At any rate, he's going in a number of problematic directions - which may in fact be more insulting to persons of other faith traditions than if he simply said, "I am a Christian, and I believe that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word of God. This causes disagreement between me and my friends who are Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. We don't agree. And, love means that we don't have to."
The approach to pluralism that Dr. Forrester seems to embody is reductive of the capacity for any religious tradition to make distinctive truth claims, based on the notion that, 'deep down,' there are no distinctions, or categories, anyway - but that 'deep down' there is only just God.
On the one hand, Christians believe that ulimately-speaking there will only be God and that which has become eternally enjoined with God. But we also believe that - as yet - the Creation and the Creator are not eternally and fully one.
And until that happens - there is not just God - there is what God has made also. And we are ever trying to reconcile the two - following after the fashion of the first fruit of that theosis - in which the Creation and the Creator were became one flesh in the full-person full-divinity of Christ.
But we are not yet quite there.
Anyway, here is the sermon:
Trinity Sunday—Kevin Thew Forrester [05.18.08]
Reading from Matthew 28: 16-20
Well, there are a number of things that come together this morning in the liturgy. The Gospel in Matthew talks about baptism this morning, and it’s connected up with what we call Trinity Sunday today, and that’s all held in our tradition in redemption. So, I’ll preach on redemption, baptism and the Trinity today and it’ll take about forty-five minutes, and to weave it all together (heh, heh)—well I am going to talk about all of them, and hopefully we’ll weave them together in less time than that. I’ve been reading this over the past several months, and doing some research and writing in early Christianity as it pertains to baptism, and focusing on a treasure in our past that we’ve forgotten about. At least I have not been taught about it, and maybe you have heard about it. It’s the strain of Christianity that came out of Syria—Syrian Christianity. And Syrian Christianity goes back to the first century. So it is an ancient, it is an early stream of Christian experience and Christian theology. And, in fact, the Syrian church came up with its translation of the New Testament, the Syriac New Testament. And there is a woman, her name is Gabriele Winkler, and she’s done some of the writing on these Syriac Christians, and what’s drawn her to it is that they’ve a very positive approach to that word and the experience of Jesus in terms of the Redeemer, which is in contrast to much of Greek Christianity, and that’s important because our New Testament, that we have in English, translates the Greek text.
Now, I’m not going to get real technical, but let me give you some examples, ‘cause it really goes to the heart of something. The Greeks have a very negative, on the whole, understanding of that term redemption. And, uh, I wrote some of this down so I would get it right. When the Greeks talk about, and you find this in the New Testament, talk about redemption, they talk about us being freed from something, being rescued from something, being saved from something. So there’s something we need to be rescued from, something that we need to be delivered from, something we need to be saved from. So there’s a negative response, there’s something negative that we need to be rescued from in the Greek New Testament. She says in the Syriac New Testament the equivalent of the Greek verbs meaning to deliver, to redeem, to save—they’re not used. Instead, they come up with Syriac terms, and the Syriac terms are these, they’re fascinating: they are “to give life,” “to make alive,” and “to cause to live.” That’s very different—to cause to live, to make alive, to give life.
So let me give you, I think I have five examples here. If you look at Matthew Chapter 9 in the Greek New Testament, it says in verse 22 “your faith has saved you,” okay? Now in the Syriac New Testament it says this “your faith has made you alive.” That’s a difference. Your faith has made you alive. One chapter later, Chapter 10 verse 22 in Matthew it says in the Greek “the one who endures to the end will be saved.” The Syrian Christians experienced Jesus and they wrote and translated it “the one who endures will be living,” will be alive. Then, if you go to the Gospel of Luke, in the second Chapter in verse 11, which you hear all the time at Christmas, it says “To you is born this day the Savior,”—I always have in mind the Charlie Brown Christmas play (heh, heh, heh)—“To you today is born the Savior.” I think it’s Linus, or someone, who says that, holding his blanket. The Syriac text says “to you is born this day the one who makes alive,” the lifegiver. That’s who was born this day, the lifegiver. And then, one chapter later in Luke, it reads, in the Greek, “all flesh shall see the salvation of God,” and the Syriac says “all flesh shall see the life of God.” Let me give you one more, and this is from Luke 19. It says “the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost,” and the Syrian Christians, in their New Testament said “the Son of Man came that He may seek and make alive.” That’s very different. I find that amazing. In the Syriac New Testament when, so it’s their translation, they had the Greek and they made their own translation, and they were very deliberate in their choice of words, Jesus is baptized. That’s one of our themes today, right, baptized, baptism; He goes in the waters of the river Jordan. He emerges and have Him baptized by John, and the Syrians say “the one who rises is the unified one who is the lifegiver.” He’s the unified one and He’s the lifegiver, and those two are very closely connected. Jesus is the lifegiver because He is the unified one.
So, what does that mean? Well, we heard in the gospel today in Matthew that, for His community, Jesus says that all, what all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. That’s what we heard today, right? All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Well, we could slightly rephrase that and keep it, keep its true meaning, I think, if we would say: Jesus realized that all that He is, He had received from God. Jesus is the one that realized all He is, “all I am, I have received from God.” And in response, we read in the gospels later on His response, to having received everything from God is that, “into Your hands I commend my spirit and Thy will be done.” He receives everything from God and He returns everything to God. That is what it means that everything has been given to Jesus, all the power. His very center, the center of His heart, of His body, of His mind, is the living God. All things come from the divine source for Jesus—who He is, His self identity, His soul, that just means His understanding of who He is, He has come to realize and it’s key in that baptismal moment, that He is the very presence of the living God. That is who He is. He is one who is unified with God. That’s what the Syrians are getting at. Jesus realizes that God dwells in His very being, He is one with God, and He is one with you and me. And because He is one, He is the lifegiver. He can show us the path of life, which is the path to realizing that we are one with God. We are one with one another.
There is a passage, it’s one of the earliest passages we have that pertains to baptism, in the New Testament, it’s one of the early formulas, and it’s in the Letter to the Galatians, and we’ve heard it often. It’s that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus. Now, it’s fascinating, the Greek and the Syriac text agree on the translation of that. “All are one in Christ Jesus.” Now I find that kind of fascinating for a couple reasons. One, I look out here and I see lots of males and females, still, right? And I see rich and poor, black and white, I see gay and straight, I see Muslim and Christian. We’re all here, and yet that text in Galatians says that no longer exists. And I’m pretty sure when Jesus came out of those waters of baptism in the Jordan they still saw a Jewish man, right? Who wasn’t a slave, but was free. So what does that text getting at, that baptismal text, because we are man and we are women; we are rich, we are poor; some of us are wealthy, some of us not so wealthy, huh? The text is talking about, that we have all these categories by which to define one another and to define ourselves. We have lots of boxes that we can put ourselves in and put one another in. And all those categories still exist after our baptism, but what the scriptures are getting at, and what the Syrians are realizing, they only exist on the surface. But if we continue to take ourselves for th thtose categories, what we will do is be at war with ourselves and at war with one another, and we give no, we give no space for each other to grow. If all I see is a man or a woman, I do not see Barb for all that you are, I’ve simply reduced you, haven’t I, to a category? I’ve reduced you to an object. And those boxes are made of walls, and the walls are hard and they are thick. And whenever there’s a wall it’s something to fight over. Look at the new wall that’s going up in Israel. My guess is that in a thousand years it won’t be there. Look at the Great Wall of China. Walls don’t work. Categories don’t work. If we think that they’re going to define us for who we essentially are, and protect us from our deepest fears, and satisfy our deepest longings, the boxes don’t work.
We have these categories, of course, but what Jesus realized, and what the Syrian Christians experienced in Jesus, is that if we go to our depths of who we are, the categories aren’t there. The only thing that exists in the depth of Jesus, the only thing that exists in the depth of Jesus, is the living God. They talk about in the New Testament, in the Greek, the kenosis of Jesus, the self-emptying. The categories are gone in terms of this is who I am essentially. All that’s left is the presence of the living God. That’s all that is left. And it’s why He is one with God and one with us. Everything Jesus is He receives from God and He gives it back in a grateful spirit of surrender. But there is more, ‘cause I would invite us to consider that not only has all authority been given to Jesus, it has been given to you and to me. We have been asked, we have been invited to receive all that is from the living God, a God who is not “out there,” but a God who is the center of our very being.
One of the amazing insights I have found in the interfaith dialogue is that, no matter what you name that source, from which all life comes—you can name that source God, Abba; you may name that source Yahweh; you may name that source Allah; you may name that source “the great emptiness;” you can name that source many things, but what all the faiths in their wisdom have acknowledged in the interfaith dialogue is that, you and I, we’re not the source. We receive from the source, and what we are asked to do is give back to the source. In other words, what the interfaith dialogue has recognized is that there is a Trinitarian structure to life. That’s what I’m driving at this morning. We make the Trinity much too complex. The Trinitarian structure of life is this: is that everything that is comes from the source. And you can name the source what you want to name the source. And our response to that is with hearts of gratitude and thanksgiving, to return everything back to that source, and there’s a spirit who enables that return. Everything comes from God. We give it back to God. And the spirit gives us the heart of gratitude. That is the Trinitarian nature of life. And you can be a Buddhist, you can be a Muslim, you can be a Jew, and that makes sense. And we all develop more elaborate theologies, but the truth is we live and have our being in a God who asks only one thing of us: to grow into people who give thanks that God is our center, God is our life, that we are one with God. And as we grow into realization, that we are one with this God who lives in us, and the only thing God asks us is to give back everything in thanksgiving, we live. It’s what the Syrians said, “we will know what redemption truly is, we will come alive, we will be made to live,” because we will know—not because someone told us—because we know that God gives us life. And all God asks of us is “give it back to Me in return.”
We are told in the scriptures that Jesus did not make equality with God something to be grasped at. All Jesus did, in the end, was say “into your hands I commend my spirit.” We are asked this day, and we are reminded in baptism, that there is only one thing asked of us, and it is to say with our minds, and our hearts, and our bodies “into your hands I commend my spirit.” And the source, our God, will hold us and take care of us. Amen.
8 comments:
Each time I hear about interfaith dialogue, I recall a dialogue in which I was involved on a college campus. All of us, from various faiths, could agree on ninety-five percent of things, items and beliefs that were common to all of our faiths. However, we did not agree on the five percent of things that made our faiths distinctive. That was perfectly OK. In fact, the very fact that we valued both our commonalities and our differences was the whole point of the dialogue, not a sort of "we're all really saying the same thing" idea. Why celebrating our commonalities as well as valuing our distinctiveness is not enough for some, I don't know.
You beat me to punch on posting something about this!
Thanks for offering your initial thoughts in response to Forrester's sermon, Greg. I agree with your analysis and may say more later on my own blog.
For the time being, I would add that Forrester completely misconstrues Syriac Christianity in comparison to Greek Christianity as though the former is some sort of "kinder, gentler" faith. It is a false dichotomy to pit redemption as "being freed from something, being rescued from something, being saved from something" over and against the idea that redemption means "to cause to live, to make alive, to give life." Greek and Syriac Christianity share a common affirmation of both the "negative" and the "positive" meanings of redemption.
My Greek Orthodox brother confirms that this dichotomy is, indeed, a load of hooey. And for proof positive, check out A Spiritual Psalter by Ephrem the Syrian, one of the most revered of the Syriac Christian saints, and much beloved among Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians. Indeed, I note that Ephrem (also spelled as 'Ephraim') is revered on the Greek Orthodox calendar on January 28.
You can read an excerpt from A Spiritual Psalter on my blog. Even such a small selection from the greater whole of that work undermines Forrester's attempt to pit Syriac against Greek Christianity. Note, for instance, that in the last paragraph, Ephrem affirms both the negative and the positive notions of redemption. The two are flip sides of the same coin of redemption.
Wow...this sermon problematic on a number of levels starting with the grammatical and structural.
I do not know if this was a transcript of a sermon he was preaching without notes or what, but it appears to be a rough draft with to many redundant and fragmentary sentences.
I also hope he was using some sort of powerpoint or had some printed version of the Syrian that he was using. I imagine this would have been hard to follow without it.
In terms of Trinitarian theology, this is really problematic. He seems to be alluding in the 4th paragraph to what sounds to me like a subordination of Christ and not a God of "three persons, one substance." I could be misreading that, as his argument in that paragraph is muddled.
And his 5th paragraph is intriguing, though I doubt he had any Muslims in the congregation on Trinity Sunday. He seems to be missing the entire point about baptismal regeneration.
In the next paragraph he seems to be alluding to the Incarnation, but then the subordinationism of Christ seems to get in the way. As I am reading his logic, if Christ emptied himself, then all there was was God. And if all there was was God, then deep down that is somehow true of each of us. Thus, as I am reading his equation, because Jesus became incarnate and emptied himself, and we model ourselves after Christ, then we empty ourselves. Thus, if we are all emptied, then...we are all the same under the skin.
From there he goes on to postulate that Muslims and Buddhists and Christians are really all the same deep down in their core belief because deep down there only God is to be found.
Aside from his rather bizarre circular logic to this point, the major question I would pose to him would be, what does he do with incarnate Evil or free will? If there is Satan or some form of incarnate evil in the world apart from man, then might not that be leading people into false belief? Can people likewise not freely choose to believe something that is not the "deep magic" that seems to be making up the universe as CS Lewis described the "deep down" knowledge that Forrester seems to be alluding to. And if so, then maybe we are in fact not all theologically the same under the skin.
Other than reading some of the works of Ephraim the Syrian, I can't speak to the Syriac discussion as I have never really studied it. But I would caution any preacher in equating the canon of scripture that the church has agreed is authoritative alongside any other parallel or apocryphal gospel(s). You get sucked into Textual Relativism really quickly.
Just my two cents...
Father Jones' comments on the substance of the sermon seem to me to be correct, as do the remarks made in the comments. I would add only this: In the previous post the question was raised whether Forrester is comparable to the priest who claims to be a Muslim and a Christian at the same time. It seems to me, from the evidence of this sermon, that he is not comparable. He is a fuzzy-minded Christian, perhaps, but his fuzzy-mindedness is not outside that wide range of views that we tolerate in the Episcopal Church.
I can't believe he mentioned Gabriele Winkler in a sermon. He didn't do a very good job in that, though, since she's a very thorough, if often overbearing, liturgical historian who's done groundbreaking work on the Sanctus and the Anaphora of St. Basil. To say that he had a simplistic understanding of her work in Syriac Christianity would be an understatement. Well, at least using her in a sermon is better than a sermon I heard once that quoted Derrida.
It is dismissive of other traditions to say we are all the same. I doubt that the others would buy that statement. We do have many things in common - but true interfaith work requires honesty about differences too.
I've finally had an opportunity to weigh in on all of this over at Creedal Christian.
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