Update

The view from my room at Nuneham College, Cambridge.

Well it has been a slower period than normal on what my sister affectionately calls 'the most boring blog in the world.' Not that I'm sensitive...

Chiefly, the reason is that my HP/Compaq laptop has given up the ghost, and it has taken the Uni computer dudes a few days to decide this. This is the longest I have ever owned a single laptop: others have been lost to lightening strike, theft, water spillage (what idiot left a paper cup of water on the computer desk at Moore College), and virus. I would love your help on a replacement: at the moment I am favouring a Toshiba Satellite Pro.

Cambridge was excellent: I went to a Symposium on Oliver O'Donovan's Ways of Judgment which is proving to be a re-readable book - which in a world of many great books is high praise. Trouble with the English in formats like this is that they are too polite, and so it is hard to tell when they are actually having an intellectual disagreement. Jonathan Chaplin, Nigel Biggar and Ben Quash gave papers, and O'Donovan responded to each. He is a very fine and engaging speaker, and concedes very little!

The Tyndale Conference followed: this was more of a mish-mash of issues and papers. We heard some very interesting stuff on Islam, and also from David Ford (Prof at Cambridge) on 'Scriptural Reasoning'. He has a new book out called 'Christian Wisdom' which looks enticing. Basically, he is suggesting that inter-faith dialogue (and ecumenical dialogue) take place on the basis of reading one another's scriptures. This prevents an annoying liberal consensus having to be established first (WCOC style). Brian Brock gave a great paper on Genesis 1-4 and ethics. We heard some other papers on politics that made me feel more and more that Christendom wasn't so bad, crusades and what-not notwithstanding. Whenever I hear a Christendom-basher make huge sweeping statements about some fourteen centuries of Church-state relations - as is currently the fashion in Hauerwas-dominated circles - it makes my toes curl. I am becoming more grumpily conservative in me old age...

I also went to one of the Biblical Theology papers given by Brian Rosner. What was fascinating for me is that I realised that there is a HUGE chasm between the methods of biblical studies scholars and those involved in doctrine and ethics. And it seems to me that there is not a great deal of mutually respectful conversation going on between the two...

Since then: I have been reading Barth's Dogmatics II.i, one of the must-read volumes. His review of the Supralapsarian-Infralapsarian controversy is fascinating... though you can see how he is introducing his own position as the only alternative through his account.

I should also report that I have an almost complete first draft of my thesis. Blogging has not hindered but rather helped this! Having had a couple of readers review parts of it, I am encouraged to do a lot better of course. But at least I am getting better at answering that 'what is your thesis about' question...

Just War and Atonement?

Over at Faith and Theology there has been a vigorous discussion after Ben invited nominations for the 'Worst Theological Invention Ever'. Everyone loves a gripe, me included!

Several of the contributors nominated Just War theory, with one of them actually noting a link between those who hold JW and those who hold to Penal Substitution.

This is just tendentious, and a bad reading of even the pacificist tradition. As Miroslav Volf points out in Exclusion and Embrace, many of the strongest pacificists in Christianity - in the early church and in the radical reformation - have also held to a vigorous account of the divine wrath against sin and sinners, and the need for a substitionary sin-bearer. It is precisely this account that enables there to be a meaningful pacificism.

Which leads me to a further observation: there are two types of pacificism. There is the one I have just described, which, though I think it has weaknesses, is orthodox and ancient (though it is a minority report). The other rests on a doctrine of God that is frankly novel, reading out of an ontology of God's peace that is exegetically and theologically unconvincing (in my opinion), owing more to Foucault than anything. Or at least, to put it less combatitively, if pacificism rests on such a doctrine of God then there are really two very different conceptions of the nature of God at play.

Christendom has also come under attack (again!), as if one could make meaningfully sweeping generalisations about a millenia of thought about this era in the history of the church! Christendom had its bad fruit, certainly, as it had its wonderful benefits for humankind and for the gospel; and I am not yet urging a return to it (as if I could) out of some Christian nostalgia: but the flaw was not in the idea of Christendom itself - at least not as it properly and accurately described.