The Vision of God

The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum is the title of a 1931 book by K.E. Kirk. I’ll summarize it with two quotes from the preface.

Worship is the Christian’s first and paramount duty

The highest prerogative of the Christian, in this life as well as hereafter, is the activity of worship; and that nowhere except in this activity will he find the key to his ethical problems.

A side note -- In today's Daily Office, "Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh and say to him, “Thus says the Lord: Let my people go, so that they may worship me." (Exodus 8:1)  

So then, this is part two of yesterday’s “Apostolic Practice, Social Ethics and Liberal Democracy.”  Kirk’s approach brings together the themes of apostolic practice and social ethics.

D. Stephen Long wrote Christian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. In the middle of the book, he offers a few paragraphs on the various ethical stances found in the church—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, and so on. In “Anglican Ethics” he draws on Kenneth Kirk’s work.

Kirk “suggested Christian ethics best proceeds by avoiding both formalism and rigorism. Formalism seeks to bring all of life under kind of a codification, the setting out of codes and laws that proscribe what is not to be done in advance, but actually demands very little; for all it asks is that we avoid violating some formal code. … Rigorism reacts against this formalism and demands a higher standard.”

Kirk  goes on to suggest that both are lacking because they miss that the true purpose of life is the vision of God.  Kirk uses the whole of Irenaeus’ quote,

The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man is the vision of God

Long goes on to explain Kirk’s notion that worship is the key to humanity’s ethical problems. The way of worship is the alternative to a moralism “that becomes so preoccupied with one’s own virtue or morality that it turns into a self-preoccupation; a ‘vision of self’ supplants the ‘vision of God’. Worship re-directs us from self to God.”

Kirk has a good bit more to offer. The book presses toward 600 pages. I’ll highlight one additional point he makes. The end of all our praying and worship is contemplation or the prayer of union. He’s not writing about a set of contemplative practices as we think of today but a state of being. He seems to be saying much what Martin Thornton means by habitual recollection. A state or stance, the “constant recollection of Christ’s presence” or “a continuous, even subconscious, awareness of the divine presence everywhere.”  It accords with George Herbert’s

Teach me, my God and King,
        In all things thee to see,
And what I do in any thing,
        To do it as for thee

With all this in mind we might suppose that our first task in contemporary parish development is apostolic practice. And the starting place of that is a parish life of Sunday Eucharist, Daily Office (daily) and reflection. A pattern seen in the parish’s common life, week-by-week as well as in the discipline of the parish’s apostolic core. All so we might nurture within us the Vision of God.

rag+

Comments

[Lowell Grisham, OA]

For me, this article gets to the essence of Christian life and practice. "Habitual recollection" is a term I've liked for many decades. I tend to tweak the language in a way that fits my language and thought. "Acceptance" and "Presence." Accept the present moment with its circumstances. It is the best God can do given the limitations of creation and the freedom God allows us. (Jean Pierre DeCaussade is exquisite with this.) And recall, remember the Presence of the Divine within the present. If I can accept the now and we awake and present to God's presence within the disguise of the now, I can ask, "What is God's will for me in this moment?" That's the question.
The answer can only be three things:
1. To do some duty.
2. To enjoy some enjoyment.
3. (Occasionally in the dark mystery of God) To suffer some present circumstance.
If I am awake and choosing to follow whichever of these three my intuition tells me is God's will, I'm doing as good as I possibly can. That's something like a modest Vision of God. (lots of DeCausade here)