Back in the seventeenth century, you could write a book and give it a title that included most of the content. In fact, as far as I can tell, Cheynell’s Divine Triunity has a title page which is nearly a chapter long. If I were to assign this book in class, I’m sure the first question from students would be, “Do we have to read the title as well, or just the book?” And in this case, that would be a reasonable question.

So here, if you have enough time to devote to reading the title, is Cheynell’s Divine Triunity from 1650.

The Divine Triunity
of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:
or,
The blessed Doctrine of the three
Coessentiall Subsistents in the
eternall Godhead without any confu-
sion or division of the distinct
Subsistences, or multiplication
of the most single and
entire Godhead,

Acknowledged, beleeved, adored by Christisns, in
opposition to Pagans, Jewes, Mahumetans, blas-
phemous and Antichristian Hereticks, who say
they are Christians, but are not.
Declared and Published for the edification and satisfaction
of all such as worship the only true God, Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, all three as one and the selfsame God
blessed forever.

Dr. FRANCIS CHEYNELL, Minister of that Gospel
which is revealed from heaven by Father, Son, and holy
Spirit in the holy Scriptures of truth.

London,
Printed by T. K. and E. M. for Samuel Gellibrand
at the Ball in Paul’s Church yard. 1650.

Whooo! Just the title is enough to start four or five arguments. Thanks to Rob Price for the picture.

The Gospel According to St. Hereticus
Scripture Lesson for Easter
“St. Hereticus” was Robert McAfee Brown (1920-2001), a good old-fashioned left-leaning American theologian who published a series of satirical jabs under his heretical pseudonym for many years around the middle of the twentieth century. This piece was published in Christianity and Crisis, March 16, 1959. It was a lot funnier in the late 50s, no doubt, when a theologian could presuppose that American culture had a thin veneer of country club Christianity over it, a veneer which needed a good dose of theological mockery. But it’s still funny today, and since St. Hereticus has lapsed into undeserved obscurity, I post it here.

In a previous installment I offered a new text for the Advent lesson, a kind of prologue to a fifth gospel, on the assumption that the canon is not closed and that future church councils will want to take all new manuscripts into account. It seems to me that something of the sort is also called for in the Easter season. In what follows, therefore, I offer the Easter story as it has come to be told in the oral traditions of modern culture-religion. While some will urge that it belongs to the genre of saga, folklore, tradition or myth, other will want to insist that it is not, for all that, the less true. It should be clear, at all events, that this is not something that I have “made up.” It is sober and straight-forward reporting of the various strata of twentieth-century religion. Students of the Formgeschichte Schule who want to disentangle the various sources can start from the fact that the extant versions draw on at least the following sources: SS (Sunday Schools), ss (sermons by seminarians), Ss (Sunday supplements), Pp (Protestant pulpits), RC (Radio Commercials), and StSp (Sermon topics in Saturday’s papers).

The Gospel According to St. Hereticus

Chapter 23

1 But on the first day of the week, toward dawn, they arose and went to the garden in convertibles, ranch wagons, and Corvettes, wearing on their persons the spices they had prepared for the occasion. 2 And behold, as the sun burst forth there was a great blast from four trumpets, drawn from the local high school marching band. And at the blast of the trumpets, an Easter bunny, wondrous large, stood before them. 3 His appearance was like lightning and his fur was white as snow. 4 And he did carry a sign affixed to his hat bearing the words “Courtesy of Jones’ Department Store.”

5 And in great joy at his appearing, all the children began to clamor and to shout, 6 saying as with one voice, “Who will roll away the eggs for us?” 7 For at his appearance it was as though the miracle of spring had been enacted once again, and that from the belly of the Easter bunny had come forth many eggs, some green, some yellow, some chocolate; and red, white and blue ones not a few.

8 And the parents were grieved and afraid for the children, that they would pick up the eggs and pelt one another therewith. 9 For it was the custom in that place that on Easter morn all believers were to dress in new raiment. And the parents were afraid not only for the children’s raiment but for their own as well, 10 for verily all those assembled were believers and were wearing new and shining apparel for which they had paid beyond their means, some thirty, some sixty, and some an hundred fold.

11 Then all with one cry took up the refrain, “Behold the miracle of spring!” 12 And those on the left did cry aloud, “I believe in the deep greenness of the new-mown grass,” 13 while those on the right were heard to say, “Verily once again from out the earth hath come forth shoots,” 14 and all together raised their voices in a mighty chorus to repeat together, “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

15 But certain scoffers there were among them who did say, 16 “Ye know not what ye do. 17 Is this not the great miracle of the irruption of eternity into time? 18 Know ye not that the eschatological moment of all the aeons is here compressed into the facticity of the concrete, specific and unrepeatable?” 19 But they said unto them, “We will hear of this another time,” 20 and they turned their backs on them. 21 Whereat the scoffers said one to another, “It is as we have always heard. The multitudes will not hear gladly the simple word of the Gospel, for their ears are verily stopped by the sin of their hubris.” 22 And they went away content among themselves.

23 And others there were in their midst who did not speak on this wise: “Easter is the season of joy. Be joyful in the God of your choice, all ye lands. Serve the God of your choice with earrings, come before his presence with new clothes, and show yourself glad in him with raiment and new finer.” 24 And then, with scarcely a change in intonation, the voices went on to say, 25 “For a small down payment you can own the hat of your choice with which to worship the God of your choice. Show your faith in the future by buying now and paying later.” 26 And all with one impulse did go forth, and he that had no money went, bought and did eat, and they all with one accord did sing forth praise to one another’s raiment.

27 But privily each one said to himself of the other, “Why did she buy that ghastly hat?”

28 And some did carry placards with words of cheer inscribed thereon, for the hope and consolation of the multitudes. 29 And affixed thereto were words for the season, to wit: 30 “There Is No Death,” 31 and “Make Every Day Easter Day,” to which latter sign was appended in smaller letters inscribed beneath, “By Banishing All Thought of Death.” 32 And one there was whose banner went, in a glorious affirmation of the entire festival, “The Miracle of Easter is the Miracle of Spring.” 33 “And many there were who carried words too small to read, but whose meaning was writ large by pictures affixed thereto, of green leaves, pansies and new ploughed fields.

34 And through it all none was discouraged save three. 35 And they went out and fled. For trembling and astonishment had come upon them. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Some of the textual critics have suggested that the MSS has broken off in the middle of a sentence. I’m willing to let it stand as is. It seems a fit conclusion.

A Charles Welsey stanza from 1742:

O Love divine, what has thou done!
The immortal God hath died for me!
The Father’s coeternal Son
bore all my sins upon the tree.
Th’ immortal God for me hath died:
My Lord, my Love, is crucified!

Somewhere around the end of the first century (98? 117?), Ignatius of Antioch was martyred. In his letter to the Christians at Rome, this Syrian bishop exclaimed that as his death approached, he no longer desired any earthly thing: “My love is crucified!”

This was a shocking thing for him to say. Ignatius knew the writings of the New Testament (he quotes several of them), and he knew that the normal greek word for “love” in Christian conversation was already the word agape (uh, goppy). But Ignatius instead used the word eros: “My eros is crucified.”
(more…)

Austin Farrer (1904-1968) wrote a little book called Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials, which sparkles with his characteristic good sense and good phrasing. Here is an excerpt appropriate to the day, along with my usual warning to eat the meat and spit out the bones. In the chapter on “Sin and Redemption,” Farrer describes redemption as God winning the battle between us and himself, without destroying us. When God’s will “breaks our opposition it secures our reconciliation.” He goes on:

And how is it done? It has become customary with theologians to let themselves off a plain answer. They will say that the reconciliation effected by Christ’s death is an unspeakable mystery, for which a whole series of different parables was offered by scriptural writers and afterwards by the Church; that none of them is adequate, and several of them seem contradictory; we must see what each of them will tell us, and we must leave it at that. I cannot agree. Everything that God does has an abyss of mystery in it, because it has God in it. But in the saving action of the Incarnation God came all lengths to meet us, and dealt humanly with human creatures. If ever he made his ways plain, it was there. The variety of parables express the love that went into the redemption, or the blessings that flow from it. They are not needed to state the thing that was done.

What, then, did God do for his people’s redemption? He came among them, bringing his kingdom, and he let events take their human course. He set the divine life in human neighbourhood. Men discovered it in struggling with it and were captured by it in crucifying it. What could be simpler? And what more divine?

An intriguing discussion of the atonement from Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson’s 1997 Systematic Theology, Volume 1. For anyone who’s read Jenson before, it goes without saying that just because I quote him doesn’t mean I endorse his whole project. Who could possibly do that? I read Jenson for the provocation of it, and am never disappointed. Here he provokes thought about how Christians live their way through the understanding of the atonement.

Let us then indeed begin afresh. And let us first recur to the Gospels’ narrative way of interpreting the cross. Freed by a more daring Christology than is usual in the West, we can say: the church’s primal way of understanding the Crucifixion is that we live this narrative, that we rehearse the canonical story, in the context of Scripture’s encompassing narrative and so that the rehearsing is a word-event in our own lives.

The Gospels tell a powerful and biblically integrated story of the Crucifixion; this story is just so the story of God’s act to bring us back to himself at his own cost, and of our being brought back. There is no other story behind or beyond it that is the real story of what God does to reconcile us, no story of mythic battles or of a deal between God and his Son or of our being moved to live reconciled lives. The Gospel’s passion narrative is the authentic and entire account of God’s reconciling action and our reconciliation, as events in his life and ours. Therefore what is first and principally required as the Crucifixion’s right interpretation is for us to tell this story to one another and to God as a story about him and about ourselves.
(more…)

This 14th century painting shows Christ climbing up onto the cross. It is surely historically inaccurate, but it even more surely makes a theological point worth making. It makes the point in a way that I find disarming specifically because of the liberties it takes with history.

Jesus didn’t climb a ladder to get his body onto the wood of the cross. But on Good Friday he was the active one, the agent, in the atonement that took place between God and man. He was not overtaken by the course of a tragic history, but he took history with him into the presence of God. He carried out in the flesh a plan he and his Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit had worked out long before.

The artist who painted this image is Pacino di Bonaguida (bone-uh-GWEED-uh). He was a well-known arist in Florence, Italy, and painted this around 1320 for a book that contained 38 painted pages (called “miniatures” in the language of medieval illuminated manuscripts).
(more…)

There’s one! Set for stun!

The Trinity is beautiful.

By common consent, great is the beauty of holiness. God himself is that beauty than which nothing greater can be desired, to give Anselm’s “maximal being theology” an aesthetic spin. Because God, unlike creatures, is not compounded of separable parts, he does not have a beauty with which to be beautified. Rather God simply is the beauty which he has.

In the words of Jonathan Edwards, God is “the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty…of whom, and through whom, and to whom is all being and all perfection.” Edwards even argues that “the true notion of divinity” is that “God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above ‘em, chiefly by his divine beauty, which is infinitely diverse from all other beauty.”

In other words, rather than there being some general standard of beauty by which we could evaluate God to ascertain whether he measures up to it, there is a particular unsurpassable divine beauty. According to Karl Barth, the confession that “God is beautiful” means that God has a “power of attraction, which speaks for itself,” and that he has this power not as brute force but “in the fact that He is beautiful, divinely beautiful, beautiful in His own way, in a way that is His alone, beautiful as the unattainable primal beauty, yet truly beautiful.”

The beauty peculiar to the Christian God is grounded in his unique being, his distinctive life, and his identifiable character. But God’s being is a being in consubstantiality among three persons; his life is the one life together of Father, Son, and Spirit; and his character is made known definitively in the sending of the Son of God into the world in the fullness of time, and the sending of the Spirit of the Son into the hearts of the redeemed, crying “Abba, Father.”

Therefore in the one divine essence, in the three divine persons, and in the economy of salvation, it is as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit that God is beautiful. Thus, to call once more on the two witnesses, Karl Barth went on to say, “The triunity of God is the secret of his beauty,” while Edwards testified that “God has appeared glorious to me, on account of the Trinity… It has made me have exalting thoughts of God, that he subsists in three persons; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

The painting of the Trinity that I used to illustrate this post is not so beautiful. Whatever God looks like, he doesn’t look like that. The only possible value of the painting, or the many like it which can be found throughout the history of Christian art, is that it calls the actual triune God to mind, and recalls to us the actual beauty of the invisible God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As Stan Lee might say, “Face front, true believers! This one has it all! Nuff said.”

Sometime in the second century, a Christian apologist (now anonymous) wrote a brief letter, addressed to someone named Diognetus, answering his questions about Christianity. This short letter is one of my favorite writings from the early church. Whoever this second-century apologist was, he has all the best things from Justin Martyr, and almost sounds like Athanasius in places. Though he never names Jesus Christ, he still manages to proclaim a clear and undistorted account of the gospel.

A few years ago I published a comic book version of Diognetus, for which I made my own translation. Here is the text of that translation. My version is shortened, paraphrased, streamlined, and even censored –I omitted a few icky bits. But this version is a brisk read that gets the main ideas across. If it piques your interest, you should certainly read a more accurate and complete translation.

My dear Diognetus,

I see that you are sincerely eager to learn about the religion of the Christians. You have asked me very clear and careful questions about it.

What god do they trust? How does their worship of this god help them all disregard the world and despise death? Why do they sneer at the so-called ‘gods’ of the greeks? What is the nature of this love they have for each other? And finally, why is it that this new race, or new way of life, has come into being in our time and not earlier?

Good questions!

I’m glad you’re so eager to find out, and now I ask for two things from God, who gives us power both to speak and to listen: May I speak in such a way that you will get some good out of what I say, and may you be enabled to listen so well that I won’t go away disappointed.

Come on then, and clear away any prejudices that clutter your mind. Throw off any habit of thought that’s leading you into error, and make a fresh start. You have to become a new person if you want to hear a new story.
(more…)