In this last of our series on John Spong’s critique of credal Christianity we are taking up thesis number 5 and thesis number 7 in the Spong manifesto. Thesis 5 is:The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity. Thesis 7 is: Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

Spong’s rejection of miracles is implicit in his rejection of Theism. Miracles are signs which are the revelation of a personal, loving God. Miracles reveal God’s nature and purpose to humankind. I have argued earlier in this series that Spong so completely identifies God with the world and natural processes that it is impossible to speak of revelation in any meaningful way. He wants Jesus to reveal “the God presence” and the nature of “the Ground of Being.” But this is a far cry from the loving self-disclosure of the God who our Lord calls Abba, Father. Revelation and miracle both imply a personal will and intention. A miracle is a special instance of God’s self-revelation. It is of necessity an act of the divine will. Spong does not want the Ground of Being to have personal characteristics such as will. A definitive self-revelation, especially a miraculous revelation is excluded from the beginning. In Spong’s system miracles cannot exist.

Spong thinks that reports of miracles are simply benighted first century people trying to express their Jesus experience in categories that are familiar to them. The reports of the Resurrection are a special example of this general process. For Spong, Jesus was an extremely intense locus of the “God presence.” Jesus was a “spirit person” who intensely manifested the spirit present at the heart of life. When his life was ended people realized that the spirit, “the God presence” could not be killed and this presence could now be found in them. They used language of resurrection for this because it was near to hand. It was the best way they had to express the unquenchable vitality of the “Jesus experience.” According to Spong the reports of the empty tomb and appearances of the Risen Lord are later elaborations of the experience of the discovery by the disciples that after the Resurrection the spirit that was in Jesus was in them.

To this writer, Spong engages in numerous self-contradictions. It is the overriding principle of his system that we are not allowed to think of a God who”intervenes.” But now we are told that Resurrection is an action of God. I do not see how Spong has made out a case that the “Ground of Being” is capable of action in any meaningful sense. It appears that denying the existence of a personal, active God has been the point of his manifesto up until now. As for the Resurrection of the Lord being a physical resuscitation, this appears a very gross instance of misinterpretation of the biblical record. It is clear in the Bible that the Resurrection of the Lord is of an entirely different sort than the resuscitation of Lazarus or Jairus’ daughter. Spong seems to me to be often knocking down straw men that have never been serious Christian teaching. It has never been serious Christian teaching that the Resurrection was a resuscitation. It is presented clearly as a complete transformation, a totally unprecedented and unique event. The Resurrection is not a return to the old life but the appearance of a new life that includes the transformation of the body. The phrase “inside human history” is likewise cryptic. I take it to mean this distinction that Spong has made much of to this point, i.e. that God does not really intervene and act in history and that claims that God has done so are imperfect attempts to express the “God experience.” Perhaps Spong means the Resurrection is something which is manifested in a non-historical realm of meaning and significance. We are given to understand that God acts but not in history. One wonders about this place inside human experience but outside human history. That he cannot maintain the consistency of his approach in the writing of his own theses is a very telling argument against his proposal.

The Anglican tradition is blessed with a history of profound teaching on the Resurrection. One of the great teachers of the end of the last century and the beginning of this one was Bishop B.F. Westcott. Bishop Westcott was sometime Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and was responsible for the definitive Greek Text of the New Testament in use at that time. In order to respond to Bishop Spong I have consulted a book that Bishop Westcott wrote in 1866. I believe that all the fast balls that Spong has been pitching as the latest thing were hit solidly out of the park by Bishop Westcott more than a hundred years ago.

To the conviction of Spong that Newtonian “laws” of nature make belief in miracles impossible, Westcott replies that the so called laws of nature are summary and retrospective. The so called “laws” tell us that based on our observation to date there are forces in the universe that work in the same manner under the same conditions. They do not tell us beforehand(Westcott uses the term antecedently) what may happen when either the force applied or the circumstances change. Wescott says

“There is then nothing absolute in laws of nature. They are relative to man, and do not explain either the origin or the preservation of things. It is quite possible for us to conceive that the unknown power through which phenomena are produced according to an observed way might have caused them to have been produced in another way wholly different. The belief in the immutability of the observed law springs wholly from ourselves and is simply a special expression of the axiom that the same power will produce the same results under the same circumstances. But we have no right to assume that the circumstances will always be the same.” (The Gospel Of The Resurrection p.23-24)

Spong does not have an adequate understanding of the nature of scientific law. If you read the entirety of Bishop Wescott’s treatment of the relation between science and religion you will find a thinker with a more profound insight into both topics. It is not the laws of nature which cause Spong to reject miracles but the rejection of a personal God. As we have noted before. No God who is separate from the creation=no intervention by God =no revelation, including no miracles a priori. This is just an axiom of Spong’s system not any kind of necessary conclusion from science. Spong’s denial of special revelation and miracles finally makes his whole system incoherent as Westcott recognized of similar criticisms of miracle being made in the heyday of 19th century scientism. A God who cannot intervene in history and nature cannot be shown to affect humanity in any way.

“To affirm that miracles are unnatural is to constitute general laws of observation into a fate superior to God, or to deny His personal action. And it must be observed that the denial of His personal action in the physical world involves the denial of His action on the hearts of men; for there is not the least reason to suppose that what is seen is less immediately dependent upon Him than what is unseen, or that it can be affirmed beforehand that He is more likely to act on one part of that which He has created than on another. In other words, if miracles are unnatural, (Spong’s arbitrary interventions) then we are hopelessly enclosed within the barriers of material laws and absolutely shut off from all intercourse with the Infinite. But this is against the fundamental axiom of religion..[by fundamental axiom Westcott means that the purpose of religion is to religere, to bind together the finite and the infinite]”(The Gospel Of The Resurrection p.32-33)

Westcott moves on from a general consideration of the nature of revelation and the place of miracles in the continuous revelation of a loving God. Westcott points out that miracles are not arbitrary manifestations of the divine power but are divinely fitted to the conditions of humankind at each stage of its development. The Resurrection as the ultimate miraculous revelation of God is not dropped into human history arbitrarily but comes in the fullness of time after long preparation. This preparation includes the expectation of Israel for a Christ who will usher in a new age with the possibility of a new life between God and humanity and the quest in the Gentile world for a transcendent source of meaning and peace. Greek philosophy could ask the fundamental questions of meaning but could not answer them. The most profound thought of humanity could bring to an intense consciousness the problem of life after death but could not provide a equally profound answer. The Roman Empire could raise the possibility of a new unity between peoples and the possibility of a universal justice but could not sustain it. The Resurrection according Westcott is prepared by all the preceding history of both Israel and the pagan world and from the Resurrection all history proceeds in a different direction. Westcott insists on the Resurrection as an historical fact, as the fact of history. He seriously considers alternatives being presented in the 19th century that are similar to theory of Spong that the Resurrection is not about something that happened in history but something that happened in the consciousness of the Apostles. These he rejects as inadequate to the textual evidence and to the vitality of the Apostolic witness. They are also inadequate to the depth of the human hope and instinct that personality has eternal significance. Martyrs do not die to give witness to the transcendent “Ground of Being.” We cannot really be sustained by the hope that “somehow” the spirit is stronger than death. This kind of talk is a pale parody of the Apostolic faith which sprung from the fact of the Resurrection from a new, mighty and miraculous deed of God in history. Wescott sums up his argument,

“It has been shown that the Resurrection is not an isolated event in history, but at once the end and beginning of vast developments of life and thought; that it is the climax of a long series of Divine dispensations which find in it their complement and explanation; that it has formed the starting-point of all progressive modern societies, ever presenting itself in new lights according to the immediate wants of the age. It has been shown that in the character of the fact there is nothing which can appear incredible or in such a connection, even improbable to any one who believes in a Personal God. It has been shown that the direct evidence for the event is exactly of the same kind which we have for the other events in the Life of Christ; that St. Paul appeals to his own experience and to the experience of the Apostles for the certainty of its literal accomplishment; that it is incontestable that the Apostles acted from the first as if they believed it and that their sincerity cannot be doubted; that the nature of the outward proof alleged seems to render it impossible that they could have been victims of a delusion; that the substance of their belief was something wholly novel, removed equally from the belief in a fantastic vision, and from the belief in a restoration to a corruptible life; that the effects of it upon themselves were such that the conviction must (so to speak) have been forced upon them by overwhelming power, capable of changing their personal character, of transforming their hereditary faith, of inspiring them with new thoughts and hopes; that the Christian Church was founded upon the belief, and embodied it in rites coeval with its foundation.” (The Gospel Of The Resurrection p.113-114)

“Indeed, taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no single historic incident better or more variously supported than the Resurrection of Christ. Nothing but the antecedent assumption that it must be false could have suggested the idea of deficiency in the proof of it. And it has been shown that when it is considered in its relation to the whole revelation of which it is a part, and to the conditions of the Divine action, which we have assumed, this miraculous event requires a proof in no way differing essence from that on which the other facts with which it is associated are received as true. In a word, the circumstances under which God is said to have given a revelation to men in the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus were such as to make the special manifestation of power likely or even natural; and the evidence by which the special Revelation is supported is such as would in any ordinary matter of life be amply sufficient to determine our action and belief.” (The Gospel Of The Resurrection p. 115-116)

I have focused on Westcott’s defense of the plausibility, even the naturalness of miracle and on his insistence of the Resurrection as a fact, even the fact, of history. There is not time here to go into his deeply moving and enlightening teaching on the significance of the Resurrection for the individual, for the church, for humanity as a whole and for the whole creation. His great teaching is that the Resurrection is the ultimate revelation of a loving God. It reveals the nature of the relationship between humanity and God now in this life and the destiny of humanity and the whole creation in the life of the world to come. Let us give Bishop Westcott the last word and allow his prophetic voice to challenge all contemporary commentators who unwittingly rob the Resurrection of its profound significance by denying it as miraculous fact.

“The Resurrection explains, as nothing else can explain, the acts and words of Christ before it, and of His Apostles after it; it gives a sufficient reason for the spiritual power and insight of the first Christians, which is different in kind from all that went before; it explains the life of Christendom, for it is not a past event only, but a fact attested by its present efficacy, by the signs of an actual union of believers with Son of Man operative in life. If, now, we give fair weight to all these considerations, upon the assumptions which have been laid down, — to the personal attestation of the fact by the Apostles, to the circumstances under which St. Paul was led to proclaim it, to its relation to Christ’s whole work, to the transformation which it effected in the opinions and conduct of the first disciples, to it continuous efficiency in life, to its consilience with instinct, to its harmony with what we can see of the divine discipline of the world,—I find no reason to modify what I have said elsewhere, that, “taking all the evidence together, there is no single historical incident better or more variously supported than the Resurrection of Christ.

Let any one who thinks otherwise endeavour to frame for himself evidence for the whole fact—for the fact, that is as belonging to two orders, the seen and the unseen, and uniting them—which he thinks would have been more satisfactory than that which we possess, and then candidly determine how far the modifications which he has introduced would have removed his difficulties, and how far they would have detracted from the significance of the fact as a “sign,” a Divine Revelation.”(The Gospel Of The Resurrection p.254-255)

©Leander Harding+2000

A Sermon Preached In St. John’s Episcopal Church, Stamford, Connecticut,

On Easter Sunday, April 10, 2004

By The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding

Christian Faith is faith in the Crucified and Risen Lord. The preaching of the Apostles is without exception Resurrection preaching. In the reading that we have from the Acts of the Apostles today, St. Peter tells us what it is to be an Apostle and he tells us the message the Apostles bring, that Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, the saviour king, promised by the Jewish prophets, has come. God has anointed Him not with oil like the Kings of old but with the Holy Spirit and power. In Him, as St. John tells us, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. He was rejected by His own people. He was condemned and crucified. God has raised Him from the dead and He is Lord of all, the king of everything. Early Greek-speaking Christians called Him the Pantokrator, the ruler of the cosmos. If the witness of the Apostles is true, if Christ is really Risen and Lord of all, the Resurrection is the single most important event in human history. It is, as the church has always taught, the beginning of a new history, a new creation in which there is a new way of being human in a new community formed by the New Testament, that is the New Covenant in Christ which is marked by the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit.

There are two sources of belief in the Resurrection. There are the reports of the original witnesses in the Gospels, the Book of Acts and the Letters of the Apostles, and there is the church’s experience throughout two millennia of the continuing presence and activity of the Risen Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church, in her preaching, her sacraments, her fellowship and her service to the world both in the lives of the great saints and the most ordinary Christians.

These two witnesses are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. The historical evidence alone is very compelling to anyone who will approach the texts without prejudice. The first witnesses are the women. Not the way you would write it given the status of women in the ancient world, unless it was the way it happened. The Apostles tell us through the Gospels that when the chips were down they all fled and that after the crucifixion they were all hiding because they were afraid. How unlike any other religious text I know is this honest self-portrait of a frail humanity. You instinctively trust the honesty of a reporter who reports honestly about himself. C.S. Lewis, the agnostic Oxford don and professor of English literature, who was converted to Christianity at mid-life and who went on to become one of the greatest Christian writers in the Twentieth Century, said this upon encountering the Gospels in a serious way as an adult, “I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that none of them is like this.”

The skeptical, secular historian has an insurmountable problem in explaining the origins of Christianity apart from an objective and supernatural resurrection. How to explain the conversion of this frightened and defeated band into those men of whom their opponents complain in the Book of Acts 17:6, “ these who have turned the world upside down are come hither also.”

Michael Ramsey, the late Twentieth Century Archbishop of Canterbury, said in his justly famous book on the Resurrection, “The present writer would ask sympathy for two very modest presuppositions. The one is that the biblical belief in the living God, creator, redeemer, transcendent, is true. The other is that the events must be such as account for the Gospel which the Apostles preached and by which the first Christians lived.” Skeptical presuppositions aside, the events as recorded by the original witnesses account for the origins of the faith and the church far more adequately than any of the speculations of doubters.

The reports of the original witnesses are twofold. They report that the Tomb was empty and that they saw the Risen Lord. Both of these things together are important, so important that the meaning of their union has been immortalized in the Apostles Creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” The proclamation of the Apostles is that Jesus has been raised bodily and that in Him we shall likewise be raised. The point is that the resurrection faith is not about the survival of some aspect or part of us beyond death. The proclamation of the resurrection is not a proclamation of survival, that the soul or spirit survives death but a proclamation that everything relating to the humanity of Jesus, that our entire human nature, body and soul, our psychosomatic unity has been recreated in Him through His sacrifice of love. It was not some part of Him that survived but all of Him was raised from the grave, the first example of a new humanity in a new creation, destined to be the elder brother of many siblings in a new race. Because He shared our lives of sin and death, He has the power to give us the gift of sharing in His new and Risen Life which is a life in which everything pertaining to our human existence is transfigured and made new. Even now, through the power of the Holy Spirit He begins to recreate those who come to Him in faith. This is the meaning of the church’s teaching that in Holy Baptism we are regenerated, born again, made new.

This desire to be made new, to be made over is very deep in the human heart. There is a current reality TV show that plays upon this profound human longing to be a new person. The show is called, “Extreme Makeover.” It is a show about plastic surgery and people are chosen for a free extreme makeover. The plastic surgeons do their best from head to foot. The promise of the show is not only that the people will look better but that they will also feel better, have better lives in every way and especially in their relationships with other people. The promise is that those getting the extreme makeover will feel better about themselves and that other people will change their opinion of them as well. In other words, change the outside and the insides will change, there will be a complete and positive change in identity and in reality. Like so many of the shows on television just now, this is a show about salvation.

There is some truth in the premise. Someone has bad teeth and they don’t smile, fix the teeth and the smile and it does change things. There is also truth in the intuition that ultimately, if you are really going to be a new person, you must have a new body and that there is a connection between the body and our relationship with others. What the surgeons can deliver of course is only a temporary fix.

There is only one physician who can deliver on the promise of extreme makeover. He works not from the outside in but from the inside out. He works with sacrificial love and He transfuses us with His life and with His recreated humanity and we really become different in every dimension of our lives. We really do have a different relationship with God, with each other, forgiven and forgiving. We have a different relationship to our own faults and failings. We know we are not alone but have access to a power greater than ourselves, the Holy Spirit that the Risen Lord breathes into His people. We have new friends and we find fellowship and a new solidarity with others in praising and serving God. We have a new relationship to God’s good creation which we believe also will mysteriously in Christ be raised. We have a new relationship with the suffering world as the place from which the Crucified and Risen one calls to us to serve Him in His distressing disguise. He changes everything about us and there is no aspect of our humanity, including our bodies, that is not touched by His recreating work until He has made over into His image which includes giving us a body like His.

The Resurrection of Christ is something that is all ready but not yet. He is Risen and He is raising us and His Resurrection in us is something that is all ready and not yet. The Resurrection is something which we know about from the witness of the scripture and something which we experience as we immerse ourselves in the life of the church. Even this thing of the recreating work of the resurrection on our bodies is something which can be seen to be all ready and not yet.

Recently there was a celebration in Rome for the beatification of Mother Teresa. It is one of the steps in the Roman Church on the way to sainthood. At the end of the impressive ceremony there was unveiled a portrait of a very old, very frail, very wrinkled, very used up little woman. It was the portrait of a very beautiful face, a face changed, made over from the inside out. It was a portrait of something invisible breaking through to the visible. So St. Paul says in the 15^th chapter of the First Letter To The Corinthians, “this mortal must put on immortality” and “it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” Here St. Paul says we get a down payment of the life of the world to come. In the face of the saint perhaps we catch a glimpse of the beauty of the body that the grave cannot hold.

It is one of the great privileges that I have as a parish priest to see people change as they grow in the life of faith and they don’t just change their thinking, they change their being and their look and I tell you I can see people become more beautiful in the Lord. It is often an extreme makeover and not a temporary one but a token of even more radical and complete changes to come.

I trust the original witnesses and I trust the reported experience of the church through the ages. I trust my own Christian experience. I believe in the Resurrection of the body.

As you come to make your Easter communion, bring this deep desire of the human heart for an extreme makeover, this longing to be made new, to be beautiful, inside and out. Ask God for the grace to open your heart and life so that you might receive the new human life the Risen Lord brings us at the price of the cross and in the power of the Spirit, that life which begins now and which the grave cannot hold, that life which makes it possible for us to say with confidence, “ I believe in the Resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.” Amen.

The Passion Of Jesus Christ
And The Passion Of Parenthood

The sacrifice of Christ is pondered in endless books and hymns and works of art. It is a “big story” generating much wonder and wondering. There is at least one part of it that I think I understand. I believe that at the heart of the sacrifice of Jesus is the suffering of rejected love, which the saviour meets with an unswerving passion.

Many years ago I watched a documentary on television about the famous school for emotionally disturbed children run by the now discredited psychiatrist, Bruno Bettleheim. What is not in dispute is that some very sick children went to his school and got better with the help of the young and dedicated therapeutic teachers employed there. The documentary found some of these children now successful as adults and interviewed them and the teachers about their past. I was struck by one story. The man, now a successful broker on Wall Street, recalled how he had been sent to the school because he had as a seven year old tried to kill his mother and sister with a knife. The film cut to a middle-aged woman remembering being a young teacher who read to the children each night before they were to go to bed. One night as she was reading she felt the air stir by her face and looked up in time to see a knife whiz by her at eye level and stick into the wall next to her. She looked across the room and saw a seven year old boy, the boy she knew had been admitted for trying to kill his mother and sister with a knife standing poised by an open window, ready to jump out. “What did you do?” The interviewer asked. “I didn’t know what to do, so I picked him up and held him. I held him while I finished reading to the group. I held him so tightly it made my arms hurt. I held him while I put the rest of the children to bed and I continued to hold him until we both fell asleep. I continued to hold him for most of the next several days except when it was absolutely impossible for either of us.”

The scene shifts to the stockbroker. “What where you going to do?” I was going to jump out of the window and kill myself.” “What was the effect of being held?” “I can’t remember what I thought but I know it was then that things began to change for me. There is a direct line from that night to my life now, even if I can’t explain it.”

There is a kind of holding that changes things. It is the holding power of love even when love is rejected, even when love is met with hostility. The cross of Jesus Christ is a mystery of unfathomable richness. It is at least this. It is the price of the persevering love of God, of God’s holding of the human race that changes everything. God holds us even though we are God’s enemies and even though we resist God’s love and push the saviour out of our lives and onto the cross. Even so God does not let go and in Christ God hangs onto us even though it costs the saviour the cross. Let us allow ourselves to be grasped by this Passion that we may hold out this love to the children given into our care. Amen.

Leander Harding+

A Meditation on the Third Word from the Cross

Given During the Three Hours Preaching, April 9, 1993

In St. John’s Episcopal Church, Stamford, Connecticut

By The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding

“I thirst,” is the shortest of the words that Jesus speaks from the cross. In Greek it is just one word, dipso. We know that part of the agony of the wounds that Jesus suffered in his scourging and upon the cross is thirst. When the body loses a great deal of blood, a tremendous all consuming thirst is produced. In every war the terrible cries of those abandoned on the field of battle is, “water, water.” At this point in his passion, Jesus flesh, like all human flesh, would be desperate with a burning thirst. Crucifixion was designed to be slow torture for criminals. The victim, though horribly traumatized by being nailed to the cross, actually died from slow loss of blood and slow strangulation. It is want of water and a want of air that does the killing. Now here on the cross in the mystery of the incarnation God gets inside human suffering. All of us are afraid of death in one way or another. In our day there is a special fear of slow death, especially the kind of slow death that it is only possible to die in a modern hospital. Here God in Jesus tastes of that suffering. Now there is truly no place where we might have to go where He has not gone before.

There are other kinds of slow death and some of the exaggerated fear of what might happen in a hospital might be a kind of cipher for types of slow death with which we are more familiar. There are other thirsts caused by a different kind of bleeding. The soul, the identity, the center of energy, the very most inmost self of a person can die slowly for want of life-giving water and life-giving breath. In both Hebrew and Greek the word for air, wind, breath and spirit are the same word. You can imagine what it might be like to be spiritually and emotionally dried up. You can imagine what it might be like to live a life day after day that is bleeding you to dry. You can imagine what it is to have a life in which each passing day leaves you with less vitality than the day before. You can imagine what it is to have a burning, all-consuming thirst, to say from the depth of your soul, “I thirst.” You can imagine what it is to have a kind of life which causes you to say in agony, “I am suffocating, I can’t breathe.” Each of us had had times like that in our lives. You may be having a time like that right now. There is a way in which humanity as a whole, the human race, bleeds from wounds like Rwanda and Iraq, from city slums and country shacks and from an empty life, of empty production and empty consumption, and says, “I thirst, I can’t breathe, I am dying.” We should have no problem joining with Jesus on the cross as he gives voice to a humanity that croaks from thirst and gasps for breath.

It is to satisfy our thirst, to breathe new life into us that Jesus has come. He wants to take from us the old life, the thirsty life, the life without breath and wind and give us a new life. He said to the Samaritan woman by the well, “I will give you water which will be in you a fountain gushing up to eternal life.” When he appears to his disciples at the resurrection he will breathe on them who are spiritless, who are winded. God thirsts to give us drink. To give us who are suffocating breath, the saviour breathes his last on the cross.

When someone is dying of thirst he or she cannot help but drink if the opportunity presents itself. When someone is strangling, suffocating, he or she cannot help but breathe if the chance comes. With spiritual bleeding and spiritual suffocation, it is different. The spiritually dying person can refuse to drink and bathe in God’s Spirit, refuse to inhale God’s life-giving breath. This obstinate panic that refuses God’s answer to our prayer when we cry, “I thirst,” is what pushes Jesus to the cross. This is what nails him there. There in the agony of Jesus, God makes his appeal to us. There God says, “I thirst also. I am crucified also. I am like you. I know your pain and your struggle. I know also a deeper struggle, a deeper passion. I know the passion of having your dying lover reject your life-giving gift. Here on the cross beloved, I follow you into death and when you are bled white and have breathed your last, I am there with the shed blood of Jesus to give you drink, I am there with the Spirit to give you breath.”

On the cross God is showing us our own suffering, showing us that God knows from the inside our suffering. On the cross God is showing us our thirst and our refusal to drink. On the cross the Father is showing us what it costs God to endure our rejection of his love, our refusal to drink and to draw breath. On the cross God meets our suffering with the suffering of Jesus in such a way that with Jesus we cry out and by Jesus our thirst is met and we have our spirits revived. In your baptism you were promised that God’s life would come into you when you were bleeding and thirsty. You were promised that God’s breath would be in you when you were out of wind. In your baptism you were asked to die with Jesus, so that you could live with him. You were asked to cry out with him, “I thirst,” so that he could give you drink. Where the thirst of the human heart and the thirst of God to give life come together, Jesus prayer from the cross, his work upon the cross is finished. Amen.

”

Godly Bishops

By

The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

In what follows I am going to take it as established that the historic episcopacy is a continuation of the apostolic ministry which has evolved in the church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and that therefore an episcopacy which has integrity and authenticity will be self-consciously seeking an ever greater conformity with the ministry of the first Apostles. One way of speaking about godliness in the episcopacy would be to enumerate all the virtues that would go into a truly consecrated character. So we would speak of prayerfulness, learning, humility, the spirit of service, zeal for souls and so on. But how might a bishop find a way into these virtues? How can the motivation to grow in real godliness be sustained? I think by dwelling on the originating encounter with the crucified and risen Lord which propels the Apostles into their ministry. Essential to the ministry of the first Apostles is that they are witnesses to the resurrection and it is in the resurrection encounters that we should expect to find the distinctive shape and power of the apostolic ministry

Three locations dominate my thinking, meditation and prayer about the apostolic office. First there is John 20:19-23. The apostles are really cowering behind closed doors and the crucified and risen one appears to them. He shows them his hands and his side. They are glad when they see the Lord and he then says to them, “Peace be with you, As the Father has sent me even so I send you.” Then the Lord breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” To be an Apostle is to be one who is sent. Jesus is the Apostle of the Father and in his turn the crucified and risen one sends out his own apostles whose mission is to create by their witness a community of witness to the crucified and risen Lord and to the presence of his Spirit. At the heart of this witness is the extension of the reconciliation which has been offered to them. That the Apostles are given the authority to proclaim the reality of reconciliation and to distinguish false from true reconciliation is not some arbitrary power but a personal authority and knowledge that comes from their own actual personal redemption and what they have learned from welcoming and embracing the one who comes to breathe into them God’s peace.

The apostolic ministry originates in a personal encounter with the saviour. There is no way for these original witnesses to claim their vocation without looking upon the one whom they have betrayed and abandoned. They cannot be reconciled to him who holds out his wounded and glorified hands without embracing their own faithlessness and sinfulness. This dynamic is portrayed even more starkly in the encounter between Jesus and Peter on the beach in the twenty first chapter of St. John’s Gospel. Peter rushes to the beach where the Lord meets him over a charcoal fire and asks those excruciating questions, “Peter, do you love me?” There by that charcoal fire Peter must think of another interrogation and of his betrayal of the Lord. Peter can only answer the call to go and gather and feed the sheep by embracing the fire of his own sin. The connection between a personal confession of sin and the reception of the call to gather in and feed the flock of Christ that is being driven home to Peter on the beach in Galilee is there as well behind those closed doors in Jerusalem. The reception of the crucified and risen one’s commission to go and tell the nations begins necessarily with a personal sense of sinfulness and failure which is provoked by the sudden breaking in of the undeserved forgiveness of God. I am not speaking so much of a particular type of conversion experience but of the reality of knowing oneself as a betrayer and crucifier of the Lord and knowing oneself as the recipient of an undeserved and costly forgiveness. There is a place where shame and joy grow together, where a growing consciousness of the enormity of human sin and rebellion and a consciousness of the astonishing goodness of the seeking, searching, sacrificial love of God grow together. In this place which is at once a place of deep humiliation and deep peace, the words of the Lord “even so I send you,” can be rightly heard and when heard are an irresistible invitation to return love for love. Here the human race is being remade by a new genesis, a new inspiration of God’s Spirit. From this place the forgiveness of sins can be declared and the lost sheep of the Father gathered in. Here is the wellspring of godliness in the ministry of bishop and shepherd. The way into this place is the way of humility, of lowliness and of deepening repentance.

The third scriptural location I propose is suggested to me by Lesslie Newbigin. It is Paul’s encounter with the crucified and risen Lord on the road to Damascus, recorded in Acts 9. Paul is a persecutor of the church of God and is thrown to the ground by his encounter with the Lord. Lying in the dust he hears the Lord say to him, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Here we have the same revelation of sinfulness and of utterly undeserved love and forgiveness which strips Paul of any righteousness of his own. The disciples in Jerusalem, Peter on the beach and Paul on the road all share in the same humiliation which is at once an exaltation, in the same death which is at once life. In Paul’s circumstance an aspect of this originating apostolic encounter is made especially clear. In order to embrace his call to be an apostle, Paul must not only confess himself as God’s enemy but in order to grasp the wounded and glorified hand stretched out to him, Paul must also grasp the hands of those he has persecuted. Paul must recognize the nascent church as the body of Christ. Paul cannot be reconciled to God without being reconciled to God’s people. Paul recognizes that God is building a new people which shall be marked off not by the works of the law but by faith in the crucified and risen Messiah. Paul recognizes that God’s promise to recreate humanity, to reconcile the nations in a renewed Israel is coming true in and through Jesus. In Paul’s call we learn that to be a witness to the resurrection is to be at one and the same time a witness to the reality of the new Israel which is the body of the Christ.

Just these few encounters we have considered point us to elements that are at the heart of the ministry of episcopacy and which if they are held fast set a person on the same road toward holiness and godliness trod by the first Apostles. We learn that the apostolic ministry begins with a deep and personal apprehension of the forgiveness of sins by the crucified and risen Lord. That included in this forgiveness and reconciliation with God is the fact of the church and the body of Christ and that the new human life that comes in this encounter by the gift of the Spirit propels one into the life of mission, evangelization and witness.

The witness and authority of the original Apostles is intensely personal. They stand before the world as men personally convicted and personally redeemed by their encounters with the crucified and risen Lord. It is possible for us to distinguish between the evangelical concern for personal faith and the catholic concern for the body of Christ and for the apostolic ministry as a vital organ in the body of Christ, but these elements are encountered in the Bible always simultaneously as inextricably intertwined. The first Apostles are living proof and a sacramental sign of the forgiveness of sins, the reconciliation with God and the reality of the one body dependent on its one head, by their very presence. The message authenticates the person and the person authenticates the message.( It is of course possible for those who succeed in this office for this relationship between person and message to be impaired and this is perhaps the source of ungodliness in episcopal ministry.)

We come to our encounter with the crucified and risen one through the testimony of these original witnesses as that testimony is transmitted to us through the Word of God and through the succession of apostolic teaching and witness. The challenge for the contemporary bishop who wishes to stand in the shoes of the original Apostles is to dwell in and upon the Word of God in such a way that this originating apostolic encounter becomes real and personal and having once found this originating moment of encounter to return to it again and again and let it be the engine of the bishop’s teaching, preaching and witness. This call to return again and again to epicenter of the apostolic earthquake is a call to prayer and contemplation. It is a call to a life of study of the Bible and of the faithful teachers who by God’s grace make a faithful succession to the Apostles possible. It is call to mission, to evangelization, to invite others into this encounter (which is bound to come in different ways for different people) with the crucified and risen Lord.

This call is also a call to guarding the unity of the church. The new life with God which the saviour comes to bring us at so great a price is a new life with each other no less than with God. It is the restoration of God’s plan that he should be our Father and we should be his children and loving brothers and sisters of each other. At the center of the apostolic experience of forgiveness is the reality of the one people of God and the body of Christ. The Apostles witness to the reality of the forgiveness of sins not just as an idea, as a teaching of the master, but as something which he has accomplished by his costly work and which has now through the power of the resurrection and the gift of the Spirit appeared. The unity of the college of the apostles in witness and in love is part of the Gospel which they proclaim. The Bible already tells the sad story that this testimony can be marred by a lack of unity and by attempts to find the center of the church in anything other than the forgiveness of sins brought by the death and resurrection of the Lord. If the secret of godliness in the episcopacy is dwelling upon the personal invitation to confession and the personal offer of redemption given by the outstretched, wounded and glorified hand of the risen one, then the bishop seeking godliness will want to lead the whole church back to this one cornerstone that it might be built up in unity and by the Spirit of love which is breathed by Christ into his church at just this point. There must be an impatience with anything which would seek to define the church on any other basis and there must be a resolute resistance to any attempt to draw the church away from utter dependence on the actual death and resurrection of her Lord. A godly bishop is one who stands in the center of the church as an authentic and personal sign of the reality of forgiveness and new life with God and among people which comes through the utter dependence of the whole church upon its one head and upon the actual events of the death and resurrection of the Lord.

71. The disciplines of unity are penitential. As St. Paul teaches, for the sake of unity we must be willing to suspend gospel freedom and conform to the limitations of the weak. This process will ascetical; it will necessarily involve the sacrifice of real but limited goods for the sake of greater good. We are convinced, however, that this ascetical dimension is necessary if the ecumenical project of modern Christianity is to move forward. Unity will require our churches not only to renounce the selfishness and insularity that we all dislike and easily see as sinful. It will also require our churches to embrace a spiritual poverty that has the courage to forego genuine riches of a tradition for the sake of a more comprehensive unity in the truth of the gospel.

The fifth issue is about the Church as a divine institution and the challenge of the democratic
cult of egalitarianism. We live in a democracy, and we have a right to be thankful for that. Democracy
is a form of government, as Abraham Lincoln orated in his Gettysburg Address, “of the
people, by the people, and for the people.” But the church is not a democracy. It is not “of the
people and by the people.” It is of God! Christ is king, the Lord of the church. Mistakenly we
often take our doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” to mean that we are all equal in the
church. The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is important; it means that we all have
equal access to Jesus Christ who is the sole Mediator between God and human beings. It is not a
definition of the church. Ordination is a sign that God calls certain ones to be leaders. Hebrews
13:17 says: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls.”
Some are shepherds, some are sheep. Authority in the church must be a function of the ministry
to which God has given special responsibility to make the church the church, where the gospel is
truly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered. Gnostics don’t like that and never
have.

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the ELCA has succumbed to the same ailment as liberal
Protestantism. What is that? Modern Protestantism is an amalgamation of historic
Christianity and the principles of the Enlightenment, its rationalism, subjectivism, and
anthropocentrism. The underlying assumption is the neo-gnostic belief in the innerdwelling
of God, such that everyone is endowed with the inner light that only needs to
be uncovered. The light of truth does not shine through the Scriptures and the Christian
tradition as much as through scientific reason and individual experience. This is what
happened in Minneapolis: appeals to reason and experience trumped Scripture and
tradition, punctuated with pious injunctions of Lutheran slogans and clichés. The majority
won. And they said it was the work of the Spirit, forgetting that the Holy Spirit had
already spoken volumes through the millennia of Scriptural interpretation, the councils
of the church, and its creeds and confessions.

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I hear instead a great deal of scolding about the bad manners and overheated rhetoric of
traditionalists. These are certainly real enough, though not universal. I have counseled
traditionalists to beware the poisonous affects of anger and resentment, and I will continue to do
so. But the demand for civility is a time-honored ploy by the powerful, deliberate or not, to
control or exclude the less powerful: “You don’t get to speak unless you speak politely, and we
decide what’s polite.” This is a distraction from the far more significant question: What will the
powerful do with their power? The future of the ELCA will in large measure be determined by
the degree to which those who support the Assembly actions are practically committed to
retaining fellowship with those who reject them. Traditionalists should be ready to acknowledge
and respect such commitment when it appears, and that will require spiritual discipline and selfcriticism
on our part. But the traditionalists do not have the power to decide whether space will
be provided for them in the ELCA.

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