Pauline Narratives: Creation and Covenant

“The failure of human beings to be the truly image-bearing creatures God intended results, therefore, in corruption and death… humans were made to function in particular ways, with worship of the creator as the central feature, and those who turn away from that worship – that is, the whole human race, with a single exception – are thereby opting to seek life where it is not to be found, which is another way of saying that they are courting their own death and decay. This is to say, with the entire Jewish tradition, that the basic sin is idolatry, the worship of that which is not in fact the living creator God.” – N.T. Wright, Paul: In Fresh Perspective

More pointedly, I think, is that idolatry is a form of pride; we worship what we want to worship in spite of being created to worship only the Creator. If we dig deeper into what Wright is saying here I think we will strike a fundamental truth that Evangelicals don’t want to admit (and, in fact, flatly deny). Christianity isn’t a relationship, it’s a religion. Granted, it is a religion structured by and around relationship but it is a religion all the same. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s look at what else Wright is painting for us in this chapter. He wants to argue, in broad strokes, that one of the theological paradigms structuring Paul’s thought was working with a theology of creation and covenant from within a decidedly Jewish framework. Wright does this by appealing to three particular Pauline passages in the New Testament: Colossians 1:15-20, 1 Corinthians 15 and (dauntingly) Romans 1-11.

The first selection seems an obvious choice given the language of reconciliation through the Son. In Him all things are reconciled to God and the “all things” is not limited believers only, rather Paul includes creation itself among that which is reconciled by the Son’s redemptive work on the cross. Wright makes the connection between these verses and the Old Testament themes of covenant and creation; particularly he connects this passage to Psalm 19. In Colossians, Paul is “making more or less exactly the same point, by means of the poetic structure itself, as Psalm 19: the Creator God is also the redeeming, covenant God, and vice versa.” The implications of this are that the God who has promised to redeem Israel will also redeem that which was promised to Israel: the land. The redemption of creation itself intertwines with those promises made to Israel. Wright, here, points out that what Paul is doing in Colossians is bringing Jesus as the Messiah into the picture. He says that Jesus “is the point at which at which creation and covenant come together” in order that the “double divine purpose”, the redemption of both Israel and creation, might be fulfilled.

Wright then moves on to a more familiar (or at least famous) passage in 1 Corinthians 15. After some initial setup, Paul launches into his argument in verse 20. Where does he start? All the way back in Genesis with Adam. The old creation is death through fleshly Adam and the new creation is life through heavenly Jesus. There are hints of Psalm 8 here that are not unintentional, Paul is keeping right in line with his particular theme of covenant and creation. This is further evidenced in Paul’s discussion of the resurrection body in verses 35-49 where we see the language of Genesis 1 in full swing. Wright summarizes: “This is how the problem within the existing creation, namely sin and death, has been dealt with through the Messiah, more specifically through the way in which the Messiah has been the means of fulfilling the promises of a great victory through which evil would be overthrown… For the moment my point is that, like the Psalms or Daniel, Paul is going back to creation itself, to Genesis, and showing how God’s fulfillment of the covenant promises has established creation’s renewal.” It is important to note, here, the connection between Messiah and Apocalyptic as it will be the next narrative theme Wright engages. Paul contrasts the earthly with the heavenly but it is not an antagonistic contrast. Paul does not want to give the impression that creation will be remade, he wants to tell us that creation will be renewed. His eschatology is at odds with those eschatologies which posit a destroying and a remaking of the creation: as we will be changed from earthly to heavenly, so shall creation be changed.

The final passage Wright would point us to in order to establish creation and covenant as a narrative theme in the Pauline corpus is Romans 1-11. I will not (and Wright does not) attempt to dig around too deeply as it should suffice for the stated purpose to make a few observations. First, Paul opens this epistle with an argument about how creation is “a way of calling the human race to account for not recognizing God and giving him the praise and honor that were his due.” In this sin man has no excuse and suffers the consequences of his disobedience, “human beings have become corrupt; violence and hatred fills the world; and even those who think they are above such things are themselves in fact no better.” It is at this point that Israel would speak up: “God has called Israel to be the light to the nations, the teacher of the foolish, the guide to the blind. That is what the covenant was there for.” As Wright continues to say, however, Paul anticipates such an argument and points out that even Israel has become part of the problem. The crisis according to Wright, then, is how is God to be “faithful to the covenant and just in his dealings with the whole creation?” Paul’s answer comes in the form of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus not only fulfills the covenant which solves the problem of creation, but also He solves the problem of Israel’s failure in that covenant.

This is just the beginning of Wright’s wading into this section of Romans but I don’t want to continue in this post. I’m sure I’ve not done Wright justice here, but I think he has done a great job of establishing this particular narrative as crucial to understanding much of Paul’s thought. It is in this section of the book where Wright introduces his (controversial) understanding of “the faithful covenant justice of God” or the dikaiosyne theou. I will let him speak for himself in conclusion:

If there is one major result of this chapter in terms of current debates, it is that the ‘new perspective’ on the one hand, and its critics on the other, both need to come to terms with the integrated vision of human sin and redemption and Israel’s fall and restoration which characterizes Paul through and through, precisely because his controlling categories are creation and covenant. He is not simply assuming an implicit narrative about how individual sinners find a right relationship with a holy God (any more than he is simply assuming an implicit narrative about how Gentiles can have easy access to God’s people). In so far as he would be happy with the former way of stating matters at all, he would insist on framing it within the much larger question of how the creator God can be true to creation, how the covenant God can be true to the covenant, and how those things are not two, but one. And that is what the phrase dikaiosyne theou is all about.

And:

Let me put the point in a sequence of three propositions which Paul everywhere presupposes and frequently makes explicit in whole or in part.

(1) God made the covenant with Abraham as the means of dealing with evil within good creation, which meant dealing in particular with evil within human beings, God’s image-bearers. This I have already explained.

(2) The family of Abraham, who themselves share in the evil, as well as in the image-bearing vocation, of the rest of humanity, treated their vocation to be the light of the world as indicating exclusive privilege. This was their own meta-sin, their own second-order form of idolatry, compounding the basic forms they already shared with the Gentiles. This further point is basic to Paul’s critique of Israel in such passages as Romans 2, 7 and 10 and Galatians 2, 3 and 4.

(3) When God fulfils the covenant through the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit, thereby revealing his faithful covenant justice and his ultimate purpose of new creation, this has the effect both of fulfilling the original covenant purpose (thus dealing with sin and procuring forgiveness) and of enabling Abraham’s family to be the worldwide Jew-plus-Gentile people it was always intended to be.

Gas Too!

“Refusing to admit narrative into this debate is therefore like refusing to put petrol in a car because you know that what you need to drive is tyres and a steering wheel.” – N.T. Wright, Paul: In Fresh Perspective

I like the way Wright writes. This is my first foray into his corpus and, so far, it has been delightful (of course, this quote comes from page 9, so we’ll see how he holds out). Paul was one of the books cited in the PCA Study report and, from the preface, this book looks to give a fairly concise summary of some of the issues involved in the FV/NPP controversy. It is “this debate” that Write is referring to in the quote above, well the NPP side of it for him at least. The title of the book is telling in a way because Wright wants to, I think (and I’ve read elsewhere in the blogosphere), separate him self, to a certain degree, from those who are participating in the new perspective(s) movement. Though he has contributed largely to it (again, as I’ve been told and as I’ve read elsewhere), it seems to be going in directions that he, perhaps, is not comfortable with.

As to the quote itself, this analogy seems quite an appropriate analysis of what’s going on with all of these reports coming out in the Reformed arena. I’ve always felt a certain affinity for narrative, perhaps due to my love of books/story in general (and all the videogames I’ve played) and my college years only bolstered my conviction that there’s a distinct lack of emphasis regarding narrative as far as systematic theology is concerned. It is likely why I consider myself an FV sympathizer; FV theology resonates with me on that narrative level where the formality of systematic theology and the practicality of biblical theology meet. And I don’t mean “meet” like when you meet new friends, I mean “meet” like accelerated nuclei. To go with Wright’s analogy here, many of the reports are concerned with the integrity of the steering wheel and the tires, which really is important. But most of the FV/NPP people are asking questions about gas, not about the tires and steering wheel (much less about the vehicle as a whole).

How Old Are We?

"The common theme [of 'primitivism'], however, was that the forms and practices that had developed over the ages within the church were not normative, nor even valuable. Instead they represented a process of corruption and degeneration in which the purity of primitive Christianity had been lost. Things like creeds and ceremonies were merely human inventions that had crusted over the gospel like barnacles on a ship, which must be scraped away so that authentic New Testament worship could be restored." - Nancy Pearcy, Total Truth

This sort of Evangelical mindset practically gives birth to a new kind of Church. It is a Church that has recently been born again, freed from its slavish traditions and dogmas in order that it might get at the Scriptures as those who were the original readers. "Nevermind the scholarship, creeds and councils," they say, "such things should not get in the way of believers and God's word!" or my personal favorite, "My Christianity is authentic because it comes straight from the Bible and only from the Bible." Pick up a copy of Pearcy's book if you want to know where your Evangelical Christianity really comes from, the last half of this book is fascinating and ecclesiologically depressing (in a good "learn from your mistakes" kind of way).

Christ Everywhere = Christ Nowhere

"What is sacrificed for the sake of this Christus praesens, as Calvin noticed long ago, is his specificity as a particular man. Christ everywhere really means Jesus of Nazareth nowhere. In the ascension he becomes [out of place] in the most literal sense: he is unnatural, absurd, for he has no place of his own. (Vague talk among modern theologians about 'a change of state, not of place' hardly alleviates that difficulty, however effective it may be in turning aside impolite inquiries as to Jesus' actual whereabouts.)" - Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia

I will qualify this quote by saying that Farrow is not arguing against the doctrine of the ascension, far from it. Rather, he is arguing against a particular interpretation of what it means for Jesus to be ascended. How often do we associate (or confuse, as it were) the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives with the presence of Christ? The reality of Jesus as a man should cause us to carefully consider how we understand Scripture's (namely Paul's) language of "Christ in you." As much as we talk about Christ's death and resurrection as a man, we often forget that He ascended as a man and remains a man even at the right hand of the Father. I'm looking foward to the rest of this book.

An Embodied View of Time

"Try to think about time without any of the metaphors we have discussed. Try to think about time without motion and space--without a landscape you move over and without objects or substances moving toward you or away from you. Try to think about time without thinking about whether it will run out or if you can budget it or are wasting it... What, after all, would time be without flow, without time going by, without the future approaching? What would time be if there were no lengths of time? Would we still be experiencing time if time could not creep or fly by us? Would time still be time for us if we could not waste it or budget it?" - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh

I am sympathetic to the authors' view that the majority of our understanding of truth comes from conceptual metaphors. Indeed, it is my contention that such a view fits harmoniously well with an Incarnational approach to epistemology (and philosophy in general) in which the Word becoming Flesh is the paradigmatic metaphor for understanding truth, for grasping truth. We tend to think of metaphor as an embelishment of language from which truth must be extracted; nothing could be further from the, ah, truth. A brief look at how we understand time is enough to demonstrate the validity of metaphor as a clear venue for the expression of truth.

In the English language the structure for our understanding (and experience) of time occurs within the context of what the authors identify as the "Time Orientation" metaphor. In this schema the observer is the marker for the present, everything in front of the marker/observer is the future and anything behind the marker/observer is the past. This is why we can make sense of sentences like "Let's put the past behind us" and "I look forward to our date on Friday." The Time Orientation metaphor reflects our everyday use of the concept of time. Even our words about the past and future are oriented in this manner: "yesterday" is past because it refers to the day behind (or before) today and "tomorrow" is future because it refers to the day in front of (or after) today. There are other metaphors that work in conjunction with this one and that help shed more light on our conception of time.

The authors note, "The Time Orientation metaphor has a spatial source domain, but it says nothing about motion." What they mean by saying the Time Orientation metaphor has a spatial source domain is that the metaphor functions within the context of location relative to the observer. The observer is present (here/now) and the future is in front (spatial relation) of the observer and the past is in back (spatial relation) of the observer, thus time is spatially oriented with the observer. But is the observer stationary or or moving, and does this affect the metaphor? If we view the observer as stationary then we get the Moving Time metaphor and if we view the observer as moving then we get the Moving Observer metaphor. Both of these schemas contain the orientation metaphor and both are used frequently in framing our understanding of time.

"There is a lone, stationary observer facing in a fixed direction. There is an indefinitely long sequence of objects moving past the observer from front to back. The moving objects are conceptualized as having fronts in their direction of motion." This is the Moving Time metaphor in which the observer is stationary and time moves from the future toward the past (or toward the observer). It accounts for sentences like "Time flies [passes quickly] when you're having fun" and "Valentine's Day will be here [will arrive] soon." In these examples we seen the role of the orientation metaphor as well. The observer is still the marker for the present and the future are those events/times moving towards the marker and the past are those events/times which move away from the marker. It is important to note that the events/times have a front-back orientation like the observer does and that this orientation, like the obeserver's, is fixed. Events/times are always moving towards us from the future and away from us as they pass.

The Moving Observer metaphor is a role reversal of the Moving Time metaphor so that time is stationary and the observer is moving. To further clarify, "Here the observer, instead of being fixed in one location, is moving. Each location in the observer's path is a time. The observer's location is the present." This metaphor accounts for sentences like "We've already been through the month of January" and "The deadline for entry is coming up soon." The Time Orientation metaphor remains our spatial reference and on this schema it is the observer's progression forward that constitutes the passage of time. From this metaphor we get conceptions of closeness and farness relative to events. Because the events are stationary and we are moving towards (or away) from them, our perception of them is constantly changing. I've been married for less than a year, so my wedding is an event/time that is relatively close in proximity to my location in the presnt. But in ten years I will have moved farther away from it and this metaphor provides the conceptual basis for my interpretation of the perceived chronological distance.

Why do we experience and interpret time with these various metaphors? The authors explain, "The answer is that these metaphors arise from our most common everyday embodied experience of functioning in the world." In other words, we are involved in "motion-situations"(i.e. situations that involve movement in relation to ourselves where we are moving towards/away from an object or an object is moving towards/away from us) which are then mapped onto our conception of time. What's fascinating about the variant metaphors above (Moving Observer, Moving Time) is that they are actually inconsistent with each other. An example sentence is given, "Let's move the meeting ahead a week.":

In the Moving Time metaphor, the times are moving. If the meeting had been scheduled for some future time and that time is facing forward toward the present, then moving the meeting ahead means to move it ahead of the time at which it is scheduled, namely, closer to the present. By contrast, In the Moving Observer metaphor, the observer is moving and facing toward the future. If the meeting has been scheduled for a future time, then moving the meeting ahead means moving the meeting ahead of where the observer will be at that time, namely, farther into the future.

Another example they use is the come of "Christmas is coming" and the come of "We're coming up on Christmas." Even though the same word is used, our interpretation of it is shaped by the respective time metaphors. This is true of our experience as well. Some people experience the coming of Christmas; they wait for it, anticipate it and are eager for it's arrival. On the other hand, some people experience the going-to of Christmas; they can't wait for it, they make plans about where they will be on it and they are excited about passing the days until they arrive at it. Even though these two metaphoric schemas are incompatible with one another, it doesn't prevent us from using them consistently and coherently. They are both true and provide true ways of understanding the place of time in our everyday lives. Now, go back up and try the thought experiment I quoted at the beginning of the post. Still think metaphor has no place in discussions about truth and knowledge? I didn't even present the other metaphors we use for time: Time-as-Substance, Space-Time, Time-as-Resource, and Time-as-Money. As the authors might greet you, welcome to the practical implications and implimentation of a philosophy in the flesh.

The Cognitive Unconscious

"Consider, for example, all that is going on below the level of conscious awareness when you are in a conversation. Here is only a small part of what you are doing, second by second:

Acessing memories relevant to what is being said
Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features and segments, identifying phonemes, and grouping them into morphemes
Assigning a structure to the sentence in accord with the vast number of grammatical constructions in your native language
Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate to context
Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole
Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion
Peforming inferences relevant to what is being discussed
Constructing mental images where relevant and inspecting them
Filling in gaps in the discourse
Noticing and interpreting your interlocutor's body language
Anticipating where the conversation is going
Planning what to say in response

Cognitive scientists have shown experimentally that to understand even the simplest utterance, we must perform these and other incredibly complex forms of thought automatically and without noticeable effort below the level of consiousness. It is not merely that we occasionally do not notice these processes; rather, they are inaccessible to consious awareness and control." - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh

I can agree with Lakoff and Johnson that the majority of our thought processes occur below the level of conscious awareness. And I don't mean things like breathing and heartbeating, those activities don't [normally] have anything to do with thought at all (it's autonomic nervous function). How many of those things in the list above are we conciously aware of during a discussion with someone? It doesn't even have to be a discussion, these processes take place during everyday conversing as well. There are a few items in the list that are suspect (e.g. I am usually consciously aware of planning responses) but, for the most part, these activities along with countless others are being accomplished automatically. It is these neural happenings that cognitive scientists are dubbing the cognitive unconcious (CU hereafter).

The CU is largely shaped by our interactions with the external world. For example, physical environments give rise to spatial-relation concepts which provide a basis for conceptual metaphors that, in turn, affect how we interpret our experience of reality. The same is true of socio-cultural environments. From the moment we emerge as infants our brains begin the process of encoding our neural networks with the CU (it actually starts before exiting the womb, but I'm not much into developmental psychology). This is why it seems that children have an innate ability to acquire language and moral concepts. They learn early on that certain vocalizations result in particular responses and this continual process develops into what becomes their native language. They learn early on that up means good and down means bad, that close is warm and intimate, and far is cold and impersonal. I'm sure you can see other conceptual metaphors forming just from these few examples, and this is only one part of the CU's activity. Since this is a blog entry and not an academic journal submission, I don't feel the need to explain this in much more detail at this time. Needless to say, coming to terms with the CU can bring a new bag of philosophy toys to play with when talking about what it means to know something. I'll interact with this in more detail in future posts as I work throught Lakoff and Johnson's book.

Learning Our Story

"Stories define who we are together, and the story of the Church is the gospel, which is the whole story of the Bible, which is the story of the totus Christus. By defining ourselves as "New Testament" Christians, we are attempting to define ourselves by a small fraction of our story. We have institutionalized amnesia; it is a form of insanity. Is it any wonder we do not know who we are?" - Peter J. Leithart

It isn't just the stories that define who we are either, it is the manner in which that story is written as well. What greater or better written story is there than that which we find in the totality of God's word? Leithart makes an important point here, perhaps the key point of this entire book (Against Christianity) in pointing out that Christians are uneducated when it comes to their own culture. Not only this, but we are taught this way in our churches. From a very early age we are taught the stories of the Bible but not the Story of the Bible that underscores them. We learn all about Abraham and Isaac and about how God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and how the angel stopped Abraham and God providing the ram in Isaac's place. We even learn that Abraham calls God Yaweh-Jireh and this will continue to be true of Him when He ultimately provides His Son for us. We are taught that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only son because he had faith that God could even raise Isaac from the dead in order to keep His promise of establishing a great people through him. What we are not taught, however, is that we are the great people. That Abraham is the father of our faith because we, as Gentiles, have been grafted into the Vine and adopted into Israel. That we are Isaac, bound before God underneath the knife of His righteous judgment and Jesus is the substitutionary ram who receives the killing blow.

Abraham's story is my story and your story; Israel's history is our history and the culture of the Scriptures is our culture. The Greeks had their stories, so did the Romans and those nations before (Egpytians, Babylonians, Persians, etc.) where they played an important role in the peoples' understanding and experience of everyday life. Leithart explains, "Myths not only embodied a political and religious vision of the city, but somtimes had direct political cosequences." He offers the example of Alexander the Great associating himself with Achilles and aspiring to obtain such a heroic status; he goes on to conquer the world. America, also, has her own stories and the problem of Christianity today is that it has adopted a story that is not its own. Christianity has abandoned the stories which should be determining and affecting how we experience and interact with all other stories, i.e. the world's stories. I like Leithart's use of the word "embodied" here as this is precisely what we are called to do: embody our faith. Paul admonishes us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices and that this is our spiritual act of worship (Rom. 12:1). What does this entail? Primarily it entails not conforming to the pattern(s) of this world and renewing our minds (v. 2) so that we are able to approve what God's will is.

Is this what Christianity does today? A quick browsing through you local Christian bookstore should be enough to answer this question. Sure we pay lipservice to "going against the flow" and being "counter-cultural", we've all seen the T-shirts and bumper stickers. The problem is that we aren't called to go against the flow or be counter-cultural; we are called to not be in the flow at all, we are called to reform culture and bring it to Christ by making it conform with the culture Scripture has already established for us in the story of the gospel. In other words, we are to bring the story of the gospel to the world, not bring the story of the world to the gospel. The story of the world isn't big enough to contain the story of the gospel. What we, as Christians, need to do is learn and know this gospel story as our identities in Christ are defined by it; we need to make this story our story.

Theology vs. The Bible

"Theology is a specialized, professional language, often employing obscure (Latin and Greek) terms that are never used by anyone but theologians, as if theologians live in and talk about a different world from the one mortals inhabit. Theology functions sociologically like other professional languages--to keep people out and to help the members of the guild identify one another. Whereas the Bible talks about trees and stars, about donkeys and barren women, about kings and queens and carpenters." - Peter J. Leithart

We take for granted the use of everyday language. Our lives are grounded in narrative so much so that we don't even really notice anymore. Scripture is also written in primarily a narrative format, and when it is not narrating a story, it is written as prophecy or prose. So where does our formal system of theology come from? What do we mean when we say that there are "timeless truths" in Scripture which fit nicely within a coherent set of doctrines? Some of us (myself included) use it to refer to the system of beliefs commonly called Reformed Covenant Theology while others refer to Dispensationalism, Catholicism, etc. The problem with such systems is that they tend to be gregarious to the extent that they breed exclusion. We are no longer a diversified body, we are, instead, a collection of body parts disassembled on the machinist's floor. Each part has the audacity to claim it is attached to something it calls a "body" while the other parts laugh at the utter foolishness of such a claim, undaunted by the reality that they are in a similar predicament.

So what do I propose? Well, I propose that my system is right but not to the exclusion of others. We should have open eyes and ears to see and hear God's truth no matter what "ism" it is attached to. The intellectuals among us should climb down from their ivory towers and mingle with the vulgar on a regular basis so they can see what their writing looks like. In other words, we should be living what is written in the Scriptures concerning goodness, righteousness, beauty, truth and love rather than systematizing it. Now, I have a degree in philosophy so I'm all about a good coherent and cogent systematization. What I, here, wish to combat is an intellectual following of that system at the expense of a physical and spiritual living out of that system. Theology has a tendency to confine God to an abstract box of natures and characteristics which are then hotly debated amongst the fragmented body parts. This isn't just true about God either; we see it in variations on the Lord's Supper, baptism, Scripture and even the gospel message.

In the city of God there is only one people; in the kingdom there is only one King. Here on earth, then, we witness and participate in what amounts to civil war. Why? Because we pit our theologies against one another. We like to test our intellectual mettle against our fellow Christians because it's too much work to pit it against the world. God has given us a revelation which enables us to topple empires and shape nations and we use it to tear down churches that don't agree with us according to every jot and tittle. I certainly don't mind the occassional spat and light-hearted sparring, but too often we (myself included) are guilty of kidney punching and not accidentally. It is cliche to recommend that we let Scripture shape our theology as a solution; that is what we all believe we are already doing. However, if we let Scripture shape our life then it will be obvious who has the right kind of knowledge. Let us pursue the divine as the divine pursues us: with a love that sets the heart of stone on fire.

Christian Ritualism

"Ritual reflects and shapes individual life and the order of a community. It is at the heart of Christian paedeia." - Peter J. Leithart (Against Christianity)

Ritual is, in fact, what defines a community. To understand a society's rituals is to glimpse the threads that hold them together as a people. Take, for instance, American Christianity; it, along with American culture in general, places a great emphasis on individualism and personalizing the Christian experience. We are to seek the truth for ourselves and whatever church we happen to be attending becomes our primary research facility. We ask our leaders great and forboding questions and they gives us their (in our eyes) opinion along with several reading recommendations. In turn, we pick and choose what looks and/or sounds good according to our peculiar circumstances (influenced largely by how we were raised as children) becoming more set in our ways with the passing of time. We come to favor a certain style and flow of worship, specific types of personal devotions, etc. and we ultimately end up with a brand of Christianity to call our own. This is the general process of ending up in First X of Chattanooga or Weeping Mother of Saint X, or whatever.

Never do we stop to examine whether or not Scripture has set forth rituals for us. Sure we have the Lord's Supper and Baptism (along with several others depending on your take) but don't those take place within our own pre-established framework? If you don't believe so, take a moment to reflect on how the Lord's Supper is celebrated in your church. Is it once a week? Is there enough wine and bread for everyone? Is wine even an option? Does the congregation celebrate together or within the individual "bubble" of their pew space? Today the American Church largely ignores her past and confusingly refers to a group of independent ritualists as a "congregation." Instead it should be the common rituals that bring us together, teach us how to interpret the world around us and train us how to live in that world as the people of God; it is also the common rituals that show us how to worship, how to be beautiful, how to be poetic:

"For individuals, Christian ritual trains the body and soul in suitable posture and movement. By moving us through a series of spiritual and physical postures, liturgical ritual imposes a choreography on us. Patterned by rituals of worship, we begin to live life before God as kneeling to confess, as standing to hear, as singing and clapping in praise, as sitting to eat and drink. Worship trains us in the steps for walking, for dancing rightly through life... For groups, ritual depicts the world as it ought to be, the real world as it is believed to be, especially the social and political realities of the world. Christian ritual displays the world as we believe and hope it one day will be. Ritual displays to public view who goes where, how each of us fits into the whole, how the members of the body are knit into one while yet remaining many, how the melodic lines of each individual life harmonize into a communal symphony." - Leithart (ibid)

In my previous post I requested that your individualism be left at the door and what I refered to is that individualism which has established its own personal rituals in addition to, or outside of, the realm of Christian ritual. It was not a request to leave your individuality at the door, as that is what makes you a unique citizen of the kingdom. God has not yet brought us, as individuals, into His presence though we experience it vicariously through the Holy Spirit. Jesus has taken humanity, i.e. human being, into the presence of God and we have the promise of a similar glorification. Jesus didn't just bring humanity into God's presence, He brought a perfected (through Himself) humanity into God's presence. That is the reality, weight and the truth of His ascension; a truth that is known through the ritual of the written word. Learn the rituals of the gospel and live life abundantly in the one who holds and continually presents those rituals for us.