Category: Uncategorized

The Water and the Wine

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. We’re in the season of Epiphany. Epiphany means literally a lamp that is shining out. The Phanos is the lamp, the Epi is out and about, the light is shining. And all during this season of Epiphany, between now and Ash Wednesday, we’re going to have stories about Jesus that, if we have the eyes of faith, can cause us to see the light of the Father shining out in the face of the Son. It can cause us to see that he is not only a great teacher and a great prophet, but he is the only begotten Son of the Father, very God of very God.

His first sign, St. John’s book is a book of signs. Here’s how I like to read books. I like to go to the last chapter and read the last chapter first, and then read the rest. That’s the right way to read St. John’s Gospel. If you read the last chapter first, you’ll have all the clues that you need to figure out what’s going on in the rest of the Gospel.

There are great themes in this Gospel. Light, life, love, my hour, glory. And one of the things, there are seven signs in this book, and every one of them is a sign of God’s glory. But the ultimate revelation of God’s glory is going to be at the end, in the events that happen in Jerusalem, in the death and the resurrection. And St. John gives us words of Jesus about his crucifixion, and he says, now am I glorified. The glory of God, the resplendent radiance of God, which is the influence of his divine love, is absolutely manifest in the sacrifice of the love of the cross.

And the hidden light of the cross is the same light that’s on the mountain of transfiguration, and is the same light that is the light of the resurrection. And already it’s beginning to appear now in this first sign. And we’re going to need to keep the end of the Gospel in mind as we read this first sign, because this sign points forward and that one points backwards. In the Old Testament reading today, the words from the prophet Isaiah, we have one of the great figures of the relationship between God and his people. God has a plan to save all people. He has a plan to save all families. He has a plan to save all the ethnic, all the different kinds of people.

His plan is to call special people to himself, to show them who he is, to give them a way of living towards him and living towards each other, such that they will be a light to the nations, and the nations will stream towards Israel. And through this nation, God will redeem and save all the nations and bring all of his wayward children home. The prophets talk about the relationship between God and his people. They give God’s words about God’s relationship with his people. Sometimes God calls his people his son, Israel my son. And of course, here we have today in our presence the perfect son, Israel the perfect son, Israel being reconstituted, remade in the one who is the son himself, Israel my son. Other times, the relationship between God and his people is talked about as the relationship between a bride, his people are his bride, as C. S. Lewis says, with regard to God, we’re all female.

His people are his bride, and God himself is the bridegroom. And God wants to consummate the marriage between himself and his people. Israel violates the marriage contract, the marriage covenant that it has made with God, and God has made with them. And it violates it by worshipping the idols. When I was first ordained, I used to try to figure out how to explain to contemporary people that we don’t worship graven images now, we don’t worship little statues of cows and things like that. I’m not so sure about that anymore. But an idol is simply anything.

It could be a wicked thing, but it could be a perfectly good thing. An idol is simply anything that is put in the place where only God should be. I mean, you know, sex is good, money is good, career, work is good, family is good. Jesus has these hard words, you know, if anybody doesn’t love his mother or his father, doesn’t love me more than his mother or father, it’s not worthy to be my disciple. It doesn’t mean don’t love your mother and father. It means if you put your family in the place where only God should be, two things are going to happen. You’re going to destroy yourself and you’re going to destroy your family.

People believe that they can be perfectly good without God. I could be convinced that you might have a crack at being good. I couldn’t be convinced that you’d have a crack at being perfectly good. You’ve got a lot of saints to compete against. And what is more likely to happen is that you’re going to get yourself a God substitute. And the God substitute will ultimately destroy you and will hurt those that are close to you. When Israel goes, and this is the word, this is the how it’s spoken about in the Bible, when Israel turns its back on the one true and living God who’s done amazing things for Israel, rescued them from from slavery, brought them out of slavery and freedom, out of death and to life, guided them through the desert, given them the promised land, given them the words of gods and the counsel of God and the prophets, all the wine, not the best wine that’s coming, right, but all the wine that God has given, right.

But nevertheless, they nevertheless, that was yesterday, what have you done for us today? They turn aside from the one true and living God. They turn towards the idols of the land. And when that happens immediately, there becomes great personal immorality and social and political corruption of a very profound kind. And corruption, by the way, also of the temple, of the liturgy. The way that the prophets of Israel talk about that is they talk about that as adultery. They now, Isaiah is talking to the people of Israel.

They’ve been conquered and they’re in exile because of their infidelity to God. But God judges his people, judges us, he judges his people. But his judgment is always an instrument of his love. The purpose of his judgment is always to turn our feet back to him. And so there, you know, in Israel, there in Babylon, Israel is, you know, their sins have caught up with them and they’re coming to themselves. Remember the prodigal son, he goes off into the far country and he comes to himself. He may still be conniving a little bit, but at least, you know, he’s beginning to get the idea, right?

And God, in that circumstance, sends the prophet, he sent the prophet Isaiah to issue a word of judgment. Now he sends the prophet Isaiah to speak a word of comfort. And the word of comfort is God is going to rescue you, redeem you, save you, bring you home. He’s going to consummate the marriage. What’s it going to be like when the marriage between heaven and earth, between God and his people is consummated?

What is it going to be like? The huge wedding feast on Mount Zion. There’ll be this huge feast. There’ll be a feast of every kind and wine, oh my word, there’ll be so much wine you won’t know what to do with it. The Bible condemns drunkenness, but it says wine gladdens the heart. It’s a symbol of, let’s say, being inebriated with the divine love. It condemns drunkenness, but wine is a symbol of a grace-filled life.

There’s going to be a wedding feast on this mountain. It’s going to be beautiful.

And you know what? Death itself will be covered up. Death itself will be consumed. No more crying, no more tears. When the Messiah comes, when the bridegroom comes from the bride, think of the feast that there will be, and everyone will call upon the name of God, and the presence of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. Now here is Jesus, the first thing that he does. He goes to a wedding feast.

Now we’re reading this. We’re not going to read this like we never read the Old Could this be a story about the Messiah? Could this be about a story about God coming to bring salvation and redemption? They ran out of wine. And then there’s this curious exchange between Jesus and his mother, and there have been numerous commentaries that have been written about this, and nobody’s ever gotten totally to the bottom of it. It sounds very disrespectful. Woman, although, you know, from the cross he calls her woman, and it’s very tender at that moment, isn’t it?

But woman is also, Eve was a woman. Mary is the new woman. Mary is the new Eve. Adam was a man.

The new Adam is here. So maybe you think it’s time for the new Adam and the new Eve. Do what he says. Mary doesn’t say much in the Bible, but that’s important. Do what he says. Now there’s these jars of purification. So the Jews had ritual baths, the purpose of which was that the outward cleansing would represent an inward cleansing, that you would repent of your sins and you would clean yourself up so that you could go and stand in the presence of God.

The water had to be very pure in these stone jars. So we’re talking about something like between 150 and 180 gallons. So he gives the instructions. The steward tastes the wine. He says, everyone gives the best wine first. You’ve saved the best for last. Well, we’ve had the profits.

Now the best wine has come. Now, this is a sign, but you’ve got to have the eyes of faith to see it. And you’re more likely to see it if you’ve read the end of the gospel, because as he hangs on the cross, the soldier pushes his spear into the side of Jesus and out flows what? Water and wine. And the water in the tradition of the church is the purifying water of baptism that takes away the sin of the world. Because he’s immersed himself in our life, we can be immersed in his life. And the wine is the grace that flows from the sacraments and particularly from the Holy Eucharist.

The wedding feast is going to come. The salvation is going to come. The new world is going to come. The new relationship between God and his people is going to come. The new heavens and the new earth are going to come, but they and this sign is pointing forward to that. The steward addresses his speech to the bridegroom.

He doesn’t know, you see. You have to have eyes of faith to even see that this miracle is taking place. God grant us the eyes of faith so that we might see the abundant things that God is doing in our midst that we don’t even recognize. So he thinks the bridegroom has done it. Well, the bridegroom has done it because the bridegroom has come. God has come to rescue and redeem his people, to purify them, to make them clean, to take away their sins, to restore them as God’s people, to make them once again a light to the nations, and the glory of his people Israel. Now, and this is one of the ancient invitations to Holy Communion, now is the wedding supper of the Lamb.

Now is the grace being poured out in superabundance. And now we are here. In the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen.

The Works of the Devil and the Work Christ

Transcription of a Sermon Preached in the Cathedral of All Saints by the Dean on November 10,2024

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated. I’m going to speak today primarily about the Collect, and then finish by making a reference to the second lesson, the portion from the letter to the Hebrews. Collects are short prayers, just like what it says. It collects our thoughts, it gives us a focus for the day. I had a teacher who said, the Collect is like the red dot on the map in the mall.

It says, you are here. People often ask me, what is this Anglican tradition of being a Christian? What is it all about? I’ll take a paper clip and put it around the Collects in the book Common Prayer. You can look in the index and see where they are. If you read through those prayers, you get a pretty good sense of the ethos of the spirit of this way of trying to live out the Christian life. This is a very beautiful, very ancient Collect that we have in front of us today, and it is a summary of the promise of salvation.

Oh God, whose blessed Son was made manifest, that he might destroy the works of the devil, and make his children of God, and heirs of eternal life. This is why Jesus has come. Now, when I was a young person, I had gone away from the faith, though I was a very pious as a child. Scholars who study faith development talk about 12-year-old atheism. I had that for about eight years, the 12-year-old atheism. I went away from the faith, and I came back to the faith. As I was coming back to the faith, as a lot of people do when they’re coming back to the faith, you negotiate it. You say, well, you know, I kind of like this, but I don’t like that.

It’s sort of the cafeteria approach. One of the things I thought was, well, how can any contemporary person believe in the devil? And of course you can summon up the most sort of silly images of the devil in that frame of mind. I now think, how can anybody look at the history of the 20th century and not believe in the devil? One of the things that changed my mind about the devil the work of a famous Protestant theologian, a man named Emil Brunner, he had a section in his theology on the devil and his angels, and he said that the significance of the devil is that it tells us that evil doesn’t originate with human beings. We’re made good. We’re not as good as we were made to be. We’re fallen.

We’re captivated by evil. But evil comes from outside of us, and it seduces us, and it tempts us, and it captivates us, and it intoxicates us, and we can’t get free from it on our own. In the way the Bible talks about this, this is all the work of the devil. And the Son of God has been made manifest to destroy the works of the devil.

And how does he do that? I’ll talk for a moment about the works of the devil, but the work of Jesus Christ is to bear the sins of the world away with the great sacrifice of love. It’s by this Niagara of love that pours forth from the cross that he drowns wickedness, evil, and washes away our sins. There’s an old spiritual song, and I like old spiritual songs because they often get things that some of us in our sophistication don’t get. There’s an old song some of you will recognize. There’s a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins, and sinners plunged beneath that blood to dissolve their guilty state. Purify us as he is pure.

So what are the works of the devil? The devil, according to the Bible, is like us in that the devil has intelligence and has free will, not like us, a different species. Traditionally, the devil is thought of as one of the angels, a prince of the angels, a fallen angel. And the devil makes this decision. He’s a creature like us, and he’s made to serve God like we are. And he makes this decision, which is an inscrutable decision. And there is something about evil that is inscrutable.

And the decision is this, to rebel against God. Now why would you do that? Doesn’t that sound like a bad plan, to rebel against God? The devil rebels against God. We rebel against God. Why would we do that? Doesn’t that sound like a bad plan?

As I say, there’s something very inscrutable about all of this, something that defies explanation. It’s irrational. Evil is irrational. It’s not according to the Logos. The Logos is the Son of God. It’s the loving reason which rules and governs all things that become flesh in Jesus Christ our Lord. So the evil, sin and evil, it’s contra Logos.

It’s a Logos. That is without Logos. It doesn’t make any sense.

But there it is. I think the best commentator that we’ve got on the decision of the devil is the English poet Milton. Milton has this great poem, Paradise Lost, and he says, in Paradise Lost, better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Now this idea, this Luciferian prideful idea of freedom is exactly the deal that the devil proposes to the man and the woman in the Garden of Eden. God has created this beautiful world. He’s created the man and the woman.

He’s created them to know, love, and serve him. He’s created them for hearts to go up to him and praise and worship and go out to each other in love and service. Created them to bless their maker, to bless each other, and to bless the world. Created them to be the priests of the creation temple, which is the Garden of Evil. One thing they’re not to do, and that’s to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But what is that? Isn’t it a good thing to know the difference between good and evil?

Here’s my understanding. That is, to take to yourself the authority to decide for yourself what is good and what is evil. To put yourself in the place of God and to say that there is no transcendent moral order to which I must conform myself. But there is nothing good or evil but by saying man makes it so. That was, of course, Socrates’ great debate with the Sophists many, many years ago. Is there really such a thing as the true? Is there such a thing as the good? Is there such a thing as the beautiful? Or is it just by saying we make it so? So you put yourself in God’s place and you determine what’s right, what’s wrong, and you’ll be free, says the devil.

You’ll really be free. You’ll be without constraint. Now, we use the word modern, and the word modern has many positive uses. You know, modern medicine, I like modern medicine. And I like modern technology. It’s like any tool. It can be used for good, it can be used for evil.

But historians and philosophers use the word modern as well. And one of the things that distinguishes the modern era is a particular notion of freedom. And I’ve talked about this before. I keep harping on this. I do. It’s important to understand it. And the modern notion of freedom is you’re free if you’re without constraint.

You’re free if you’re without constraint. Ancient Christians and ancient pagans both thought that they were free if whatever it was that stood between them and the proper end of what it was to be a human being was done away with. Then you’re free. We think we’re free if we’re without constraint. We’re free if we’re in charge of ourselves and we decide for ourselves. It’s the deal the devil offered to the man and the woman. What happens,. The book of Genesis tells us what happens when you take that deal.

When you turn away from God, the devil tempts us to the hatred of God. One of the forms of hatred of God is indifference to God. But the devil tempts us to hatred of God. When we turn away from God, it’s all laid out in the book of Genesis, what happens to us? We turn against each other. They turn away from God and right away there’s the first murder. Turn away from God, turn on each other, and then we turn in upon ourselves.

And one of the things that characterizes, at least in the West, the modern era, is self-preoccupation. Now do you know that the psychiatrists and the psychologists, when they’re trying to measure how neurotic somebody is, how disturbed they are, they will simply try to do an inventory of how much time they spend thinking about themselves. The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more neurotic you are. It’s not healthy. When life is going well and we’re functioning well and we’re healthy, we’re self-forgetting. And there are even these moments when we’re engaged in something really meaningful and wonderful that’s true and good and beautiful and we’re taken outside of ourselves altogether. So you turn away from God, you turn upon each other, you turn in upon yourself.

This is the work of the devil. The devil doesn’t do much on his own. What he does is draw us away from God and make us instruments of the demonic hatred of God. Now, the twentieth century has been a century where the works of the devil have been very, very evident, and no more evident than in the death camps of the Nazis. The word genocide is being used a lot in our time, and I think it’s being used improperly. A genocide is when, by intention and by methodical design, you are determined to wipe away a whole race of people.

We bombed hundreds of thousands with atomic bombs on Japan. The morality of that was debated at the time. The morality of that can be debated now. This is war.War is very, very terrible. We did not intend to exterminate the German people, and we did not intend to exterminate the Japanese people. The German Nazis intended to exterminate the Jewish people, and they were very nearly successful. I’m wondering if our young people are being taught today how successful that was and how horrible it was. So, six million people. Well, these numbers are so big you can hardly comprehend them. Six million people died in the Nazi death camps.

The camps were so terrible that at the beginning of the war, when a few Jews escaped and made their way to the West and were debriefed by British intelligence officers, the British intelligence officers would not believe them because it beggared the imagination. You turn away from God, which the Nazi regime explicitly did. You turn away from God, and you become capable of wickedness, which beggars the imagination. They say that hell is a bottomless pit. Well, great depths of hell have been sounded in the 20th century. Six million people died. What does that mean?

That means two out of every three European Jews were exterminated. Two out of every three European Jews were exterminated. At the beginning of World War II, there were three million Jews in Poland. In 1950, there were 45,000. I very seldom speak about anything that’s in the newspapers from the pulpit. I think that my role is to present Christ to you, but I need to speak about this. On October the 7th, terrorists of Hamas slaughtered 1,200 men, women, and children, including babies. They did so intentionally evoking the crimes of the Nazis. There’s a difference between Hamas and the Nazis. The Nazis, there was enough residual civilization, even though Western civilization was even then as it is now in a crisis, but there was enough residual civilization so that they wanted to keep what they were doing quiet, they wanted to keep it secret even from their own people.

Whereas on October 7th, the perpetrators of those crimes wore GoPro cameras and published what they were doing on YouTube. When the camps were liberated, the world was horrified and there was a universal condemnation. It’s been much more muted in our time now. And I don’t know how many of you know that in the city of Anne Frank, in the city of Anne Frank, you all know the name Anne Frank, I think, in the city of Anne Frank, two days ago, gangs of Muslim men were hunting down Jews on the streets of Amsterdam. As we are gathered together this morning, El Al airline is organizing an airlift evacuation of Jews from Holland. The works of the devil, the works of the devil are real. And there’s a particular work of the devil that’s really real, very real in our time.

And it is the uncanny coalition of radical jihadist Islamism and secular hatred of Jews, Christians have a lot of Jew hatred to repent of. We are only able, we are able to engage in that because we are forgetting of the core foundations of our own religion. We are forgetting that the man who hung on the cross was a Jew and we are forgetting his words that he said to the Samaritan woman whose picture is up there over the high altar, salvation is from the Jews. So we are betraying our own religion when we engage in Jew hatred. The hatred of Islam for the Jewish people is embedded very thoroughly in the Koran. I will leave it to the Islamic scholars to determine how essential it is to that faith.

I don’t know, but it’s very early. And it comes from the time of Muhammad. It predates the conquering of the Holy Land by Islam after the death of the prophet. There is a coalition now, and it’s the work of the devil, between the Jew hatred of the radical Islamist jihadism on the one hand, and I don’t know what to call it on the other hand. I think a lot of people would call it the radical left. I’m not sure that the terms left and right work anymore. Because what do you make of the fact that from what you might call the left is coming the Jew hatred of the right?

You know, this all comes from the French Revolution and where people sat in the assembly at the time of the French Revolution. Here’s the thing that I think really separates, really divides. There are those people who think that the great problem, the only thing that stands in the way of our happiness is those people over there who are wicked. They think the problem is some other class of people, people with a different race or class or social position. They divide humanity into pure victims and pure victimizers. They are on a constant search for a whipping boy and the Jewish people will always be prime candidates.

That’s one view of the world and of the human heart. But there are those who, with the Bible, think that the problem of evil and wickedness runs right through the middle of every heart. The human problem is that on the one hand, we’re drawn towards God. On the other hand, we’re tempted towards evil. The human problem is not someone else. As Pogo said so wisely, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”

The Gospel of Saint Mark has wonderful moral teaching by Jesus. I would that we would listen to it and take it to heart. But the heart of that gospel is the struggle of Jesus with evil and the demonic forces. For which he has been manifest, the Son of God. The word of God’s love incarnate has come into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil. The works of evil are real. The works of the devil are real.

There is a temptation to hatred of God. I think that one of the things that is going on in our time is that even though we’re a very secular age, we’re a God-haunted age. And there is an ideological hatred of the Jewish people because they remind us that there is a God. They remind us that God is not mocked. They remind us that there is a God who judges and we want to push God out of our world and push God out of our lives. We want to rage against God.

He’s not an easy target. It’s his people that we can rage against. And so there’s this uncanny work of the devil in our time. And it needs to be identified. And it needs to be utterly rejected in the name of the Savior. But that is not enough. What also is necessary is that we should put our trust in him who comes to destroy the works of the devil, to bring us out of darkness into his marvelous light, who washes away the sin of the world with his great sacrifice of love and brings life and immortality to life.

Jesus Christ, the Lord. Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world.

Have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world. Grant us your peace and conform our hearts to yours and purify us as you are pure. In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Mission of a Cathedral

The following is an excerpt from my Dean’s Address to the annual meeting of the Cathedral congregation.

In the remainder of this report I want to focus on responding to the immense missionary challenges that are facing the Christian Church in general and the Cathedral in particular. In November I gave a set of talks in the Diocese of Dallas on this problem entitled Modernity and Mission. The topic was the focus of my study and prayer for the Summer and Fall. I believe I have a better understanding of what is distinctive about the missionary environment in which we find ourselves and greater clarity about what an authentic missionary engagement with modernity looks like. I have been trying to share some of these thoughts in the Dean’s Forum. As a result of this study I believe strongly that The Cathedral of All Saints is uniquely positioned to be especially effective in reaching contemporary people for the sake of Jesus Christ. 

 There are many blessings of modernity for which to give thanks, modern medicine and a remarkable rise in the standard of living right across the world. Modernity is also characterized by what the old preachers called worldliness, a mentality which is preoccupied with the things of this world in which God is not so much denied as forgotten. The experience of transcendence, of holiness and otherness is rare. The experience of awe which leads to worship is rare and so modern people are in jeopardy of losing their souls and of losing that which is essential to our humanity: the worship of the one true and living God. It requires something powerful to break out of the captivity to this worldliness and the diminution and constriction of the human heart that must be its consequence. It requires something like a Gothic Cathedral. Pope Benedict XVI has a wonderful reflection on the significance of Gothic Cathedrals in an audience address that he gave on November 18, 2009. I encourage you to read the whole thing. Here is a quote, “In the 12th and 13th centuries another kind of architecture for sacred buildings spread from the north of France: the Gothic. It had two new characteristics in comparison with the Romanesque, a soaring upward movement and luminosity. Gothic cathedrals show a synthesis of faith and art harmoniously expressed in the fascinating universal language of beauty which still elicits wonder today. By the introduction of vaults with pointed arches supported by robust pillars, it was possible to increase their height considerably. The upward thrust was intended as an invitation to prayer and at the same time was itself a prayer. Thus the Gothic cathedral intended to express in its architectural lines the soul’s longing for God.”

To maintain this beautiful sacred space as well as we are able and to invite in every winsome way possible the public to come and see, places our congregation on the cutting edge of the mission to modernity. Simply getting people into the building challenges what the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, calls the imminent frame of modernity, the lowered horizon of the modern person. When people enter the Cathedral for worship or for a concert or for The Cathedral in Bloom they are taken up in a great act of prayer simply by being in the space. The experience of being in the Cathedral humbles and dignifies at the same time and causes people to awaken to “the soul’s longing for God.” The daunting sums of money that are required to maintain this building are not an impediment to mission but a form of mission that is particularly needed in the time in which we live. Of course we need to be thoughtful and creative about how to help people take a next step in faith once their hearts have been awakened from the this-worldly trance of modernity but stirring up the hunger of the heart for the one who is all beauty, all truth, all goodness is no small thing.  

Another way in which The Cathedral of All Saints is uniquely positioned for an authentic missionary engagement with modernity is through liturgy and worship which aims by God’s grace for the transcendent. I was privileged to know the great Lutheran pastor and theologian, Robert Jenson. Dr. Jenson was a friend of Fr. Edge who is a member of our congregation. Jenson believed that modernity was characterized by a loss of meaning. Years ago, he wrote a very important article called, “How the World Lost Its Story.” He believed the essential missionary response to modernity was for the church to regain the power of her liturgy. “One of many analogies between postmodernity and dying antiquity—in which the church lived for her most creative period—is that the late antique world also insisted on being a meaningless chaos, and that the church had to save her converts by offering herself as the narratable world within which life could be lived with dramatic coherence. . . The church so constituted herself in her liturgy. . . The classic liturgical action of the church was not about anything else at all; it was itself the reality about which truth could be told. . . In the postmodern world, if a congregation or churchly agency wants to be “relevant,” here is the first step: It must recover the classic liturgy of the church, in all its dramatic density, sensual actuality, and brutal realism, and make this the one exclusive center of its life. In the postmodern world, all else must at best be decoration and more likely distraction” You can find the whole article on the website of the journal, First Things. It is well worth a read.

With our tradition of liturgical and musical excellence, we are able to recover the classic liturgy of the church, in all its dramatic density, sensual actuality and brutal realism in a setting carefully designed for just this purpose. Worship is central to the mission of the church and especially a Cathedral church and the liturgical experience that we can by God’s grace provide here is just the medicine that is the antidote to the modern sleeping sickness. The care, attention and money that we spend on music and liturgy are not a distraction from mission but an investment in a form of mission which is especially pertinent to the time in which we live.

For our liturgy to be authentic and to have both the form of Godliness and the power thereof challenges us to serious preparation by prayer and study of the scriptures and by the cultivation of the holiness of the Christian life. We must also be thoughtful and creative about how we make it possible for people to enter more deeply into the power of the liturgy. What we do on Sunday morning is central but services such as Evensong and Lessons and Carols offer an opportunity for people to come out of the chaos of modernity into the reality ordered by God’s love which is the Christian cosmos. In England there are signs of life in the great Cathedrals and the services of Evensong there are drawing new people to the faith. We can do that here as well. I want to close by saying the obvious which is that at the center of a congregation that aims to be effective in mission is an absolute consecration to Jesus Christ. It must be clear that what we are all about is that He should live in us and we in Him. A living encounter with Him is all that we have to offer our time. It is all that the church when true to itself has ever had to offer. If it is clear that our care for the building is an expression of our care about Him, and that our care about the music and the liturgy is an expression of care about Him, then His light will shine here and as the prophet Isaiah said in chapter 60, “The nations will come to your light.” The word nations in the Bible means all the different kinds of people drawn by the light of Christ into the one flock of the one Shepherd.

Getting Beyond Darwin

There are numerous scientific challenges to Darwin’s theory. The Roman Catholic public intellectual and biographer of John Paul II, George Weigel has an essay in First Things on an article by the distinguished scientist, David Gelernter on Giving Up Darwin. Some years ago I wrote a review of Etienne Gilson’s book From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again which included a reflection by Gilson on the dispute between French biologists and French mathematicians about the improbable probability statistics that would be necessary to make Darwin’s theory work. Gilson’s main critique was philosophical, with Aristotle he thought you couldn’t explain animals without teleology. It is becoming increasingly clear that Darwin’s theory works well for relatively small adaptive changes but fails as an explanation of the origin of species. Gilson said that natural selection was not an explanation but a placeholder for a lack of explanation. Below is my review of Gilson’s book.

Etienne Gilson, Translated by John Lyon. From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1984. (Originally published in 1971 as D’Aristote a Darwin et retour. Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin) XX and 209 pages.

In order to help its readership make wise decisions about the allocation of precious reading time, a theological journal should alert its readers not only to promising new books but to existing books which are of enduring value, particularly if these books might otherwise escape notice. I have known the name Gilson for many years but have only recently become aware of his work on Darwin. Gilson was a distinguished French Thomist philosopher of the twentieth century who was a central figure in the renaissance of Catholic thought and culture in the years following World War II. He was invited to give both the Gifford lectures and the William James Lectures. He founded a famous center of Medieval Studies in Toronto which in turn produced a generation of scholars dedicated to retrieving the treasures of the Christian centuries. He lived into his nineties and wrote more than 600 titles. In his middle eighties, he decided to take on a philosophical analysis of Darwin’s Origin of Species, thus the title of this volume. The book is a magisterial treatment of the history of the interplay between the discipline of biology and the philosophy of science from Aristotle to Darwin and back again. Gilson carefully sorts out the dividing line between science and the philosophy of nature and the places where Darwin and others promote questionable philosophical conclusions that cannot properly be established by the scientific method as though they were the results of that method. If you look among the footnotes of contemporary critiques of the Darwinism of such writers as Richard Dawkins you will find numerous mentions of this book.

The hero of Gilson’s book is Aristotle. According to Gilson, in The History of Animals Aristotle identified the issues that have to be addressed in order to comprehend the existence of living things. In Gilson’s eyes, Darwin’s book is full of precise observations and shrewd generalizations but is not as adequate an analysis of the fundamental questions of biology as Aristotle. For Gilson Darwin describes many things and explains very little. To the extent that Darwin’s theory is frustrated in its explanatory power it is because Darwin resists Aristotle’s way of stating the problem.

For Aristotle living beings present a unique challenge to understanding. There are things that are made up of homogeneous parts and there are things that are made up of heterogeneous parts. Aristotle described four causes of things. These were the material, formal, the efficient and final. The material and efficient causes answer the questions of immediate causality, of how the thing works. The formal and final causes tell you what sort of thing it is and answer the question of why and what for. Homogeneous things, stones for instance, can be understood in terms of material and efficient causes but living things are different, says Aristotle; they can be understood only in light of their final cause. This is because really different sorts of things are in an organism organized in proportion and in favor of a principle and that principle is what the thing is for or its final cause. So for instance all the varied parts of the eye are organized to the purpose or end of seeing, which is the eye’s final cause, its telos. When we come to living things, Aristotle says, we come to the inescapable fact of the operation of final causes in nature. The end is present in the beginning. There is in nature teleology or the final causality in the title of the book. For Aristotle the perception of the proportion between an organism and its final cause was a source of contemplative joy.

Gilson relates the story of the mounting war against “finality” or teleology in the natural sciences. It takes a decisive turn with Descartes and Bacon. Both want to bracket the consideration of teleology and focus on the material and efficient cause because of the practical usefulness of this type of investigation. Focusing on the material and efficient cause, the how does it work questions, gives modern science its explanatory power and helps drive research toward technology. The desire to bracket the final cause turns in modernity into a campaign to develop a science which disproves the existence of teleology in nature. Darwin’s book is the decisive chapter in that campaign. His special interest was to disprove teleology in nature and especially that version of teleology based on the belief that God had created at the beginning of the creation all the species as they exist.

Gilson points out that Darwin does not actually undertake to explain the origin of species in his book. His book is really about how some species transform themselves into others over time. Darwin says that the process by which this happens is analogous to the process by which a breeder of livestock improves the breed or develops new varieties by selecting desired traits over time. The difference is that in what Darwin calls “natural selection” there is no final cause or teleology at work. The selection process is unconscious and advances by chance mutations which fit particular individuals to succeed especially well in the struggle for survival and who are thus able to reproduce in disproportionate numbers. By the accumulation of these very small changes brought about entirely by chance over very long times, new varieties or species emerge.

The problem is that it is very hard to see how this process can account for the complexity of organisms. Darwin himself was worried about how his theory could account for the complexity of the eye. The eye is made up, as Aristotle would say, of heterogeneous parts. The parts need to be organized to the end of seeing and it is very hard to imagine the small random steps that would lead suddenly to the emergence of a new organ. Gilson says some sort of final cause must be at work. In order to imagine a selection which is not driven by teleology Darwin invoked the “unconscious” selection made by a group of livestock breeders who do not set out to consciously develop a new breed but who do so unconsciously by simply preferring as a group the same sort of animals. Gilson points out that this is none the less an example of teleology and is an example of organization toward an end. Gilson argues that Darwin needs to make the selection process of the mythical livestock breeders unconscious so that he can make the same process in nature unconscious, the blind watchmaker of Richard Dawkins. So Gilson finds that Darwin cannot dispense with the final cause and in his attempt to evade the issue uses a metaphor that is simply a sort of crypto-teleology. Gilson believes that what drives this move in Darwin is not science but an attempt to discredit any kind of creationism by developing a biology without recourse to the consideration of teleology.  Gilson says that chance functions in Darwin’s system not as an explanation but as the place marker for the absence of explanation, an explanation that will not be forthcoming as long as teleology is deprived of its due weight. In addition Gilson finds Darwin giving himself over to the same kind of teleological contemplative joy that was known by Aristotle. Darwin is in awe of the fittingness of the adaptation of organisms to their environment. “Adaptation” is, according to Gilson, the word whose chief virtue is that it allows Darwin to enjoy the proportion between an organism and its final cause, all the while denying the existence of the thing he is enjoying.

 Reviewing theorists in contemporary theoretical biology that are grappling with the inadequacies of a purely mechanistic approach to biology, Gilson says “it brings to our attention the disturbing fact that the very existence of the biological is not susceptible of a mechanist explanation, and that, of course, not only insofar as it exists but insofar as it implies the existence of organized beings. . . . The facts that Aristotle’s biology wished to explain are still there. He is reproached, sometimes bitterly, with having explained them poorly, but to the present no one has explained them any better. Mechanist interpretations of these facts, which Aristotle formerly said had failed, have not ever been satisfactory; they have only displayed more and more the inevitability of the notions of organization and teleology invoked by Aristotle in order to explain the existence of mechanistic structures of which science is the study. Contemporary science itself attests to the unavoidable necessity of notions of this sort.” (p.119).

A little further on Gilson says, “We could say that, scientifically speaking, we ignore the question of why birds have wings, but to say that the conjunction of conditions necessary to the flight of birds was accidental is to say nothing. To add to chance the astronomical extent of billions of years during which it has been at work is still to say nothing, for whether the absence of a cause lasts a year or billions of years, it remains forever an absence of cause, which as such, can neither produce nor explain anything.” And finally from Gilson this coup de grace, “scientifically as well as philosophically, the mechanism of natural selection is simply a nonexplanation.” (131).

Gilson makes only modest and properly philosophical claims for teleology. The effects of final causality are observable in nature. The cause itself is not observable in the nature of the case. We observe the end at the end but we cannot make sense of other observations without postulating this final cause.  The final cause is, as Aristotle first observed, that which makes an organism an organism. The observation of these effects begs the question of the nature of the final cause. Proponents of intelligent design give one set of answers to this question which stands or falls on both the scientific and philosophical issues involved. Affirming final causality or teleology in nature does not automatically endorse any one philosophical or theological proposal about the true nature of the final cause. Gilson says that teleology is analogous to intelligence but that is all that can be said on the basis of observation itself. We cannot say without making further philosophical and theological moves that the final cause is an intelligence. The various sorts of creationism from young earth creationism to the episodic interventionism of intelligent design to theories which conceive of God directing the evolutionary process from within are all possible versions of final causality. Adjudicating between these claimants and other non-theological possibilities includes reference to the scientific record but requires philosophical and theological reflection as well.  Gilson makes the modest point that science cannot exclude the category of purpose from the explanation of reality a priori because science itself, especially as it attempts the comprehension of living things, bears testimony to the enduring necessity of final causality.    In this masterful book a philosopher in the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas with a sure grasp of contemporary biology rings the front doorbell of an over-reaching, reductionist and mechanistic Darwinism and gives a better account of both the successes and the persistent failures of this hugely influential theory than the Darwinists themselves are able to give, and in the process deconstructs the myth of the blind watchmaker and sets the question of purpose in the universe as a kind of stumbling block that can’t be avoided or easily dismissed. The book is a hard read but foundational to the conversation between science and theology and profoundly significant for the apologetic and evangelistic task in these Darwinian times.


Why Beauty Matters

The English Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton explains in this visually beautiful documentary why beauty is important and how it relates to the true and the good. Beauty calls to us from beyond. Beauty opens our hearts and minds to the eternal and the transcendent. Sometimes beauty and art can be a substitute for religion but for Roger Scruton they share a joint witness to that reality that calls to us from beyond and offers the experience of homecoming.

The Crisis of Modernity

I have been reading the work of the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce. Recently two of his major works have been translated into English, The Crisis of Modernity and The Age of Secularization. Del Noce devoted his scholarly life to understanding the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. He had a unique understanding of the emergence of both Communism and Fascism. The standard narrative is that the massive brutality of both of these regimes represents a reaction to the progressive forces of modernity. Demagogues are able to rally people afraid of the progress and liberation of the modern world and are able to usurp power with the rhetoric of scapegoat and security. The descent into barbarism is a parenthesis in history, an interruption in the inevitable forward progress of history in which reason, science and technology will bring in a more just and equitable society.

Del Noce who was a young man when Mussolini came to power and who briefly embraced Marxism but was ultimately unable to reconcile himself to revolutionary violence. Del Noce came to believe that the rise of totalitarianism was not a parenthesis in the march of modernity but that totalitarianism is quintessentially modern. He came to believe that what makes the modern age modern is atheism. Del Noce’s study of the early philosophical writing of Karl Marx convinced him that atheism is foundational for Marxism. In order for man to be free he must be liberated from all dependencies. The greatest of all dependencies is the dependency on God. God must not exist or else man cannot be free. Marx insists that we make ourselves by our own labor or engagement with the world. This absolutely autonomous self is the idol of the modern world and millions have been slaughtered on its altar.

This radical atheism of Marx has profoundly influenced the intellectual culture on both sides of the Atlantic in the Twentieth Century. It is a radical atheism because it is not only faith in God that is attacked but the reality of any transcendent point of reference for humanity. One of the consequences is a change in the nature of philosophy. Philosophy ceases to be a search for the truth and becomes merely instrumental. The question is no longer is it true but does it advance the cause of the revolution, or progress or sexual liberation or whatever the cause may. The worth of ideas is judged by who proposes them and not by any inherent quality. Philosophy is collapsed into politics and politics is collapsed into war. The war can be cold or hot but all that is left is raw power when any sense of universals or moral absolutes is gone.

Del Noce predicted the collapse of Soviet Communism. He thought there were two elements in Marxism, the destructive atheism and relativism, and the romantic, revolutionary impulse which functioned like an atheistic religion. He thought it inevitable that the relativism would consume the romantic, revolutionary and religious side of Marxism and history has born him out. Del Noce said that Marxism failed in the East because it won in the West. But what comes as the result of the triumph of the negative pole of Marxism is not the revolution but the nihilism of the technocratic society. Rather than overturning the bourgeoisie, the atheistic and relativistic side of Marxism has produced a hyper bourgeois society in which any transcendent restraints on capitalism have been rendered impotent. People are controlled by a new totalitarianism that oppresses chiefly by restricting and managing desire. The desire for the transcendent must be anesthetized at all costs.

In the same way the hyper individualism that comes with the radical atheism and the loss of the transcendent must, because of the logic of ideas, lead not to greater and greater individual freedom but to a new kind of totalitarianism where dissenters to the anti-religious and anti-metaphysical mode of the technocratic society will be exiled to “moral concentration camps.” Modernism is not the tide of history running against totalitarianism but the tide running toward it. But also Del Noce said it does not have to be so and religious and metaphysical reality can be rediscovered and indeed cannot be forever suppressed.

Carlo Lancellotti, the translator of Del Noce can explain his work far better than I can. I recommend this YouTube video from Notre Dame and this video from Biola. I think the implications of Del Noce’s work for Christian mission are significant. Among other things opening the religious and metaphysical dimension through beauty and art and serious philosophical discussion become important for reawakening the deepest desires of the human heart so that contemporary people can recover their hunger for the true, the good and the beautiful and the hunger for God.