Faith Going Deeper

Faith Going Deeper

Andrew Davison

• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848256422
• eBook ISBN: 9781848256446
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Blessing, whether we are giving it or seeking it, is perhaps one of the most overused but least understood Christian terms. This engaging introduction to blessing unpacks this rich, many-layered word, exploring its meaning, the power of blessing, how it appears in our lives, how to cope with its absence, and more.

Part 1

Blessing in Christian Theology

1

Creation: Recognition, Thanksgiving and Praise

Christ’s last act before his Ascension was to bless his disciples:

he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God. (Luke 24.50–53)1

This is the image of Christ fixed in our minds by his departure: Christ blessing. That theme is then immediately taken up, in this passage, now among the disciples. For their part, they devoted themselves to praise in the temple or, as Luke calls it, to ‘blessing God’.

Here, at this crucial juncture in the Gospel story, we are presented with two of the most significant meanings of blessing: as a benediction bestowed and as praise given. Blessing is central at this turning point in the story of Christ, which underlines the significance of blessing as a theological topic – and yet, as a subject, blessing has not received a great deal of theological discussion. As one scholar has recently put it, blessing has ‘received relatively little attention from theologians and liturgists before the twentieth century’.2 The priest and poet George Herbert (1593–1633) made a similar point when he remarked that his fellow priests were apt to treat blessing as ‘empty and superfluous’. But, he went on:

that which the Apostles used so diligently in their writings, nay, which our Saviour himself used (Mark 10.16), cannot be vain and superfluous . . . Besides, the Priests of the Old Testament were commanded to bless the people, and the form thereof is prescribed (Num. 6.22–27). Now as the Apostle argues in another case, if the ministration of condemnation did bless, how shall not the ministration of the Spirit exceed in blessing?3

There is mismatch between the prominence of blessing in the Scriptures and the attention it has received in theology. That would be enough to invite a study such as this, but there are other reasons, not least as part of an attempt to explore the range of registers in which the ministry and mission of the Church can be carried out. Personally, as one who particularly respects the traditions of the Dominican Order, I am drawn by the threefold pattern set out in one of their mottos: Laudare, Benedicere, Praedicare (‘To praise, to bless, to preach’). We have a sense of what it means to have a vocation to praise, and perhaps what it might mean to have a vocation to preach, but what – we might ask – does it mean to be called to bless?

As we set out to explore the meaning of blessing, we should recognize that it is a broad category. We have already seen the word function in two senses at the end of Luke: related senses, assuredly, but certainly not identical. These are as a benediction bestowed and as praise offered. Part 1 of this book will consider some of these dimensions. A good place to start is with speech. To bless is to speak. That is obvious enough, since blessing is always a matter of communication, one way or another: words are spoken; some communicative gesture is often made. Moreover, often something from God is being communicated to whatever or whomever is being blessed.

The significance of speech is borne out by the etymology of a related word, namely ‘benediction’. Its English root is in the Latin benedicere, which is grounded in the idea of ‘speaking well’ of something: from bene, meaning good (as in benefit), and dicere meaning to speak (as in diction).4 In this opening chapter of the book we will explore just this, and consider what it means for blessing to be about ‘speaking well’ – first of creation and then of God.

Ask someone on the street what blessings mean or achieve, and the most common response is likely to be that they make something holy, ‘good’ or special. That sense is certainly important but we will begin somewhere else, with the doctrine of creation and the conviction that a blessing is about recognition as well as conferral. Whatever else we are doing when we bless someone, something or somewhere, we recognize that all God has made is already good, already possesses a certain holiness, precisely since it comes to us from God’s hands.

A blessing recognizes the goodness of God’s creation. This links blessing to a central task of Christian discipleship, namely learning to see the world from a Christian perspective. Much of what we call Christian ethics is to be found in that discipline and goal. The Christian moral life is not primarily a set of rules to be followed but a way of perceiving, from which the right action naturally follows. Whatever else it involves, such a perception of the world, in a Christian way, includes beholding it with a sense of wonder and apprehending it in such a way that we recognize it as a gift. Those dispositions, in turn, elicit praise from us, and thanksgiving.

The practice of blessing things is first of all about opening our eyes, so that praise and thanksgiving arise often and spontaneously. Part of the reason that we bless is to develop the habit of seeing the world in a way that elicits responses of praise and wonder. As a recognition, as well as conferral, blessing is an act of reception – of reception with a thankful spirit. We are in territory here discussed in 1 Timothy, where we read the precept that ‘everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving’ (1 Tim. 4.4). One of the earliest Christian liturgical texts to have survived, the Apostolic Tradition (probably from the second to fourth century), echoes this injunction: ‘for everything we receive we should give thanks to God the Holy One, receiving it in this way for his glory’.5 If blessing is about speech, then learning from the Christian tradition about blessing must also discipline the way we speak about creation. Blessing is a way to ‘speak well’ of creation, to recognize it as God’s work and as God’s gift to us.

However, before we can speak, God has already spoken. Creation itself is already God’s primordial ‘speaking well’. Through speech – as the metaphor at the beginning of Genesis has it – God brought creation into being. God created through a word, which theologians have described as his Word, with a capital letter, or his Son (John 1). That Word brought everything into being and invested it with character, meaning and significance. That, after all, is what speech is all about: character, meaning and significance.

In the Genesis story, at the end of each ‘day’ God looked at the world and ‘saw that it is good’. After God’s creative ‘speaking well’, he ‘recognized’ that what he had made is good. In blessing we follow in God’s footsteps: we ‘see that it is good’. In the Genesis narrative, God himself pronounces blessing upon creation: first upon sea creatures and birds (Gen. 1.22) and then on human beings (Gen. 1.28).6

If blessing is about a way of seeing, then it aligns with other Christian practices, of which a particularly important example is contemplative prayer. As David Bentley Hart has put it, such prayer is ‘an extremely simple thing’:

It often consists in little more than cultivating certain habits of thought, certain ways of seeing reality, certain acts of openness to a grace that one cannot presume but that has already been granted, in some very substantial measure, in the mere givenness of existence.7

Blessing occupies a place in the life of the Church as just such a ‘habit of thought’, a way ‘of seeing reality’, an act by which we are open ‘to a grace that one cannot presume but that has already been granted . . . in the mere givenness of existence’.

We see this connection, between blessing and recognition, in the account of Jesus being presented in the temple in Jerusalem 40 days after his birth (Luke 2.22–38). The purpose of the visit was a rather solemn kind of blessing: it is called a ‘presentation’ and it is clearly a form of consecration. Its purpose was to ‘designate’ every firstborn male ‘as holy to the Lord’ (Luke 2.23). Simeon, the priest, took the Christ child up into his arms and, after he had proclaimed the song we call the Nunc Dimittis, he ‘blessed them’ – child and parents. Blessing is linked here to recognition, since that canticle is precisely a song of recognition:8

Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word;

for my eyes have seen your salvation,

which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles

and for glory to your people Israel. (Luke 2.29–32)

For another sign of this link between blessing and the recognition of goodness, we might consider their negation. Down church history, various heretics simply could not have made much sense of our practice of blessing, and precisely because of its association with ‘speaking well’ of creation. Gnosticism, in its various guises, saw the material world as the work of an evil god. For Gnostics, therefore, material things are basically evil, at least in as much as they are material. They would not bless material things – or human beings in their bodyliness or places in their physicality – whereas orthodox Christians would. A Christian would bless what is good but refuse to bless something orientated towards evil; the Gnostic would not bless anything material at all, because they saw materiality as sinful to its core.

In Part 2 of this book we will consider some of the ways blessing could feature more centrally in the life of the Church, of individual Christians and of households. A good place to start is with blessing as thankful recognition, not least in the most c...

Table of contents

• Blessing
• Contents
• Part 1 Blessing in Christian Theology
• 1 Creation: Recognition, Thanksgiving and Praise
• 2 Vocation: Abundance and Consecration
• 3 The ‘Prosperity Gospel’
• 4 Christology: Jesus as the Son of the Blessed One
• 5 Sin: Curses, Cursing and their Abolition
• 6 Blessing and Salvation in Ministry and Mission
• 7 The Efficacy of Blessings
• 8 Blessing, Action and the Natural Order
• 9 Varieties of Blessing (and not Blessing)
• Part 2 Blessing in the Christian Life
• 10 A Brief History of Blessings in the Life of the Church
• 11 Who and What is Blessed?
• 12 Who Blesses?
• 13 How Do We Bless?
• 14 When Do We Bless?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography