The Church as the this-sidedness of Christ

In Barth's Doctrine of Reconciliation there are plenty of fascinating passages describing what the Church is and does with an idealist realism. I strongly recommend that if you ever want to get your ecclesiology straight you read the 100+ page section in Church Dogmatics IV entitled "The Being of the Community."

The following is by no means the best of possible excerpts, but it is a cool description of how it is understood that the risen and ascended Jesus Christ--true God and the true human!--has his presence on earth in the meantime before the new creation and the Kingdom come. It is also another place where my blog title crops up in the theology I'm studying and so I like the echoes it sounds into what I tend to yammer on about here.

[I]n its [the Community's] very this-sidedness, in its human doing and non-doing, in its common action and the life of all its members it is continually confronted with His presence as the Holy One, it is continually exposed to His activity, it is continually jolted by Him, it is continually asked whether and to what extent it corresponds in its visible existence to the fact that it is His body, His earthly-historical form of existence. (CD IV/1, 700-701).

This Side of the Church Dogmatics

Last Friday I completed my five month project of reading all 3,000 pages of Karl Barth's fourth volume of the Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation (including the posthumously published fragments). As a commemoration, and as a way of incorporating my recent endeavours with Barth into the intended echoes of my blog title, I decided to quote a few of the places where the English translation came close to using the phrase "this side of sunday".

Thanks to a search of the digital Barth library, it turns out that though he never used my title exactly the phrase "this side of" does occur 67 times in the entirety of the Dogmatics. Given their nature, it works out well to post some on Easter weekend.

"He [Jesus] breathes on His disciples as the Resurrected and says: "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." It is He Himself who does this, but He Himself on the far side and not on this side of that frontier; He Himself as the One who has crossed it, who in His death has fulfilled both His humiliation and His exaltation" (IV/2, 325-6).

"Where on this side of the resurrection of Jesus Christ are there genuine Christian actualisations in which the presence of the future of salvation which took place in the resurrection of Jesus Christ may be unequivocally seen and known and experienced in a way which is even approximately similar to that of the resurrection itself and is not exposed to some measure of haziness and doubt?" (IV/3.1, 322).

"The community is not the kingdom of God, nor will it ever be before the kingdom encounters it, and is revealed to it, in its glory at the end of all history. It prays for the coming of the kingdom, that encountering it in its true and perfect form it may be directly and universally and definitively revealed. But already on this side of the end, even in the form of the community which prays for its coming, the kingdom is really on earth and in time and history. The community would be nothing if it did not come from the kingdom and go towards it; if the kingdom were not present in this transitional movement" (IV/2, 656).

"He [the risen Jesus] encountered them formally (eating and drinking with them) in the same way as He had encountered them before, and as they for their part encountered Him, as living men in the flesh (eating and drinking with Him)--in a real encounter, themselves on the one side, alive but moving forward to death, and He on the other, alive from the dead, alive no more to die, alive eternally even now in time.

We can therefore say quite calmly--for this is the truth of the matter-- that they attested the fact that He made known to them this side of His (and their) death wholly in the light of the other side, and therefore that He made known to them the other side, His (and their) life beyond, wholly in terms of this side, even as spoken in His resurrection from the dead, as the Yes of God to Him (and therefore to them and to all men) concealed first under the No of His (and their) death. As the One who really encountered them in this sense He constituted Himself the basis of their faith and the theme and content of their witness" (IV/1, 352).

Three Years Blogging

On October 22, 2005, this blog was born. I had heard of blogging on a West Wing episode, was intrigued, did some playing around online, and came out with this.

At the time I felt like a bit of a bandwagon jumper and wondered how long the fad would last. Almost 200 posts later I find myself communicating with quite a few people this way, and though I feel like taking a hiatus now and again, I generally enjoy posting here once a week or so and taking whatever dialogue comes my way. I also check out about a dozen other blogs throughout the week and comment regularly on at least half of them. Though I have allowed it to distract me from "real life" at times, for the most part it has been really good.

As is common, this side of sunday began with an explanation for its existence, which went as follows:

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This is my first blog so I'm still finding my way around. My intention here is to explore my passion for writing and to see where that takes me.

I plan to write mostly social commentary peices from a decidedly Christian perspective. However, I'm not so concerned about pushing religion as I am in authentically exploring the depths of this faith in a reasoned and empassioned manner.

Spirituality encompasses all of life, from doing dishes to talking philosophy, and so there will be very few topics I won't want to tackle. Unless of course they simply don't interest me at all.

Among the things which do interest me are reading, sports, culture, truth based spirituality, the church, music, movies, well-done television, and even politics to some degree. Although it is rare that my thoughts on the latter are anything less than frustrated.

I look forward to the possibilities this site might hold both for my own exploration of writing and for the potential dialogue that could ensue, whether that be among friends, family, colleagues, strangers or even enemies (should I have any out there or make any along the way)! See you soon.
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I am pleasantly surprised to look back and find that this still pretty much describes what I'm doing here.

My first comment came from tonytanti, my brother, who continues to be one of my most vocal readers, along with matthew wilkinson. I often run into friends and acquaintances who tell me that they read but don't comment, and so I try to keep writing for a pretty general audience. However, it must be admitted that the conversations that ensue are often driven by the reactions of one of those two, which is more than fine with me since they are both people I like talking to. I really do welcome more comments though, even in disagreement. I think dialogue has become my number one reason to be in the blogosphere.

Anyway, I think in the next week or so I'm going to try to update my tags. I've always been sloppy with these and I figure it might be good to get them more accurate before this blog gets too big to handle. In the meantime, here is my first post, from October 29, 2005:

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Blood is Hard to Ignore

On Sunday morning we went to church and sat near the back. The sermon was about Ruth, the singing was mostly hymns, and the pastoral prayer was given by the elder who also goes to our weekly Bible study. The pew bench was particularly hard this week, and there were more than a few empty spots in front of us. We weren't even all that far back either. It occurred to me that attendance was significantly lower this day. Probably some people away, or maybe it was Christian sleep-in day and nobody told me.

I noticed only part way through the service that the "elements" were out at the front of the church. The stale bread and the tart grape juice were all ready to be passed around at the end of the hour. Usually I'm pretty into this part of the service, but today it seemed so stiflingly normal.

Indeed, once we got to it, it went along like most of the rest. The eight elders gathered at the front, only one of them conspicuously wearing no suit jacket, and they took turns praying for "the bread and the cup." I started to wonder why we felt these little cubes of Safeway bread needed our petitions and these tiny glasses needed our prayers. I was also thinking about how we in evangelical circles like to call it "the cup" most likely because it sounds better than "the sacred grape juice" or the "wonderful Welch's." It all gave me a bit of a chuckle ... which of course I had to suppress.

As with most of our services around the Lord's Table, this one was pretty quick and painless and full of Christianese. Being so used to it, I never doubted our sincerity during this time though, in fact I quite appreciated that we were pausing to remember our debt to the Lord -- a debt that grows that much greater with each feeble attempt of ours to give him worship.

Once the bread started its rounds, I enjoyed watching all the people in front of me shuffle down the pew to make up for all the blank spaces, pass the plate, and then return to their places. They were sitting so far from one another! Of couse when it came my turn, I did the same.When the cups came by, I noticed they'd been jostled a bit, and while I tried to avoid taking a spilled one, I realized my failure to steer clear of the sticky little mess as I passed the tray over to my wife.

I saw a dot of grape juice on my finger, and to be honest, it kind of startled me.

When it caught my eye it looked like a prick of blood. Blood is hard to ignore. And with the elements passed now I looked and saw an even larger smear of it on my wife's hand, right in the middle of the palm. Right where the nails might have been. She tried to flick off the grape juice but it only streaked down one of her fingers and threatened one or two drips onto the floor. To avoid this, she closed her hand and clenched it repeatedly until all of it was rubbed into her palm. Moments later we "partook" together.

I have to say that despite my best efforts to notice everything but the sacred truth behind our tradition that morning, it had now become inescapably clear. Tucked away into our pathetic little ceremony was the amazing fact that the bread was as freely passed to us as was Christ's body, and this grape juice made a mess which paled in comparison to that of His blood.And these were just lame little attempts to encapsulate God's passion, as I am but a lame little attempt to encapsulate His Son. An attempt wrought with failure but met by the forgiveness His sacrifice won.
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Well, there you go. Thanks for meeting me here.

This Side of Sunday

This month I'll be putting together my official thesis proposal. Right now I'm working with the title "This Side of Sunday: The Natural Theology of GK Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday". Part of this title might sound vaguely familiar, as well as familiarly vague! Maybe I'll explain briefly why it is the title of my thesis as well as of this blog.

In The Man Who Was Thursday there is a character who goes by the code name Sunday. Sunday typically refers (in my tradition) to that especially holy day of the week, loosely associated with Sabbath and therefore the Peace of God. When I wrote about life and spirituality for our college newspaper (some of you will remember it as the notoriously badly titled "Phat Papyrii") I used this title to signify that this was church-talk outside of church.

When I use it as a thesis title I am alluding more to the cosmic scope of things as addressed in Chesterton's book. If Sunday is the Peace of God, well, we are currently on the wrong side of it. I mean, we can have the Peace of God, but only a shadow of that reality which we await in the coming of God's Kingdom, the Year of Jubilee, the Sabbath to come. We wait, this side of Sunday.

But Sunday is also a day where we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. A past event. And we are past that, looking back. We remember, we try to live in light of, this side of Sunday.

Who knew I meant all that eh? And if you read the book you'll see I mean more. Just say it, I'm crazy aren't I?

Anyway, I kind of like it and I hope I get to keep it. However, who knows how much this thesis will change between now and next March (when it is due).

Incidentally, since my thesis is basically a critical literary-theological reading of Chesterton's best novel, check out this quote I found from GKC himself about the act of literary criticism:

The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only
be one function - that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author's
mind which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the
author's mind, which the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good
at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an
author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

If I could make him jump out of his boots I'd be mighty pleased.