Frank Anthony Spina, diversificator par excellence

"diversity is hardly controversial in academia.  Everyone is in favor of it.  I am, too.  Perhaps a few think that my retirement may enhance SPU's diversity[; that w]hen I leave the faculty will be less white, less male, and much younger.  Be assured that I am not offended.  After all, when I became an Episcopal priest after having been ordained by the Free Methodist Church, I made both denominations more theologically conservative.  This summer I will move to Idaho, at which time I will make two whole states more politically liberal.  Not bad, huh?"

     Frank Anthony Spina, "A Professor’s 'Last Stand' for Diversity" (intellectual diversity, that is), Ivy Cutting, Seattle Pacific University, 7 June 2019.

"Modern pneumatology" as both dogmatically and pastorally perverse

Carl F. H. Henry Center

     "For Christianity it's not everything or nothing.  It's some particular thing.  This.  Sin and all, it's this.  What those who choose to live require, getting back to my opening (and it seems to me we are all asked to choose today), what we require is not another world, but the finality of a choice for this world that somehow stands beyond and beneath our decisions, not only as an enabling power or an inspiration (which the Holy Spirit certainly is), but as a revelation, as an establishment.  What we require, that is, is an Amen to our life that, in its very utterance, establishes its worth, in the face of all that clamors for its inadequacy.  And such an Amen is, we know, a Person:  the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God.  The beginning of the creation itself.  An Amen who comes, who speaks and teaches, who lives as a creature, and does indeed die as one in particular ways and forms, and, in so doing, takes to himself what is just this life as it is created and so oddly laid out, and deformed by us to be sure, but nonetheless in the heart of God.  Those who choose to live require first the choice that God has made to live this life that they were given.  And so I confess:  there is no other model, figure, form, or truth than the incarnate person of Jesus Christ.

     "So if the Holy Spirit does not resolve the world as it is, and I think demonstrably, existentially, . . . [if] the Spirit demonstrably does not resolve the existential realities of our life as we live them[,] . . . if the Spirit doesn’t do that and if pneumatology has mistakenly insisted that that's at the center of what the Spirit does, we must move more deeply into the world itself, and into the primary choice for the world that God has made, and in the way that God has made it in Christ.  We shall there discover the form of that choice as that which is therefore most truly of the Spirit. . . . [T]he pneumatological foundations for theology . . . must [therefore] resist theories, metaphysical frameworks, and instrumentalist promises and fantasies.  They must instead approach the Spirit as the God who establishes the world as it is, such that the form of life that Jesus lived and died within it is of God.  Utterly.  And of course the world changes.  We know that.  It will, we can assume and imagine, someday disappear.  While we can assert the Spirit’s life as somehow wrapped up with all this change, wherever it’s going, the purpose of pneumatology cannot be to specify the ways of transformation as such. . . . these attempts are profoundly off the mark.  Just such intractably unspecified change is part of the world we cannot fathom.  Nor are we meant to.  And, in fact, drives too many to run from it altogether.  Rather, pneumatology, austerely chastened, as I would like to imagine it, is, like philosophy, not meant to change the world, but to speak truly of what it is.  In theological terms, to speak truly of the world’s worth, and of human life’s worth, precisely given in the life lived by the Son of God.  It is not for me to offer an apology for life.  God already has.  Such that I can only wonder that I am worthy of it, and must certainly confess that such a life, therefore, is enough.

     "In conclusion I want to suggest that any contemporary theological anthropology resist the allures of modern pneumatology.  And that any theology of the Holy Spirit tie itself to the forms of human creatureliness in the way our Lord did, very specifically.  There are dogmatic reasons of truth, I think, for doing so.  But there are also the deep demands of compassion that dictate such parameters.  And dogmatics and compassion are two sides of the same valuable coin."

     Ephraim Radner, "Spirit of life and death: modern pneumatology and the struggle against mortality," Creation Project, Carl. F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Trinity International University, 15 June 2018, from 33:32.

"grant, we pray, that Christian hope may draw us onward to where our nature is united with you"

"Almighty, ever-living God, who allow those on earth to celebrate divine mysteries, grant, we pray, that Christian hope may draw us onward to where our nature is united with you.  Through."

"Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui in terra constitutos divina tractare concedis, praesta, quaesumus, ut illuc tendat christianae devotionis affectus, quo tecum est nostra substantia.  Per."

Almighty, ever-living God, who allow those stationed on earth to handle [things] divine, grant, we pray, that to that place may tend the affection of Christian devotion where with you is our nature [(substantia)].  Through.

     Prayer after Communion "At the Mass during the Day" of the Ascension, Roman Missal.  The core of this "Prayer after Communion" is basically no. 185 (which Vogel, following Mohlberg, appears to date between 400 and 440 (Medieval liturgy:  an introduction to the sources (1986 [1981]), 43-44 and 58n127) in the "Sacramentary of Verona, called Leonine" (Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, cod. 85 (once 80)).  Text of no. 185 from the 1956 edition ed. Mohlberg, where it is assigned to "nach 440" and later (groups 13, 27, etc. ("Die Datierungsversuche," pp. lxix ff.) is as follows:

Tribue, quaesumus domine, ut illuc tendat christianae nostrae deuotionis a(f)fectus, quo tecum est nostra substantia:  per.

More (less well-organized) here. 

Lord, have mercy

"suppose a Catholic puts such an emphasis on Christ’s mercy that he takes it to imply that someone in an adulterous second 'marriage' can be absolved and receive Holy Communion despite having no intention of refraining from adulterous acts in the future.  This would manifestly be a heresy in the original sense cited by the Dictionary, and in the sense explained by Belloc.  For it would both be an obvious departure from two millennia of common doctrine, and would involve a distortion of the notion of mercy, turning it into a kind of license to sin.
     "Indeed, it would be an especially perverse distortion, since it would, in the name of Christ’s teaching on mercy, reverse Christ’s teaching against divorce and remarriage – a teaching that Christ enjoined on his disciples precisely in the name of mercy!  For it was, Christ said, only because of their 'hardness of heart' that the Israelites were permitted by Moses to divorce, a permission he explicitly cancelled.  So, a permissive attitude toward divorce and remarriage is the very last thing one could justify in the name of Christ’s understanding of mercy."

     Edward Feser, "Popes, heresy, and papal heresy," Edward Feser, Saturday, May 25, 2019.

Finitude gives us time to think

     "In transhumanism as we experience it and as it continues to emerge [(se profile)], the notion of time is turned upside down.  Longevity, i.e. the promised 'immortality', causes the horizon of death to recede or modifies it.  That much is obvious.  Now, death and suffering are essential to [the abundance of] life:  addressing our finitude clearly forces us to live and to choose, [and] therefore, for lack of time [(par manque de temps)], to optimize our life-choices.  This same lack of time is what makes it possible for us to avoid ennui and monotony, and, in the end, give meaning to life.  One can transcend death by leaving something to others, by giving life, or by enjoying [(vivant)] an experience. . . .  In transhumanism death is no longer seen as a natural event, but is medicalized, seen as an illness to be vanquished.  It’s the same with senescence.  These questions are typical of the singularity and of the reification of the human.
     "Paradoxically, faced with the promised eternity, transhumanism lacks time, lives in [a kind of] immediacy [(l'immédiateté)], and pursues it [(et la course, i.e. this immediacy)] via [constant] innovation [(aux innovations)].  Time is literally crushed [(écrasé) down into the immediacy of the present moment].  In fact, the finitude of the human being forces him to manage the time that he has to live, [and] the choices imposed on him cannot be made without a minimum of [critical] distance [(recul)] and reflection.  Finitude gives us time to think [(La finitude nous donne le temps de penser)].  Eternity, in the sense of [mere] longevity [(ou la longévité)], doesn’t have this capacity, for it is lived in [a kind of] immediacy.  Consumerism and ennui are accentuated in a roboticized society in which the human being is increasingly deprived of his capacity for meaningful action [(d’agir et de faire, to act and to do)]."

     Vincens Hubac, "Science sans conscience:  le transhumanisme est-il un humanism?," Foi et vie 114, no. 4 (décembre 2014):  23 (9-26).

An intellectual (and spiritual) apprenticeship

     "Much of the work of post-Cartesian, modern philosophers in epistemology was driven by worries about skeptical objections that we do not know much, or most, or even all of what we think we know. . . .  some of these philosophers formulated a foundationalist theory of justification which could, they hoped, overcome skeptical worries by admitting as foundational only beliefs which were indubitable, or at least sufficiently obvious and secure, so they could withstand skeptical objections, and other beliefs could be justified on the basis of these.  A characteristic of these sorts of views was the stipulation that the foundational beliefs be evident to the autonomous investigation of the rational subject, for any reliance on authority or other mediating presuppositions, they believed, would be open to skeptical challenge, and assent to them would not be fully rational.
". . . some have interpreted . . . Aquinas’s foundationalism along the lines of this modern tradition.  But although Aquinas recognizes that certain truths may be per se nota ('known of themselves,' i.e. self-evident) to us, the goal of inquiry is that we may come to grasp what is per se notum in itself, and reason to conclusions from these truths.  We can only do this, however, by undertaking a period of training and discipline under the guidance of those more accomplished with the field, so that we may acquire the intellectual habits to apprehend what is per se notum as such.  The concern here is not with skeptical worries and the focus is not on autonomous, individualistic investigation; it is rather with the sort of intellectual formation required so that what is most intelligible in itself becomes most intelligible to us.
     "Central to our interpretation of Aquinas is [therefore] the notion of apprenticeship. . . ."

     John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), 49.  I have not read this book, but rather stumbled on this passage while spot-checking the claim that "what is the most intelligible in itself is also what is the least [intelligible] for us" (Philippe-Marie Margelidon, "Questions de Christologie en théologie Thomiste au XXIe siècle," Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 119, no. 1 (Jan-Mar 2018), 103n30 (91-124)), which didn't seem quite right taken in isolation.

The logos asarkos is none other than the logos incarnandus

"But that then also means that there is no Logos as such, no Logos in and for himself.  An 'in and for himself' which lacks the determination for incarnation is simply a myth.  But here I must immediately add [that] to say this much is not to reject the concept of a logos asarkos.  The Logos is united to a human person in time, and in fact 'late in time', as Charles Wesley so nicely put it.  And he does not bring his humanity into this world, he does not bring his body down from heaven.  The man Jesus is conceived by the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin precisely for the union.  Or, better, to borrow I. A. Dorner’s phrase, 'for this uniting'.  So, yes, the Logos is asarkos before he is made by the Holy Spirit to be ensarkos.  Moreover, one cannot erase the concept of a logos asarkos without completely collapsing God into the history of the man Jesus, without erasing the Creator-creature distinction, without surrendering the otherness of God from the world.  I mention all of this because I have, on a number of occasions, been accused of rejecting the concept of a logos asarkos. . . .  But that is a charge that is completely without foundation.  I have from the beginning of the debate . . . quite explicitly affirmed the existence of a logos asarkos.  But I have done so, please note, in the form of a logos incarnandus, by which I mean the Logos who is eternally determined for incarnation, but who has yet to be united to the man Jesus in the womb of the Virgin.  Thus, the issue for me has never been whether, prior to incarnation, there is such a thing as the logos asarkos.  The issue has always had to do with his identity. . . . his identity in eternity and his identity in time are the same:  Jesus Christ."

     Bruce Lindley McCormack, "The processions contain the missions:  reconstructing the doctrine of an immanent Trinity," Kantzer Lecture no. 6, Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 3 October 2011, 37:43 and following.  There is much more of significance after this point.  (I'm not yet taking a side in this debate, by the way; just noting the precision here.)