AN Wilson returns to Christianity

Famous atheist A.N. Wilson has decided to become a Christian once more. See here and here. Extraordinary. And he always was an annoyingly good writer...

Here's some highlights:

Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.

See, that's one for the martyrs...

... the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – “Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once . . . ‘The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’.” And then Coleridge adds: “‘And man became a living soul.’ Materialism will never explain those last words.”

On Easter:

Easter does not answer such questions by clever-clever logic. Nor is it irrational. On the contrary, it meets our reason and our hearts together, for it addresses the whole person.
In the past, I have questioned its veracity and suggested that it should not be taken literally. But the more I read the Easter story, the better it seems to fit and apply to the human condition. That, too, is why I now believe in it.
Easter confronts us with a historical event set in time. We are faced with a story of an empty tomb, of a small group of men and women who were at one stage hiding for their lives and at the next were brave enough to face the full judicial persecution of the Roman Empire and proclaim their belief in a risen Christ.

Title for new e-journal?

Ok, you heard it here first... or maybe second. But anyways, I am in the process of setting up a quarterly e-journal for the purpose of 'showcasing' Moore College students excellent work in the fields of Theology, Church History and Ethics.

The idea would be that students submit for publication their revisions of their essay work (it has to have scored an HD level mark in the first instance). I/we would then select four pieces for uploading as PDFs each quarter. I wouldn't expect the revisions to make the work more palatable for a general readership, though the writing could be made more clear in the revision process. The purpose is to have some great academic work available on line. Other institutions like TEDS and Princeton and Regents do something similar.

ANYHOW: we need a name. I am leaning away from the Greek/Latin name idea, but I can be convinced.

Here are some suggestions:

Alignment/s (ie, Alignments, or Alignment)
Refinements
reSubmit
Mortar
Sentientes
Mindsets

got any others?

Test Podcast

Just a test.

The state of education... hmm...

Something has changed in our educational culture. When I say 'our', I suspect that this is true of most Western countries, but since what I am going to say is anecdotal and observational, I restrict myself to those systems with which I have some experience, namely, Australia and the UK. Some of these changes are undoubtedly for the better, or inevitable because of technological advances, so this is not a 'grumpy old man' list!

I am finding it hard to nail down, so this post is a necessarily inadequate attempt. I am hoping for responses which deepen this. So, here goes:

1. There seems to be a far greater expectation that educators are 'service-providers' and students (and, where relevant, their parents) are 'clients'. The economic paradigm is corrupting at almost every level - though it is understandable given the huge price of education.
2. Whereas in the past, students had to find their own articles and materials, and make their own way in attempting assignments, today there is an expectation that a task will be clearly spelt out with accompanying notes, and that specific articles will be provided direct to the student. Research in the library seems almost redundant.
3. Knowledge of 'learning styles' has led to great student/parent awareness of teachers not addressing the different learning styles. On occassion, students even refuse to learn if their 'learning style' is not catered to!
4. Teachers at secondary and tertiary level are weighed down with administration and reporting.
5. There has been a strong reaction against exams as a form of assessment. The advantage of exams is that they are the least labour-intensive form of assessment from the point of view of teachers - meaning they are free to care for students in other ways.
6. Vocational training has almost completely triumphed over the old, humanist-style (and Christian-endorsed) broad-based education in subjects which cannot be justified by appeal to 'relevance'. Like Latin, for example. Knowledge is almost never now seen as an end in itself. The complete victory of pragmatism?
7. The postmodern to turn to perspectival approaches to texts means that students no longer develop basic skills in interpretation and exegesis of texts in their own language. Year 12 students are taught how to give a Foucauldian reading of a website, but not how to read it. (And hey, I like some things about postmodernism!) They are equipped with suspicion, and not naivety: and I think the latter is essential for good reading. The former only gets in the way.
8. History is bunk, as far as contemporary education goes.
9. We don't put up with people who are bad teachers (on the face of it) but great thinkers. And yet some of the best educational experiences happen with such people.
10. The emphasis in high school on a final, standardised test/assessment has led to the dumbening down of educational standards, because of the need to compare apples with oranges. It also leads to very assessment-stressed students at tertiary level. Anxiety about assessment is palpable.
11. Memorisation of anything is now just not done.

Any more?

Stuff I have been up to...

I am sorry that there hasn't been much blogging of substance of late. No excuses, excuses are boring.

However, I haven't been idle.

I have been preaching some, at All Saints Petersham. I have been trying to do evangelistic sermons from the Sermon on the Mount.

Here's How to be really happy ;
and How to have a worry free life.
And How to get what you really need.

I have also been reading: David Malouf's new novel Ransom. I think Malouf is one of the best writers about the world of men that there is. This novel is pretty much the best thing I have read from him. His novels sometimes become rather twee: but not this one. Not for a second.
I have also been reading Steve Volz's A Fraction of the Whole. A sprawling comic epic of outlaws set in Australia. Marilynne Robinson's essays in The Death of Adam are amazing - including a stout defence of John Calvin from the usual Weberian cliches.

More to come: I am thinking about education, and more about Charles Taylor....

YOU on YOUTUBE!

YOU: An interview on the Radio

Listen here.

And go ahead and buy it here!

Jesus is the question to all our answers

Moore College students have been hard at it this week, coming out of their classrooms and into the community to talk to people about the Lord Jesus Christ.

You might have noticed the mission-related posts from the student bloggers on my blogroll...such as this one, this funny one, this one, this one (from the team I am with), and this one. Oh, and this one.

Actually it was at Dan's blog that I heard the story of the student who accidentally said to a classroom of teenagers 'Jesus the problem to all our solutions!'

The more I think about it, the more I think this is a piece of accidental genius. It is a far better and I reckon far more biblical way to preach the gospel I think! Jesus is the question to all our answers! What do you think?

Torture doesn't work

In a brilliant essay in the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner writes:

'The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed'.

And yet, it appears, the US and its allies have been engaged in what can only be described as a regime of torture against its enemies in the last few years. Now, I am not particularly sorry for the terrorists on whom it was practiced. But, as Danner says:

'by choosing to torture, we freely chose to become the caricature they made of us'...

Luther’s Moral Theology

The accusation was from the first pressed against Luther's theological system that it was antinomian. If the individual was to be justified by faith and not by the merits of works, then what motivation could there be for good behaviour? This accusation lead Luther to write extensively on the issue – most particularly in his Treatise on Good Works (1520). Luther was concerned to show how his ethical teaching was not an addition to his theological thought, but actually formed a unity with it.

How would Luther expound the Ten Commandments, for example? If Law and Gospel were opposed, did the Law have anything to offer the Christian believer? Luther did not want to read the Decalogue as a moral code, distinct from ceremonial or civil laws. As he pointed out, no such easy division is possible. God's law is one. All the commandments derive from the first commandment. As he said: 'the first commandment contains in itself all the other commandments. Whoever keeps it, keeps them all, and who does not keep it, neither keeps them, for his heart clings to something other than God alone.' That is: only faith can keep the fulfil the first command – and thus all the commands.

But, more crucially, Luther would insist that the law was unintelligible unless read christologically. There were two aspects to this christolological conception of the law. Firstly, the Sermon on the Mount shows that external acts are not enough to fulfil the law if inner motives are not themselves righteous. Second, there is an exposition of the law as positive commands rather than merely prohibitions.

Luther was to insist that there was no two-tier level of performance in the Christian life – works of supererogation were not taught by the gospel. The commandments come to every person as a whole – or no commandment comes at all.

Luther was not as dualistic as usually supposed. While in soteriology he did push the opposition of law and gospel, in his Genesis commentary we find him making a more subtle use of the law. Law is already present in the garden as a means of providing Adam with a way of giving concrete form to his love of God in responsive obedience. The Christian life means dying to the pride and desperation of the external code and rising again to the law in its original sense – 'the law of the spirit of life in Christ' (Rom 8:2).

Neither does Luther's moral theology rest on a dualist anthropology (as many of his interpreters and critics have supposed). In The Freedom of the Christian Luther distinguished between the 'outer and the 'inner' man. By this distinction Luther did not mean to split the individual man in two – and thus bolster make the works (or not) of the outer man an unimportant matter. Rather both concepts refer to the whole individual – the one facing God [coram deo] and the other facing the world [coram mundo]. It is not as if faith belongs to the inner and love to the outer man. Rather, love is in need of being shaped by faith. 'Faith is the 'genetrix', the fertile soil of good will and just action, in that it give a specific shape to love by transforming the affective existence of the beliver, from the 'impious affections' towards the affects of the Spirit' (Bernd Wannenwetsch).

Reviews of YOU: An Introduction

*NEW* Nathan Lee

Brett Hall in Southern Cross

John Hundscheid in The Gadfly (US)

Arthur Davis

Matt Moffitt

Julian Gamble

Mark Barry

David Miers

A couple of things from Mark Meynell

Tim Vasby-Burnie (UK)

Peter Sanlon (UK)

Sam Allberry (UK)

More to come!

A new review of you!

http://nathanjameslee.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/you-an-introduction/

Getting things done

Here's my latest Defence Against the Dark Arts piece:

 

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/life/culture/the_man_who_gets_things_done/

 

I am trying to apply justification by faith to the modern world…

Luther’s Theology of the Cross

As Luther explains it, there is no other true locus of the knowledge of God than the cross of Christ. And yet, in the cross of Christ God is both at the same time revealed, and paradoxically hidden from view just as he is revealed. Like Moses, the cross only grants a view of God from the rear – a posteriora. God in his revelation is also, strangely, hidden. He is deus absconditus just as he is deus revelatus. This distinction means that 'the holy, unapproachable majesty of God remains even in God's self-disclosure' (Lohse).

McGrath outlines five features of the theology of the cross (theologia crucis):

1. It is a theology of revelation, not speculation. It is not based on the created order as we perceive it. Theologians ought to concern themselves with what God has revealed of himself, and not rely on preconceived understandings of God, which are ultimately idolatrous.
   
2. This revelation is indirect and concealed, even as it is revealed. Sound paradoxical? What Luther is trying to help us to see is that if we expect a direct revelation of the face of God, we will miss the way in which he has revealed himself, unexpectedly and shockingly, in the passion and cross of Christ. Faith is required to see that in the humility and shame of the cross is God's great power and glory.
   
3. God is not found in intelligent reflection on the nature of our moral being or the order of creation. True theology can only be found in Christ crucified. The cross shatters human reason's pride.
   
4. Knowledge of the God who is hidden in his revelation is by faith only.
   Only faith can see the cross as revelation of God. This is what Jesus taught his disciples, who sought a theology of glory – see, for example, Philip in John 14:8. This theology of glory bypasses the cross!
   
5. God makes himself known through suffering – primarily of course that suffering which is Christ's. But also, suffering and temptation are the way in which God acts to bring human beings to himself. In fact, he needs to humiliate us before we may be justified. 'God assaults man in order to break him down and thus to justify him' (McGrath). Both law and gospel are necessary to each other. This breaking down – the experience of Anfechtung - is a work that alien to God in order that the work that belongs most to his nature.
   

The theology of the cross can be regarded both as the substantive and the methodological principle in Luther's theology – and its impact is felt on all his theological work.

It meant for example a radical recasting of the nature of theological language. To simply somewhat - throughout the middle ages, it was held that 'the righteousness of God' was analogous to 'justice', as we understand it and encounter it in the world. The justice of God was to be understood after the pattern of, or in continuity with, the justice of man. But under the account Luther gives of the theologia crucis, this is no longer possible. For him, all theological talk must be related to the word of the cross. 'The cross is the test of everything' – crux probat omnia. It means that human theological intuitions are always suspect. The cross breaks down our preconceptions regarding everything about God – and, if we see with the eyes of faith, rebuilds them.

And that is the heart of justification. The individual finds himself under the judgement of God, with nowhere to turn, exposed terribly to his wrath. The only place to flee for safety from God's wrath – is to God! And there he finds the mercy that lies hidden under the terrible wrath. Christ the crucified one, who suffered on our behalf, became sin for us in order that his righteousness might become our righteousness.

Faith is really the only means by which the true significance of the cross can be perceived – faith alone. Faith is hearing the word of promise; and it is also the special bond that unites the believer with Christ – which means that the great exchange of Christ's righteousness for our wickedness is far more than a merely externalised transaction.

For Luther, then, the Christian life is lived in the middle of a tension between faith and experience. Our experience only serves to contradict our faith. This was something Luther expounded when he thought that he might be martyred. Where was God in this? Luther used the word Anfechtung – 'temptation', or 'assault' – to describe this experience. The devil, the world and death are allied in a war against man. But of course, it is a work of God too, to reduce man to utter reliance on him and him alone. The only way to grow in the Christian life is to return to the foot of the cross and start all over again.

To my alarm

To my alarm, it has come to my attention more than once that some readers think that in this post from last month, 'Missiological Assumptions', I was urging clergy everywhere to don their collars and dress up in their flowing white robes!

I was not.

I think a straight reading of the post will reveal that my intentions were quite otherwise: I was merely questioning some of the discourse that I have heard used to justify changes in church practices over the years, and also asking whether we really are as flexible as we think we are. It was somewhat of a thought experiment - and a useful one I feel.

Furthermore, in the discussion that followed a variety of views were expressed. Some people made my point more intensely than I had, I think, or pushed it further than I had done. The discussion was vigorous, but polite and thoughtful too.

A few points:

1) a blog post is not a definitive declaration of one's deepest convictions.
2) the owner of the blog ought not to be judged by the opinions of the commenters.
3) good missiology helps us to revisit our assumptions, doesn't it?

Piper on worship, emotion and so on.

I just went back to Piper's book Desiring God - Meditations of Christian Hedonist. This is Calvinism in the tradition of Jonathan Edwards, make no mistake. And it is full of purple passages about the emotions or affections that seem to ring true:

Where feelings for God are dead, worship is dead...
True worship must include inward feelings that reflect the worth of God's glory.

These are strong statements - but surely right! Piper says that the right affections give authenticity to the external acts of worship, performed as they are by the will. He turns to the Psalms, especially as they give expression to a genuine brokenness and contrition on the one hand, and to the hearts right desire for God himself on the other.

Review of YOU

http://allberry.blogspot.com/2009/03/getting-to-know-you.html

Moore Blogs

I have had a go at aggregating as many Moore College student and faculty blogs as I can, and you can see them over right on my blog list. I think they give a fascinating insight into Moore College life and its joys and trials. There is some quality theological discussion and some very funny stuff. There is also stuff about food, about living in Newtown, and about hobbies, like craft.

To those student and faculty bloggers - the challenge to you is to keep your blog ticking over at least!

I am also starting a select Moore graduates list - so if you are a Moore graduate and blogger, send me your url!

Wisdom of God at Him

A series on The Wisdom of God begins today at 'HIM: An Introduction'.

Luther on the Lord's Supper

In response to some discussion in class on Tuesday about Luther's view of the Lord's Supper.

It might be worth citing from the Smaller Catechism:

VI. The Sacrament of the Altar
As the head of the family should teach it in a simple way to his household.
What is the Sacrament of the Altar?
It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, under the bread and wine, for us Christians to eat and to drink, instituted by Christ Himself.
Where is this written?
The holy Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and St. Paul, write thus:
Our Lord Jesus Christ, the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread: and when He had given thanks, He brake it, and gave it to His disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is My body, which is given for you. This do in remembrance of Me.
After the same manner also He took the cup, when He had supped, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Take, drink ye all of it. This cup is the new testament in My blood, which is shed for you for the remission of sins. This do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of Me.
What is the benefit of such eating and drinking?
That is shown us in these words: Given, and shed for you, for the remission of sins; namely, that in the Sacrament forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation are given us through these words. For where there is forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation.
How can bodily eating and drinking do such great things?
It is not the eating and drinking, indeed, that does them, but the words which stand here, namely: Given, and shed for you, for the remission of sins. Which words are, beside the bodily eating and drinking, as the chief thing in the Sacrament; and he that believes these words has what they say and express, namely, the forgiveness of sins.
Who, then, receives such Sacrament worthily?
Fasting and bodily preparation is, indeed, a fine outward training; but he is truly worthy and well prepared who has faith in these words: Given, and shed for you, for the remission of sins.But he that does not believe these words, or doubts, is unworthy and unfit; for the words 'For you' require altogether believing hearts.

Luther had made a strong attack on the Catholic understanding of the sacraments in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. He was appalled by the pratice of communion in one kind, which he viewed as unscriptural. The doctrine of transubstantion was an absurd - an attempt to explain a mystery. To know that Christ is present - isn't that enough? Furthermore, the idea that the priest made a sacrifice on our behalf was equally unscriptural. Sacraments were for the nourishment and growth in faith of the people of God, not for accruing merit.

But Luther held onto the view that bread and wine really did become the body and blood of Christ. He did so not because it was traditional, but because it was (as he saw it) scriptural. This IS my body! The principle of the clarity of scripture seemed to be at stake here.

The controversy between the Reformers over this matter dominated the late 1520s. For Luther, the Word of God and the sacrament were inseparably linked. Both serve to mediate the power and presence of Christ. The sacraments, just like the word, could generate and support saving faith.

Furthermore, Luther asserted that Christ was 'ubiquitous': that is, the ascension of Christ 'to the right hand of God' did not mean that his presence was limited by space or time. Thus, he could be present in the sacrament in a saving way.

Schleiermacher, Newman, Warfield

In our Shapers of Contemporary Protestant Theology course here at Moore we have been reading sections from Schleiermacher, Newman and now Warfield. It is quite interesting to see the lines of concern and thought criss-cross in surprising ways. Having read Newman on the development of Christian doctrine, it is fascinating to see Warfield appealing to some of the same criteria in trying to defend the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture. This doctrine, he argues, is early, ubiquitous and persistent.

Warfield claims:

Despite these attempts to introduce lowered conceptions, the doctrine of the plenary inpsiration of the Scriptures, which looks upon them as an oracular book, in all its parts and elements, alike, of God, trustworthy in all its affirmations of every kind, remains to-day, as it has always been, the vital faith of the people of God, and the formal teaching of the organized church.

Newman might have agreed with this as a method, if not an affirmation. The doctrine, he says, is not merely a matter of form alone, but is a necessary preservative of the lively faith of the church.

Of course it is in the role of the church that they will differ. Newman appeals to the need for an authorised interpretive magisterium and the providential care of God. Warfield will put the church - and he DOES have an ecclesiological concern - is the role of a hearing, listening and obeying church, the church that recognises rather than authorises the authority of scripture....

Teach us to pray?

The trouble with most evangelistic courses or programmes is that they focus on imparting information. That isn't bad in itself - and the ones like 'Simply Christianity' which introduce you to a text of the Bible and to the person of Jesus, which is great.

However, I wonder if it would be possible to construct an evangelistic course around the idea of teaching people to pray.

The basis for this idea is firstly that people think of themselves as 'spiritual', and like the idea of praying, but have no idea how one might do this - 'in the Christian/Anglican tradition'. Secondly, it is less confronting than an out and out 'investigating Christianity' course. But, thirdly, you can't explain Christian prayer without explaining the gospel. That is, Christian prayer is very much shaped by the nature of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. You can't avoid talking about topics like forgiveness and confession of sin and God's soveriegnty and his Father-heart - topics that bring you into the gospel itself.

And while you might focus on some specific practices that have helped Christians pray - kneeling, praying over Scripture, some famous Christian prayers - you would also try to subvert the idea that Christian prayer is a technique, or a means of somehow accruing greater religiosity. Christian prayer is specifically not about grandiloquent words, or about goading God into action. You could very usefully talk about prayer in other faiths as a way of doing comparative religion in a gentle way, as well.

Of course, the Sermon on Mount would be a key text. But Paul's prayers prare so attractive that it would be great to show them to non-Christians...

Is it a go-er?

Propositions on Emotions and the Christian life - a preliminary sketch?

1 - To apprehend God in Christ requires/produces an emotional response - reverent fear! 1 Peter 2:17 (and many other NT references as well). It is a response it is appropriate to command, even. 'Requires' in this sense is not a pre-condition of justification.

2. There is also an expectation of joy - an emotion that is often linked to the Holy Spirit. 1 Thess 1:6, Gal 5:22.

3 - It strikes me that we distinguish falsely if we separate the emotions from reason/rationality. The emotions are an epistemological or apprehensional tool as much as the mind is. And, if we fear that a speaker may manipulate the emotions, how much more ought we to fear that a speaker may manipulate us by using rational argument? Impeccable logic can lead to absurd conclusions, indeed. We ought not to avoid or downplay the emotions because the mind is more trustworthy, surely...

Nostalgia

Here's my article having a go at nostalgia.... a malignant cultural tendency?

How near?

Despite the great gulf between human beings and God being crossed in Christ - a crossing that we can truly call, with the New Testament, reconciliation - despite that, there is no sense in which the holiness of God collapses into the ordinary. God remains in his godness God - the incarnation and the atonement don't change this. We are purified and brought into his presence, inhabited by the Holy Spirit and granted a place in the divine fellowship (2 Pet 1:4) -but though the matter of sin has been dealt with, our union with God does not mean that the creature is no longer a creature and the divine no longer divine. God's holiness is still awe-inspiring. (I don't quite want to be the Orthodox doctrine of theosis, here, if it means the divine-human is collapsed. I think there can be union, and reconciliation, but it is without loss of the transcedent.)

We can see this from the prominence given to the idea of 'reverent fear' in the NT as an absolutely appropriate emotional response to an encounter with God - even for those who have been reconciled with God. The people of God are both confident to walk into the heavenly throne room and trembling at the prospect.

Take Hebrews 12:28-29, for example

28 Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; 29 for indeed our God is a consuming fire.

The people of God know better than anyone that God is to be truly and deeply revered. God is not in anyway tamed by the incarnation.

Will this be the case in the eschaton? I think so - God is visibly near, but not even then visible, no?

Over at HIM

At Him: An Introduction I have started a series entitled Is God Laughing?

A penny for your thoughts.

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?