Saving Memory and the Body of Christ - by Timothy F Sedgwick (Hardcover)

About the Book

Saving Memory and the Body of Christ defines the memory of God as the memory of Christ known in worship, in word and sacrament, which calls Christians into the life of the world together as many in one in compassion and care.

Book Synopsis

For Christians, memories of God given in the Christian Bible are juxtaposed, echoed, and expanded within and outside Christian communities of faith. In Saving Memory and the Body of Christ, Sedgwick argues, Christians are attuned to the polyphony that is the voice of God calling those who have ears to hear into the love and grace of God in life together.

Sharing together in the Eucharist, he goes on to describe, Christians remember, celebrate, and are drawn into life in God as imaged in the Greek word 'kenosis, ' meaning emptying oneself. Christian faith is accordingly what the Latin word 'credo' means: to give one's heart to God, hence, to give oneself in faith and fidelity to the memory of God.

In the memory of God, Christian faith is a practical piety. In prayer and worship Christians remember and respond to the call of God to life lived in the grace and love of God, in the glory of creation, in birth and death, in sickness and health, in compassion and care for one another in creation. This is the birth of moral conscience, hearing in the voice of others what claims those who have faith and calls for response.

Review Quotes

No one has written better over many years than Timothy Sedgwick about the practice of faith in moral action as centered on the community of worship. In this book he provides a magnificent apologia for the Christian faith drawing on contemporary science and philosophy about how we come to know, and how that way of knowing finds its fulfillment in the Christian faith. A deeply moving book which is graced with his characteristic lucid prose, and thought provoking ideas, and which challenge the reader into reimagining the faith as a matter of practical piety. A book to be treasured, read and re-read. Profound, elegant and succinct.

This is a big book! It is not big because it is long. It is big because it addresses a matter of supreme importance--Christian formation. Just how, in a secular society, are individual believers and the congregations to which they belong to live lives that are in the form of Christ? Sedgwick answers. They are to remember; and they are to remember by participating In a range of common practices such as worship, self-examination, welcoming strangers, care for the poor among many others. It is through these practices that individuals and the communities to which they belong become the Body of Christ.

Tim Sedgwick has been among us as perhaps the most seriously Anglican and yet seriously ecumenical voice for a philosophical ethics grounded in the Christian sacraments. This latest book goes even deeper and farther than he has done before. He now harvests decades of teaching and decades of reading in giving us a liturgically based, philosophically acute moral theology. It is very welcome and very much needed.

Timothy Sedgwick draws us into the dynamism of liturgical practice as the polyphonic sounding of the memories of God that form and sustain the Christian way of being in the world. At once an account of liturgical worship and Christian life itself, this is the sweet fruit of a lifetime's reflection - an Anglican theologian's interdisciplinary gift to liturgical, moral, and ascetical theologians of the wider church.

About the Author

Timothy F. Sedgwick is the Clinton S. Quin Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethic at Virginia Theological Seminary.