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"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."


- Jaroslav Pelikan
CTS is a member of the Metropolitan Washington, D.C. Synod of the ELCA
CTS is a Reconciling in Christ Congregation
CTS is a ONE Lutheran Congregation

Pastor's Letter

January 2010

Dear Friends in Christ,

I would like us to begin our New Year by contemplating this line from an Eastern Orthodox hymn: “The uncircumscribable Logos of the Father was circumscribed by becoming incarnate and by transforming the darkened image to the original, united it with the divine beauty.” I like this poetry because it provides an alternative to the legal model by which we in the Western church have tried to understand the Incarnation. The Eastern church has always preferred an organic and aesthetic metaphor to our legal one, probably because a legal metaphor leads pretty inexorably to legalism. Both the monarchical absolutism of the Papal churches and the absurd literalism of the fundamentalist churches seem to me to derive ultimately from our Western (thank Saints Augustine and Anselm) reliance on this legal metaphor.

As we head into a new year I would urge us to rethink how we think about God. What if God did not become human in order to create a legal loophole that would allow our salvation? What if God became human to unite us again with “the divine beauty.” Or, as Orthodox mystics like to say, “God became human so that humans could become divine.” Now this is a crazy notion if what we mean by “divine” is Zeus or Marduk. We are not stupid enough to think that humans can become omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. (At least I hope we’re not!) But if the “beauty of the divine” is the Love incarnate in Jesus, then it all starts to make some sense. What makes God radiant is love, What has darkened human life is the loss of love. God entered Jesus in order to enter our history and to reacquaint us with the people God designed us to be. Our loss of this love has had tragic consequences too awful to contemplate, but here they are—right on our doorstep in 2010.

It is to the effort to turn those evil consequences back and to become healthy humans again that I pray that we will dedicate our lives as disciples of Christ in the year ahead. A basic piece of that effort, that struggle, will be to rethink God. We need a faith that can teach us again how to be human. I look forward to working on that new theology with you here at CTS.

Happy New Year!

-Pastor Bastein

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