Benedict XVI — a reading between the lines

September 23rd, 2011 by Charles Cameron

We are seeing prophets and apostles coming forth for a strategic reason. … We are about to move from the dispensation of grace to the dispensation of dominion. We are about to see Jesus, not as the suffering lamb that was slain, but the roaring Lion who is King!

If we’d be well-advised to follow Pope Benedict’s further utterances, we should also take note of sources like the Elijah list, and critical considerations of the movement, like those posted on such Evangelical sites as Herescope.

*

Please note that I am not saying that Benedict’s remarks were directed specifically at the New Apostolic Reformation — they were diplomatic and highly generalized for good reason — merely that the NAR is a prominent, if not the preeminent, manifestation of the kind of shift that Benedict is talking about. The second section of this analysis, in other words, is simply one person’s attempt to “read between the lines”…

And did I really just promise to write a series of posts on demographic and doctrinal shifts within Christianity?

Also in the pipeline, a series on the psychological impact of ritual and ceremonial, whether of state, military or religious origin, and a series on the “other wing” of AQ’s jihad, the Ghazwa-e-Hind hadith, Pakistan’s ISI and related matters.

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Posted in 21st century, Apocalyptic, Benedict XVI, Charles Cameron, christianity, Religion, Theology, Uncategorized | 13 comments

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  1. Mr. X:

    September 23rd, 2011 at 9:55 pm

    I’m thinking here of the very large reception by Southern Baptists and other Protestants that greeted Hilarion as an envoy of Partriarch Kirill last year at Southwestern Theological Seminary in Dallas. It seems mainline Protestants either have a choice of dissolving into broad evangelicalism or becoming more (c)atholic or even returning to Orthodoxy, something parts of the Church of England in particular has flirted with at times. The alternative seems to be dissolution.

  2. Mr. X:

    September 23rd, 2011 at 9:58 pm

    http://www.mospat.ru/en/2011/02/13/news36219/
    text of his remarks

    http://orthocath.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/metropolitan-hilarion-alfeyev-lecture-in-dallas/
    more here

  3. Lexington Green:

    September 24th, 2011 at 3:07 pm

    I tend to think that the "first mover" phase of evangelization may look very anarchic, but as any such community matures, it will need "institutional depth, … rationality … dogmatic content, and … stability."  At that stage, there are very few places to go to get what you need.  Benedict’s successor, hopefully from one of these "new" places, will have to be prepared and equipped to respond to these needs, charitably and diplomatically.  

  4. seydlitz89:

    September 24th, 2011 at 11:42 pm

    Charles-
    Nice post, very much to ponder . . . 

  5. Charles Cameron:

    September 25th, 2011 at 8:24 pm

    Thanks, Seydlitz:
    .
    There are some commonalities between so-called "fundamentalist" strains (meaning here the "contemporary militant and political religious movements which have organized in reaction to the prevailing patterns of modernization in their respective societies" that are the topic of Martin Marty and Scott Appleby‘s 5-volume Fundamentalism Project) across religions — the FP itself includes case studies from within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Confucianism — as there are between their various contemplative traditions (Hassidic, Benedictine, Sufi, Advaita, Zen, Taoist etc), and even a two-dimensional map of the territory would accordingly need to include one axis that extended from the most literal to the most mystical and another axis for the religions and their various sects themselves…
    .
    Finding the attitudes towards war and peace or militancy and pacifism within different areas of that grid would be an instructive and necessarily subtle exercise.

  6. Charles Cameron:

    September 25th, 2011 at 8:30 pm

    Lex:
    .
    I was indeed hoping that you would comment — my thanks for a most diplomatic response. 

  7. Lexington Green:

    September 25th, 2011 at 11:10 pm

    The Holy Spirit is at work, all the time, in ways beyond our comprehension.  We need to respond to that with charity and humility and hope.  Great things can happen, and will happen.  

  8. J.ScottShipman:

    September 26th, 2011 at 1:25 am

    Hi Lex,
    .
    I wish there were a "like" button.
    .
    I sent Charles via email this quote attributed to Clement: "We can form some notion of what he  is not by method of negation, a process of dialectical regress analogous to that used when we think of a geometric point. To conceive of a point we must take away all magnitude, all physical qualities, all dimensions of height, breadth, and length, until nothing is left but position. Abstract positions and only the idea of unity remains. We must follow this road to the knowledge of God, stripping off all corporeal, and indeed incorporeal, notions at the last casting ourselves into the greatness of Christ for the first ascent to the Unconditional. Lest we think of God as the first in a series of numbers, we must affirm (as Philo had done) that God is "beyond the One and beyond the Monad."
    .
    The Alpha & Omega have other analogous dialectic brothers—the Lion and the Lamb from Revelation 5, for instance.
    .
    Great things continue to happen, we’ve much to be thankful for—including this forum and the generous and thoughtful commenters.

  9. Lexington Green:

    September 26th, 2011 at 1:43 am

    "…stripping off all corporeal, and indeed incorporeal, notions…"  Yes, but Jesus Christ, the incarnate word of God, has given us a corporeal starting point, a reaching into history of God’s love in tangible form, to lift us up and fortify us and get us started on the road toward this humanly unknowable being in whom "we live and move and have our being."  

  10. J.ScottShipman:

    September 26th, 2011 at 2:01 am

    Hi Lex,
    .
    Concur, but I loved Clement’s insight—completely unexpected.
    .
    Recently I heard a message based on Revelation 5—this quote only reinforced the potential.

  11. Charles Cameron:

    September 26th, 2011 at 3:06 am

    Scott:
    .
    I’m very glad to read you here, too…
    .
    Henry Chadwick would have been one of the Canons of Christ Church, my college at Oxford, and a Regius professor of Theology while I was there — and was likely one of the elders who questioned me about Bach at my viva voce for entrance to the college — he was keenly interested in music, and the college chapel at Christ Church is also the Oxford cathedral, with a noted choir.
    .
    Clement of Alexandria‘s position described here is that of apophatic theology, whose converse, cataphatic theology, makes the point Lex also makes — and which Chadwick makes in the sentences immediately preceding the ones you quote:

    Words cannot express and the mind cannot grasp what God is. That is why revelation is through the Son, who is the Alpha and Omega and the limit of our knowledge: the supreme Father transcends the possibility of our understanding.

    and those immediately following:

    The via negativa brings Clement near to the point of an agnosticism that sees all utterance about God as symbol that may be subjectively useful to the user but may also have no objective correspondence with reality. This is not Clement’s intention. He does not forget to emphasize that ‘the greatness of Christ’ is that on which the believer trusts for the knowledge of God. He is in part motivated by an anxiety to vindicate revelation: God, he says, is so utterly transcendent that we can know nothing at all about him except by grace.

    The "negative" or "apophatic" approach is especially highly regarded in the Eastern Churches to which Mr X pointed us above.

  12. Michael Robinson:

    September 26th, 2011 at 12:23 pm

    Clearly concerns such have spread in to the mainstream: this morning a NY Times opinion piece considers the significance of the ‘antichrist’ and the ‘end of times’ in US politics: 
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/opinion/why-the-antichrist-matters-in-politics.html?ref=opinion

  13. J.ScottShipman:

    September 26th, 2011 at 2:24 pm

    Hi Charles,
    .
    Thanks for filling out the quote and the link to Chadwick’s wiki entry—quite a mind.
    .
    The book was very good and I think I ordered a used copy, but need to make sure.