of our transgressions and in the shadow of death of our sins.

--From the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus

I wrote some comments on this on Estebans post.

See also my post Ancient Christian reception of Psalm 24.

Zitate zum Bußtag

Ich glaube, daß ich deswegen Christ bin, weil ich durch einzelne Christen erfahren habe und noch immer erfahre, was Vergebung ist. In ihr ist mir die schöpferische Herausforderung Jesu konkret begegnet. Vergebung befreit und verändert: mich, den anderen und unsere Beziehung zueinander. Vergebung setzt frei, wo Gefangenschaft war. Sie schafft eine Solidarität, die auch unsere dunklen, gefährlichen Seiten mitträgt. Dadurch wird sie zu einer Quelle von Freundschaft und Liebe.

- KURT MARTI

Da unser Herr und Meister Jesus Christus spricht: "Tut Buße", hat er gewollt, daß das ganze Leben der Gläubigen Buße sei.

- MARTIN LUTHER
1. THESE DER 95 THESEN VON 1517

Umkehr ist der schnellste Weg voran.

- C.S. LEWIS

Eine Fürbitte für die Christen im Irak

My Bible study group dedicated last night to learning about and praying for the Christians in Iraq (and I think we managed about a fifty/fifty balance of prayer and learning). Not only did we use the most recent articles on the topic, we also had the pastor of the arab congregation which meets on our premises. Eyes were opened (wide), emotions were stirred, souls searched, and horizons broadened. I hope and pray it wasn't a one off wonder, but that we will continue to bear our brothers in prayer and remember our responsibility to the larger church. The following is a litany I swiped from the EKD website:

Liturg: Gütiger und barmherziger Gott,
wir legen unsere Hände zusammen
und halten Fürbitte für die verfolgten Christen im Irak:

Sprecher I:
Gott, Ruhe und Sicherheit
gibt es noch immer nicht im Irak.
Die Situation ist so verworren, wie nie zuvor.
Die Bevölkerung lebt in großer Angst
und ihre Hoffnung wird kleiner
angesichts der vielen Anschläge und der vielen Toten.
So viele Menschen sind auf der Flucht -
Christen, Muslime, Yeziden,
Mandäer, Kurden, Araber, Turkmenen -
der ganze Irak scheint unterwegs zu sein.
Wo gibt es Sicherheit, wo Schutz, wo Geborgenheit
in diesem friedlosen und von Gewalt erschütterten Land?
Wann wird dieses geschundene Land
endlich im Frieden leben dürfen?

Höre unser gemeinsames Rufen: Kyrie eleison.

Sprecher II:
Gott, wir machen uns große Sorgen
um unsere christlichen Brüder und Schwestern -
grausame Nachrichten erreichen uns fast täglich,
sie müssen, um ihr Leben bangen.
Von fanatischen Islamisten werden sie gejagt und vertrieben.
Ihre Gotteshäuser sind Zielscheibe von Zerstörungen.

Höre unser gemeinsames Rufen: Kyrie eleison

Sprecher I:
Gott, wir können es nicht fassen,
dass Christen im Irak wegen ihres Glaubens
ermordet werden.
Stärke die Kraft ihres Glaubens;
halte deine Hand über alle,
die Angst haben;
gib ihnen Menschen zur Seite,
die sie schützen und für sie beten;

Höre unser gemeinsames Rufen: Kyrie eleison

Sprecher II:
Gott, wir denken an die vielen Flüchtlinge unter den Christen,
die aus Angst ihre Heimat verlassen haben,
deren Familien auseinander gerissen sind,
die um einen ihrer Lieben trauern.
Vor unseren Augen vollzieht sich gegenwärtig
der größte Exodus von Christen weltweit.
Wir denken an die Kinder,
die heimatlos geworden sind;
wir denken an die Eltern, die nicht wissen,
wie es mit ihnen in Jordanien und Syrien weitergeht;
Wir denken aber auch an die Menschen,
die sich um diese Flüchtlinge kümmern,
die sie begleiten und trösten.
Gib ihnen Kraft, barmherziger Gott,
und Mut für diesen wichtigen Dienst.

Höre unser gemeinsames Rufen: Kyrie eleison

Musical appropriation of the Psalms (and why I dig Gregorian chant)

In response to a post on an Australian psalmic-pop group, Esteban and Richard have called my attention to two other styles of appropriating the Psalms: Reformed Presbyterian Psalm singing



and Anglican plain song:



(Richard has also posted audio clips of Psalms 8, 90 and 100 [their source is here]).

I've been looking for ways to appropriate the Psalms in my own devotional life. They are practically non-existent, as far as the Free Churches that I know go. The one I'm at now is an exception, in that we read a Psalm about once a month.

Luckily, a Gregorian chant fanatic at the Protestant faculty here in Bonn has led a course on the subject over the past two semesters. I only had time to visit 3/4 of the first and the singing of the Divine Office to round of the second and I've since become a major fan. I'm not sure what it is, but that monotone somehow helps carry me through the endless text. I feel like I'm floating, observing the content of the Psalm from above. It's as if the "music" creates a space in which I can be alone with the Psalm. This was brought home to me as we chanted a particularly bloodthirsty psalm. On the one hand, the aesthetic of the chapel with the mellow candels, chilled atmosphere and gentle chant didn't gel well with a text about destroying our enemies and grinding their bones into dust. On the other hand, from that "chanting state," I was able to look down from above,as it were, and oberserve what was going on in a different dimension of realty.

I now do it everyday on my own and have managed to stick to it far more consistently than other projects I've tried ... so far. I find that it provides an especially healthy corrective to my otherwise intellectualized engagement with the text, which tends to rush over stuff that one normally thinks "one already understands." It also holds me back from my usual rush to extend my knowledge by reading more and more rather than reading deeper and deeper, which requires far more patience and a special disposition. Oh, and the last benefit of Gregorian chanting, it simply helps me remember the text better. I need less and less read the text and recite everything by heart, which also has the advantage that I can do it wherever I want.

Update:

Sister Macrina, Citercian nun and authoress of the blog A Vow of Conversation, has linked to her Abbey in Holland, where you can listen to the sisters chanting the divine office in Gregorian chant, a large percentage of which is psamoldy. You can even watch them on video.

Poetry Wilderness

“The poetic imagination is marginal within our dominant scientific culture. This tends towards a deadening literalism. In most traditional societies, poetry, myth, song and music were central to the culture. In our society these have often been reduced to entertainment. The hunger for the transcendent is still there in the human heart. As St. Augustine said, it is restless until it rests in God. But in our postmodern society it is harder for the preacher to evoke that ultimate human destiny which transcends our words. Few preachers are poets. I am not. But if the preaching of the word is to flourish, then we need poets and artists, singers and musicians who keep alive the intuition of our ultimate destiny. The Church needs these singers of the transcendent to nurture her life and her preaching.”

(Timothy Radcliffe OP, ”The Sacramentality of the Word,” in LITURGY IN A POSTMODERN WORLD, pp.133-147, here p.145)

Liturgy and Exegesis

Halden from Inhabitatio Dei has written an interesting post entitled Reclaiming Christ's Time, in which he looks at the significance of practising the church's liturgical calendar for Christian ethical living, mission, and identity-formation. He claims that

The Christian liturgical year embodies a way of ordering time which is distinctively shaped by the Christian narrative. ... Through a narrative-Christological ordering the celebrations and festivities of its people, the church constructed a powerful mode of ecclesial formation that orients its members toward an explicitly theological and ecclesial understanding of their identity and the practice of everyday life.

This idea of situating ourselves in God's time has implications for how we should read our Bibles. I am once again brought back to that incredible theological exegete Christopher Seitz. In the preface to his book Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture, he makes the following comments:

"The loss of figural reading is not the loss of an exegetical technique. It is the loss of location in time under God. Certain forms of allegorical reading, it has been claimed, are ahistorical and must be cast out of the church's academic (or ecclesial) reading of the Bible. Ironically, however, those readings most interested in historical reference are the same ones that cannot make any accounting of the church's place in time and so resort to homiletical analogies of the most spiritualizing and moralizing sort in order to let the Bible have some sort of say after all the historical heavy lifting is over. And one might well question whether all spiritual reading was as temporally disinterested as modern historically minded folk have thought. At issue is likely a different order of temporality, not a spiritual-versus-historical frame of reference. ...

... My only prayer is that Christ's body will be "figured in" to his glorious body and that the scriptures would illumine him in his threefold mystery and give the church a place in time again."

(2001: viii)

'Figuring' oneself into the History of Mankind

Christopher Seitz is interested in how the Church can recover the instincts of figural reading in our own day. He says,

"The loss of figural reading is not the loss of an exegetical technique. It is the loss of location in time under God."

His prayer is that

"Christ's body will be 'figured in' to his glorious body and that the scriptures would illumine him in his threefold mystery and give the church a place in time again."

(2001:viii, italics my own).

A beautiful glimpse of what this could look like is provided by the eucharistic president's speech on behalf of the entire human race in the Alexandrian anaphora of St. Gregory Nazianzen:

"As the lover of man, thou didst create me as a man. Thou hadst no need of my service, though I had need of thy lordship. Of thy mercy thou didst bring me into existence, thou didst establish the heavens above me as a roof, thou didst make the earth firm for me to walk upon: for my sake though didst confine the sea: for my sake thou didst give life to animals in their kinds: thou didst put all things under my feet, not didst thou permit me to lack any of the things of thy love. It is thou who didst fashion me and lay thy hand upon me, thou didst inscribe in me the image of thy power, thou didst endue me with the gift of logos, thou didst open paradise for my delight, thou didst bestow on me the instruction of the knowledge of thyself, thou didst reveal to me the tree of life, didst make known to me the thorn of death. From one tree thou didst debar me that I might not eat of it: I ate it, I rejected thy law, I neglected thy commandment, I brought on myself the sentence of death. Thou, Lord, didst convert my punishment (into salvation) ... Thou who didst ever exist, camest on earth for us who were ignorant, didst enter the Virgin's womb, albeit God who cannot be contained. Thou didst not think it robbery to be equal with God, but thou didst empty thyself and take on thee the form of a servant, didst bless my nature in thyself, didst fulfil thy law for me ... Thou didst go forth like a sheep to the slaughter, didst manifest thy solicitude for me on the cross, didst slay my sin in thy sepulchre, didst take my first fruits up into heaven, didst reveal to me thy second advent wherein thou shalt come to judge the quick and the dead and give to everyone according to his deeds. I offer to Thee, Lord, the symbols of this my free service: my actions are a copy of thy word. It is thou who hast given me this mystic share in thy flesh in the bread and the wine. For in the night in which thou didst give thyself up ... "

It's Christmas Time ...

... so I guess, given the heavily theological tone of this blog, that I should say a few seasonally fitting words.

The problem is that this has not been one of the most 'Christmasy' Christmases for me. The day itself came almost as a surprise, and the church services did not particularly speak to me (German language barriers aside). But that fact in itself throws in sharper relief what I really have learnt over this past year about the true nature of 'Advent faith'.

What have I learnt over the past year? What follows is a summary of truths I've come to know in more than the abstract, 'theological' way that characterizes so much academic thinking. Feel free to contradict or query anything that I say.

- God is sovereign. It's his world, his plan and his will. He stoops down into our world and works within our categories and traditions, but he isn't bound by these categories and traditions. When he wishes, he hides himself and leaves us dangling (biblical echo: 1 Samuel 4-7).

- God places a high premium on human responsibility. So high it's scary. Part of that responsibility is taking care of the purity of your own heart. The connection between 'inside' and 'outside' is more important than piety and religious posturing. He wants you, he wants genuine, sincere, full-hearted workers and warriors in his kingdom and he's willing to put you through hell to make you realize where your priorities lie (biblical echo: King David's career, the 'deuteronomic' version).

- God, despite seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is a solid rock and eternal foundation, a fortress to those who seek shelter from the storm. But this God is not an abstract principle to be nodded at or an indulgent father to manipulate. He's a man with a plan, and this plan is of eternal significance. This plan is called the Gospel, and those who would find shelter in this safehaven must first be gripped, propelled and infused with this vision. Adoption into God's family means playing according to his agenda, and this agenda determines the nature of the relationship (biblical echo: the Book of Job).

- God's agenda is good, very good. This can seem hard to grasp when the battle is grim (and all too easy to forget) but the end is of a joy that is so substantial that all previous pain evaporates in the presence of tasting what life was meant to be from the very start. The greatest meaning and significance one can receive is participating in this movement, struggle, from falleness to restoration. Hope consists in 'tasting' this reality and realising there is more to come. Motivation for mission consists in wanting others to see this reality and be redeemed by it.

- One practical lesson I've learned is connected to my first point: you can't manufacture spirituality by doing your Bible Study, liturgy, quiet time, meditation or joining a religious organisation. These activities only become truly spiritual when they become places for meeting the God of your salvation, the God of the Gospel. The Gospel is the pre-condition for genuine spirituality, which can only be a response and participation, and not the result. Our work flows out of our vision, and not vice versa.

So what does all this have to do with Advent faith?

Advent is that funny time of year when we are doing two things at once: looking back and looking forward, rejoicing and fasting, ending something and starting something new. As someone caught by the vision of God's good news and drawn into its outworking in history I'm stuck in this intermediate period: the God of goodness has revealed his plan for a redeemed creation. I've been born anew and allowed to taste what life should be like. Yet this reality still remains a 'should' and there's work to be done. I hesitantly look into a future of which the only certainty is the victory of God and I'm humbled that he knows me by name.