The Elephant in the Sacramental Family Room

It is a curiosity that the offering and reception of Holy Communion among Australian Lutheran Communities in the last hundred years has undergone significant change.

 It was not uncommon even one or two generations ago for a person to be offered communion only four times a year. These days weekly communion is not uncommon, and fortnightly communion is perhaps the norm.

Of course the application of a strict interpretation of the Augsburg Confession would have communion offered every Sunday, every Saint’s Day, and whenever the faithful ask for it.

The curiosity is that this teaching could fall so far from memory, and that the relative recovery of the frequent offering of communion could have the feel of novelty.

But there are bigger curiosities.

Consider Private Confession and Absolution.

Here’s a practice, based in the Gospel, that is promoted with vigor in the Lutheran Confessions. The Augsburg Confession, the Smalcald Articles, the Large Catechism, and, to me, most significantly of all, the Small Catechism put Private Confession and Absolution front and center in the life of the Christian. Although Luther would not assert that anyone be forced to use this practice, his vehement denunciation of those who refuse to use it is startling.

Yet…go the length and breadth of the LCA, and see how many congregations will you find that publicly offer a regular time and place where Private Confession and Absolution is offered.

Or ask the average congregation member what they know about it, as it is taught in the Small Catechism.

Or consider how many people who regularly receive Holy Communion who have never used Private Confession and Absolution.

Curious.

My own opinion – and I have to tell you that I’m rather fond of my own opinions (and you are, after all, reading this on a voluntary basis – unless there’s something you’re not telling me) – is that the fact that there has been a resurgence in the offering of Holy Communion in the LCA with no concomitant resurgence in the offering of Private Confession and Absolution is a cause for pastoral concern.

In particular, I think a Christ-given opportunity for burdened and sin-addicted people to receive the great comfort and life-transforming power of the absolution spoken into the context of confession is being lost, and that the reception of communion is somehow subjectively diminished in its unifying power.

I sometimes wonder whether God lets people leave the LCA to go to churches with less than encouraging sacramental teaching and practice because the opportunity to experience personal accountability for, and freedom from, particular sins is denied them when the office of the keys is not personally applied.

  

 

 

Karl Marx and Young Couples in Love

Regarding my previous post: it’s not that I want unfairly to stick it to Karl Marx. In fact there something about his writing that I find irresistible. 

Take, for example, this tasty nugget, from The German Ideology: 

‘In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.’ 

I first read this back as an undergraduate at the University of Sydney in the late 80’s. The approach outlined in this single paragraph has been seeping into my whole way of thinking since then. 

So these days, for example, when I consider the dramatic changes that have occurred in the shape of courtship, marriage, and family life in Australia since I was born (1969), I don’t think too much in terms of material life-process being shaped primarily by changing ideology, but of ideology being shaped by the changing material life-process. I think of consciousness being shaped by life. What do I mean? 

This is what I mean: Would the idea (the consciousness, if you like) that it’s OK to live together before marriage – so common now as to be not just the norm but the expectation (including, so it sometimes seems, in the church) - have happened without the sterilization of sex through the pill and other means of contraception, and the backup of contraception failure by easily accessed abortion?  I think: No. 

I don’t think that all ideology can be explained in terms of the material life-process. That sort of reductionism doesn’t shine the shell on my neighbour's terrapin (as they say in the classics). But there’s something going on here. And to try and see what’s happening with pre-marriage cohabitation as primarily being the result of a revolution of ideas doesn’t seem to fit the reality for me.

And an another track: I have often thought about Marx's The German Ideology in relation to the Incarnation. Christian teaching on the Trinity, on Justification, on, well, name just about any doctrine, is the direct result of Christ's proclamation, in the flesh, of the Gospel, and meditation on the meaning of Christ's flesh in light of his proclamation. Christian consciousness comes from the flesh and blood life of Christ.

And dare I say that in a sense Christ's teaching develops in the body of Christ, the Church? That Christian consciousness, seen from this viewpoint, necessarily involves the life of the growing body?

Well, enough for this afternoon.

Karl Marx Denounces Lion for Eating Antelope

After being castigated (well..chided) for my ‘wet bridal dress competition video,’ I said that I would resume my idiosyncratic blogging. 

So here goes: 

Has anyone else out there wondered where Karl Marx’s sometimes incandescent moral indignation came from? I mean, how would Marx, according to his own way of thinking, have explained his prophet-like denunciation of economic and social inequality?

As I understand it, Marx thought he was doing science. He thought communism was, according to the laws of science, historically inevitable. He ridiculed bourgeois morality, especially as it was (sometimes tenuously) based in religious mystery.

But whence his own morality? A scientist doesn’t moralize about photosynthesis. Or denounce a lion for eating an antelope.

What was going on?

Why You Should Get Married in Church

Just watch this.