Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: And welcome to the first of the Stone Lectures for 1988. It is my happy privilege to introduce our guest lecturer for this year, Dr. Margaret Miles, who is the Bussey Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School. We've just been comparing notes and discover that we both have the tie of having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years. Dr. Miles is a graduate of the Graduate
Theological Union in the Bay Area. She is a member of the Episcopal Church. She has many awards that I could spend most of the afternoon telling you about but promised her I would not do that. I will share with you some of her book titles, however: Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture; Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality;
and Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture. The title of her Stone Lectures is Critical Tools for Revisioning and Embodying Christianity, and her lecture this afternoon is titled "The Incarnation and the Practice of Christianity." She will be lecturing twice tomorrow, at 1:30 and at 4:30, at 4:30 on Wednesday, and
the final lecture will be on Thursday at 1:30 p.m. Dr. Miles, we are indeed honored to have you come and to be our Stone Lecturer this year, and I invite you to welcome now Dr. Margaret Miles from Harvard Divinity School.
MILES: Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. The topic announced for the day has changed a little bit in the doing. You know, one gives these titles somewhat ahead of time, and then as you actually get to working on the material, they take a little different shape sometimes. The topic of the lectures as a whole is part of a larger project, in which I'm attempting to find the historical evidence that enables me to
identify how most people got their access to Christian ideas, how most people were instructed in the practice of Christianity. The next piece of that project is to see what the values and attitudes that are embedded in the practices advocated are, and finally, to assess those historical
Christian values in relation to the nuclear world in which we live and have to conduct our lives. Let's begin, then, by asking how did historical people learn to shape their lives around Christian ideas, attitudes, and values? There were, of course, many sources of instruction: religious visual images, religious drama, sermons,
hymns, Scripture, and so on; but perhaps the most important source was the devotional manuals that achieved enormous popular interest. That is evident in the many publications they went into in the years after they were written. The resources of the Christian tradition, as well as what most people now consider
the horrors of the tradition, are not so evident in theological writings as they are in these devotional manuals: the best-sellers, the self-help manuals of Christian tradition. These manuals constitute a bewildering resource for a historical theologian with contemporary interests. Theological writings from the past exhibit
neither the wealth of practical advice nor the blatantly dualistic, individualistic, and privatistic focus that characterizes much of historical devotional material. This literature, then, provides a twentieth-century historian of Christianity with remarkably rich resources for reconstructing a layperson's training in
Christianity. The devotional manuals I've worked with for information about the practices that translated Christian ideas into concrete, into people's bodies and relationships, are then the most popular. I've tried to identify what were the most popular by what seemed to be most influential before printing, and then after printing, one can tell by
the number of editions they go into. There are manuals like the fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ; Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ; John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress; the nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox manual, The Way of a Pilgrim; Erasmus's Enchiridion; and Francis de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life,
to name only a few. My interest in the literature of Christian devotion is partly personal and partly academic. As a child, growing up in a fundamentalist Baptist parsonage, my imagination was awakened and stimulated -- for better and for worse, I now think -- by an illustrated copy of The Pilgrim's Progress that was somehow always on the table beside my bed.
Moreover, as a scholar, I'm committed to learning whatever I can about the so-called "ordinary" people of the Christian West. And the historical evidence that comes closest to telling me about them are the visual images and books that were accessible to people who largely did not read or write and certainly had no specialized theological education.
Devotional manuals informed the fragile lives of people of the past. They told and showed them how to navigate the slippery banks and rushing waters of life's deep and treacherous and unmapped river. I sense their lives as I read devotional manuals, and I puzzle over ultimately unanswerable questions. How did these manuals affect the people who read and
reread them? Did these books contribute to people's awareness of the singular preciousness and beauty of human life; or did their insistent reminders of death, eternity, and judgment bleach the vividness from earth's colors and block people's recognition of the divine worth of human love? I've not been able, finally, to answer these questions, but
I have developed a respect for the historical people who undertook to live examined lives, cultivated and chosen lives. I've also learned not to presume to judge historical people whose complex circumstances I do not see in full. I have learned not to be -- to try to decide for them what ideas, attitudes, and values they should have had.
But, on the other hand, I too am a Christian, and so I'm addressed by devotional manuals from the past. I can neither read them disinterestedly nor can I simply adopt their advice. Some of their methods and practices seem to me misguided. Some seem potentially quite dangerous in the context of the world in which I live. If it means something to me,
and it does, to identify myself as within Christian tradition, then, I find I must scrutinize, analyze, and evaluate the complex inheritance to which I'm heir. A hermeneutic of generosity regarding the choices made about their own lives by historical people must not preclude a hermeneutic of suspicion in the present toward the instructions in the
practice of Christianity given in devotional manuals. Further, to adopt a critical approach seems to me to take seriously manuals that were not meant to be read for anachronistic interest but for personal use. My reading of historical devotional manuals, then, is an active and a disobedient reading, in the sense that I'm alert
to what is unintended, accidental, or so thoroughly assumed that it appears natural within the text's argument. Implications, effects, and rhetorical strategies are also clues to what underlies the text: a problem to be addressed, perhaps, or a certain religious experience for which the text proposes a method.
These textual signals help me simultaneously to understand the author's project more clearly and to assess its usefulness to me in the world in which I live. So I'm a historical theologian with contemporary interests, rather than a contemporary theologian building a theological system. The historical evidence
I have read offers some suggestions for contemporary reinterpretations of Christian tradition that I will sketch, rather than a comprehensive theory that I will argue. Also, because I'm accustomed to working with students and colleagues at the Harvard Divinity School who have very diverse ecclesiastical orientations and affiliations, I don't picture, as I think about these things,
a single denominational community, in which devotional instructions from the Christian past might function. So I will suggest, propose, sometimes argue interpretations of the Christian traditions that will necessarily need to be assigned different weights by people with different perspectives, different interests, different concerns, and different perceptions
of what constitutes the main danger faced by the global community in these last decades of the twentieth century. So instead of designing a theology, I'll try to demonstrate a method, a systematic questioning for evaluating the present usefulness of historical instruction in the practice of Christianity. The care and
cultivation of an interior life has fascinated human beings for many centuries. This is not unique to Christianity. Certainly human life contains an irreducibly high incidence of gratuitous conditions and events, but the possibly of shaping one's subjectivity and one's life in society within the wider parameters of the unexpected, unpredictable,
continues to intrigue thoughtful people. Perhaps Socrates overstated his plea for self-awareness when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"; but the alternative -- that is, reliance on one's socialization -- has frequently been experienced as confining or even as dangerous. Socrates advocated
the pursuit of philosophy as the access to an intellectually examined life. But others have said that it's not only one's disorderly and contradictory ideas that require attention. Scrutiny of the habitual practices that inevitably affect consciousness and behavior has also been repeatedly recommended. In his posthumously published book,
The Care of the Self, Michel Foucault described a "cura sui," a care of the self, developed in the first two centuries of the common era that produced what he calls an "accentuation of the relation of oneself to oneself." This "care of the self," and I quote, "took the form of an attitude, a mode of behavior. It became instilled in
ways of living. It evolved into procedures, practices, and formulas that people reflected on developed, perfected, and taught. Regimes involving diet, management of sex, physical exercise, and meditation or prayer were used to gather and focus attention and energy and to give a heightened sense of agency and responsibility --
a new relation of oneself to oneself." Practices that regulate and shape life have, in the history of the world, often been practiced by individuals or groups of people who have had the economic resources to ensure the necessary leisure for exercising a more or less fulltime cultivation of body and mind. But less privileged people have also been
concerned to weave disciplined regimes into the fabric of busy lives. In Western Christianity, a voluminous literature exists around this struggle to care for the self. These self-help manuals do not often argue theological issues. The advice they give is usually quite practical, usually concerned with changing their readers'
behavior. Altering habits, they assumed, can change perceptions and ideas, and insight is at least as likely to follow change in behavior as is change in behavior to follow insight. And so these self-help manuals give us some interesting material on the way people were instructed in the
care and cultivation of the religious self. That's the historical part. If we want, however, not only to understand historical Christianity but also want to design a Christian practice for the present, then our job becomes far more complex than simply a generous historical reading of the literature. We must, for example, analyze
the contemporary world within which a practice of Christianity is to be formulated. Thus, our task in these lectures will be simultaneously historical and constructive or contemporary. The past can inform the present, and then our analysis of the present situation must lead to a critical evaluation of traditional ideas and practices.
The history of Christianity, I think, represents both a tremendously rich resource for contemporary Christians; and it also contains ideas, values, and practices that are deeply problematic in the context of the nuclear world, and we need to identify both. Two features of the contemporary Western world make it especially, perhaps uniquely,
important and urgent for contemporary Christians to examine our practice of Christianity. First, we live in an entertainment culture. The communication media assigns to individuals the role of spectator or passive voyeur. Without the television set, few of us can sit quietly in our rooms, which was the condition that Pascal cited as
absolutely essential for any self-knowledge. Moreover, along with providing entertainment, the communication media surreptitiously conditions attitudes and behavior. It creates our self-images and creates and shapes desire by advertising consumer goods, none of which we thought we needed several years ago. All cultures, of course,
have socialized their members to think and act in ways that support the social, economic, and political arrangements. But, until recently, none has possessed the technology necessary to simultaneously inform, entertain, and condition massive populations continuously and cumulatively. The second incentive -- the second, perhaps unique, situation
that makes it imperative for us to examine our operation of the practice of Christianity is our precarious existence in a nuclear world. Human beings have always, of course, lived in peril, vulnerable at any and every moment to accident, disease, and ultimately -- and inevitably -- death. But the possibility that humans could exterminate the human race and destroy all life
on the planet has existed only in approximately the last 40 years. I'll have more to say about the complex political, environmental, and social conditions condensed in that phrase, "the nuclear world." For now, though, I want only to suggest that the nuclear threat, together with cultural conditioning to passivity in an entertainment culture, has created a
situation unique in the history of the world. As the novelist Saul Bellow wrote, "The temptation to lie down is very great." And the urgency of awareness and activity has never been greater. Now it's my conviction that historical Christians who learned, under vastly different circumstances from ours, methods for taking their
lives in their own hands -- in the best sense of that phrase -- can inspire us to do the same. However, the care and cultivation of the self cannot be an end in itself in a nuclear world. The contemporary practice of Christianity cannot have as its goal individual happiness -- or even, in traditional terms, individual salvation.
Rather, in the nuclear world, an "examined life" is a moral responsibility. A life before God in our time requires a degree of social responsibility far greater than that recognized by most historical Christian writers. Let's consider, then, some of the resources and some of the problems that we'll encounter this
week in examining historical Christian practices from a contemporary perspective. The primary source material, as I've said, is the literature of Christian devotion, the best-sellers of the Christian traditions: the most popular devotional manuals over approximately a 1500-, 1600-year period, from early Christian writings
to the early modern period, and across a wide geographical distribution. But my choice of the literature of Christian devotion as primary evidence is not solely because it's an interesting literature that people usually -- historians usually disdain, but also, it represents a protest against the preference of historians and
theologians for works of philosophical theology as sources for information about historical Christianity. The intellectual tradition of Christianity, the doctrines that summarize the essential ideas of Christian faith, and the philosophical and theological explanations of those doctrines and ideas has been understood as the primary access
to the Christianity of the past. Identification of Christian tradition with philosophical theology, however, results in a picture of the past that is both elitist and sexist. Christian intellectuals of the past were usually the most uncharacteristic members of their communities: people who had the leisure to read and write,
to think and discuss together. The great majority of historical Christians had a much more pressing and immediate need for the orientation afforded by Christian ideas and practice than for intellectual precision. The exigencies of the lives of Christian laypersons placed stern demands on their religious provisions. Most of the devotional manuals that I will refer to in these
lectures were written for Christian laypeople. They characteristically forego sophisticated theological arguments because they address people who have no specialized education in Christian theology. A few of the manuals I have worked with were initially written for monastic audiences, but their wide circulation and popular appeal in centuries following their
publication can be documented by the number of editions that they went into. Also, devotional manuals originally written for monastic audiences often became models for laypeople as well as for those with fulltime religious vocations. And I have chosen the historical resources available to Christian laypeople for a reason more urgent than the intrinsic interest
of these works. The ideal Christian life has often been thought of as the monastic life, while laypersons were seen as practicing, at best, a diluted version of that ideal life. Theologies of the laity have occasionally attempted to correct this model and to describe the important place of laypeople in Christian churches, but these have not been as influential
as the distinction between what was called "fulltime" and "part-time" Christians -- between clergy and monks, on the one hand, and laity, on the other. In short, then, if we want to understand the history of Christianity not as the history of a few philosophically inclined men but as the struggle of Christian people to live a Christian life, we need
different historical evidence than the theological treatises that have provided the intellectual histories of Christianity. Most people created meaningful life in Christian communities by the use of religious messages interpreted for them by sermons, paintings, religious dramas, so on, and the devotional manuals which were the media of people of the past. In
fact, the overriding concern of most historical Christians, monks and laypeople alike, was primarily a very practical concern: how to live a Christian life in the face of an expectation of an inevitable judgment, in which their destiny of everlasting reward or eternal punishment would be decided by an omniscient and perspective-free judge.
Historians have not yet explored rigorously enough the effect of such a belief on people of the past. Because many contemporary historians, even historical theologians, do not really subscribe to this belief, we tend to automatically discount it as the strongly motivating factor it was for those who did believe it. The effective
intensity, the passion with which historical Christians prayed, served the sick and the poor, journeyed on pilgrimage, and solicited mystical communion with Christ cannot be explained by the theological rationale accompanying those practices. Attempting to explain these religious phenomena by theological ideas is, I think, a category error
that has been repeatedly committed by historians and historical theologians. The result is that the people of the past, in modern eyes, are reduced to their ideas. Their vividness, their intensity, their passion, and their alienness from us has been glossed over. In fact, people of the past did what they did for very complex reasons, perhaps ultimately inscrutable reasons
for us, reasons that we may be more or less successful in reconstructing. Their fasts, pilgrimages, their persecution of dissidents, their rituals and visions were not primarily, I repeat, the result of their study of theology, but represent their enactment, their acting out, of religious provisions that enabled them to comprehend their lives
and make some choices about them, to achieve self-esteem, to manage social arrangements -- and ultimately they hoped to achieve eternal salvation. Historical manuals in the practice of Christianity comprise a very diverse literature, not only in the instructions given but in literary quality. The fact, however, that it is such a large and
diverse literature makes it clear that do-it-yourself manuals on how to live as a Christian were attractive to a large number of people. Each manual has a strong, vivid interpretation of Christianity, a way of construing the world and human life that is passionately held and articulately expressed. The authors of devotional manual, clergy and monks,
women and men, are people who had accepted the trouble, the discomfort, and frequently the pain of a quest for self-knowledge, who had explored their own and others' predilections and aversions and had discovered or created some methods that they found worked, some methods they found helpful for moving toward a more centered and loving life. Their methods can sometimes
give us suggestions for our own practice of Christianity, but more importantly, we can always learn from their struggle. Their work, not necessarily their conclusions, can be our models and guides for our activity of designing a contemporary practice of Christianity. On the other hand, devotional manuals of the past are very hard reading indeed for many twentieth-century Christians.
They often contain advice that contradicts our own clearest self-knowledge. Symeon the New Theologian of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, for example, describes the essence of the practice of Christianity as, quote, "fleeing the world and ridding oneself of passions," end quote. One must act, he wrote, as though, quote, "he had wholly lost his
own life." Advice like this sounds diametrically opposed to our twentieth-century preference for affirming passions, senses, and our own lives. A second difficulty arises when different and sometimes opposite instructions appear in different devotional manuals. We'll find many proposals in these manuals for organizing a Christian life, proposals that
disagree with each other completely in some cases. And I think that ultimately, though, the diversity of these proposals can also help us to recognize that a Christian life may be much more a matter of self-conscious, ongoing alertness to the need for correcting one's particular propensities -- temptations, historical Christians
called them -- than a matter of discovering universal prescriptives, equally universal and pressing on everyone who undertakes to live as a Christian. We'll ask, then, for what sort of person in what historical circumstances the author's prescription was designed. That is, in very concrete terms, who -- man or woman? Of what age, class,
physical condition or occupation -- might profit from these instructions? The manual itself may imply or state its ideal reader, but it seldom describes her. Rather, devotional manuals claim implicitly, often explicitly, to be universally valid. Their universalizing rhetoric even operates to steer the reader away from
questions, like the ones I have just suggested about the gender, social location, education, and perhaps state of health of the manual's ideal reader. Seeking to identify the historical location of authors and original ideal readers is not, however, for me, a way to imply the complete relativism of all advice in the
practice of Christianity. I do not advocate or formulate a historicism that reduces all meaning to the conditions under which it arose. It is, however, possible, I think, both to understand the text as part of a complex historical situation which has shaped the style and the content of the writing and to find that some of the insights formulated
under this historical pressure are relevant and useful for me in my historical situation, while some are not. The effort to historicize a written document becomes an evasion of engagement with that document's content only when one refuses to entertain the possibly that there might be some detachable insight, some meaning that could be translated or
reinterpreted in such a way that by it I am helped to understand my life. Reconstruction of the historical situation of the author, then, does not preclude present use of the author's insights but enables us to understand the manual more fully, to reconstruct it as living text, functioning in a human life or lives, a text
embodied in a Christian community, in which it was read and valued. But educated twentieth-century people are probably not so much tempted by our predilection for contextualizing normative statements as by our ability to entertain a variety of analyses without trying to decide which provides the most accurate and fruitful account in the context
of ourselves and our world. We can look at historical instructions and say, "Yes, this, and this, and this," without ever trying to bring it home and see what it might mean in our own context. It's the moment of appropriation we usually evade. This openness is frequently an appropriate stance. We may see -- we see many situations in both personal and public
arenas through a glass darkly. But this praiseworthy reluctance to form strong opinions on matters we do not see with clarity can also become an escape from self-knowledge. There is a more or less accessible truth about one's interior life. Just as there is a state of the body, there is a state of one's interior life.
And one actually exists in that particular state of health or malnutrition, of equilibrium or disequilibrium. This condition can, with work, be discerned, addressed, and either maintained or corrected. This is what all devotional manuals of the Christian West have to assume in order to give the kind of instructions they do. One final difficulty --
not the final difficulty, actually, but the final one I'm going to talk about today -- for twentieth-century people alerted to the existence of gender assumptions in our own culture, there is the problem of reading consistently male language in the devotional manuals of the Christian past. This language is symptomatic of the male perspective that has dominated historical writing. Now
historical people, women and men, did not have a twentieth-century sensitivity to issues of gender conditioning, the author's social location, or the inevitable operation of power relations; and it is certainly important to understand the concerns and the interest that consciously motivated their projects. Nevertheless, if their instructions in the practice of Christianity
are to be read as they intended, as offering serious advice for the cultivation of a spiritual life and a religious practice, we must not only read them for historical knowledge, but we must bring to them the questions and the issues to which our own personal and cultural experience has sensitized us. To those of us who are concerned with
orthodoxy, the acknowledgment that one can and must evaluate, judge, and even reject some aspects of Christian tradition may seem dangerous. A closer examination of historical Christianity, though, will make us aware that all that is genuinely non-traditional about the task of sorting useful from peripheral or even dangerous ideas is the
explicit acknowledgment that we are doing so. Religious leaders of the past found, focused, and emphasized aspects of Christian faith that they found useful and usable. Then, instead of critiquing and rejecting other aspects, they simply ignored them. But they adjusted the weight, the central focus, and the emotional
intensity of Christian faith in some radically new ways that responded to the religious needs of their contemporaries. The activity of continuous reappropriation, a reappropriation that includes both critique and retrieval, is what it means to participate in a tradition. The strategy employed by most theologians of the past to mask their
theological innovations was their claim to be simply identifying the "true" Christianity, or the Christianity of the "early church." There is, in short, no way to avoid the critical appropriation of Christian tradition. The only choice, I think, is whether we do so explicitly or implicitly. Moreover, there is no value-free appropriation. A
complex of personal and cultural values are always engaged in interpretation. Historical authors in the Christian traditions frequently claimed a God's-eye view, based usually on scriptural or ecclesiastical authority, yet the claim to be speaking for God often concealed a socially and institutionally privileged voice. Women, blacks, and
third-world people have only recently participated in theological discussion in large enough numbers to support each other's questions and criticisms -- to begin, that is, to construct an effective collective voice. This pluralism has created a new awareness that all human beings speak from a perspective that both informs and limits
our analyses and evaluations, our descriptions and our prescriptions. Under these conditions, the "universal" condition of human speech, we can speak about God, but no one can speak for God. Finally, a critical appropriation of Christian tradition requires that the interpreter relate her theological agenda to the world in which she works. I have, for
example, referred to "the nuclear world." The fact that we exist in a global crisis, unique in the history of the world, seems to me the most pressing aspect of the present situation and needs most to be taken into account in examining present religious practices. Yet the nuclear world is perhaps only the most vivid presenting
symptom. The capacity to exterminate the human race and destroy the biosphere may be the bottom line of the global crisis, but it functions, in my usage, to represent a complex of interrelated geopolitical policies and world problems, such as hunger, population, ecology, exploitation and oppression of all kinds, and unjust
distribution of wealth. Unless the relationship of a Christian practice to this complex I call the nuclear world can be demonstrated, we are in danger, either of cultivating a dead religion or of participating in religious practices that are narcissistic and escapist. Moreover, the fact that nuclear weapons were invented in the predominantly Christian West
I think places upon us a heavy responsibility to examine the tradition, both for its destructive aspects and for its resources for the present. The nuclear world is at least partly the product of a tradition in which human bodies have not been sufficiently valued. In spite of doctrines of creation, incarnation, and resurrection of the body that
would seem to affirm human body-selves, oddly, these central tenets of Christian faith do not seem as characteristic of Christianity as centuries of practical advice to deny, despise, and even to damage one's own body in harsh ascetic practices. The notion of human transcendence, usually interpreted as the soul's transcendence over the body,
and the human transcendence over the material conditions of human life has created some endemic problems in the Christian West, problems that perhaps have become only fully visible and urgently pressing in the contemporary world. One might even ask, "Why look for resources for a nuclear world in a tradition that has fostered contempt for living bodies
and the natural world?" It is my conviction that, just as human beings do not personally choose the problems we inherit, we similarly don't create, ex nihilo, the tools with which to confront the problems we have inherited. People do not create in the same way that the Hebrew Bible describes God's creation, out of nothing. Our creativity -- and it is a
real creativity -- can be exercised by finding and pressing into service tools that are unused or underdeveloped, perhaps, in Christian tradition. As participants in a very small world, as members of an endangered species, we have a responsibility to success any resources, ideas, images, or practices that can be identified in Christian tradition for addressing the
mammoth problems of the nuclear world. These may be resources that have perhaps never been given adequate expression or articulated in such a way that people found them compelling. Or perhaps, like the doctrines I mentioned, they have been given forceful historical expression, but their contemporary relevance needs to be specified. In addition to surveying the history of
Christianity for resources, we also need to explore the religious significance -- the religious significance -- of contemporary activities we usually think of as secular: political engagement, peace and justice activism, participation in the women's movement or in environmental concern groups. And we must incorporate suggestions from other religious traditions that have valued the natural
world more consistently and more articulately than has Christianity. Our attitude in seeking resources within Christianity cannot be one of confident assurance that the resources we locate, the resources of a tradition that has contributed to the creation of a nuclear world -- I don't say is wholly responsible, but has contributed --
will be effective in relieving its present needs. Rather, our attitude must be one of stubborn courage in the face of what appear to be overwhelming obstacles and peril. The Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf contains a metaphor that aptly describes the creativity with which historical resources can be identified and used in present crises. As the epic Beowulf
begins, Beowulf the warrior hero is called upon to rid the community of a monster who regularly appears at night, when Beowulf's fighting men are asleep, snatches several of them, and carries them off to devour in her watery home, deep in the virtually bottomless lake. I won't comment on the monster being female in this -- [later?]. In order to do battle with the monster, Beowulf arms himself with
his trusted sword -- and at this point, the poem proceeds to spend several less-than-edifying pages listing the sword's credentials by naming the noble, fearless, and mighty warriors that the sword has killed. The narrative continues. Beowulf trails the monster to her den at the bottom of a bottomless lake, raises his sword to strike her, and finds, to his horror, that it melts in his
hand. Desperate, he looks around for a weapon, grabs various implements and cooking utensils off the wall -- literally, off the wall -- and manages to kill the monster. What this story articulates, perhaps a little more vividly than I need for purposes of the illustration, is that weapons or tools that have served well in other historic locations may not be the
best ones with which to do present work. Tools with which to understand and address our world may be provided within Christian tradition, but they may not be those which have dominated the tradition -- or they may not have been the favored ideas and images of the people who dominated historical communities. The tools with which to reconstruct an embodied Christianity are certainly
present in the Christian tradition, but they often appear implicitly rather than explicitly in devotional manuals. The doctrines of creation, the incarnation of Christ, and the intellectually baffling affirmation of a resurrection of the body clearly and unambiguously record insistence on the integrity and permanence of bodies in human personhood. It is, however, in the
emphasis placed on practices, rather than in their slender attention to doctrines and theology, that devotional manuals reveal most directly their awareness that it is only by embodying Christianity, by bodying forth its ideas, that one can claim to be in the process of living a Christian life. The next three lectures will
explore the three metaphors for Christian life most frequently developed in the most popular devotional literature of the Christian West -- Christian life as imitation of Christ, as pilgrimage, as ascent -- and will look briefly at Christian life as fight, struggle, or battle. What made these metaphors attractive and even compelling to
generations of Christian women and men; what is the range of historical interpretation given them; and what attitudes and values, what practical prescriptions, what practical priorities are embedded in these visions of what it means to live Christian life? Finally, we'll ask in connection with each metaphor, do these constructions appear fruitful for practicing Christianity
in the nuclear world? The spirit of the lectures is contained very nicely in a quotation I recently found from the historical theologian John Calvin, and I close with this quotation. "We ought to labor most for our own time and take it most into account," Calvin says, in his commentary on Isaiah 39:8.
"The past and future should not be overlooked," he continues, "but what is present and urgent requires our attention more. For we who live at the same time are bound together by God with a stronger bond in order that, by consulting together, we may assist each other as much as we can."