More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
October 16, 2018
The Puritan ability to justify atrocities in the name of a divinely privileged social order was shocking. Their tendency to project onto aberrant women and fiendish Indians the dark forces of their own desire could lead to horrendous consequences. Making this even worse was a rapidly expanding thirst for land and market growth. In this turbulent combination of disordered passions, it became a matter of convention that nature itself required an exercise of dominion akin to the mastery of unruly women and native peoples. Land was assumed to be an “object” involving proprietary rights, no longer
...more
By the end of the eighteenth century, Timothy Dwight (president of Yale and grandson of Jonathan Edwards) came to lament the “naked and bleak” landscape of New England, where “almost all the original forests of this country [have] been long since cut down.” With the sad wisdom of hindsight, he mourned the loss of the great trees, saying, “there appears little reason to hope that they will ever grow again.”71
What does one conclude from all of this? The stark, embarrassing irony I have to embrace as a Reformed Christian is that the tradition I claim—with all its passionate longing for God’s beauty—possesses vast resources for deluding itself.
Girard, in his study of sacred violence, argues that human desire is mimetic in its origin. We learn to desire what we see other people desiring. We make up for our own perceived lack or insufficiency by imitating the other, exercising an envy that eventually leads to violence. We simply want what the other has.
Girard might suggest, for example, that the Puritan desire for land was prompted in part by their envy of Native Americans’ closeness to the earth in bringing forth its bounty and the uncanny power that witches drew from its dark wilderness. These energies elicited Puritan orthodoxy’s own desire for mastery of the New World, leading to the elimination of all rivals. The Puritan social order required that devilish Native Americans and demonic women be singled out in the process of “purging” God’s New Canaan of unmanaged desires.
He perceives the role of philosophy (or theology) as challenging the desire to possess the other, questioning the impulse toward domination that emerges so often in the human experience of wanting. Our need, instead, is to recognize our deepest human longing as a matter of appreciating the “distance” and unique character of what is different from us. Our profoundest desire, says Levinas, “tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other.” From this perspective, then, “possession” inevitably destroys, while true eros simply delights. It does not try to control what it cannot
...more
I’ve rediscovered in the Reformed tradition a boisterous celebration of the beauty of the natural world—underscoring the profound dignity of creation, urging that we attend to the School of the Creatures in learning environmental responsibility. Its appreciation of the world as a dazzling theater of God’s glory is rooted, not in a shallow, “politically correct” ecological sensitivity, but in the mystery of God as Holy Trinity, the brokenness of the cross, and the liturgical power of communal praise. This gives me hope in the tradition, despite the errors of the past.
I would argue, that a significant number of prominent naturalists in the history of American environmentalism, poets and activists alike, emerged out of roots in the Reformed tradition—whether English Congregationalist, Scots Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, or Old School Baptist. These include an amazing range of figures—from Emerson, Thoreau, and John Burroughs to Theodore Roosevelt, Sigurd Olson, and Annie Dillard.76
Louis Agassiz, the famous naturalist at Harvard, was the son of a Swiss Reformed pastor. Asa Gray, a Harvard botanist who became Darwin’s foremost advocate in nineteenth-century America, was a committed New School Presbyterian. He claimed that “the Calvinistic doctrine of a calling heightened his determination to be a scientist.”78
Others, like Stevens, Dillard, and (to some extent) Kathleen Norris would turn to the sacramental life of the Catholic Church in search of additional support for their love of the natural world.81 The Reformed tradition may have been able to incite in them an early delight in the glories of nature. But they were soon put off by its alternative tendency to steer them away from the School of the Creatures lest they fall into idolatry, a Catholic dependence on “images,” or a slide into pantheism. The fragmented faith of their childhood ultimately failed to provide the resources they needed for
...more
Why have Reformed Christians had to go elsewhere at times to seek the mystical vitality or sacramental depth they found lacking in Reformed worship and piety? It has to do, in part, with the split character of Reformed thought that I have described in comparing Calvin’s and Turretin’s theologies of creation. If one understands Reformed theology, after Turretin’s model, as primarily absorbed with predestination and God’s overwhelming work of redemption, viewing original sin as distorting every aspect of the created order, there is little reason to seek God in the natural world. If, on the other
...more
He read voraciously in Thomas Dick, a Scots Calvinist philosopher and astronomer who everywhere found “manifestations of God in the material universe.”87
Remaining a deeper Calvinist than he knew, Muir insisted that, “Every particle of rock or water or air has God by its side leading it the way it should go. How else would it know where to go and what to do?”89 He
“In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world,” he declared.90
Through the centuries, then, Calvin’s God of beauteous splendor has remained large (and wild) enough to capture the human imagination in ways that give distinct value to the earth. What started in sixteenth-century Geneva, came to bud in seventeenth-century Puritanism, and blossomed in Edwards’s eighteenth-century thought would take new directions in the nineteenth-century work of Emerson, Nevin, Bushnell, Muir, and others. In the twentieth century, it went on to express an increased ethical responsibility, with writers like Jürgen Moltmann, George Hendry, Holmes Rolston III, Richard
...more
O hidden Mystery, Sun behind all suns, Soul behind all souls, in everything we touch, In everyone we meet, your presence is ‘round us And we give thanks. But when we have not touched, but trampled you in creation, When we have not met but missed you in one another, When we have not received but rejected you in the poor, Forgive us. —Iona Communion Service Liturgy1
Calvin and de Sales shared a common delight in the role played by all created beings in singing the glory of God. Calvin, in his Psalms commentaries, and de Sales, in his Treatise on the Love of God, emphasized a rich theology of divine providence. Their God was intimately involved in loving and sustaining the natural world. Calvin spoke of the world as a theater of God’s glory; de Sales spoke of beauty as God’s way of attracting the affection of all creation.3
I’m curious to ask what Catholic and Reformed spiritualities share in common. I’m on a pilgrimage of sorts, having spent my academic life as a Reformed theologian on a Roman Catholic faculty. I stand on the edge of the two traditions, loving both. The Taizé and Iona communities remind me how that remains possible.
This monastic community of a hundred Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox monks was founded in the early 1940s by Brother Roger Schutz, a Swiss Reformed pastor.
The community he founded on Iona became controversial for its strange mix of radical politics, a Catholic sense of the church and sacraments, and a call for reconciliation among Christians. Its members were accused of being crypto-Roman Catholics in Presbyterian guise.4
Both communities are based on a rule and a common life of prayer that joins work and worship in a Benedictine pattern. Morning prayer at Iona never concludes with a benediction; evening prayer never begins with a call to worship. Instead, the whole day becomes a continuation of the prayer that frames it at either end. Similarly, the three daily periods of prayer at Taizé lack any formal conclusion. Soft chanting persists as people gradually leave to attend to other activities. In each place, praise governs the order of the day.
Iona and Taizé are located at remote sites, places on the edge, where a concern for marginalized peoples expresses itself naturally. Both are determined to cross ethnic, economic, and ecclesial boundaries. Both reach out to the world while also reaching back to an e...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Calvinists need to hear the Benedictine caution that lectio divina always finds its completion (and the recycling of its action) in contemplation. Presbyterians have never been especially good at silence.
Celtic Christianity anchors them in the soil, reminding them of the importance of other creatures as partners in praise.
Though a small contingent of members remains on Iona to help run programs and to welcome guests, the community in general follows the Celtic pattern of wandering missionaries launched on pilgrimage around the world.
Taizé appeals to the ear, while Iona more readily attracts the eye. People who return from Taizé invariably speak of the beauty of the chanted songs that constitute its worship. Those coming back from Iona mention the wild splendor of the island itself. But Iona is celebrated for its creative music as well (with John Bell, for example) and Taizé is surrounded by the beautiful vineyard-covered hills of Burgundy. Together they point to a common desire—a wish that the whole of creation break into song in awe of God’s glory.
I was left with two dominant impressions from my encounter of these two communities. The one is an astounding sense of the adoration of God as still very much alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The other is an awareness of the breadth and...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Dare we imagine that the company of praise does not include the rest of creation?
The scene, framed by oak and foregrounded by walls of books, suggested John Scotus Eriugena’s notion of the joining of the two sandals of Christ—Scripture and Nature—the latchets of which John the Baptist knew himself unworthy to loose.
The phrases tell of adoration and human longing, of God’s tenderness and Teresa of ávila’s consolation that, ultimately, nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten.
Yet another melody celebrates the unity it extols: “Praise the Lord, all nations. Sing Allelulia.” And not only all nations, but omnia genera—all species, too. From the red maples outside the church door to the yellow leaves of distant vineyards—even the nettles in nearby fields, once used by poor farmers to make soup. Everything is finally absorbed in praise.
He laughed at one point about our confusion over a particular idiom, reflecting that, despite all the difficulties, “the problems of translation in our little European world are good. They require that we make sure nothing is forgotten, that no one is missed.” He noted that in places like the United States, where everyone speaks a common language, it is easy to assume that everyone understands (and is understood), when that may not at all be the case. Carefully listening to each other’s languages is prerequisite to any sense of common worship.6
(1) Dei gloriae. The first is that the Reformed, Benedictine, and Celtic traditions to which these groups are indebted have always emphasized the praise of God’s glory as the chief end of creation.
They all emphasized that theology has to begin and end with doxology—a common vision of God’s astounding beauty.
A second theme arising from the two communities is the notion of the sacramental character of the world, the reminder that praise is always local, growing out of the specific memory and ecology of the world from which it rises.
To rightly celebrate God’s glory is to recognize the earth’s dignity as a sacrament of God’s presence.
When St. Columba chanted the three-fifties (all 150 psalms) down by the sea each morning before dawn, he did so with an awareness that the whole world joined him in benediction.
This sense of the world as celebrant of God’s glory, witnessed also in the crops, farm animals, and grapevines around Taizé, underlies the call for ecological justice arising from both communities. They recognize the quest for a sustainable future as a natural extension of praise.
final theme drawn from the lives of these two communities has to do with the radically open-ended character of pilgrimage in the Celtic tradition.
Such a spirit demands a readiness to travel light, a practice of living simply.
The way toward reconciliation is never simply back. Reformed and Roman Catholic Christians have to journey together, as Karl Rahner said, to a home where none of us have been before.10
As Calvin and de Sales would remind us, it is a community that includes the rest of creation as well. It is evident that all creatures, said Calvin, from those in the heavens to those under the earth, are able to act as witnesses and messengers of God’s glory.
You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and beautiful system of the universe, in its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness.
It puts to rout the sedate, housebroken deity that masquerades as God in so many churches today. I delight in the energetic power of his mind. He anchors theology in Scripture and tradition while demanding its practical application in transforming culture. I marvel at his embrace of paradox. His God of majesty, who causes the earth to tremble, is also a God who weeps, whose “astonishing warmth and tenderness of affection” is that of a mother giving birth, gasping in labor.2 This is the Calvin I love.
What warms me most to the Genevan Reformer, however, allowing me to forgive him so many other sins, is his delight in the natural world, his uninhibited celebration of creation. Calvin was as smitten by God’s beauty as he was overwhelmed by God’s power. His writings abound with creative images and metaphors. Like the Psalmist, he uses the language of nature to extol God’s grandeur, admitting the limited capacity of human speech. He marvels at an entire world that exuberantly participates in praise.
God is the principal actor in this vast theatrical production, evoking desire by “showing himself in the visible splendor of his apparel.”5
We do not associate positive images of theatrical life with sixteenth-century Geneva. Nor does his image of the “world as theater” fit the usual pattern of this literary trope in the history of Western thought. From Stoics (like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius) to patristic writers (like John Chrysostom and Augustine) to sixteenth-century Christian Platonists (like Ficino), the metaphor generally pictured humans as principal actors in a play determined by a divine playwright.8 In this pattern, the theatrum mundi offered a reflection on the vanity of human life, the failure of human actors to play
...more
his conception of worship as mimetic performance.
Calvin was formed by his training as a Renaissance humanist. His language was more rhetorical than dialectical. He made use of theatrical imagery to trace the entire course of salvation, for example. “In the vast theater of heaven and earth,” Ford Lewis Battles says of Calvin’s vision, “the divine playwright stages the ongoing drama of creation, alienation, return, and forgiveness for the teeming audience of humanity itself.”10 In the broadest sense, this theater is the entire created world, summoned to a common praise. But Calvin spoke more particularly of the church as a distinct company of
...more
The human adoration of God, as modeled in Scripture and echoed in creation, was the goal of his Institutes of the Christian Religion.
