If you are not familiar with the current hoo-hahs within the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), then for minimum context you will want to read Peter Leithart’s letter to Presbytery following the 2007 General Assembly, Rob Rayburn’s supplemental brief to the NW Presbytery Standing Judicial Commission (SJC) regarding their decision and the eventual final ruling by the SJC from this past March 2010. I had been waiting to hear something on the appeal — though, I must confess, I wasn’t expecting (arrogantly and sinfully, I should confess) anything much different than that they would walk in lockstep with the “9 Declarations” (which, I think I recall, were not to be used as the basis for judicial cases … alas … we knew it would happen) but it hurts my heart to the point of sleeplessness to read some the reasoning.
tan·gent
idiom– 7. digressing suddenly from one course of action or thought and turning to another: The speaker flew off on a tangent.
The quoted article below is by Leithart, The Cross of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in (of all places …) Credenda Agenda. It’s an excellent article, host magazine notwithstanding (its association with Doug Wilson makes me more than a little nervous … but I suppose that puts me in the same boat as those who railroad Leithart without actually taking the time to listen carefully, huh?).
“The Crucifixion is the fountainhead of all my values,” wrote the German-American philosopher and historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “the great divide whence flow the processes most real in my inner life, and my primary response to our tradition is one of gratitude to the source of my own frame of reference in everyday life.” He adds, “our chronology of B.C. and A.D. makes sense to me. Something new came into being then, not a man as part of the world but The Man who gives meaning to the world, to heaven and hell, bodies and spirits.” A bride who receives her husband’s name is set in a “new realm” and all her actions are “credited” to that realm. In the same way, “in His name we [as His bride] enter a realm of freedom unknown to mere heirs” (Christian Future, hereafter CF, p. 102).
This paragraph neatly captures the pace and sprawl of much of his writing. He begins with the historical event of the crucifixion, and immediately goes existential, describing how the cross is frame for his own experience. In the next sentence he has moved from inner life to the crux of history, endorsing the division of time between B.C. and A.D. Characteristically, he employs a marital image to describe the historical change that comes with Christ, and, obsessed as he is by speech, he cannot stop himself from inserting something about new names.
From here Leithart continues to touch upon several themes with which I find myself perpetually and persistently grappling with, not least of which is, on the one hand, the pressing sense of urgency to speak of the existential, moment-by-moment reality of the cross for life coupled with, one the fore-finger of the other hand, my own frustrating inability to find words to make that connection and, on the thumb of that second hand, the complementary frustration of our cultural inability – and impatience – to try to hear and understand the connection. Alas …