The Pope on Being 'Saved in Hope'

The Bishop of Rome asks a pertinent question in his encyclical Spe Salvi or Saved in Hope:

How could the idea have developed that Jesus's message is narrowly individualistic and aimed only at each person singly? How did we arrive at this interpretation of the “salvation of the soul” as a flight from responsibility for the whole, and how did we come to conceive the Christian project as a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving others?

I also found his explanation of the nature of freedom to be interesting:

Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the world, man's freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all.

More to come.

Rene Girard on American Fundamentalists

I found this interview the other day. Rene Girard is an interesting thinker and his work on violence is amazing. He was asked what he thought of the religious right in America and responded:

What we see in America today is more the rise of the Republican Party than the religious right. I don't think there are more Christian fundamentalists in America today than 30 years ago; it is just that they have become politicized. Republicans have focused on issues that bring them to the ballot box. And that is a big change indeed.

The problem with the Christian fundamentalists, though not as much as with the Muslims, is their view of the violence of God. They often talk these days about the Apocalypse. And there is certainly reason to be concerned about where the world is headed. But the violence will not come, as they suggest, from God. I find that incredible. It is we humans who are responsible. That, in many ways, is one of the key messages of the Gospels.

The whole point of the Incarnation is to say that the human and divine are interrelated in a way that is unique to Christian theology, unthinkable in any other religion and, in my view, absolutely superior.

Whether in the case of Muslims focused on martyrdom or the fundamentalist Christians focused on the Apocalypse, the old Greek conception of a God apart from man is not enough. That is really the meaning of all my work.

Anglican Ecclesiology

The Rt Revd Pierre Whalon, the bishop of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe does a beautiful job trying to work towards an Anglican Ecclesiology. He notes that the Anglican communion was born as a unique via media. Have a read:

A number of scholars recently have been focusing on the question, is there, in fact, an ecclesiology proper to Anglicans? We have never defined one, per se. But in fact, I would argue that we do in fact have a distinct ecclesiology of our own. The conundrum that Anglicans have had to face since the first intimations of the break with Rome is how to be the One Church when unity is no longer available. Of the four “notes” of the Church, “one, holy, catholic and apostolic,” unity is first. “Is Christ divided?” Paul sarcastically asked the Corinthians (I Cor. 1:13). That would be obviously absurd. Yet unity has been broken. The Reformed way of solving this conundrum—that the true Church had disappeared for centuries and has now only re-appeared—did not convince the first Anglicans. The Roman Catholic solution, submitting everything to the papacy—was of course not acceptable to them. They were the Catholic Church in England. They knew in their bones that their church was no sect.