Where is the Kindness We Seek? (I)

In his letter to the church in Galatia, St. Paul famously lists the fruits of the Holy Spirit, one of which is kindness. Kindness is treated in another book by Adam Philips, the English literary scholar and psychoanalyst whose other very valuable books I have discussed here and here as part of an ongoing if ad hoc series of reflections reconsidering the relationship between Christianity and psychoanalysis.

This latest book to be considered is co-authored with the historian Barbara Taylor. On Kindness is a short book centred around the question: if kindness if the thing we most wish to see in, and receive from, other people, why do we stint so much when it comes to practicing it ourselves? How can we hope for something in others when we are so unsure of offering it ourselves?

As I make my way through this book, I shall have more to say on it.

Continues. 

The Impossibly Prolific Matthew Levering on the Holy Spirit

That horrible, no-good book-writing devil Matthew Levering (whom I am privileged to call a friend!) has another book out. Can you believe it? I think he's in some mad competition to write 50 books before he turns 50 or something. Or perhaps Pope Frank has ginned up some new enchiridion of indulgences, and for every book Levering publishes 294,000 of his closest family members get out of Purgatory? At the very least, he needs to s  l  o  w   d o w n  because he's making the rest of us look bad.

Set for release in the middle of July is Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit: Love and Gift in the Trinity and the Church (Baker Academic, 2016), 448pp.

Here is the publisher's official blurb:

Distinguished theologian Matthew Levering offers a historical examination of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, defending an Augustinian model against various contemporary theological views. A companion piece to Levering's Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation, this work critically engages contemporary and classical doctrines of the Holy Spirit in dialogue with Orthodox and Reformed interlocutors. Levering makes a strong dogmatic case for conceiving of the Holy Spirit as love between Father and Son, given to the people of God as a gift.

In perusing this book, I see that, true to form, it will represent an engagement with the best of scholarship, contemporary and ancient, Catholic and Orthodox. Not only does his third chapter cover that old bugaboo of East-West relations, the filioque, but his sixth chapter deals with the Spirit and the unity of the Church. Along the way, there is wide and generous engagement with such Orthodox theologians as Vladimir Lossky, John Zizioulas, David Bentley Hart, Boris Bobrinskoy, Gregory Palamas, Sergius Bulgakov, and others.

There are few Roman Catholic theologians today of whom I would unhesitatingly say "When he speaks, listen." But Levering is certainly one of those, not because of his own ideas but precisely because, and to the extent that, he is a man of the Church immersed in her tradition out of which he, good householder that he is, brings to offer the world gifts both old and new (cf. Matt. 13:52).

Where's the Bird?

Oftentimes in that rarefied and fanciful hothouse of Western-Rite Orthodoxy, one sometimes finds, amidst much liturgical bricolage, an "epiclesis" jerry-rigged onto some Western eucharistic anaphora or other. This is usually based on the ironically Western concern with certain formula that must be uttered for a sacrament to be validly "confected." Eastern Christians who have been misled into believing that an anaphora is not "valid" if it lacks an epiclesis thus feel the need to tack one on to Western prayers they have appropriated unto themselves. More amusingly still, some of them claim that the West once had an epiclesis until it "dropped out," much like those towering theological giants at Charlemagne's court insisted, with no evidence whatsoever, that the filioque was in the original draft of the creed from Nicaea until it, too, somehow mysteriously "dropped out." (The always witty and erudite Fr. John Hunwicke has discussed these silly ideas over the years.)

The concept and role of an epiclesis comes up for renewed study in a recent book: Anne McGowan, Eucharistic Epicleses, Ancient and Modern (Liturgical Press, 2014), 312pp. About this book the publisher tells us:

The past several decades have witnessed a shift in the approach to the Spirit. Since the mid 1960s, scholarly attention has been focused on the role of the Holy Spirit in the modern — and now increasingly postmodern and ‘post-Christian’ — world:  first, there has been a resurgence of interest in the pneumatology of past eras; second, studies of the Spirit from a Pentecostal and Charismatic perspective have entered the mainstream of contemporary theological discussion and scholarship;  third, interest in the Spirit has intersected with feminist, liberationist, ecological, global and interfaith concerns, among others, to produce a multitude of new constructive theological proposals in which the Spirit plays a prominent part.

Now it is time to give attention to the liturgical role of the Spirit and the study of worship as a site of the Spirit’s presence and work — an approach that is thoroughly and expertly discussed in Eucharistic Epicleses.

The Lord the Giver of Life

Coming out in June of this year is a collection from Eerdmans treating that one Person of the Trinity sometimes overlooked in some traditions, and sometimes thought to be at issue in East-West Trinitiarian disputes. I speak, of course, of The Holy Spirit: In Biblical Teaching, through the Centuries, and Today. Authored by Anthony Thiselton, this book, the publisher tells us, is a

wide-ranging, thoroughly researched volume [that] approaches questions concerning the Holy Spirit with an up-to-date account of biblical teaching on the topic, including exposition of passages and hermeneutics; a comprehensive historical survey; and current writers and issues, with assessment and mutual dialogue with Pentecostals and the Renewal Movement.

The Holy Spirit, prophecy, tongues, the miraculous, the range and nature of the Spirit's gifts, the Holy Spirit in relation to the Trinity -- all of these topics are of ongoing interest today. This learned volume from Anthony Thiselton offers scholarly work on specific themes along with practical consequences for worship and life.

Part II treats the Fathers, including the ante- and post-Nicene Fathers in both East and West. Part III has a chapter looking at both Lossky and Zizioulas.

Christian Spirituality: A Quiz

Which is the more tiresome and fatuous phrase:
(a) I'm not really religious, but I am spiritual
(b) I'm spiritual, but I'm not into organized religion
(c) Jesus: Yes! Church: No
(d) All of the above.

The correct answer, of course, is (d), and the penalty for failing the exam is a mandatory reading of a new book by Kyriacos Markides that may help us turn back the flood of narcissistic nonsense spewed today in the name of "spirituality": Inner River: A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Christian Spirituality (Image Books, 2012), 336pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us

In Inner River, Kyriacos Markides—scholar, researcher, author, and pilgrim—takes us on a thrilling quest into the heart of Christian spirituality and mankind’s desire for a transcendent experience of God. From Maine’s rugged shores to a Cypriot monastery to Greece’s remote Mt. Athos and, ultimately, to an Egyptian desert, Markides encounters a diverse cast of characters that allows him to explore the worlds of the natural and the supernatural, of religion and spirit, and of the seen and the unseen. Inner River will appeal to a wide range of readers, from Christians seeking insights into their religion and its various expressions to scholars interested in learning more about the mystical way of life and wisdom that have been preserved in the heart of Orthodox spirituality. Perhaps most important, however, is the bridge it offers contemporary readers to a Christian life that is balanced between the worldly and the spiritual.

Markides is the author of several other similar works, including the highly regarded book The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality as well as Gifts of the Desert: The Forgotten Path of Christian Spirituality. 

UFOs Over the River Jordan

"Hey! What is that bird doing above Jesus' head?"

Such is the type of question novices ask around icons. That "bird," of course, is a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is, for most people, the most mysterious of the Trinitarian Persons. It has long been a commonplace that Pneumatology remains weak, especially among Western Christians, though Eastern Christian understandings of the Holy Spirit are not always as they seem.

Now a new book comes along to help us further understand the Spirit: John Oliver, Giver of Life: The Holy Spirit in Orthodox Tradition (Paraclete Press, 2011), 164pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Delving deep and subtly into Orthodox tradition and theology, The Giver of Life articulates the identity of the Holy Spirit as the third Person of the Trinity as well as the role of the Holy Spirit in the salvation of the world. Written with a poetic sensibility, Fr. Oliver begins with Pentecost, an event uniquely celebrated in Orthodoxy as a time when greenery of all kinds is brought into churches. "The splash of green foliage calls to mind not just life, but a special kind of life. It is the life that transcends biological existence and flows from the very Godhead Itself; it is life that's a state of being—immortal, everlasting, changeless. Ferns and flowers fade and die, but souls filled with this ‘life from above' flourish forever."

Reflecting on the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Church, to the world, and to the human person, Giver of Life looks to the impressive biblical and liturgical tradition of Orthodox Christianity. This is a book weighty in content but accessible in tone, not an academic study of the mind, but a lived experience of the heart.

The Holy Spirit in Eastern Christian Worship

It is a commonplace that the West's Pneumatology is weak while the East's is strong--but is that the case always and everywhere? Is that not one of those received stereotypes or shibboleths--like saying the West is always "scholastic" and "rationalist" while the East is always "patristic" and "mystical"--that was tendentiously reasserted again and again as an excuse for East-West division, and even a justification for their ongoing separation? As David Bentley Hart has rightly noted, we have too often allowed bad history to be used by many Orthodox Christians to justify their disdain of, and separation from, the Catholic Church. Such ideas as a supposedly defective or deficient Western Pneumatology--in contrast to the supposed superiority of the East on this point--are usually based on only a passing familiarity with actual history, and rightly do not withstand serious scholarly scrutiny. We see precisely such welcome scrutiny in a new book, bringing together some leading North American liturgists to examine the issues:

Teresa Berger, Bryan Spinks, eds., The Spirit in Worship: Worship in the Spirit (Liturgical Press, 2009).

Among the articles of particular note to Eastern Christians will be, first, Peter Galadza's "The Holy Spirit in Eastern Orthodox Worship: Historical Enfleshments and Contemporary Queries." With his characteristic lucidity and cogency, and his usual willingness to pull no punches, Fr. Peter shows fairly that the accepted ideas about Orthodox Pneumatology are not always borne out in practice, and the theology of Chrismation raises more questions than is usually thought. What, e.g., are we to make of the fact that St. John Chrysostom held that the prebaptismal anointing was sufficient to convey the "seal" and "gift" of the Holy Spirit, obviating the need for "chrismation" as a second, separate sacrament? These and other questions he discusses by combing sources, ancient and modern, in Greek, Russian, Slavonic, French, English, and Ukrainian. The influence of the historical-comparative methods of Anton Baumstark and Robert Taft can be seen throughout the article. 

Other articles of note include Simon Jones on Syrian baptismal theologies and Habtemichael Kidane on the Holy Spirit in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition.

Look for this book to be reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies next year.