Deus Misereatur

The Asian Assembly of God theologian, Simon Chan, has written an excellent book, "Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community". Early on as he writes about the importance of Ecclesiology, he comments on Cyprian's dictum: "He who has not the Church as his mother, has not God for his father." Chan states: "We are not saved as individuals first & then incoporated into the church; rather, to be a Christian is to be incorporated into the church by baptism & nourished with the spiritual food of the body & blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Failure to understand this fact has led to a reduction of the church's role to a largely sociological one of a service provider catering to individual believers' spiritual needs" (24). This reductionistic trend is one that Philip Lee, in Against the Protestant Gnostics , pictured when he described the modern Protestant congregation as 'the church of & for the individual.' Le...

Scottish theologian, T.F. Torrance, wrote: "Arians operated with the principle that what they could not humanly conceive could not be. That is to say, they equated the limits of their understanding with the limits of reality, and thereby laid down conditions for their understanding of God and their interpretation of divine revelation. It became increasingly evident to the Nicene theologians, however, that all such ways of thought shattered themselves upon the transcendent Lordship of the Holy Spirit which means that God can be known only through and out of himself" (The Trinitarian Faith, 207). It seems to me that this is part of our struggle today: God as I understand him/her/it from within myself, my comprehension, my experience; contrasted with God as he reveals himself, known only through and out of himself : "No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared him" (John 1.18). The question is how...