Anvil

Please pardon the blatant self-promotion, but - what is a blog for if not that?

In the latest issue of Anvil, I have an article on Chris Wright's The Mission of God - much of which was trialed here on this blog. Chris also adds his response to the four reviews that appear, and there admits to having read the debate as it developed here!

In the same issue, I have smaller reviews of Mark Thompson's A Clear and Present Word , Bernd Wannenwetsch's Political Worship, and Sam Well's God's Companions.

I also note that Wannenwetsch has edited a collection of essays, Who Am I? Bonhoeffer's Theology Through His Poetry. Alas, T&T Clark are offering it at the mighty price of £55!! That's 140 AUD!! (or 110 USD). Ouch - looks like a trip to the library to read that one...

Reviewing: Brock, Wells, Thompson

I have taken three books to review for Anvil (a UK-based evangelical journal). Just some brief notes on my first impressions.

The first of these is Mark D Thompson's A Clear and Present Word. This is a no bull polemical call to return to and recapture the Reformation doctrine of the clarity of scripture. I have to say I heard the lecture version of these and it looks as if they have really been given a full revision for publication. Mark has a real gift for summarising other points of view - surveying the terrain quickly AND thoroughly, so that an immense amount of ground is covered in no time at all. Mark tries to clear away the philosophical and theoretical tangle and ask what Scripture's own attestation to itself is. Of course, like many Reformation doctrines, this one suffers from bad press based on a great deal of misinformation and caricature, so necessarily the book does a job of clarifying clarity. In a nutshell, Thommo is convinced that God is very good at saying what he wants to say. (Exiled Preacher, I think you would enjoy this book!)

Secondly, I have been reading Aberdeen ethics lecture Brian Brock's new work Singing the Ethos of God - On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture. I haven't got far, but as my own supervisor says of it: 'Beyond Hermeneutics would have been an apt subtitle for this groundbreaking study'. Essentially, Brock enlists the help of Luther and Augustine to engage in a reading of the Psalms as texts to pray and sing. Too often, ethics has come to the Scripture with its own agendas and theories rather than starting with the ancient practice of praying and praising with the text. As Brock writes:

Praise takes us inside God's works. It reveals God's daily care in providing the food that sustains living creatures, and the time, space, and emodiment in which all creation exists. He makes human sociality possible by providing, reneing and reclaiming language. He sustains this social space by setting up political authorities and maintaining peace. At the heart of human political life is the church, a community that learns from Scripture how to praise, with all creation, the divine inexhaustibility. In the church, the twisted sociality that expresses the ethos of self-interest, fear, and tribalism is remade into a political order whose telos is the discovery of the divine ethos of diversity in mutuality [is this really the divine ethos? MJ]. It is a renewal sustained by the divine gift of Scripture, thourgh which God invites and facilitates human praise. In praise the communion of saints continually rediscovers that God uses our faltering collaboration to bring humanity in tune with himself. p. 363.

Thirdly, I have God's Companions by Sam Wells, co-editor with Hauerwas of the gratingly cheesy Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (every chapter opens with a tear-jearking anecdote about 'what happens in my church', in an attempt to ground the thing in the practices of church life). From my first impressions (and I hope to be corrected), this book shares the Companion's laudable emphasis on the local church, but also its 'we do it this way and it is so beautiful' anecdotalism and sentimentality. Hmm...

Mark D Thompson on the future of church...

Some great stuff from me learned colleague:

We never want to return to the strict formality and artificiality which characterised at least some Christian gatherings in the past. Gathering with God’s people must mean taking each other seriously as well as the opportunities for service that arise when we are together. The critical difference between ‘church’ and our own private prayer and Bible reading is that we are together, ‘in the fellowship of his people’. And that fellowship must have a sense of reality about it. Precisely for this reason the work of ministry has ‘building each other up’ as a proper concern. But in our rush to address the imbalances of the past and to work together for the good of the body, it is at least theoretically possible to ignore that this happens as we meet with, or better, are met by God in his word. Church is not just a study group or a training centre. Church is a gathering around the powerful, confronting and encouraging address of the living God. Recapturing this sense of the significance of our gatherings might actually prove to be an important part of getting on with the mission.

'nuff said.