Realizations.

This summer, I've decided to regularly attend my family's non-denominational Church so that I can worship with my parents, Grandmother, and nephew every Sunday morning. Given my love for high-liturgical services (despite all my issues with it), I have struggled to find patience with the cliche worship style. The homilies, however well-intentioned, are little more than Oprah's self-help messages baptized in a few Scriptures. I often leave these services feeling rather alienated. Beyond the fact that so many of the lyrics in these modern worship songs are theologically impoverished at best, I find it dishonest to say that I will "give all" to Christ. Isn't that the point, that I can't do such things? Isn't His faithfulness to me, even when I am faithless and seek to escape the friendship He has established with me in Christ, the very essence of the Gospel?

Today, I found it difficult to be silent. So I began to express my disagreements about this particular Church with my Dad. I started out by saying that my intention isn't to seem like an elitist, or that I have it all figured out. I truly am learning just like everyone else - this much is certain.

But as I was talking, I honestly could not believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. There is no potentiality, it is all actualized in Christ. There is no ladder for Christians to climb, it is simply an act of grace that we continually realize who we are in Christ by the power of the Spirit. Sanctification isn't necessarily a matter of "getting more holy" but rather a deeper awareness of one's own inability and helplessness. This is what grace means. To me, this is the Gospel. That before the foundation of the world, the Father chose to reconcile humanity onto Himself in Christ. Even more, we have no where to stand, but continually depend upon the grace of God as we bear witness to this truth not only to each other but to the world. A theologia crucis - a theology that believes God is most revealed in the suffering and humility of the cross - does not mean recovering from and escaping doubt, weakness, and disbelief. Rather, it recognizes that God is still faithful to us in Christ as we encounter all of this suffering.

I began to wonder how all of this is consistent with my other theological sympathies. The radical posture of humility and dependence I just outlined which I articulated to my Dad today doesn't seem to be consistent with other aspects of my theology (ecclesiology for starters). My Dad's questions by way of response made me realize that my position is very unstable. Again, it offers no where to stand. Ironically, this is what makes me so attracted yet so uncomfortable with Barth's methodology (this became all the more clear at the Karl Barth conference last week). His understanding of the object of faith in Jesus Christ determines his radically unstable methodology which continually seeks to "start at the beginning" when bearing witness to the Gospel.

Is this too - the instability - what it means to faithfully witness to a theologia crucis?

While I won't end up long-term at this type of non-denominational Church, the very occasions that give rise to these realizations and questions are uncomfortable. I pray for the courage and willingness to live out whatever conclusions might surface even if that means a radical ecclesial reorientation.

History and Good [1].

One of the people in my life for whom I have the highest degree of respect and admiration brought Bonhoeffer's life to my attention today. When they mentioned his name, I chuckled at the providential irony that I am supposed to be reading Bonhoeffer's Ethics this week for the current blog reading project going on over at Jeremy's blog. I continued to read in my assigned reading and found the following gem of a quote. As I get older, I am sometimes tempted to believe the mark of sin and death is the reality of situations that do not offer a clear moral absolute. Sometimes there is little confidence that you are doing the right thing in a situation. But I was surprised to learn that Bonhoeffer calls this tension the "freedom" of the Christian - abandoning abstract reasoning in favor of concrete historical situations within a community.

"The moment a person accepts responsibility for other people - and only in so doing does the person live in reality - the genuine ethical situation arises. This is really something different from the abstract way in which people usually seek to come to terms with the ethical problem. The subject of the action is no longer the isolated individual, but the one who is responsible for other people. The action's norm is not a universal principle, but the concrete neighbor, as given to me by God. The choice is made no longer between a clearly recognized good and a clearly recognized evil; instead, it is risked in faith while being aware that good and evil are hidden in the concrete historical situation.

To act out of concrete responsibility means to act in freedom - to decide, to act, and to answer for the consequences of this particular action myself without the support of other people or principles. Responsibility presupposes ultimate freedom in assessing a given situation, in choosing, and in acting. Responsible action is neither determined from the outset nor defined once and for all; instead, it is born in the given situation. The point is not to apply a principle that eventually will be shattered by reality anyway, but to discern what is necessary or 'commanded' in a given situation. One must observe, weigh, and judge the matter, all in the dangerous freedom of one's own self. One must indeed enter the sphere of relativity, in the twilight that the historical situation casts over good and evil. The self-denial often necessary for those who act responsibly is to prefer what is better over what is less good, since 'absolute good' is capable, to an even greater extent, of provoking nothing less than evil. The so-called absolute good would in such a case be bad, and that which is relatively better is 'absolutely' better than the 'absolute good.' This throws the freedom of those who act responsibly into the sharpest relief: it is freedom from servitude even to an 'absolute good'."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "History and Good [1]" in Ethics, 221-222.

The Christian as Ethical Agent

"We do not have the option to choose whether to exalt or abase ourselves, whether to save our lives or lose them, whether to take up our cross or to leave it, whether to hate our enemies or to love them, whether to accept suffering in the discipleship of Christ. We are not - to use one of Barth's favorite images - Hercules at the crossroads with a liberum arbitrium. There is no general principle or symbol of the cross about which we can deliberate and choose. Instead, we stand under the sign and direction of the cross because that cross is the cross of Jesus Christ and because God in Jesus Christ stood there first, in obedience and humility. We stand there because Jesus Christ is both the subject and the object of the election of God and because we are elect in him. Moreover, this existence under the cross is, for Barth, not a yoke of servitude that the Christian must bear because God wills it. It represents rather God's call 'into the freedom of the children of God, into a following of the freedom and the work in which God Himself is God.' It is only because Jesus Christ is the electing and elected Son of God who suffers and dies in love and freedom and obedience and humility that we are 'called and empowered in fellowship with Him to choose the humility which is natural to the children of God'."

- Paul Nimmo, "Barth and the Christian as Ethical Agent" in Commanding Grace, 237.

Speech Therapy (Week Two)

As I sat in the airport terminal last Friday to write my first blog post about speech therapy, I was convinced that initial post would be the most arduous to write. Unfortunately, I was very mistaken. This past week has proven to be the most difficult for me in a variety of ways. I guess you could say that real life has finally penetrated its way into my three week therapy bubble. And it has taken its toll.

Over the past two weeks, my life has been consumed by speech therapy and at-home speech practices. Every single day, I get better and better at the many exercises and tools that my speech therapist has given me to improve my fluency. But the end result of fluency doesn't come instantly. There is not a sudden flip of a switch inside your brain or your vocal tract to produce complete fluency. Moreover, it is not simply putting the procedures into place. The path to fluency includes overcoming all of the emotional factors - the fear, anxiety, and shame of stuttering.

I noticed that since Thursday evening, I have not been doing as well in my moments of disfluency like I have been in the past. When we have a moment of stutter, we are supposed to use this practice called freezing. Basically, instead of pushing through the stutter and engaging with it in order to "push out" a word, you are supposed to stop, and ease into the sound. That probably sounds like no big deal, right? Well, it is. You relax your upper body, focus on your breathing, relax your throat muscles, inhale, and ease into the sound. This takes time. And practice. Constant practice of overturning old habits. Instead of pushing through stutters or avoiding something I want to say, every conversation requires me to say exactly what I intend to say and engage in new behaviors. It is something like sanctification for speech. Unlearning bad habits and engaging in new ones. Facing my feared words and not backing down, even when I know I just entered a moment of stutter. Sometimes I fail miserably at freezing and it an unnatural lengthy pause occurs in a conversation so I can get out the sound.

I know overturning these old habits are for my benefit. But they create new fears. Will I ever get better at this? Will the moments of disfluency ever get shorter? Will the seconds for easing into a vowel sound ever decrease? When will they stop feeling like small eternities?

Moreover, the issue of minimizing the emotional factors in a moment of stutter is an even greater battle. Somewhere along the way in the past two weeks, I realized that one of the largest obstacles to fluency is the fear of other's opinion of me. Whenever I get into a moment of stutter, even with my closest friends, I feel extremely guilty. I am making them wait. What do they think of me right now? Do they think I'm not intelligent? Do they think that I am weird? Why does this make me feel so alienated from my audience? Will they feel uncomfortable and try to end this conversation? When will I stop having this inner dialogue and simply not care what other people think of me?

I found myself, starting yesterday, actually apologizing in my moment of stutter. I offer a quick "sorry" in the period of pauses. And then eventually, I get the sound out. But in essence, I realized that I'm apologizing for who I am. I keep apologizing because I'm essentially begging my audience not to judge me, and to believe that I am just like them.

But I'm not like them. And I never will be. Obviously stuttering is an actual disability. However, I never imagined that spiritual transformation would come through an attempt to confront my stuttering. Every conversation presents a new opportunity to forfeit my idolatry and work on improving my fluency. That part is more painful than getting my vocal tract to finally produce a sound.

At the end of this week, I find myself amazed again at the way in which God has used my disability to reveal my continuous theology of glory. But conversation after conversation, I am reminded that the God of the cross dwells with the lowly, the humble, and the least of them.

Speech Therapy (Week One)

Before I begin to write about the past week, I need to offer a few disclaimers and apologies. First, I intend to write part two of "Knowledge of God and Holiness" sometime in the next week. I have not had a lot of free time in the past week and any time I might have had left over has been spent sleeping (exhaustion isn't even an appropriate word for my continual state this week!). Second, I apologize to the few people who commented on my blog this week to whom I have yet to reply. I hope to do so this weekend. Finally, this post is part of my assignment for my speech therapy program. It promises to be incredibly honest so I hope you bear with me as I adjust to this new degree of transparency.

Let's start at the beginning. My name is Kait and I stutter. That is what I have been trained to say this week in my speech therapy program. We call this "advertising." See, I started a speech therapy program this week and it has quite dramatically changed my life. When I began this program, I thought I would simply learn the skills to speak more fluently. Little did I know it would transform how I see myself. Even though most people can't even tell that I stutter, my speech plagues me. I have tremendous difficulty reading in front of people. I am usually unable to say names that begin with vowels. This becomes all the more burdensome when I can't even say the name of my best friend on most days without a tremendous amount of "pushing" and anxious-filled struggling. When I walked through the doors of the speech fluency program in Boston on Monday morning, I was confident that I would be the one person for whom the program would not work. I was the only female in the program out of six males. Throughout the day, my speech therapist pointed out my stutters in places I didn't even notice. Let's just say there were a lot. Would the average person notice them? No. I don't usually repeat the beginning of words but rather use short or long pauses. But my speech therapist can hear and see everything. In her presence, I am totally exposed. It was one of the most difficult days of my life. I left speech therapy that afternoon, called my Mom, and just started weeping. Is this what my parents sacrificed thousands of dollars for, so I could be crushed and feel more hopeless than I already did about my speech? My Mom offered her usual words of encouragement. I calmed down, drove home, and did my homework in hopes that perhaps I wouldn't be the total lost cause that I believed myself to be.

I returned the next day. Little did I know that this day would change my life. My speech therapist told us that morning that it is not a question of if a word will come out, but when. She told us that the difference between a "severe" stutterer and a "mild" stutterer is the amount of time it takes to recover from a moment of disfluency. But you see, this was news to me. My greatest obstacles are vowels. I can remember times in the past where I tried to push out vowels for up to twenty seconds with no success. These moments of failure eventually made me believe that every time I spoke, there was always the possibility that I would not physically be able to say a particular word. But my speech therapist told us that we do have the physical ability to say any word; it is all about minimizing the moment of disfluency. To me, this was like gospel. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. nAt this point, I didn't care HOW long it took me to say any particular word; I realized that I had the ability to say any word at all! It was just a matter of getting there. With her one sentence, one of the greatest lies in my head that made me feel hopeless and helpless was overturned. This is why I am here.

But to be honest, that wasn't even enough for me. While this was a huge moment of breakthrough for me, I still had what seemed like endless fears, questions, and insecurities. At times, it took every ounce of self-control to keep from bursting into tears (I never did, thankfully). Following this life-changing Tuesday morning, I walked to the elevator to go to lunch by myself. Waiting for the elevator, my speech therapist walked up to me and said, "do you want to eat lunch with me?" What I wanted to do was cry and tell her that I would buy her caviar if she would agree to talk to me one-on-one at lunch, but thankfully I just offered a short "yes." As we stepped into the elevator she said to me, "I want you to tell me every fear you have, every question you have, and anything else that is on your mind. I can tell you have so much going on inside your head." There are moments in your life that you can feel the tangible grace of the Lord. This moment might have been in my top three. In that hour, my speech therapist felt like my priest. I confessed everything to her. I told her every fear, question, and insecurity I had about my speech. She answered everything. She encouraged me. She was honest with me. And that hour left a mark on me.

The rest of the week included so many details and events that I don't have the time to tell you about. But day by day, these six other students and myself are slowly learning to accept ourselves as stutterers. As much as I want to change myself, I can't. All the speech therapy in the world is not a cure for the fact that I stutter. But this week has taught me that I am not a victim. This does not have to control me. With patience, perseverance, and a tremendous amount of hard work, I can manage my stutter.

I will be in speech therapy for the next two weeks. I hope to write a blog post at the end of each week of therapy. After that, I will undergo two months of at-home follow-up therapy. I can't say that there won't be days where I will feel defeated. Motor training is one of the most difficult things I have ever done. But one thing I do know: it has to come out. And it will. One word at a time.

Knowledge of God and Holiness (Part 1)

A few weeks ago, I was conversing with Jeremy about the relationship between one's personal piety and their ability to engage in the theological task. Since college, I have often wondered about the connection between the words and deeds of the individual and the ability to think properly about any given subject (I blame this on reading Paul Johnson's Intellectuals in college). My intention is not to put forth one giant ad hominem against any particular philosopher or theologian. Rather, I genuinely wonder if anyone, especially myself, can possess the ability to think properly and rightly about an object of inquiry if these same persons are engaged in habitual and intentional immoral behavior. Let's break it down: can you have repeated affairs on your spouse and do theology? What bearing does your affair have upon your cognitive faculties and your ability to understand the object of theology, Jesus Christ?

If there is no connection whatsoever between proper knowledge of God and personal behavior, what keeps the theologian from engaging in any type of corrupt behavior that shares no identity with the message of the Gospel? And if there is a connection between proper knowledge of God and personal behavior, what hope is there for any creature? Romans 3:23 never seems to go away, no matter how much you try to forget it.

Throughout the past few weeks, in between watching more episodes of The Wire than I'd care to admit, I have been reading T.F. Torrance. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I have been reading The Mediation of Christ. The following excerpt verbalized nearly everything that I have wondered and considered concerning the connection between knowledge and behavior for the task of theology (though Torrance notes that some argue for the necessary connection in all disciplines). It is quite powerful:

"All genuine knowledge involves a cognitive union of the mind with its object, and calls for the removal of any estrangement or alienation that may obstruct or distort it. This is a principle that applies to all spheres of knowledge, and not simply to our knowledge of God. I have sometimes argued that a person can be a good scientist or mathematician without being morally upright. All of us, I suppose, are aware of scientists or mathematicians who are not morally good people, and perhaps of some who are quite immoral or depraved. A number of years ago, when I ventured to say to a group of scientists, mathematicians and theologians that while an immoral person could be a good mathematician he could not be a good theologian, an eminent mathematician, Professor Gonseth, objected. He insisted that a good mathematician had to be dedicated to integrity and rigour which could not but affect his whole character. In fact he claimed that mathematics induces what he called 'a sanctity of mind'. That was certainly true in his case, and in the case of many others to whom we might refer, not to speak of outstanding people like Pascal, Clerk Maxwell, or Einstein.

Nevertheless, it is largely true that mathematics, where we are concerned with impersonal or abstract truth, our personal being is relatively unaffected. That is not the case in our relations with other persons which are mutually modifying. In fact we are not really able to know other people except in so far as we enter into reciprocal relations with them through which we ourselves are affected, that is, in friendship. If it is a fundamental principle that we may know something only in accordance with its nature, then we may know it only as we allow its nature to prescribe to us the mode of knowing appropriate to it and to determine or us the way in which we must consciously behave toward it. Personal beings require from us, therefore, personal modes of knowledge and behaviour, that is, the kind of knowledge that comes through a rapproachement or communication of minds characterised by mutual respect, trust and love. It cannot be otherwise with our knowledge of God. If we are really to know God in accordance with his nature as he discloses himself to us, we require to be adapted in our knowing and personal relations toward him - that is why we cannot know God without love, and if we are estranged without being reconciled to him. Knowing God requires cognitive union with him in which our whole being is affected by his love and holiness. It is the pure in heart who see God.

That God may be known only in a godly way, in accordance with his nature as God, is an emphasis that one finds in whole areas of Christian theology, especially in ancient times. I have in mind what is sometimes called the tradition of ascetic theology in the patristic period, where stress was laid upon the need for askesis or spiritual discipline in mind and life promoting a way of understanding of God that is worthy of him. To know God and be holy, to know God and worship, to know God and be cleansed in mind and soul from anything that may come between people and God, to know God and be committed to him in consecration, love and obedience, go inseparably together. That is to say, ascetic theology sought to put into serious effect the fact that the knowledge and vision of God involve cognitive union with him in accordance with his nature as holy love, in which reconciliation and communion with God through Christ and under the purifying impact of the Holy Spirit are progressively actualised in the renewal and transformation of human patterns of life and thought. The closer people draw near to God, the more integrated their spiritual and physical existence becomes, and the more integrated their spiritual and physical existence becomes, the closer they may draw near to God in mind and being in ways that are worthy of him."

- T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 34-36.

This leaves me with a few thoughts:

1. If Barth is correct and revelation is the reconciling event of the personal encounter with the Triune God, what necessary consequences should the Church expect in terms of one's behavior and morality? To be clear, I am not arguing that the subjective aspects of one's response to the Gospel or any other subjective element within the person should determine the objective reality of their election in Christ. I don't think I have to explain how dangerous it can be to allow this to happen and to let the noetic factors determine the ontic reality of election in Jesus Christ.

2. What hope is there for anyone, especially myself, if there is such a necessary connection between knowledge of God and morality (i.e. sanctification)? There is no degree of false humility when I confess that sometimes I feel like the chief of sinners. How can anyone faithfully witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ unless they truly know and encounter the object of faith in Jesus Christ? And how can anyone confess that they have truly known and encountered Jesus Christ if their lives are marked by any degree of sin, rebellion, corruption, and intentional depravity?

Stay tuned . . .

Of Gods and Men*

If ever I doubted the power of film, I was proven terribly wrong on Tuesday evening. Of Gods and Men left so many impressions and the deep theological issues addressed seemed overwhelming at times. But oddly enough, the one thing that I took away from this film more than any other is the profound urgency and necessity for intentional Christian communities.


*My apologies for the false posting a few days ago. I realized too late that it is nearly impossible to blog from an iPad and my computer was in the shop. The iPad was returned.