New Blog

I wanted to give my blog a new look. So this blog will be no more. See my new blog at

www.jrickard.wordpress.com

Karl Barth and Election

I wrote a research paper on Karl Barth's Doctrine of Election for Theology class this Fall. Barth's doctrine of election is significant because he understood election to be essential to who God is. Election is not about a predetermined number of individuals who will be saved, but rather it is about the God who has eternally elected to be God in Jesus and therefore God has eternally identified God's self with all of humanity in this election. Election is the free and gracious movement of God to make room within the Godhead for humanity. Here is a snippet of my paper for your reading pleasure:

For Barth, the existence of Jesus, God in flesh, demonstrates God’s eternal election of humanity.

In the person of His eternal Son he has united Himself with the man Jesus of Nazareth, and in Him and through Him with this people. He is the Father of Jesus Christ. He is not only the Father of the eternal Son, but as such He is the eternal Father of the temporal man.*

God wills to be God in relation to Jesus; therefore election is central to the doctrine of God because God has eternally willed to be God in Christ.* This predestination of God and of humanity fundamentally orients the ontological status of God and humanity. Election “determines the being of God and of humanity.”* This is because in election God has determined to be an electing God and God has determined humanity to be the elect.* This is known in Jesus: the electing God and the elected human.

Everything that is, is because of God’s election. Because God chose to be God in Jesus, God who was divine and human; God who was God and not God, God decided to bind God’s self to everything that was not God. Barth writes,

In the beginning, before time and space as we know them…God anticipated and determined within Himself that the goal and meaning of all His dealings with the as yet non-existent universe should be the fact that in His Son He would be gracious towards man, uniting Himself with him.*

This would ultimately result in the Son offering himself in sacrifice for humanity in order that God’s covenant with humanity would be a reality.

Jesus is the electing God and the elected human. Jesus is God’s electing movement towards humanity and humanity’s subsequent movement towards God.* “For it is God’s free grace that in Him He elects to be man and to have dealings with man and to join Himself to man.”* What Barth is doing is reorienting the doctrine of election so that it is not an afterthought. It is not an improvisation that occurred due to the fall of the created order. Rather, “God, as essentially the electing God, makes the universe in order that it may be the arena on which his gracious purposes may come to pass. It is therefore the presupposition of all God’s works.”* In Barth’s own words, he writes, “This decree is really the first of all things…It is the decision which is the basis of all that follows.”*



References

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.2, eds. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburg: T. & T. Clark, 1957).

Eberhard Jungel, God's Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, trans. John Webster (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001).

Colin E. Gunton, "Karl Barth's doctrine of election as part of his doctrine of God", Journal of Theological Studies 25.2 (1974): 381-392.

Why Episcopal?

As many of you know Kate and I have been attending an Episcopal Church since we arrived in Seattle. Many people have asked me "What drew you there?" This is a normal question considering I grew up in the Evangelical church, spending time in its many different streams: holiness, methodist, pentecostal, and independent. The easy answer to the question is, the church was right up the street and our friends were going there. But as I have reflected upon my time at the church and as I have looked back on where I have come from, in many ways it makes sense to me why I, at this moment in time, find myself in an Episcopal Church.

I plan to share a few of these reasons with you in a series of blog posts beginning with this one. Keep in mind that due to the nature of a blog these descriptions are brief, often poorly nuanced, and do not do justice to the complexity of the story I am sharing. One other disclaimer, I am not speaking of my brief experience in the Episcopal Church in order to say that I have finally arrived and here is where I will stay. But rather to simply reflect on where I find myself now. Furthermore, I not an expert on anything Episcopalian, so my interpretation of things Episcopal, may be simply that.

1. Encounter with the Holy. The ecclesial settings that I have found myself in have been places where I have encountered God. Due to particularities of my own story and aspects of the Evangelical tradition that gave form to my spiritual makeup, early on in my journey I sought intense intimate union with God. This happened through scripture reading, prayer (private and corporate) and worship experiences, at times these were highly emotional and charismatic in nature. I believed that God was near to me and able to guide every aspect of my life. However, this nearness was conditioned by my diligence to maintain it. This required an incredible amount of expended energy on scripture reading, prayer and worship. The payoff was the presence of God in my life who filled the deep holes of my wounded heart.

To make a long story short(i.e. Africa), my body and soul eventually caved under the pressure of maintaining a relationship with God. Church became to me a place of disappointment and isolation. Singing praise to God was laborious and painful. Prayer was confusing and accompanied with silence. Scripture became nothing but dead letters. Sermons were manipulative and demanding. Ultimately I was no longer able to join in with the worship experience. Too much was dependent upon me.

Needless to say I carried all of this emotion, confusion, and frustration with me as I entered St. Paul's Episcopal Church, an Anglo-Catholic parish. Being in a church still put me at unease. I continued to wonder if I would ever experience anything besides anxiety. However, after several visits I was feeling more comfortable with the liturgy. I knew the flow of the service: stand, bow, cross, sing, silence now, come forward, kneel, receive, exit here, etc... I soon began to develop the sense that I was being held and carried along by the worship experience. Not in some supernatural, otherworldly sense, but in the actions, prayers, praise, and silence of a physically gathered community.

Encounter with the Holy came in participating with a body in praise, word and sacrament. The liturgy is not sustained by my emotional output, the charisma of a worship leader, nor the verbosity of the preacher; rather it is in the mysterious encounter of the divine through the flesh and blood movement of the gathered community, culminating in the meal of Christ's flesh and blood.

Coming soon: Liturgical worship as Divine Drama.

Mars Hill Graduate School

MHGS in movie format.



Click on movie.

Hello Weekend, Goodbye Retail

Tomorrow morning I am going to wake up and go over to my friend Mark's house to watch football. That my not seem like an extradinary feat, but to those who have lived and worked in the world of retail understand that a liesurely Saturday putzing around or watching football rarely occurs.

This brings me to my next point. I have a new job! Last Friday I interviewed and was hired to be the Program Assistant for the MA-TESOL (Teaching English as a Second Language) department at Seattle Pacific University. I will be assisting faculty, interacting with prospective and current students, marketing, and doing some administrative tasks. Definitely not my dream job, but it feels good to be working at a university, meeting faculty, and learning about the ins and outs of the organization.

And this of course means no more Starbucks! No more waking up at 4:30 AM. No more early Saturday morning shifts. No more working holidays. No more starting Christmas the second week in November. No more dealing with customers who demand their half-caf double light ristretto double cup with a sleeve grande, two and half pump vanilla, one pump hazelnut, two third soy, one third two percent, light foam, one hundred and seventy three degrees, extra caramel, stirred, caramel machiato! Hallelujah!

Jesus died for....?

How would you end that sentence? The answer might role off your tongue or it may cause you to stumble. Whatever the case may be for you, it is a question that is being re-examined today. Why did Jesus die? And what (if anything) did his death accomplish?

I recently wrote a paper tracing the understanding of Christ's death as victory (Christus Victor) throughout church history. It is an ancient concept that has made headway in recent years. In essence the death of Jesus in the Christus Victor model is not a payment to God for the penalty of humanity's sin; rather it is the result of divine conflict with the powers of evil. Jesus assumes humanity within himself and suffers death in order to triumph over it through resurrection.

The ancients explained this phenomenon using metaphors that are not necessarily adequate today: Jesus died in order to trick the devil. He fooled the devil by offering his humanity in death; the devil took the bait and Jesus defeated him because his divinity could not be contained by death.

J. Denny Weaver, a modern Anabaptist theologian, recasts Christus Victor by describing it in a more historical/material way. He writes, Christ’s conflict took place with the evil forces here on earth. Jesus confronted the political power of Rome and the religious authority of Judaism. The kingdom that he inaugurated “establishes a new social order which stands over against – in confrontation with – the structures of this world.”*

Obviously there are many others who also utilizing the idea of Christ's death as victory. Liberation theologians recognize that in Christ, God joined in the sufferings of the oppressed and triumphed over their oppressors in resurrection. Black and Feminist theologians also recognize the importance of seeing Christ's death as victory. People who are oppressed resist the idea of passively submitting to suffering (in order to be saved or to save others) because too often it simply reinforces the tyrannical powers that be instead of critiquing them.

The crucifixion of God is too incredible, too absurd, too incomprehensible for us to completely explain. With that said, we must continue to faithfully offer our explanations of the pinnacle event in human history, knowing that we can only see dimly and that none of our theories have the monopoly on the death of God.

*J. Denny Weaver, “Atonement for the Nonconstantinian Church”, Modern Theology (6.04 July 1990) 308.

A Provoking Image

I feel like this picture captures the essence of what it is like to be a young theologian.


*Picture taken from the BBC. It is a gathering of Muslims in the Phillipines to celebrate Eid.

What if the future has not happened?

In theology class the other night we were discussing the doctrine of God. Who is God? What can we know about God? How do we know God? Where is God? How does God relate to the world?

In our discussion group during class I posed a question along these lines: What if the future has not happened yet?

Some of us who live and think within a Christian context have the idea that the story has already played itself out (at least in the mind of God). What happens tomorrow in my life, in the events of the world, God has already seen/allowed/willed/ordained/known.

But what if it has not happened yet? Rather than starting a philosophical/theological argument over this issue (What must God know, in order to be God, etc...I also find is fascinating to examine the affects of doctrines/beliefs on people and communities as opposed to simply discussing what is "true" or "untrue"), how is your imaginative/creative impulse affected by the notion that the future has not happened yet. The story has not yet been written. Anything can happen.

Furthermore what if we thought of the eschatological visions of scripture as God's redemptive trajectory. How does that affect our imaginative/creative impulse?

One of my imaginative/creative impulses: When Tolstoy wrote a novel did God read along with anticipation? When Monet painted did God gasp at the beauty of the finished project? When Mozart composed his first symphony did God listen with wonder?