Is it possible to please God?

Is it possible to please God? I raise the question because I suspect the common answer to be 'no'. Indeed, I read of someone saying recently '“I think a lot of people have the misunderstanding that going to church is going to please God by virtue of our activity.”

I think what the speaker was trying to avoid is the possibility that people think they are gaining justification by coming to church - that somehow church going is a work that enables sufficient merit to be accrued in order that God smiles upon it. But there are a great number of scriptures which teach precisely that Christians are able to please God. Indeed, this is one of the great freedoms of the Christian life. And, what is more, they can please God when they gather together to praise him.

Of the passages in the NT which talk about pleasing God, two stand out. Firstly, Romans 8:6-9:

6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law-- indeed it cannot, 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. 9 But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.

Now, there is only a negative here from which the positive is implied: the mind to which the Spirit is given, and the individual in whom the Spirit of Christ dwells can indeed please God. Is this just on account of Jesus's righteousness vicariously applied to us? Is there an imputed pleasing of God (as we can assume an imputed righteousness by which we are justified?) Was is not Jesus with whom God was 'well pleased', after all? Well all that is true, and the prior action of God in the spirit is assumed here; but it is also true that the context (see Romans 6 and 7) is talking about the wrestle to offer the members of the body to God as weapons of righteousness. The fleshly man of Romans 7 cannot please God, certainly; the spiritual man of Romans 8 apparently can, in the power of the Spirit. Paul will go in Romans 14:18 to speak of the one who serves Christ being pleasing to God...

The second text is Hebrews 13:15-16

15 Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. 16 Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

Here, the Christian is called on to offer sacrifices that are pleasing to God! Not cultic sacrifices. Not atoning sacrifices - but then, the OT sacrifices werent all atoning sacrifices either. But still - here are acts of sharing and praising - which we do when we meet together, in which God delights...

My piece on the financial crisis

... is here.

Thanks to Laurence, Justin, and Bruce for their help at various times.

In praise of difficult children

Adam Phillips has a brilliant piece in the latest London Review of Books about difficult children! He asks 'When you play truant you have a better time. But how do you know what a better time is, of how do you leanr what a better time is?'

He argues that you have to be bad in order to discover what good is - a kind of self discovery through sin. Adults who look after adolescents are in the vexatious position of wanting them to behave badly, so that they can learn, and of wanting to stop them. In order to do this we need to have 'traunt minds' - to see the value of the experiment, the experience and the trespass. The adolescent is 'the person who needs to experiment with self-betrayal, to find out what it might be to betray oneself.'

If a child is never really difficult, then, or is difficult and has adults who just cave in, he never really grows into adulthood, because he never finds the limits. And he always envies the adolescent his freedom to tresspass...

Phillips makes an intriguing reference to Romans 7 in which Paul noted the function of the law was to increase the trespass. The rules are an invitation to find out what sort of person you are... only for Paul of course (and Phillips misses this) the transgression of the rules actually 'unself' him. They don't lead to his self-discovery at all; or, they do, and it is a complete mess. Which means that true self-discovery is the realisation that grace is needed...

Missiological assumptions?

Born in 1970, I am a post prayer-book Anglican. That is, I grew up in the era when formal liturgies and distinctive clergy dress were become a sign of the moribund and alien past. The outsider (so the argument ran) was alienated by such things, which were at best mysterious and at worst signs of a theology we wanted to repudiate. Formality in and of itself was part of everything that was wrong with the church of the 1960s which so many people had decided to...well, not attend.

When I was a Chaplain at the Cathedral school, following this logic, and with 90% of the kids unchurched, I moved school chapel services out of the Cathedral building itself and into the hall next door. I very rarely wore my collar. The services were informal, the music contemporary and the prayers spontaneous. The Christian students were especially supportive of this, because it was like the churches they went to. Surely the non-Christians would love it too...

But one day, one of the unchurched kids came to me and said 'look, why are you trying so hard to be like our culture? Surely the best thing you have going for you is your difference. The old thing is the thing you do best - that makes sense to me. And I can't stand your contemporary Christian songs'. (well that was the gist of it...)

Here's the thesis I am running, anyhow: The reason we eschewed formality in church services was because that was what WE on the inside wanted (or some of us, anyway) - the missiological reason was in fact only a justification for it.

There were some mistaken, or at least challengeable, assumptions here -

1 - that the outsiders prefered us to look like TV shows, and not like 'church' as they knew it
2 - that familiarity is always good, dissimilarity is always bad
3 - that formality equals insincerity and pomposity (it certainly can do, but not always)
4 - that formality equals impersonal, bumbling and ineffectual
5 - that church meetings/services should be attractional (as opposed to church communities)
6 - that a prayerbook service with a robed clergyman will be understood by an outsider as a sign of Tridentine catholic theology of the priesthood and sacraments

So - what's the evidence?

Top Theological Research Centres?

A colleague wrote:

I need a list of the top theological libraries / research centres in the world. This does NOT refer to the building but to the collection and resources and facilities for research.

I would appreciate it if, just off the top of your head, you would list what you understand to be the best 10 in the world. No need to try and put them in order of importance, just a list. You do not need to try and justify the selection as all I need now is a list of possibilities.

I replied (in no particular order):

Oxford
Cambridge
Princeton
Aberdeen
Tubingen
Vatican
Yale
Duke
Durham
Edinburgh
King’s College, London

What would you say? My ignorance of the European scene is quite profound of course...

Upcoming Moore Chapel series

I am planning a three part series for Moore College Chapel on, well, God.

1. The Oneness of God
2. The Glory of God
3. The Wisdom of God

These are putative chapters of HIM: An Introduction.
What texts spring to mind?
What are the implications for us of the oneness, glory and wisdom of God?

Help me out here.

Another YOU review

Peter Sanlon

An interesting one, this.

On Sorry day

Sorry, we really are...

More on Calvin’s Hermeneutics…

...Awareness of the context of our reading allows us also to undermine the apparent dominance of the historical-critical approach. If contemporary interpreters must be aware of the way in which the intellectual and political context shaped Calvin's reading of scripture, then we must also be aware of the way in which intellectual and political history shaped historical-critical readings – and indeed, shape ours. These intellectual decisions about the meaning and nature of history were no less determined by historical context and cultural forces than in Calvin's time, and in ours. This is not to reduce ideas to their historical contexts, or so utterly to historicize them as to empty them entirely. But the point has particular force given the claims to objectivity and universality that attend historical-critical scholarship. The apparent threat to the unity and historicity of the Bible is itself not above proper contextualisation.

The proof of the pudding is in the discovery that its ingredients taste good in combination. Is Calvin's exegesis, which treats Scripture as a unity, but does not ignore the human differences between authors, convincing? Is it rash or speculative? Having taken a Pascalian wager on the unity of Scripture, it is readily apparent that the coherences and correspondences between its different parts proceed to flow. Calvin's exegesis is a reminder that the unity of Scripture is a theological discernment in the first instance, and only secondarily a literary one; but that we need not suppose that the diversity and plurality of the human voices of scripture threaten it. On a literary or textual level, Scripture may indeed present us with a number of valid and Christological ways of conceiving of its own unity. Calvin's lesson for modern interpreters, which Krauss notes well, is that the presumption that Scripture is unified remains for us the basis on which theological interpretation of Scripture may proceed.

HIM continues

Don't forget to help me out at:

http://himanintroduction.blogspot.com/

I'd love to have your thoughts. Vent your spleen if you like!

My article at ABC online - for Valentine's Day!

LOVE, THE LAST GOD STANDING?

Latest Defence Against the Dark Arts entry

Is Postmodernism Passe?

Rudd in the Monthly

I have just finished Aussie PM Kevin Rudd's essay on the financial crisis in The Monthly. In it, he mounts a strident attack on 'free-market fundamentalism' which he blames for our current woes - positioning himself as a pragmatic 'social democrat' in the meantime. It is interesting to see such an ideological turn from an Aussie politician - usually we steer clear of that stuff. It is a rather turgid read I have to say - but he lays the challenge out there to neo-liberals: how has your ideology done anything but expose us to this terrible danger?

I have never been fully persuaded that by the small govt mantra of the neo-liberal/Reaganite. I can understand some apects of it, but my theological appraisal of human nature (that we are unusually evil AND stupid) means that I don't trust the free market to produce just outcomes anymore than I trust government not to become corrupt and self-serving. Neo-liberalism has its own utopian vision - a dream of unfettered market forces aligning to produce prosperity and security for all. This is just as dangerous as the utopian vision of the socialist of course, with a completely planned and fixed economy. The trouble with neo-liberalism is that it hopes that a human vice - namely, greed - will produce much virtue.

The Pauline account of the role of the state focuses on justice - the restraint and punishment of the wicked (Rom 13). That is, in its own way, minimal - a 'small' government. Does it square with Rudd's view of the role of the state? -

Government is not the intrinsic evil that neo-liberals have argued it is. Government, properly constituted and properly directed, is for the common good, embracing both individual freedom and fairness, a project designed for the many, not just the few.

Well, I think so: here is a vision for the adminstration of justice - with the government taking its proper role of serving the people and not itself. The state is after all 'God's servant to do you good'. The language of 'fairness' echoes a kind of Rawlsian philosophy of justice, perhaps - and that could be debated, certainly. Rudd here speaks of 'the creative agency of government' - a phrase that could alarm neo-liberals and Reaganites, but which, in the current circumstances is prbably justified.



As Sarkozy says: Le laissez-faire, c'est fini.

Religion

Religion is great experiment to see if the human body can be mastered. It can't.

Defence Against the Dark Arts

I am doing a weekly blogspot now for Sydney Anglicans, called Defence Against the Dark Arts. The title is meant to be ironic-ish, if you hadn't guessed...

Here is my opening post.

I'd love you to comment there - but also, I'd love some feedback as to how the posts are coming out.

What will this mean for The Blogging Parson? I am not sure, but I tend to do 'recreational' blogging here (if you hadn't noticed). Some ideas tried out here will definitely be recycled - but that's a secret!

Five reasons that Calvin was a postmodernist - well not quite

1. Calvin thought author's intentions were not decisive for interpretation, though not irrelevant. You can't understand biblical prophecy if you are wedded to author's intentions! In fact, it was the Enlightenment that was obsessed with origins and psychological states, not the Reformation. The text is to be understood with reference to its self, primarily.
2. Calvin recognised that texts produced a multiplicity of possible meanings depending on context and purpose - because he believed that the text was speaking to us today, and had spoken to people in the past. The text has a tradition of interpretation that is not irrelevant to understanding it.
3. But Calvin's not an allegorist - he believes in history, of which we are a part. He doesn't seek 'eternal spiritual truths' from the text. Rather, he is aware of its time-boundedness. So, NARRATIVE is really important for him
4. He thinks hermeneutics has a context - ie, it serves an interpretative community. 'Who is this for?' is a question that really matters for the interpreter.
5. He was French -so must have been a postmodern!

Calvin’s Hermeneutics Today?

Having offered both an overview of Calvin's hermeneutics and a sample of it in full flight, it is now opportune to return to the questions I posited in the opening section. I asked in what sense it might still be possible for contemporary interpretation of Scripture to trail in Calvin's wake, given the differences between then and now. We live in the aftermath of historical criticism. We have become used, in the last two centuries, to understand 'history' as a reconstruction of the facts in as an objective and disinterested manner as possible. While, like Calvin, we understand the need to trace the causes of events, it is not a matter of connecting analogous events by resort to a doctrine of providence; modern practice has been to scrape away at the evidence, removing the overlayers of interpretation and bias, until the causes of events are laid bare, to be linked in a great chain to other causes and other events. We live, too, on the other side of the era in which the Bible itself has become the subject of academic study, rather than the book of a people of faith – read in the seminar as much as the sanctuary, in the service of that great encyclopaedic vision that built the modern university.

This is where Calvin's pre-critical hermeneutics start to show their value for post-critical interpreters. As we have seen, Calvin approached the Bible believing that it was saying something for the contemporary believer. He was an exegete in the service of the believer and of the church – because he believed that the Bible was speaking to those people today. This was the proper context of biblical interpretation. He was not part of an independent academy, beholden only to the principles of higher learning. It was to believers that the Bible was addressed – and so the interpreter's task was to show how what the ancient text said was now the God's word for the present time. This message was not to be located behind the text, or by dismembering the text; it was not something to which the text referred. It was gleaned from reading the text itself.

The endeavours of historical critics cannot be merely set aside. However, interpretation in the service of the church and its members is never merely an analysis of the text. It is always an exercise of listening to the text. Calvin positions himself as the servant of the text, and not its master. This posture is not an empty rhetorical move, or a false humility on the part of the exegete. It is actually a decisive condition for biblical interpretation if it is to be interpretation of the Bible, and not of some other thing to which the bible is apparently a conduit.

If Calvin was ever aware of the context in which he carried out his biblical interpretation, then we should not be embarrassed as his putative heirs to discover that our context is somewhat different. That is: if in Calvin's day he read the Scriptures as being addressed to the sixteenth century reader, so then might we read the Scriptures as if we are being addressed in our time. How is that different? The believer of the twenty-first century lives in a context in which even belief in God is not at all a given. The 'Secular Age', as Charles Taylor calls it, is in some ways the step-child of Calvin's thought. The task of biblical interpretation now takes place in a context in which its value as a task is very much under question. The authority of Scripture is not taken for granted by our contemporaries, or even those within the churches.

There is then a need for greater awareness of the evangelical heart of the Scriptures. Christology is not sufficient, unless it is understood as a soteriological motif. The motifs of promise and fulfilment, so prominent in Calvin's exposition of the text, need to be understood as propelling the missiological task of the churches of Jesus Christ. Calvin was aware of this of course; but he could not have been aware of the extent to which secularism would roll back Christian belief five centuries after his birth, or of how full the earth would be of people who need to hear the message of the Jesus Christ of the scriptures. Exegesis must not be an intramural activity; and hermeneutics must insist on this. Its sphere of reference cannot be ecclesial only – because the Bible is not merely
addressed to the church, but also to the world.

Reviewing Tom Schreiner's New Testament Theology

I have been asked to write a review of Tom Schreiner's New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ. It is an interesting and well-considered work.



Schreiner wants to argue that the anchoring theme of NT Theology is something like:



God magnifying himself through Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit.



That is, God's concern for God's own glory is the driving heartbeat of the NT witness and mission. His self-referencing self-regard is what perpetuates his plans and his interaction with his creatures.


Of course, accusing this God of narcissism is beside the point: he is God after all. But is this really a true depiction of the Biblical God? Isn't God - the who God who is love - fundamentally other-regarding?

Bird on imputation

Michael Bird's excellent short book 'A Bird's Eye View of Paul' is really a very good piece of work - especially to a non-Pauline-specialist like me. Pauline studies has really suffered from a plethora of disagreeing experts in the last twenty years, which leaves trials of confusion.

One area on which I have felt particular disorientation is that of the imputation of Christ's righteousness. In the teaching of a John Piper, this teaching becomes a crux. But, as NT Wright points out - where is the NT on this subject? Where is it explicitly taught? Even if we decide that imputation is a necessary inference from the theology of the NT, it is surely the case that it can't be as focal as Piper seems to make it.

Anyhow, here's Bird:

...what about the imputation of Christ's righteousness as the basis of justification? That is the notion that God imputes the obedience and merits of Jesus to believers and in turn imputes their sins to Jesus on the cross. Well, the fact of the matter is that we cannot proof-text imputation. If we think we can cite 2 Cor 5:21, Rom 4:1-5, 1 Cor 1:30, Phil 3:6-9 and find the entire package of the imputation of Christ's active obedience and the imputation of our sin to Christ embedded in all of these texts, we are sadly mistaken...

At the level of the text, then, Paul argues that we are justified by union with Christ through what I have called 'incorporated righteousness.' Jesus is justified in his resurrection, and by faith we have union with him so that we share in his justification. Through incorporation into Christ by faith, what is his becomes ours and what is ours becomes his...

The imputation of Christ's righteousness is a necessary and logical inference to make, as it allows us coherently to hold together a number of ideas and concepts in Paul's story of salvation. Although no text explicitly says that Christ's righteousness is imputed to believers, nonetheless, without some kind of theology of imputation a lot of what Paul says about justification does not make sense. Imputation is a synthetic way of holding together a number of themes...

I concur with Leon Morris, who said that imputation is a corollory of the identification of the believer with Christ. (p. 96-8)

Marilynne Robinson on sermons

I have been reading a truly excellent novel, Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. It is about an old pastor from the mid-west - and so it is a novel imbued with theological thinking and scripture. Anyhow, I found this comment on sermons from an interview with Robinson:

A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that. The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It's very exceptional. I don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one.
One of the reasons that I think that a sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one -- and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form -- is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith. This is a kind of standard of discourse that is not characteristic of the present moment. I think that it makes a sermon, when it is a good sermon, stand out in anyone's experience.

She also has this to say about 'The Protestant Imagination':

Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions -- the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life. I think, frankly, that his PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT is theology, too.When the Reformation became established, one of the things that was a question between Catholicism and the Reformation traditions was whether there was a hierarchy of being. If you look at Thomas Aquinas, for example, you have hierarchies of angels and all the rest of it, and hierarchies even of saints and then subsaints -- people who aren't quite there, that sort of thing. The Reformation rejected all of that and created a new metaphysics, in effect, that is not hierarchical. The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself. If you read Calvin, for example, he says, How do we know that we are godlike, in the image of God? Well, look at how brilliant we are. Look how we can solve problems even dreaming, which I think is true, which I've done myself. So instead of having an externalized model of reality with an objective structure, it has a model of reality that is basically continuously renegotiated in human perception. I think that view of things is pretty pervasively influential in Protestant thought.

10 Really bad reasons to stop having the Lord's Supper

1. Jesus said nothing about it. When he said 'Do this in remembrance of me' in Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24, he clearly meant something else.
   
2. In 1 Corinthians, the Christians were clearly having a full meal, not just a bit of bread and wine.
   
3. Why say with a symbol what you can say with words?
   
4. Outsiders will think that we think that we are offering a sacrifice to God that takes away our sins.
   
5. People will think the minister is a sacerdotal priest with special powers.
   
6. People will think we are Roman Catholics.
   
7. We haven't had it for so long that now it is weird.
   
8. We will have to explain everything and that will take too long.
   
9. The scary words about eating the supper unworthily in 1 Cor 10 and 11 mean that we are probably better not to do it and so keep out of trouble.
10. Having done away with the old formal ways of doing the Lord's Supper, we can't decide on a new, less formal way of doing it that isn't awkward and weird.

The Ten Worst Habits of Preachers

My assumption in this list is a culture that values the preaching of scripture very highly. This of course should not be assumed at all! There are actually worse crimes than these that include doing violence to the text of scripture, or ignoring it altogether, or waffling and calling it 'spirit-led'.

1. Merely 'explaining/teaching the Bible' and not preaching the living Word of God. (I think we should ban the phrase 'we are now going to hear the Bible explained'. I don't need it explained. I need it preached.)

2. Introducing us to the text and not to the issue addressed by the text.

3. Providing overelaborate explanations of the biblical-theological background to no great end.

4. Moralising from the Old Testament.

5. Reading every OT text immediately in terms of Christology without regard to its own particular context and meaning and purpose.

6. Speaking down to the congregation; assuming we are simpletons and do not read or think for ourselves. That our questions just need better information in order to answer them.

7. Getting Penal Substitution (or whatever the hot-button issue is for your church!) from every single text.

8. Illustrations that confuse more than illuminate. That's...most of 'em.

9. Never referring to self and own Christian faith in sermon. (Of course, the opposite is worse: using the pulpit for autobiographical purposes. Yuck.)

10. Making ill-informed generalisations about culture/sociology from a knee-jerk conservative standpoint.

11. (sorry) Pop-psychologising.

Preaching like...Peter Roebuck

How do you train preachers?

Preaching is not a technique or a method, though of course it makes use of techniques and methods. To think you have taught preaching because you have given students a workable outline of how to go about preparing a sermon is utterly mistaken.

Teaching preaching is like teaching a creative writing class. You will have tips and suggestions - but what is really needed is for the person to find their own voice, and to be capable of real insight and wisdom. The getting of wisdom takes an array of skills, to be sure, but it takes personal courage; and the development of one's own voice requires an ear for the language.

The reason that a preacher needs to find his/her own voice is because sermons (as Alan Lukabyo says) must be true, clear, and real. Giving real sermons is much more complicated and intuitive than giving merely true and clear ones. And it takes the development of a whole person in a Godward direction.

An analogy: in the Sydney Morning Herald there are two cricket writers with clear tasks. Chloe Saltau is the reporter. Her job is to give a descriptive account of the day's play, informing the reader of its significant events and scores. She has to integrate information from the teams as well as what she sees before here eyes, but though she is involved in a level of interpretation, she is not venturing her own opinions in doing so. Her style is very unembellished and direct. She may have played the game for years, but in a sense that is irrelevant to her work. Salthau could go and become the crime reporter and still do the same kind of writing. She does what she is supposed to do very well.

Peter Roebuck on the other hand provides a world class level of analysis and insight into the game. He himself was a first class player for many years; and he has coached cricket all over the world. He is deeply imbued in the very spirit of the game - a man formed by its challenges and attracted to its joys. He brings to his articles (which are some of the best loved in the whole newspaper, of any kind) a level of insight and wisdom that he achieves by integrating at a very deep level his insights developed over his years of study of the game. He can opine believably about Zimbabwe because he has been there and he knows Zimbabwean cricketers. He is fascinated by the characters who play the game and what the game brings out of them, or what the game does to them. He ventures opinions about cricket that are sometimes controversial, and sometimes he gets it wrong by his own admission - such as when he called for Ricky Ponting to resign in early 2008. He takes that risk, the risk of giving his opinion - and I assume it did not make him popular in the Aussie dressing room - because that is the nature of his task.

My point? Preachers are to be more like Roebuck than Salthau.

(Which is why Moore College is by far the best college for the preparation of preachers in Sydney, btw ;-) )

The cricket problem

[don't forget to drop by my blog HIM: An Introduction and add you comments.]

It is a miserable summer for Australian cricket. To lose to India and then South Africa - and the latter at home for the first time - shows that our stocks have plainly fallen a long long way.

How has this come to pass? Well some of it is just happenstance. Warne retired, and then so did Hogg and MacGill. It is unreasonable to expect any international team to have more than three back-up spin bowlers. Then, we have had some frankly bizarre selections and mysterious non-selections. Beau Casson? Jason Krezja? Cameron White? What the?

But in the fast bowling department the failure to prepare for the retirement of McGrath is very distressing. Fast bowlers win tests. And so they need careful protection. The strain of too much cricket and overzealous training is telling on bowlers like Stuart Clark and Brett Lee. Shaun Tait had personal problems. Likewise, Brett Lee's failure to fire stems from the time his marriage disintegrated. Perhaps 'pastoral' issues play a more significant factor in this then we are led to believe. It is a very English problem to have so many injuries to key players. In the Steve Waugh era, our team was able to play test after test unchanged because the top players had so few injuries.

It all takes me back to the bad old days of the 1980s when Lillee, Chappell and Marsh all suddenly retired leaving a generation of young cricketers exposed. There were bizarre selections then, too (Glenn Trimble anyone? Robbie Kerr? Chris Matthews?). The scent of desparation hung over the team for a good while.

What did it take to revive our fortunes? It took several years, a tough minded skipper (Alan Border), the gradual coming to experience of bowlers like Lawson, McDermott, Alderman and Hughes, the persistence of the selectors with an underperforming Steve Waugh and the discovery of some consistent top order batsmen (Marsh, Boon, Taylor). Warne and McGrath appeared after all of this.

Which is by way of saying: I don't think the solution is around the corner. But whacky selections will really slow the process down.

Training and hiring

In the New Yorker - an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell about trying to predict who will be right for the job. He focuses in on NFL Quarterbacks and the teaching profession. And he focuses on the fact that success at training levels (or college football) is no indicator of success in the actual profession. His essay has important things to say about how we train ministers of course, too.

He writes:

In teaching, the implications are ... profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.

Simply touting 'high standards' and 'rigour' for no good reason is pointless unless the standards track with what we think is most important. When he says 'standards should be lowered' he is speaking of entry requirements - and I don't think the training itself should be at all compromised. It is however worth asking if what is asked of students, and therefore measured in them, is any helpful indicator of how they will go as ministers.

Shapers of Contemporary Protestant Theology

Introducing - an important course offered to fourth year students at Moore College!

Shapers of Contemporary Protestant Theology is a reading and seminar style course which seeks to give the student an orientation to current themes and debates in theological thinking. This is in part at least to help the student conduct some self-analysis about their own theological thinking, its context and the influences on them. To do this, we will be narrating the story of Protestant theology in the last two centuries with special reference to four main thinkers: Schleiermacher, Newman, Warfield and Barth. Each of these thinkers is both an individual of immense and original influence on theological thinking, and also representative of (roughly speaking) 'schools' of theological thought within Protestantism. What is also of significance is that each of these thinkers is trying to do Christian theology in a faithful way in response to the modern world of the industrial revolution, the rise of the nation state, the Darwinian revolution in science, the politics of tolerance and charity and the inevitable progress of human culture.

Schleiermacher is of course the representative of the turn to 'feeling' and experience over and against the rationalism of Kant; Newman (who of course ended up as a Roman Catholic, but whose influence on Protestant/Anglican thinking is ongoing) turns to the church and tradition; Warfield is the orthodox Calvinist, and an American as well; and Barth represents the single most impressive attempt to reposition Protestant orthodoxy within modernity.

We see some themes beginning to emerge even from the planting of these four stakes in the ground. What is the place of academic theology vis a vis the church? What role can scripture plausibly have in modern theology after the fact of the rise of biblical criticism? What can theology say about politics in the modern world? What is the response of theology to the rise of science?

Here is the reading list:


Schleiermacher, F.
The Christian Faith. 1821. Repr. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999, 52–93; 11–19.

Newman, J.H.
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, 93-178

Warfield, B. B.
‘The Church Doctrine of Inspiration’. The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948. 105–165

Barth, K.
Church Dogmatics, I/1. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956, 125-186.

Church Dogmatics, II/2, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956,145–194.

Moltmann, J.

Theology of Hope. London: SCM, 1967, 15–36.

Pannenberg, W.
from Revelation as History. London: Sheed and Ward, 1969, 123–158.

Gunton, C.E.

Father, Son, & Holy Spirit, London: T&T Clark, 2003, 3-18


Torrance, T.F.
"Theological Realism." The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 169-96.

Wiles, M.
Working Papers in Doctrine, London:SCM, 1976, 1-17; 180-193

Packer, J.I.
“Hermeneutics and Biblical Authority,” Themelios 1.1 (Autumn 1975): 3-12.

Frei, H.
Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, Hunsinger & Placher eds., New York: OUP, 1993, 94-116.

Lindbeck, G.
The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Lousville: Westminster John Knox, 1984), 73–90

Williams, R.
‘On the Unity of Christian Truth’ in On Christian Doctrine, Oxford: Blackwells, 16-28

Milbank, J.
‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’, in G.Ward (ed), The Postmodern God, Oxford: Blackwells,1997, 265-78

Horton, M.
Covenant and Eschatology: Divine Drama, Louisville: John Knox, 2007, 1-19

Vanhoozer, K.J.
The Drama of Doctrine, 1-30

Knox, D.B.
Selected Works, Vol 1, Kingsford: Matthias Media, 37-50, 73-95


Robinson, D.W.B.
Selected Works:Vol 1, Camperdown: ACR, 230-53

(about 550 pages in total)

Christianity's internal tensions..

OK - bear with me here. This is a historical rather than a theological point.

It seems to me that in the history of Christianity a number of tensions exist that never seem to be decisively resolved (in historical terms). Now, I must emphasise that highlighting these tensions isn't to say I don't have positions on each of these.


1. aestheticism vs iconoclasm

2. hedonism vs asceticism

3. universal vs local church

4. rationality vs experientiality

5. celebration of marriage vs celebration of virginity

6. optimistic vs pessimistic views of sanctification

7. free will vs bondage of the will

What does the New Testament say about false teachers?

The term 'false teacher' is thrown around with some (gay?) abandon. It is increasingly the case that this term is used to describe any Christian or putative Christian whose teaching differs from mine – or, I say with all seriousness, to describe someone whose work I don't understand and haven't read at any depth. But what does the NT actually say about who 'false teachers' are and what should be done about them? Because the term sounds like it is biblical one, it is important that those who use it use it biblically, true?

So I have made a small investigation. Truth is, the term 'false teacher' hardly appears, though 'false teaching/doctrine' does and 'false prophet' certainly does.

In Matthew 7:15-16 Jesus warns the 'new Israel' against the infiltration of false prophets among them:
¹⁵ "Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. ¹⁶ By their fruit you will recognize them.

He doesn't tell them what the false prophets will teach, but he does say to them that they will be recognized by their fruit. What is their fruit? Is it what they teach? Or the immorality of their behavior? Jesus does not specify, other than to say that we will be able to recognize them as false by what they produce – and that they are doomed to destruction.

In Matthew 24:24 Jesus teaches that in the end times many false Christs will arise along with false prophets. There will be declarations of the appearance of Christ that are false accompanied by great displays of miraculous power in order to deceive people.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul admits that if Christ is not raised he would indeed be a false witness about God – it is clearly an essential and decisive truth about God that is at stake for him and that would make him a false witness if it failed.

In 2 Cor 11 it is the false super apostles, who preach a faith of glory and not of suffering weakness. These guys are motivated by greed, power and vanity – and it is quite clear to Paul that they are feigning their role as apostles of Christ. There is no hint of honest error in what Paul's opponents are accused of.

In Galatians 2:4 Paul speaks of false brothers who have spied on the freedom of the Galatians. Of course, in Galatians, Paul's gospel and Paul's commission to preach it to the Gentiles itself is at issue, and he is very strong in his repudiation of those who have compromised its integrity by their behavior.

In 1 Timothy 1, Paul urges Timothy to be firm with certain men who are teaching falsely out of their ignorance:

³ As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain men not to teach false doctrines any longer ⁴ nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. These promote controversies rather than God's work-- which is by faith. ⁵ The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith….⁷ They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.

False teaching in good faith can be dealt with firmly but restoratively. After all, as Paul says of himself: ¹³ Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.

Later in the same letter Paul asks to Timothy once again to be firm with those who teach false doctrines (not 'false teacher', note)

³ If anyone teaches false doctrines and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, ⁴ he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions ⁵ and constant friction between men of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain. ⁶ But godliness with contentment is great gain.

That is to say: if the one who teaches falsely won't listen to rebuke – well, watch how the consequences are destructive of community. Watch how constant friction circles about this person. And notice again – Paul has reason to think financial gain is on the horizon of those teachers in question. The content of the false teaching in 1 Timothy seems to be 'myths and genealogies': a devotion to the obscure and useless knowledge that is of benefit to no-one but of interest to many.

IN 2 Peter we read:

But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. ² Many will follow their shameful ways and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. ³ In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping…

Once more – these are people – ex-Christians no less - who really want to make money out of the religion business. Just as Israel was infected by smooth talking false prophets, so the false teachers of the coming time will be in the church. Their teaching? A denial of the sovereign Lord who bought them! There seems however to be an immoral content to the teaching of these false prophets – as Peter goes on, it seems that debauchery is the result of what they teach: ¹⁸ For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of sinful human nature, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error.

It is quite specific: these false teachers are open in the immorality and in their lust for sex and money. In Jude, while 'false teaching' isn't mentioned per se, it is the case that the church is likewise infected by divisive and argumentative types who are also openly immoral – who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.

In I John 4:1ff we are told that many false prophets have gone out into the world, and that they are to be recognized by their denial of Jesus' coming in the flesh.

To sum up:

1. 'false teacher' itself is a rare terminology, only occurring in 2 Peter – though there it is given an extensive exposition.
   
2. false prophets/teachers are not usually thought to be sincere, since the NT authors hold them to be motivated on the one hand by profit and on the other hand by lust.
   
3. the content of false teaching in the NT is often a Christological issue – the incarnation, for example, of the Lordship of Christ.
   
4. it is also libertarian in character – advocating grace as an excuse for licence.
   
5. false teachers are divisive and argumentative, especially over trivialities, like genealogies and myths. The trivialities prove a distraction to the feeble. One of the worst results of their teaching is the division they cause in the church.
   
6. those who teach falsely may at first be rebuked and corrected with forbearance. It is possible to teach falsehood without being (technical term) a 'false teacher'.
   
7. the NT authors reassure (and warn) Christians that unrepentant teachers are doomed to an extra-hot end.
   

SO: The NT alerts Christians to the ongoing presence of teaching that will a) compromise the divinity and/or humanity of Christ, for the purpose of b) promoting division amongst Christians and licentious behavior.

 

Ursula Le Guin on fiction:

 

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor....

I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find- if it's a good novel – that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little...

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words...

Lots to ponder!

Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

At Michael Paget's recommendation I have been reading Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Sci-fi has never been my bag, but it has to be said that some fairly amazing working out of the themes of human existence occurs in sci-fi writing. Think of Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale, or Bladerunner (based on Philip K Dick's work), or William Gibson's Necromancer.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, a lone emissary from Earth travels to the planet 'Winter' on which people exist who have no gender except at certain regular time, the kemmering, in which they can be either male or female.

...Anyone can turn his hand to anything This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable...Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the smae risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else. ...There is no unconsenting sex, and no rape....there is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.

It is not quite a recipe for utopia, however. The narrator-envoy finds himself in a labor camp where prisoner's are chemically castrated. He observes:

They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.

 

 

 

Full-text notes and pedagogical practice

I am a theological lecturer. I believe in the content of my course material.

Since I have returned to teaching, I have had repeated requests from students for full-text notes of my lectures.

I have refused these requests, on the grounds that I do use a text-book and allocate set-readings, and that my lecture 'notes' are not of publishable standard. The notes are actually for me, as a prompt to my oral delivery of the course content.

Futhermore, I think giving out a set of full-text notes is not that way I want to teach. I think it encourages 'bulimic learning' - the rote learning of information for an exam which is quickly forgotten. I would like to encourage what they call 'deep learning' - and to regard the lecture itself as not an injection of information but an educational experience.

Am I missing something?

Theology of the Human Being course 2010

This is a draft of a draft of a proposed Masters course on theological anthropology.... see what you think.
The rationale is that it is meant to engage both theological and non-theological voices and draw out a theological reading of scripture. The cases of torture at Abu Ghraib invites consideration of the human person in many contexts, since it was an attempt to strip certain human beings in terms of their gender, religion, culture, the image of their bodies, and their liberty. Not only that, but contemporary discourses about human rights circulate around this incident too. A theological analysis is not far away either - the cross of Christ is a similar incident, yet it is held to be a great human victory - or the inauguration of a new humanity...

What a Piece of Work is Man: A Theological Investigation into the Human Condition

1. Abu Ghraib and the Disappearance of Man
readings from M. Foucault Discipline & Punish

W. Cavanaugh Torture & Eucharist
Tertullian On the Spectacles
excerpts from Luther
Scripture text: 2 Corinthians 3-4

2. Born Free? Erasmus & Luther and Human Servitude
Luther & Erasmus texts
John Carroll The Wreck of Western Culture
Galatians

Philemon


3. Radiant Hair: Human Gender and the Glory of God
Luce Irigary This Sex That is Not One
Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex

1 Corinthians 11

Genesis narratives

Song of Songs


4. Homo Laborans: The Human Task
Miroslav Volf A Theology of Work
Hannah Arendt The Human Condition
Ecclesiastes


5. After Humankind? White Teeth and the Human Future
Zadie Smith White Teeth
Michel Houllebecq Atomised
Donna Harroway FutureMouse
Moltmann The Coming of God
1 Corinthians 15

Revelation




6. The Gift of Speech
Habermas?
Alister McFadyen The Call to Personhood
Vanhoozer

Psalm 119


7. My Family and Other Animals
R. Gaita The Philosopher’s Dog

C. Darwin Origin of the Species
from Barth, CD. III
Gregory of Nyssa
Job; Genesis 6-9

8. Realising the Authentic Self with Charles Taylor and Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Charles Taylor Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity
Bonhoeffer Letter and Papers from Prison, Ethics

John 4


9. The Human Being on Trial: Temptation and Identity
Paul Ricoeur Oneself as Another
Bonhoeffer Temptation
Hebrews 4-5
Gethesamane, Wilderness narratives


10. Social Being, Human Rights and Violence
Cain & Abel; Revelation; Deuteronomy
Ellul The Meaning of the City
Volf Exclusion and Embrace
Rene Girard

11. Homo Adorans: The Religious Being
Hans urs von Balthasar Theological Anthropology

Proverbs; Acts 17


12. The Problem of Human Evil

Dostoyevksy, The Brothers Karamazov

McFadyen, Bound to Sin

Jenson, The Gravity of Sin

Romans

13. Memory, Imagination and the Inner Self
Augustine Confessions
Volf Memory

14. Martyrdom as a Type of Authentic Human Existence

In praise of academic administration

In my days as a postgraduate student one of the things I enjoyed not being a part of most was the process of academic administration - the meetings and chores that inevitably crowd into an academic teacher's life and prevent him/her from doing what he/she feels called to do - teach students, research, publish and so on. Academics often wish they could be freed from the grind of admin in order to do the real thing.

Today was the marathon meeting of our academic year at Moore, the famous post-exams 'Board of Studies' meeting. It is 8 hours of hard slog, for the most part. Meditating on the process when I was supposed to be thinking about something else, I realised that the nexus between academic administration and academic knowledge (in the best sense) is tighter than it feels. It just isn't true that they have nothing to do with each other. Governing the process of teaching and learning depends heavily on - and in turn informs - teaching and learning itself. The ordering of education is in itself educative. While the process can be more or less pleasurable, it is still part of the business of academic thought to which academics are called.

The history of the university depended on this observation: that knowledge was united and its various parts ordered to one another in a certain way was at the heart of the medieval university. And theology, of all the disciplines, held the honoured place - 'the queen of sciences'. The university, as much by its structures and by its location and communal disciplines as by its curriculum, upheld and reinforced a view of knowledge.

It doesn't make it more pleasant, but hopefully makes it feel more purposeful!

On Rowan Williams here in Australia

On Rowan Williams is available here in Australia - at the legendary Moore Books.

It contains essays by Andrew Cameron, Greg Clarke, Matheson Russell, Byron Smith, Ben Myers, Rhys Bezzant, Tom Frame, and Andrew Moody. .

Oh, and me.

Intro is by Oliver O'Donovan

From the blurb:

Theologian, poet, public intellectual, and clergyman, Rowan Williams is one of the leading lights of contemporary British theology. He has published over twenty books and one hundred scholarly essays in a distinguished career as an academic theologian that culminated in his appointment as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. Williams left this post to serve in the Anglican Church, first as Bishop of Monmouth, then Archbishop of Wales, before finally being enthroned in 2003 as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury.In this collection of essays, a talented younger generation of Australian theologians critically analyzes the themes that bind together Williams' theology. These sympathetic yet probing essays traverse the full breadth of Williams' work, from his studies on Arius, the Desert Fathers, Hegel, and Trinitarian theology to his more pastoral writings on spirituality, sexuality, politics, and the Anglican Church.

Calvin on Biblical interpretation

Calvin's letter to Simon Grynaeus, which opens his Romans Commentary ought to be a must read for all Protestant exegetes. His explains here his preference for 'lucid brevity' in commentary – because his task is to unfold the mind of the author as much as possible. But then he recognizes that commentators, even good ones, differ and have always have differed. This is not because the text is problematic, but rather because human beings have been limited by God – even the ones guided by the Holy Spirit. Here is what he writes:

God has never so blessed His servants that they each possessed full and perfect knowledge of every part of their subject. It is clear that His purpose in so limiting our knowledge was first that we should be kept humble, and also that we should continue to have dealings with our fellows. Even though it were otherwise highly desirable, we are not to look in the present life for lasting agreement among us on the exposition of passages of scripture. When, therefore, we depart from the views of our predecessors, we are not to be stimulated by any passion for innovation, impelled by any desire to slander others, aroused by any hatred, or prompted by any ambition. Necessity alone is to compel us, and we are to have no other object than that of doing good.

Pannenberg on Anthropology

Christian theology has been suspected of being just a form of anthropology since the 19^th Century, and the work of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzche and so on. The danger is that God may be indeed eliminated from the study of theology! This was Barth's great worry, of course, and the root of his insistence that theology not be translated into anthropological terms. He was adamant that this not be the case: and critical of those theologians who he saw as collaborating in the anthropological reduction of theology.

Wolfhart Pannenberg, however , refuses to accept that theology can be cordoned off from other sorts of human knowledge. Or at least, it is a matter of theology's own self-authenticity that it not do so: it cannot park itself off the highways of human reason in a quiet little driveway and remain anything other than superstition. He writes:

If it can be shown that religion is simply a product of the human imagination and an expression of a human self-alienation, the roots of which are analyzed in a critical approach to religion, then religious faith and especially Christianity with its tradition and message will lose any claim to universal credibility in the life of the modern age. The Christian faith must then accept being lumped together with any and every form of superstition.

Without a sound claim to universal validity Christians cannot maintain a conviction of the truth of their faith and message. For a 'truth' that would be simply my truth and would not at least claim to be universal and valid for every human being could not remain true even for me. This consideration explains why Christian cannot but try to defend the claim of their faith to be true. It also explains why in the modern age they must conduct this defence on the terrain of the interpretation of human existence and in a debate over whether religion is an indispensable component of humanness or, on the contrary, contributes to alienate human beings from themselves. (Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 15)

Pannenberg argues that there isn't an option for Christian theology: it must

begin …reflection with a recognition of the fundamental importance of anthropology for all modern thought and for any present-day claim of universal validity for religious statements. Otherwise they will, even if unintentionally, play into the hands of their atheistic critics, who reduce religion and theology to anthropology, that is, to human assumptions and illusions. By narrowly focusing on the question of human salvation, theologians have undoubtedly forgotten in great measure that the Godness of God and not human religious experience must have first place in theology.

He goes on:

Theologians will be able to defend the truth precisely of their talk about God only if they first respond to the atheistic critique of religion on the terrain of anthropology. Otherwise all their assertions, however impressive, about the primacy of the Godness of God will remain purely subjective assurances without any serious claim to universal validity. p. 16

He maintains, furthermore, that rejecting this anthropological ground is in fact conceding the ground to anthropological suppositions – by reducing theology to mere subjectivity.

Which way are evangelicals going to swing on this?

Contextualisation, and so on.

I am always surprised by the naive but belligerent talk one hears from evangelicals who are disdainful of "contextualisation'' - usually with an equally vehement contempt for ''hermeneutics".

I understand the fear. The craven accommodation of the gospel to the fads and fashions of the time is appalling to see. Even now, the fad of the 1980s to have 'perspectival' theologies - black theology, lesbian theology, latino theology and whatever - looks simply laughable. Why did anyone ever take that seriously?

But the alternative is to be blind to our own context, and to our own (sinful and human) propensity to distort things. The Bible needs to be interpreted ever anew, not because it isn't clear or effective or coherent, but because we tend to get it wrong. Faithfulness to the original demands not parroting it but hearing it again as fresh for today and today's people. To borrow an analogy from bible translation: ''dynamic equivalence'' is the most authentic and faithful means of transmission!

Daniel Treier on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture

Daniel Treier's stimulating book Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture serves as a kind of companion to the Dictionary of Theological Interpretation of the Bible. Treier's claim is that there has been in the past two decades a movement towards the recovery of a hermeneutics that is properly theological. This movement, which is fascinating in its ecumenical breadth, respects the unity of the Scriptures and the wisdom of the great interpreters of the past. I say ecumenical breadth because it appears that Roman Catholic, Lutheran, conservative evangelical and reformed thinkers have simultaneously made a discovery/recovery of this kind of interpretation.

Some samples from Treier:

From the ancient masters we can recover a way of integrating Scripture study with piety that has been virtually lost in much of late modern Western culture. We can also learn to read the Bible as Christ-centred in a way that makes possible spiritual participation in the realities of which Scripture speaks. Moreover, we can imitate reading for application with theological, not just narrowly exegetical, guidance and restraint. p. 54

Theology is the practice of all Christian people growing in their knowledge of God amidst their various life activities and church practices. The academic discipline of theology is not entirely separate from, or more important than, ordinary Christian growth in biblical discernment. Rather, professional theologians ought to pursue the same practices as lay Christians but with different intensities of inquiry, amounts of time and levels of expertise. p. 188

The Christian Life – too urgent to rush?

Christians are, I think, living a life somewhere between the lateness and urgency of the hour ('the time is short') and the long view of time that comes from worship of the God for whom a day and a thousand years aren't very different. I think it is the latter that conditions the former: that is, the 'urgency' of living in the last times is not a frantic rush but a realisation that only good things are worth doing. It is the kind of urgency that comes from knowing our 'times are in your hands'.

The Christian attitude to time is marked by 'patient endurance'. It is more a five-day Test than Twenty-20; more gourmet meal with mature cheese and vintage wine than McDonalds; more epic than haiku; more stone than weatherboard; more Mahler than Kylie; more ocean liner than speed boat. It is more family than business. Christians don't respond rapidly to social change, on principle – and thank goodness.

So why is church life so busy? Why do ministers collapse under the burdens of the work, too exhausted to think? Why do run so many events but see so little of one another?

F. LeRon Shults on fear in theological education...

LeRon Shults' book Reforming Anthropology is by turns enriching and annoying. Shults does not write lucidly I have to say; and like many American writers he seems to have to quote or cite everybody. But he is full of insight, too, including a chapter on 'relationality and pedagogical practice', where he writes:

I suggest that the ultimate remedy to the repression that keeps seminarians from transformational learning is to fear the only One worth fearing, so that they can overcome the fears of this world. For truly transformational learning to occur in seminarians, it is crucial for us to provide an integrative environment in which they see their intellectual task (theological exploration) as inherently connected to their relation to God (spiritual and personal formation) and to their ministry with the people of God (transformational leadership). p. 67

He argues that theological education should, of all studies, be an aesthetic exercise:

The aesthetic dimension in theological learning includes the pleasure and pain of the learner's life story, one's systemic and sensible relations to community, one's emotive and optative investment in the whole history of humanity, and of course one's experience of God. p. 69

It is fear, the psychologists tell us, that keeps us from learning. But the theological response to this is not the removal of fear, but the changing of fear's object. This is the conquering of other fears by fear of God. Fearing God in fact is the purest of fears, and is 'the beginning of wisdom': it is the purest pedagogical principle! Therefore, theological education ought to cultivate the fear of the Lord. Shults writes:

Human love of God includes the element of fear but it is transformed infinitely into the terrific delight of worship, not merely a worship that is ritualistically compartmentalized, but a doxological way of living in relation to the Holy that constitutes the whole of one's identity in the lived world. p. 74.

Wow.

On Rowan Williams is available!

The collection of essays by a group of Australian Anglican theologians edited by Matheson Russell is now available.

Is Church Politics possible?

Like many Christians, I feel ambivalent about church politics. Church politics is, of course, reported in the NT - think of the council of Jerusalem! As a human reality, the church on earth needs - and indeed is called - to order and govern its mutual life in accordance with its discipleship, to decide and affirm right doctrine, to manage common resources, and to make space for the exercise of right authority. To say otherwise is to have an over-spiritualised ecclesiology. Even the most free of free churches has to agree with this. Anarchy is not in any sense properly Christian. On the other hand, church politics as we experience it, in denominations or congregations, can be exceedingly unpleasant and a travesty of the gospel. It is possible to make it better? Here are some principles:



1 - the process is as important as the outcome. If God is truly sovereign in the church as he is in the world, then it is not necessary to use means that are not his means. His means might not be politically expedient or efficient. That means that love has a priority over outcomes.

2 - give reasons for your position that you believe, and not just reasons that are likely to persuade. Being Christian, we believe certain things about speech and its integrity to speakers. It is impossible to carry on a genuine disagreement with the possibility of mutual enrichment and edification if people are arguing merely in order to manipulate those voting. If you speak in this way, then I can not actually speak to you.

3 - seek more mutual accountability, not less. That is, the ordering of church life ought to have a realistic doctrine of sanctification. The child abuse scandals have taught us that 'trust me' isn't enough - there was a naivety about the extent to which the Christian is progressing in sanctification. Now most churches have all sorts of accountability structures in place in this area. Why not extend this to other areas of church life too? It is boring and painful, but isn't it actually right?

4 - respect the process. manipulating the process demeans the process. The law is an ass if it is treated like an ass... Church laws exist as an expression of mutual purpose and accountability. If the words and intentions of the framers of laws are twisted, then the law no longer protects the fellowship of believers. If no-one can trust anyone else, then we might as well be in the NSW state parliament. Which, if you don't know, is bad.

5 - protect ourselves from groupthink. People would much rather leave the messy business of church politics to others. It is hard work to think through church life at an organisational and theological level, and what is more, most people actually don't like conflict and would prefer to avoid it. We would much rather just do what the agenda says we ought to do and live harmoniously. This pattern does not lead to wise or mature church-political processes. Those entrusted with decision-making ought to be diligent, or give up their votes to someone else.

6 - practice agreeable disagreement. That is, it ought to be possible to strongly disagree without casting doubt on the other person's salvation. And the 'winners' in any decision ought to seek reconciliation if necessary with the 'losers' - indeed, it is their responsibility to do so. Don't label those you disagree with as defensive. Also: understanding and agreement are not the same...I can actually understand you and still not agree with you. Please don't keep shouting!

7 - take the long view. Christians understand history in a particular way. We don't need to rush! Theological and ecclesiastical discernment takes time - sometimes generations. Patience practiced in church politics means that sometimes thirty years thinking about a particular issue isn't enough.

8 - don't pretend that political acts are somehow not political. There's nothing wrong with them being political. The processes of lobbying and grouping together to urge for change are not in themselves wrong. On the contrary, they are perfectly appropriate to an exercise of church government. What really stinks is when someone exercises or achieves political power in a church context and calls it something else - spiritualises it so that it doesn't appear to have all the supposedly grubby aspects of politics. If we can call it 'politics', then when can judge it for what it is. Indaba groups are not somehow more spiritual or less political that a synodical style with parliamentary rules! They are just different.

any other ideas?

A YOU review

Mark Barry reviews YOU here.

The poor, and so on

It is easy to be glib and romantic about the poor, disadvantaged and socially outcast from the theological ivory tower. In principle - and it's more than a principle - yes, it is disgraceful that churches perpetuate the social alienation of the economically disadvantaged, the unemployed and so on. James tells us to show the poor man to the pride of place, and so we should.


The reality of life for church communities is that overcoming the factors which cause social exclusion is far more complicated. Economic disadvantage is (in the welfare state) rarely just economic disadvantage; social exclusion is rarely just social exclusion. These things often come with a raft of other problems. In my pastoral experience I have encountered some people who, while wanting to members of the church community, were really, really difficult, for whatever reason. They came with alarming or disturbing or deeply unpleasant personality traits. (Sometimes this was the result of a mental illness, though not always; and, it must be said there are those with mental illnesses who do not exhibit these anti-social behaviour patterns.) There were those who frightened off other church members, or who were inappropriately attentive to members of the opposite sex. There were those who told lies and took advantage of the charity of the church - in one case, to the tune of several hundreds of dollars. There were those who feigned serious illness in order to get attention.

And, anti-social behaviour, it turns out, is well named: people like this can drain the resources of a community and sap its growth. As a young pastor, several times I poured my heart into people who were difficult, trusting that my naive trust would be rewarded. It rarely was, I have to say (not with any bitterness).

So what is the way forward? How does the community of God's people take seriously the teaching of the NT and yet do so with wisdom? How have others - especially in inner city ministries - dealt with this issue?

Which Theologians would have made good bloggers?

Which theologians would have been successful bloggers? Or, which theologians do you reckon would have had blogs if they had been available at the time?

Luther - the pamphleteer and controversialist in Luther would have been attracted to the medium of blogging. He was a master disseminator of his own ideas using the printing press. His colourful language would have got him a seat in Australian parliaments. And he was quick on his feet. Perhaps verbosity would have got in his way.

Newman - A controversialist too, but with an acid tongue and an piercing application of sarcasm when needed. Aren't the 'Tracts for the Times' really just blog entries?

Augustine - a more ponderous thinker and not equipped for the brevity necessary for good blogging perhaps: but quite the controversialist and up for a good argument. You certainly wouldn't have wanted Augustine lobbing comments on your blog!

Tertullian - a master of Latin style, an orator and a lawyer. Great with the extended metaphor, and the wry observation. A little mad - it helps!

Broughton Knox - our local Aussie theologian never wrote much, but had a flair for the compact observation, the scribbled down note, the timely saying. Also a noted controversialist in the vein of a Luther. His piece on nude sunbathing in (I think) the Selected Works Vol 1 is a blog entry pure and simple!

Any others?

Francis Watson and interpretative practice…

An interpretative practice working within the world of the text may offer many insightful observations about the workings of that world. But it will tell us nothing at all about the one thing that actually matters, the relation of that imagined world to reality. If it wishes to engage responsibly in theological construction, biblical interpretation must there abandon the myth of the self-enclosed text and learn to correlate the text with the reality to which it bears witness, understanding the text as located primarily within the church which is itself located within the world. Interpretation must take the more demanding but also more rewarding way of seeking to discern the truth mediated in the texts of holy scripture. And it must not be deterred by the skepticism that such a project is sure to evoke.

                            Francis Watson, Text, Church and World p. 293

 

The temptation for conservative interpreters has been to cordon off the scriptures from the more ornery questions of its existence in the world – the questions that historians might ask, for example. However, (and I am sure Watson would agree), the text has something to say about the world which changes it. If the text is in the world, then it is also true that the world is in the (this) text. Can both be held without compromise?

YOU at Good Book Co!

http://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/You-an-introduction-you_1037/

Jurgen Moltmann – The Crucified God

Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God is an attempt to come at Christian theology in a manner different to his previous work Theology of Hope, with the accent now on the cross of the risen Christ rather than the resurrection of the crucified Messiah. This is not a regressive step, he says, but an examination of the reverse side of the theology of hope (p.5). Methodologically he appeals to Adorno and Horkheimer's 'negative dialectic' because "[U]nless it apprehends the pain of the negative, Christian hope cannot be realistic and liberating" (p.5). The perspective of the problem of theodicy is thus prominent, together with the motif of the loving solidarity of God with the suffering of the world. His trinitarianism is a dominant strand of the work, and central to his explanation of the cross. The voluntary fellow-suffering of God on the cross with those who suffer godforsakeness is the key to Moltmann's theologia crucis. Everywhere is his admirable concern to articulate the faith in terms that make practical sense in the bloody twentieth century. As he says of his own experience of returning to the lecture halls after three years as a POW: "[A] theology which did not speak of God in the sight of the one who was abandoned and crucified would have had nothing to say to us then" (p. 1)

Chapter Six of The Crucified God is explained as an attempt to develop the consequences of the theology of the crucified Christ for the concept of God - that is to say, an attempt to understand God in light of the godforsakeness of Jesus on the cross (p. 200). In particular, Moltmann wishes to chart a course between modern existentialist atheism on the one hand, and traditional Christian theism on the other. Moltmann argues that traditional explanations of the cross have been restricted to soteriological questions, and have not pushed forward to ask the explicitly theo-logical question, "What does the cross of Jesus mean for God himself?" (p.201). He critiques the tendency to speak of a "death of God" even in Rahner and Barth, and insists that the answer to this question must be trinitarian - Jesus' death must be understood rather as a death in God (p.207).

The tradition of philosophical theism is then subjected to a thorough examination with Martin Luther enlisted as an ally. The theologia crucis means a new epistemology, a "crucifying form of knowledge", contrary to human pride. Metaphysics of the Greek strain cannot stand in the face of this cross of Christ - the theistic concept of the God who cannot suffer, the God who is pure causality, is incompatible with a Christian understanding of reality. In fact, it is necessary to speak of a "history of God" which the cross reveals. Atheism, too, has been an unbelief of the theists' God, not the crucified God. Moltmann hopes that if metaphysical theism disappears, then protest atheism will also die. This is because the crucial problem for the protest atheist is not God's existence, but his righteousness. Thus Moltmann's key strategy contra atheism is a theodicy. God must be understood as the suffering God in the suffering of Christ and the one who utters the cry of dereliction.

Moltmann now examines traditional christology and finds in the doctrine of Christ's two natures a possible docetism. He carefully examines the early church statements against Arianism, monophysitism and the via negativa. What is needed is a christological doctrine of the trinity (p.235), and western Christianity, as Rahner has noted, has been more monotheistic than truly trinitarian. Importantly, God's being and God's acts cannot be separated. The cross - God's act - is essential to who God is - trinity. But further, on the cross the Father delivered up the willing Son, and so suffers the death of the Son. This voluntary act on the part of God is solidarity with the godforsaken world. Even in this point of separation the Son and the Father are united in their love for the world. The trinity is not a closed circle, but an open embrace of the world in its godforsakeness. God becomes not other-worldly, but this-worldly (p.252). The problem of suffering is not "solved"; rather it is met by God's voluntary and loving suffering in identification with the world. This is to be the praxis of the church also. Moltmann also wants to speak of a trinitarian history of God, rooted in his exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15:28. Further, he wishes to propose that Christ does not face redundancy in the eschaton. In fact, the Sonship of the Son is consummated in the handing over of the kingdom.

One can see how Moltmann develops his Christian panentheism from such beginnings. The suffering of God means that man is taken up, whole and entire, into the life of God. Not only is God in the world: his embrace is so strong that the world is in God. Ultimately, God is in Auschwitz and Auschwitz is taken up into God, and this is grounds for an extraordinary hope.

Moltmann's theodicy is the great strength of this work, in that it directly engages the protest atheism of the mid twentieth century without negating the powerful emotional impact of its claims. We are returned to the cross as the heart of the Christian message repeatedly - it is no accident that Luther features so strongly and so positively in these pages. Further, the rigour of his penetrating search for the implications of the cross for God himself has led him rightly to the trinity, and stands as a rebuke to the western tradition for neglecting this understanding of God for so long. The atonement is necessarily a trinitarian event/process. The sense of God identifying with human beings in Christ is also very strong. Moltmann develops a theology of the atonement with a cosmic scope, and does not fall into the trap of individualising the work of the cross.

We might complain that Moltmann's doctrine of God suffers from an overdose of Hegelianism, by presenting the history of the world as God's history, the process by which he realizes himself. By rejecting impassiblity and divine aseity, does he allow a compromise of God's freedom? This having been said, is God still as impersonal as he ever was under the scholastics? Further, the God presented here seems almost dependent on, or at least intrinsically tied to, the world. His is a vulnerable God. Moltmann's trinitarian reflection leaves him open to the charge of tritheism - however, he more than responds to such a charge in The Trinity and the Kingdom of God; and he is recapturing a biblical emphasis, after all.

While the cosmic vision of Moltmann's theologia crucis is admirable, it says almost nothing about individual salvation - in fact, it almost non-soteriological. He describes God's judgement in the terms of the "giving up" of human beings to their godlessness, as in Rom 1 (p.242). The atonement is achieved not by any substitutionary work of Christ but by his identifying with human beings in their lostness, by solidarity with them. In the end, his panentheism leads him to a universalist model; and the preaching of the cross becomes a following of God's example in identifying with the lost and godforsaken.

One last quibble is with his lack of exegetical foundation at points, and a tendency (that I have noted in Moltmann's other writings) to recycle a few favourite passages (such as I Cor 15 and Rom 8, crucial though they may be).

Calvin, hermeneutics and history…

On the final page of his authoritative work The Unaccommodated Calvin, Richard A. Muller writes: 'A clever theologian can accommodate Calvin to nearly any agenda; a faithful theologian – and a good historian – will seek to listen to Calvin, not to use him.' Professor Muller's warning is salutary, not the least in the area of Calvin's hermeneutics. If anything, there has been since the 1960s a revival in interest in Calvin's interpretation of scripture, and an unseemly rush to appropriate or 'accommodate' him to new hermeneutical models. In the light of the slow dismemberment of the text of the Bible by scholars who hunkered around it like vultures pecking at a carcass, what else was to be done? The problem is that while this clinging to our forebear is driven by motives that are indubitably noble, it is by no means clear that Calvin has been listened to, and not used.

That is all very easy to say. The honest truth is that it is by no means obvious that listening to Calvin on the matter of hermeneutics is possible five centuries after his birth. The providential unity of the historical and Christological senses of scripture is no longer a assumption with which the contemporary interpreter can proceed. Stephen Edmondson voices the disquiet:

'These developments over the last four centuries have shut off any direct appropriation of Calvin's scriptural hermeneutic for contemporary interpreters concerned with the historical sense of the text. …it is problematic at this point to offer an historical reading of Scripture that is either unitive or generally theological, much less one that roots the unity of the narrative in a robust Christology. Calvin's history, then, is not our history.'

On the one hand, Calvin posited a single divine authorship to the Scriptures that was evidenced in its unity of voice and continuity of narrative; and that the text was a direct description of what actually happened in history. In direct and mutually-informing relationship with it, on the other hand, he held to a Christological theology of providence – the divine will shaped the events of history such that Christ was their consummation. If, first, the text could be shown to be not a united text but a plurality of competing texts, with an at best uncertain relationship to what actually happened in history, and second, if the view of the divine superintendence of historical events could be challenged and even discredited, then Calvin's reading of scripture could be made to look very odd indeed. Both of these were held to have occurred by the beginning of the nineteenth century; and so Calvin's narrative reading of scripture was 'eclipsed'.

[to be continued...]

Volf, new identity and the power of promises

The making of new identity in Christ and the effect of believing in promises have been themes in Volf's work since Exclusion and Embrace. No surprise to hear him saying these things in his book on Memory:

This new identity – not humanly acquired but divinely bestowed, even in the midst of our ruin – helps to heal wounded selves. We remember wrongs suffered as people with identities defined by God, not by wrongdoers' evil deeds and their echo in our memory. True, sometimes that echo is so powerful that it drowns out all other voices. Still behind the unbearable noise of wrongdoing suffered, we can hear in faith the divinely composed music of our true identity... p. 80

And then:

In the Christian view of life...future possibilities do not grow simply out of the actuality of the past and present...instead of arising simply from what was or what is, the future comes the realm of what is not yet...In Jesus Christ, God has promised to every human being a new horizon of possibilities – a new life into which each of us is called to grow in our own way and ultimately a new world freed from all enmity, a world of love. To be a Christian means that new possibilities are defined by that promise, not by any past experience, however devastating. If the traumatized believe the promise – if they live into the promise, even if they are tempted at first to mock it – they will...enter a world 'marked by a genuinely open future that they could not have imagined in the living death of the old world they have constructed for themselves... P. 82

Theological Anthropology – reading list?

I am compiling a bibliography for a Master's level course on Theological Anthropology for 2010. Any suggestions of items that ought to be on the list?

Love covers a multitude of sins

Miroslav Volf just does not know how to write dull books. His book The End of Memory is a stimulating discussion of memory and forgiveness. And it asks the very good question – how will the past, much of it evil and painful, be remembered in the age to come? How will God mend what is unmendable because it has happened and so cannot unhappen? Love, after all, 'keeps no record of wrongs'. Is the divine love in some way forgetful? How can love 'cover a multitude of sins' without somehow looking past them? (1 Peter 4:8)

Volf says: '…truthful memory does not have to be indelible memory. The purpose of truthful memory is not simply to name acts of injustice, and certainly not to hold an unalterable past forever fixed in the forefront of a person's mind. Instead, the highest aim of lovingly truthful memory seeks to bring about the repentance, forgiveness and transformation of wrongdoers, and reconciliation between wrongdoers and their victims. When these goals are achieved, memory can let go of offenses without ceasing to be truthful. For then remembering truthfully will have reached its ultimate goal in the unhindered love of neighbour'. (p. 65)

Paul Helm and Calvin’s Ideas

I have been reading Paul Helm's excellent John Calvin's Ideas in preparation for an essay that I am writing - for a collection to be published in celebration of Calvin's 500^th birthday next year.

Helm shows, in his opening chapter "God in Se and Quoad Nos" that Calvin's thought shows continuity with that of Aquinas – more than commonly assumed. Calvin's famous ranting against speculation, Helm claims, was as a recognition of the division of labour between philosophers and theologians. He was perfectly prepared to admit speculative questions in their place.

For Helm it is important to show that Calvin's approach to the divine essence is 'consistent with and indeed requires a robust metaphysical theism'. And so:

In both Aquinas and Calvin some of the human language about God is univocal, but it is couched mainly in negative terms. But apart from this …'negative core', all other language about God is analogical or accommodated language, with elements of univocity but also with elements of equivocity. Modern discussion recognizes that we readily employ metaphors, similes, and analogies when talking about God; nevertheless, it takes there to be a univocal core that is usually much more extensive than that envisaged by Aquinas or Calvin, for it embraces the entire concept of God…

Helm complains that modern theologians are far too ready to draw analogy between nature and the divine character. So, for example, the change we observe in nature is in no way for Calvin and Aquinas a flouting of God's immutability. 'Part of what a negative, reserved theological approach to divine goodness and immutability implies is that we cannot draw valid conclusions about God's character either a priori or a posteriori. But if God has, by revelation, said that he wills to do such-and-such, then such-and-such either cannot be evil or it cannot be willed as evil by God; and if he has said in unconditional terms that he will do so-and-so, then he cannot not do so-and-so.'

 

Quite!

You for the Brits

If you are in the UK, YOU: An Intro is available for pre-order

here or here for only £6.99

In Australia, try here (you get a sample chapter, too).

YOU is available!

You can grab copies of my book, YOU: An Introduction right now! (A sample chapter and TOC is available too.)

If you are in the US, go here.