What is it like to be distinctly, securely a member of God’s people?

(With restricted liberty and faint apology to translators of the NET Bible, the Orthodox Jewish Bible, and the NASB.)

Yet this I want to do, it’s worth the effort and discomfort.  Rosenzweig was the skeptical Jew converted to his own people’s religion; Rosenstock the acculturated Jew who was baptized a Christian in his teens, and who eviscerated Rosenzweig’s sloppy thinking about reality, forcing him to dare to face God.

Right now I am working through Judaism Despite Christianity and find in Rosenstock’s letter to Cynthia Harris in 1943 many stunning comments making a unified argument that prayer is an absolute necessity–and his definition of prayer encompasses the entire life of a people.  Nineteenth-century biblical scholars did not represent Jewish history accurately or fairly.  The missed the “No” of the Jews to idols–Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and God’s three “No’s”:  the Fall, the Great Flood, and the Exodus.  “‘Revelation’ is a knowledge of God’s will, after his ‘No’ to our will has become known.” (181)  But the “No” was necessary if Israel was to recognize “herself as God’s servant, merely a man in the face of God’s majesty.”  (181)  This is not just strong stuff, it is the basic stuff.  It undergirds everything else Rosenstock wrote in the letter to Cynthia Harris in 1943.

One example will be enough:

The Germans all knew in 1918 that the World War had been lost deservedly.  Faith accepted the defeat.  But it takes faith in God to accept defeat fully.  If there be no divine will, then our will must reign supreme.  Naturally the whisperers came–those all-knowing ones who cannot be named but who are always being quoted–those who said, “It was a stab in the back,” “It was this or that,” “It was unnecessary,” etc.  The reaction was inevitable:  “We shall undo the defeat.”  Whispering is unauthorized speech.  The devil is any person who does not wish to be quoted; and so he never attains the rank of a person.  For a person accepts God’s judgement over what he has said or done.  Thus can he come to know the truth.  The devil never receives his verdict because he whispers only and never speaks truly and confidently.

. . . The people who had believed only in science, and who could not distinguish between spell-binding magic and prayer, now fell for the stump speakers.

Rosenstock summarizes the German history of persecution and repression against Lutherans (after 1825) and Catholics (certainly after 1871) and identifies Hitler as “the third attempt to free the German nation from any check on its nationalistic conscience.  This time, the triangle Luther-Rome-Israel is attacked foremost at the Jewish corner.  Also, the attack is far more violent than the two former.”  The furor Teutonicus runs a system of hatred, and there are other arguments to illustrate, but I will finish this statement with a few more of Rosenstock’s sentences:

Hitler hates everything started by the Jews, including democracy and the Freemasons.  Why?  They all know of the insertion of God’s “No” into history as a vital element.  But a spellbinder must be sure that his spell will work under all circumstances.  This prevents him from admitting God’s “No” to the fabric of history.

Hitler’s will and his god’s will are nauseatingly one.  The great art of speech has made Hitler crazy.  Since he has the privilege of speaking, of inflaming the masses, he spellbinds.  And so he hovers as a ghost from the abyss of paganism, a ghost of the days before God touched Israel’s lips with his fiery coal:  ”My will, O mortal, not thine, be done.”

The specific character of biblical prayer explains the uniqueness of the Bible.  We can’t forget the Bible because the divine “No” was created, in our speech, during those thousand years of Jewish prayer.  And all the other departments of our linguistic faculty rest on this clear distinction between prayer, on the one side, and science, poetry, fiction, and law, on the other.  If we do not pray with Israel, we cannot retain our Greek mathematics or our Roman law.  This will sound arbitrary or exaggerated at first reading.  But it is simple truth. (183)

Rosenstock goes on to illustrate examples that bind ancient and modern paganisms together while they show biblical prayer (faith, religion, core of revelation) to be absolutely distinct from them.  It is the distinction and emphasis that energized the philosophical, faithful thinking and dialogue that Rosenstock and Rosenzweig conducted over many years — theirs was an astonishing interchange between Christian and Jew; it started a century ago and lasted until Rosenzweig died.  Rosenstock lived to write voluminously on themes that grew out of scholarship as — I would like to say this —  a form of prayer.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, letter to Cynthia Harris (in 1943 a freshman at Radcliffe College): “Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer,” first published in The Journal of Religion (University of Chicago Press, April 1945).  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed., Judaism Despite Christianity:  The 1916 Wartime Correspondence between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (with a new  foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a new preface by Harold Stahmer, and a new chronology by Michael Gormann-Thelen (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Before that period a sizable group of Hebrews had become Israel in a sustained revelatory experience.  God gave the Covenant amid a growing and distinctive relationship.  The Covenant was the mode and the result of the continuing revelation, yet undergirding the Covenant was, and is, the God who revealed himself in it.  Even at that point, if I hear Hans Boersma correctly in his writing on “heavenly participation,” the Christ of God himself took full part in that Covenant (yes, and came to fulfill it) just as he always has been in relationship to the Creation.  Trinitarian teaching demands that conclusion; the Scriptures are shot through with references to the presence of God, with emphasis on his presence and availability or his presence even when he is hidden.

The Chinese cosmology entertained the presence of ancestors and exalted leading ancestors to a type of godhood–the Yellow Emperor is an example.  From the Zhou period forward, kings and then emperors carried the title tianzi or Son of Heaven.  They were expected to be sage–knowledgeable and wise; virtuous; beyond reproach; and committed to the proper ordering of things, to the Ordinances of Heaven, by which authority they sat on heaven’s throne.  Starting with the first emperor Qinshihuangdi, it was earth’s throne, the throne of the “Middle Kingdom,” Zhongguo.  My understanding of the system stops not far beyond this point.

Chinese tradition leaves no room in itself for Christology; the Old Testament does, and the New Testament tells us so.  The hunger of God for relationship (not out of any deficiency of fellowship in the Trinity) shows through and in all of the Creation, even if the general revelation stops at a certain point as in the Chinese tradition.  Yet I find that the human hunger for both transcendent and immediate relationships (and security, relief, protection) is expressed in that tradition.  And that tradition allows that people are predisposed to respond appropriately to authority, even more so the authority that can come right down among the people, to share in their hunger for purpose and relationship, and to fulfill it.  Not through the ancestors, not through the emperor, but in a renewed family that we sometimes thoughtlessly call the “family of God.”  We are right to say it, but we must also take its importance more to heart.

It is no wonder that so many Chinese are following Christ.  They, too recognize in Christ the satisfactions intended for them in the hunger of God.  Again, it is not that God needs more fellowship than the Trinitarian perfection in Himself, it is that he yearns to expand that fellowship among his family, those he created in his own image and ordained to enjoy the fellowship as He does–as well, as deeply, as joyfully, and as long as time beyond time–on earth as in Heaven.

The works of the great writers of the past are very beautiful even from without.  And yet their visible beauty is sheer ugliness, compared with the beauty of those hidden treasures which disclose themselves only after very long, never easy, but always pleasant work.  This always difficult but always pleasant work is, I believe, what the philosophers had in mind when they recommended education.  Education, they felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom that is not license.  [Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Free Press, 1952, 1980; University of Chicago Press, 1988), 37.]

By philosophers he means Plato and Aristotle, primarily.  The education he mentioned produces discernment, prudence, and wisdom, and presumes a level of intellectual and moral maturity as evidence of its effectiveness.  That reminds me that Jesus did say, “Be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) Perfect: “fully made or formed”, “mature”, “grown-up”, but like God.  Jesus was teaching–this is the Sermon on the Mount, not just some offhand comments.  But be like God?  Who were his hearers?  Beyond his disciples and a nameless crowd at the time, or intervening generations of people, most certainly you and I are his hearers today.  We are to be like God in some specific ways.  But he pronounced two key things, one at the start, one at the end:  do what you know to do and profess to believe in order to show that God’s truth really lives in you (Matt. 7:26), and be sure you know you get nothing unless you see yourself honestly as spiritually impoverished, and needing clean intention, and so forth in the “Beatitudes” (Matt. 5:3, 8).  Jesus customarily spoke in ways that required long, hard thinking and personal honesty in order to know personal liberation.  Socrates probably would approve.

What about that “order which is not oppression”?  I hasten to wrap up the present thought by quoting James Schall on the Trinity:

The trinitarian life of God is reflected in what is not God on the vastest of scales, the scales both of cosmos and of history.  But the paradigm of the order that we encounter in the world is already found in the Trinity of Persons and their inner relation to one another.  We are to imitate the divine order in all ways that it can be imitated–in making, in living, in thinking, in loving.  But ultimately the point of contact is where Gift meets gift, where what proceeds out of the inner life of the Godhead meets the inner life of the finite persons who have, in the end, nothing higher to do than to accept a gift, the gift of revelation with its description of the inner life of the Godhead, that which we call the Trinity of Persons:  Father, Son, and Spirit.  [James V. Schall, S.J., The Order of Things, Ignatius Press, 2007].

I understand the Trinity much better from having read Schall’s chapter “The Order within the Godhead” and his book.  Cannot recommend it highly enough.  Blessings on you.

Well, TODAY the Magi have come to honor the baby, the king, at Bethlehem, to resolve their questions about that Star of the East, and we can do the same.  Today is Epiphany in the traditional calendar of Western Christianity.  Christ is revealed, Truth is known, Insight and Light are ours.  How we need that for today and for this year!  May I recommend an MP3 program?  It’s for anyone, at BBC Radio 4 Podcasts:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/belief along with other downloads.  The one I’m recommending directly is “The Magi.”  Actually, it’s well balanced and thought-provoking.  Let me know what you think.

And among the four groups — the Unarians, Decenarians, Centenarians, and Millennarians — does the denomination suggest its members vary in their ability to cope with “the noonday demon” called acedia?  Do the Millennarians, who are allowed to emerge once every thousand years, have a special gift of focused discipline that allows them to endure?  Or do the others do better?  How do they vary in their encounters with boredom, or depression, or apathy?  Stephenson may have some answers from the geek-sci-fi- side; I’m reading Norris for hers.

9/16–The primary reference is to Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which should be in release since September 9th.  (See the article in the Sep 2008 Wired .) Set on the planet Arbe where the people are either the Saecular (anti-environmental consumerist, sybaritics) or the monastic avaunts or auts who live and think amid ritual in the mathic world inside walled concents (sounds a bit like “cloisters,” eh?).  The four divisions of auts — Unarians, Decenarians, Centenarians, and Millennarians — are free to venture out of their assigned or chosen (?) concents according to classification:  by year, decade, century, and millennium.

Time is the central focus.

Already this sounds restrictive.  But suppose there could be an inversion of socio-cultural values that prized slowed time rather than life-lived-at-ever-increasing-velocity-with-no-end-in-sight — and decreasing returns on one’s efforts?

Some things to consider short of further comment for today:

First, the Christian tradition holds and provides an ideal, or varieties of the ideal, for maximizing time:  one in forms of the monastic tradition; another in expressions of Pietism; and another in personal expressions of piety and devotion, to name three examples.  And then — shall we never forget? — Sabbath, with an extra bolt of wisdom from the Israelitic/Judaic tradition.

Second, Jesus said something about rest; perhaps we should attend to that, too.

More later . . . .

Some older readers could dismiss him and others like him as careless reactionaries. But would they dare say that to an entire generation of twenty-somethings? Some older readers should recall themselves in the 60s and 70s; I invite the comparison.

But what of the “us vs. them” noted in the AP article — Christians against non-Christians? Not entirely true, I’m sure, but true enough, and often enough. Practices belie professions too facilely made. Some older commentators have helped (and challenged me with their words), so I invite you to read on:

Jacques Maritain (in The Peasant of the Garonne, trans. Cuddihy & Hughes, 1968, pages 79-81), writing as a Catholic, primarily to Catholics. The topic was loyalty to the law of the cross of Christ; he wrote,

The more a Christian . . . gives an absolute primacy in his heart to a fully liberated brotherly love, and in dealing with non-Catholics or non-Christians, sees them as they really are, members of Christ, at least potentially, the more firmly he must maintain his positions in the doctrinal order (I don’t say he should brandish them at every turn), and must make clear the differences which, in the realm of what is true or false, separate him from these men he loves wholeheartedly. In acting thus, he will be honoring them. To do otherwise would be to betray Truth, which is above everything.

Maritain refers to the difficulties, the great discomfort, of practicing “brotherly love and the love of the One who is the Truth.” He continues,

To begin with, it is at the very core of brotherly love that inevitably we suffer in our hearts, because those non-Christians whom we love like members of Christ, of the beloved Saviour, do not know Christ. There can be and certainly is much of truth in their baggage. But they do not know the Truth, the Truth that frees, and it is a great misfortune for them, and one great joy less for heaven and for Jesus. They continue to struggle with many chains, they still collide against many barriers along their road; there are for them still many traps in the shadows. Would we love them truly if we didn’t suffer because of what they lack? The more fraternal love grows, the more this suffering also grows. Clearly, if anyone delights in loving them, and receiving the gift of their friendship in return, but without experiencing any of this suffering, there is something unreal about his love.

Maritain seeks the “natural joy” (Psalm 85:10 is in the background)

to contemplate in quite a few of our Christian brothers, entranced to be able at last to rub their noses, all atremble with enthusiasm, with the noses of all the sons of Adam.

I don’t soon expect to see my denominational brothers, or most American Christians, delighting to exchange a holy kiss or to practice certain other European or Middle Eastern forms of greeting among themselves, let alone with unbelievers. But I think Maritain is suggesting the rightness of just that kind of thing — of so delighting in the non-Christian as a brother or sister that we could all the more delight in him or her as a believer and full member of God’s household. Psalm 85 is about the restoration of a broken relationship — that between the LORD God and his people. So Maritain’s point is potent, poignant: in keeping faith with God, and with his gospel in the cross of Christ, how could the Christian not love thusly?

Maritain is not naive: a breach is possible when a non-Christian may reject doctrine — it could be a barrier. I agree. Perhaps, then, his point about the necessity of brotherhood, of true friendship, is chief. Jesus did say a thing or two, did he not, about friends and friendship? (John 15:13-15) Difficulties? You bet.

Novelist Will D. Campbell, in The Convention, in the novel’s closing scene at the home of Exell and Dorcas Rose McBride, at prayer time with their three mixed-ethnic foster children, including Leanne:

Leanne prayed the way she always did, for everything and everybody: the new kitten that Volene had gotten to replace Doshie: the Dominique rooster in a cardboard box on the back porch, his broken leg having been splinted by Dale Alan and Volene. Then Leanne called the names of everyone in the family and all the neighbors she could remember–especially for “Mister Leland who lives in the tar paper house on the left, just before you cross the river on the way to town who is bad sick and ain’t . . . uh . . . excuse me, God . . . I mean . . . and isn’t expected to live very long.” She thanked God for bringing Mama and Daddy home safely. She prayed for the fireflies in the jar and promised God that she would turn them loose in the morning if they didn’t smother.

When the prayer ended and they were getting to their feet, Denise whispered, “Leanne forgot to pray for the church.”

“No she didn’t,” their mama said.

Woe to us for the lack of holy imagination to envision a more inclusive church; where that statement might be misinterpreted, I say, then, that we must envision the possibility that Jesus is calling more people to his church than we are able to imagine.

More, later, perhaps.

The Baby is Paradox itself, himself: God the Son limiting himself to become a human person, growing up, showing the way to full personhood, all the time relying on the Father, all the time cradling culture’s captives in his arms of truth, mercy, and grace. Sinless. Yet, at the end is the cross, a cruel cradle, and the cradling Sufferer does his work, though with, only with, both arms nailed wide apart as if helpless, and indeed so, but for the moment. It is a work unto death, yet the grave does not cradle Jesus Messiah long; his cross-work paradoxically is not yet his completed work; the Father does not orphan the Child who in resurrection, his work now complete, again takes his rightful place in the Cradle of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And yet a greater Paradox: you and I are invited to the Cradle. Would we embrace the Child? But we need his embrace more: Can we embrace and be embraced? Now is the time to embrace the Paradox and settle your mind, down to the core of your life. Consider the song by Bailey and Larson:

Cradle the Baby, cradle the Child, sing to Him softly and gaze on His smile.

Infant of mercy, envoy of grace, look at His eyes and you’ll see heaven’s face.

Come to the manger, cradle the Light. Jesus is waiting with arms open wide.

Cradle the Savior, fell His embrace. Hold close the gift of God’s infinite grace.

God reached in mercy from heaven above, sending Christ Jesus to hold us with love.

With grace so amazing and love so divine, He merits our praises, devotion, our lives.

So cradle the Baby, worship the King, join with the angels and joyfully sing.

Love Him and serve Him, bring Him your praise. Cradle the Child, Messiah of grace.

Cradle the Messiah of grace.

(Lynn Shaw Bailey and Lloyd Larson, Glory Sound, Nashville, (c) 2007)

We’ll be singing this at Central Baptist Church, Marshall, Texas, on the 16th.