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The Order of Reality: Time, Space, and Vocation

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The nature of Christian apologetics has changed in ways that reflect our cultural situation. Whereas an earlier generation approached the apologetic task as the engagement and resolution of certain ideas set in opposition to the claims of the Christian faith, our world works with a particular set of problems. These problems, real or imagined, tend to provoke the creation of new tribes and conspicuously ritual religions that are united in their rejection of the Christian religion. Apologetics has become focused on ethics.

This new challenge opens up an avenue for Reformed theology to recover the ritual nature of the Christian faith in keeping with advances taking place in biblical studies, Church history and historical theology, systematic theology, and the reconsideration of ancient philosophy. There is an urgent need in our day for theologians to press forward into a subject area often assumed but set aside: “theory,” by which we mean a vision of reality in its ordered relations, nature, and purpose. In its programmatic interest in matters of time, space, and vocation, Leviticus provides a kind of catechism of reality which Christians embrace by faith as the true world

Reflecting on the ways this is so accentuates ways the Church must proclaim the good news of the incarnation, ministry, and centrality of the Lord Jesus Christ to a people harried and overworked (time); deeply displaced, homeless, and lacking in practical appreciation of the necessity of the church assembly (space); and confused over the nature and integrity of male and female natures and relations, as well as the value and purpose of ordinary callings, in a culture pushing for a new disembodied Gnosticism (vocation). Positively, the biblical and theological beauty of the order of reality enchants and suffuses Christian experience with its rootedness in the new creation that has come and is coming in Jesus Christ. This course module explores Christian theory, including the liturgical cosmology of creation and consummation as it bears upon the meaning of humanity within the sure and ordered purposes of God.

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The nature of Christian apologetics has changed in ways that reflect our cultural situation. Whereas an earlier generation approached the apologetic task as the engagement and resolution of certain ideas set in opposition to the claims of the Christian faith, our world works with a particular set of problems. These problems, real or imagined, tend to provoke the creation of new tribes and conspicuously ritual religions that are united in their rejection of the Christian religion. Apologetics has become focused on ethics.

This new challenge opens up an avenue for Reformed theology to recover the ritual nature of the Christian faith in keeping with advances taking place in biblical studies, Church history and historical theology, systematic theology, and the reconsideration of ancient philosophy. There is an urgent need in our day for theologians to press forward into a subject area often assumed but set aside: “theory,” by which we mean a vision of reality in its ordered relations, nature, and purpose. In its programmatic interest in matters of time, space, and vocation, Leviticus provides a kind of catechism of reality which Christians embrace by faith as the true world

Reflecting on the ways this is so accentuates ways the Church must proclaim the good news of the incarnation, ministry, and centrality of the Lord Jesus Christ to a people harried and overworked (time); deeply displaced, homeless, and lacking in practical appreciation of the necessity of the church assembly (space); and confused over the nature and integrity of male and female natures and relations, as well as the value and purpose of ordinary callings, in a culture pushing for a new disembodied Gnosticism (vocation). Positively, the biblical and theological beauty of the order of reality enchants and suffuses Christian experience with its rootedness in the new creation that has come and is coming in Jesus Christ. This course module explores Christian theory, including the liturgical cosmology of creation and consummation as it bears upon the meaning of humanity within the sure and ordered purposes of God.

The nature of Christian apologetics has changed in ways that reflect our cultural situation. Whereas an earlier generation approached the apologetic task as the engagement and resolution of certain ideas set in opposition to the claims of the Christian faith, our world works with a particular set of problems. These problems, real or imagined, tend to provoke the creation of new tribes and conspicuously ritual religions that are united in their rejection of the Christian religion. Apologetics has become focused on ethics.

This new challenge opens up an avenue for Reformed theology to recover the ritual nature of the Christian faith in keeping with advances taking place in biblical studies, Church history and historical theology, systematic theology, and the reconsideration of ancient philosophy. There is an urgent need in our day for theologians to press forward into a subject area often assumed but set aside: “theory,” by which we mean a vision of reality in its ordered relations, nature, and purpose. In its programmatic interest in matters of time, space, and vocation, Leviticus provides a kind of catechism of reality which Christians embrace by faith as the true world

Reflecting on the ways this is so accentuates ways the Church must proclaim the good news of the incarnation, ministry, and centrality of the Lord Jesus Christ to a people harried and overworked (time); deeply displaced, homeless, and lacking in practical appreciation of the necessity of the church assembly (space); and confused over the nature and integrity of male and female natures and relations, as well as the value and purpose of ordinary callings, in a culture pushing for a new disembodied Gnosticism (vocation). Positively, the biblical and theological beauty of the order of reality enchants and suffuses Christian experience with its rootedness in the new creation that has come and is coming in Jesus Christ. This course module explores Christian theory, including the liturgical cosmology of creation and consummation as it bears upon the meaning of humanity within the sure and ordered purposes of God.

Lectures

Full Course | 25 hours

Section 1: Levitical Foundations of Christian Theory
This series of lectures explores Leviticus as catechism for reality for the covenant people of God, as properly theory rather than pre-philosophical or mythological (a la Hegel), and its relationship to ancient near eastern cuneiform philosophy. As catechism for reality, Leviticus provides a framework for reading the entire canon of Holy Scripture as well as a foundation for appreciating the ritual nature of reality, human nature and experience, and the Church’s faith, hope, and ministry. This includes commending theological and canonical reflection on the metaphysics and theology at work in what we will call the “Levitical Quadrilateral”: holy, profane, impure, and pure (Lev. 10:10).

1. Ordered Reality: The Christological-Doxological Divine Project
1.1 An Introduction to the Meaning of Everything
1.2 Perspectives on Reality
1.3 Leviticus as Catechism of Reality
1.4 Leviticus as Catechism of Reality (continued)

2. The Non-Contingency of Christ
2.1 Two Views in Modern Biblical Studies: Salvation-Historical and Apocalyptic Readings
2.2 Christ in the Johannine Literature
2.3 Christ in the Johannine Literature (continued)

3. Family, Church, and Providential Affinities
3.1 Providential and Eschatological Witness to the Kingdom of God
3.2 Providential and Eschatological Witness to the Kingdom of God (continued)
3.3 Unfolding and Enfolding

Section 2: Sacred Time
This series of lectures explores time within the biblical ritual world with a view to the complex history of our changing concepts of time, the ordering of time for humanity within Scripture in relation to the identity and works of God, the Christology of time in relation to biblical hermeneutics, marking time as a matter of faith, our experience of time in terms of delay and waiting/patience, and the role of faithfulness in time (especially the sabbath idea) in resisting oppression of others, reducing anxiety for ourselves, and advancing the Church’s identity in the present as an alternative community in which time is experienced deliberately and theologically.

1. Waiting
1.1 Waiting and the Experience of Time
1.2 Waiting, Delay, and Gestation
1.3 Waiting for God(ot)

2. The Festal Shape of Christ: Leviticus 23
2.1 Christ and the Shape of Time
2.2 Festal Figurations
2.3 Christ as the Passing Shadow and as Reality

3. Sabbath as Resistance
3.1 Exodus and the Egyptian Order
3.2 The Tyranny of Endless Consumption and Commodification
3.3 The Sabbath and the Introduction of the Neighbor

Section 3: Sacred Space
This series of lectures explores space within the biblical ritual world with a view to the aforementioned “Levitical Quadrilateral”: holy, profane, impure, and pure (Lev. 10:10). The priority of the communal over the individualistic in Scripture’s ritual ontology is examined in relation to sanctuary space considerations including tabernacle, temple, and the church or sacred assembly, and the function of the sacraments in identifying and delimiting sacred space as a Christological-ecclesial reality. Within this overall vision, the theological meaning and existential phenomenon of “home” (including nostalgia) for human persons is unpacked and explored with a view to the enervating aimlessness and fundamentally detached character of contemporary life.

1. Home
1.1 Preliminaries for the Contours of God’s Abiding
1.2 Constructing the Place of God’s Abiding
1.3 The Sense of Home

2. Thirdspace
2.1 History of Spatial Theory
2.2 Thirdspace and the Ascension; Prosopological Exegesis
2.3 Thirdspace in Paul and Hebrews

3. The Body of Jesus Christ
3.1 Hebrews 12: A Cloud of Witnesses and Firstfruits
3.2 Contested Spaces
3.3 The Body of Jesus Christ

Section 4: Sacred Vocation
This series of lectures explores human identity and nature within the biblical ritual world by exploring male and female as vocational realities. This will include a recounting of the story of theological anthropology, including the Boethian legacy of viewing the human person as a “what” among other “whats” in creation. Appreciating the Christological intention in that Boethian legacy, we will propose a counter-vision in which the human person, distinct as divine image-bearers within creation, are most fundamentally a “who” in a world of “whats.” Human persons are those in whom the historical and eschatological purpose of the triune God are figures historically, physiologically, and liturgically in terms of an elemental, “all the way down” sexuate rather than merely sexual significance of our being either male or female, a conviction with great consequences for contemporary debates over gender, domestic life, and the dynamics of life within the Church.

1. Woman as Figural Confluence of Time, Space, and Vocation
1.1 Personhood
1.2 The Levitical Woman
1.3 Womb as Microcosm

2. Man, Woman, and the Way of the Lord
2.1 The End of Intimate Ambiguity: Bride, City, and Spirit
2.2 Woman as the Way: Dissolution and Reconstruction
2.3 The Unveiled Woman at Table: The Zealous Love of the Song of Songs

3. The Meaningfulness of Human Labor
3.1 Digging: Theological Reflections on Seamus Heaney’s Poem
3.2 The Intersection of Tuesday with Eternity
3.3 Inauguration and Glorious Fruitfulness