Augustine and Preaching

At the Latimer Conference we were treated to a fine paper from Peter Sanlon, a student of Catherine Pickstock's from Cambridge University, on 'The Preaching of Augustine'. It was very stimulating. Sanlon's claim is that Augustine's sermons have been scandalously overlooked in academic study of his work.

One point he made I would like to share here. Augustine as a preacher shaped his preaching according to his theology of humanity. Which is to say, he was aware of what it took to persuade a person, to ask a person to look into their heart in response to the word of God. He quoted Michael Hanby:

It is no accident that charity assumes a paramount importance in the Augustinian tradition and discretion in teh pagan, nor that delight in the one case and assent or choice in the other are the corresponding terms in their respective philosophies of action. The terms denote divergent ontological contexts within which selfhood, action and virtue are construed.

Would that modern day preachers thought so comprehensively about those they were addressing!

Hart on the bad taste of Nietzche

Hart's argument in The Beauty of the Infinite is that Christianity is jolly well the most attractive thing around, if you think about it. And other ways of thinking are, well, dog-ugly...

So he writes about Nietzche:

The most potent reply a Christian can make to Nietzche's critique is to accuse him of a defect of sensibility - of bad taste. And this, in fact, is the last observation that shuld be made at this point: Nietzche has atrocious taste. (p. 125)

!

I always thought that this ought to the Christian strategy to counter the rise of queer culture: camp is not just bad morality: it is bad art.

The ascension

The exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of the Father is a basic component of the NT preaching of the person and work of Christ. In fact, the gospel declaration – “Jesus is Lord” – is a declaration of Jesus ascended: that the story of Jesus did not finish with his bodily resurrection but is ongoing, for he reigns. The ascension is the counterpart to the incarnation as we see in passages like Philippians 2:5-11. This was a favourite theme of our old friend, Irenaeus (A.H. 3.1, 18.2, 19.3.)


“In biblical terms the ascension involves a real departure of Jesus of Nazareth. That is the basis on which we find ourselves compelled to speak of two histories rather than one. Covenant history and world history have divided in this departure, for in and with Jesus the former has already reached its goal. In the resulting gap a place has opened up for the Eucharistic community as a genuinely new entity within world history, albeit a peculiar one with its peculiar view of the way things are.” (D.Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia p. 40)




“Doctrinally, then, the Ascension … marks the culmination of the resurrection gospel – the universalizing of Jesus’ relevance to all aspects of human life, individual and global; the present possibility of a share in Jesus’ loving union with his Father, i.e. a life of both trustfulness and authority; the crowning of the purpose of Jesus’ life and death in the restoration of fellowship between heaven and earth. It represents both the call to witness (and to recognize Christ in the world of which he is declared Lord) and the promise of transformed – ‘deified’ – life, as the ground and source of that witness.” (R. Williams, 1983)

And heaven? What is that?

“’Heaven’ in biblical language is the sum of the inaccessible and incomprehensible side of the created world, so that, although it is not God himself, it is the throne of God, the creaturely correspondence to his glory, which is veiled from man, and cannot be disclosed except on his initiative.” (K. Barth, C.D. III/1. 453)

Twelve Steps For Doctoral Students

Tomorrow I am going help at a seminar at a day hosted by the Latimer Trust at Oak Hill College for people interested in persuing graduate studies in theology.

Here's what I am going to say, or part of it:

Lessons I have learnt about doctoral study on the way:

1. Few books, but good. Learn to be a good re-reader rather than try to read absolutely everything. Who cares if you can read 1000s of mediocre books and articles? Find the best. Read them carefully.
2. It may not look it, but thinking is hard work. Thinking takes time to be good. So you will need rest, and holidays, and fun, and diversions. And these will actually help the work progress! Even TV is good.
3. Footnotes should be fun. Slathering everything in footnotes is a bad habit that helps nothing. References are sometimes necessary, but if a footnote is merely a sign of indecision - 'I couldn't work out whether to put it in or not, so I put in a footnote' - cut it out or add it in.
4. Don't wait for inspiration, start writing from day one! Getting words down on paper is really important, because you actaully do much of your thinking while you are writing. This business of leaving writing till the third year is weird to me.
5. Read outside you topic. Attend seminars and lectures. It is amazing how much benefit I have gained from this. It is amazing how unforeseen connections will spring up from completely unrelated contexts. Also, if you are aspiring to be a teacher in a certain area, use the free time to fill in the holes in your knowledge.
6. Find readers for your work/read others' work. Your supervisor will read your work twice a term, perhaps. You will need more than that! The price you might have to pay, is that you will have to read someone else's work: but the pay-off there is that it is comforting to see how they are struggling too!
7. Overcome the evangelical tendency to polemicise. We tend to see life as a series of battles between the forces of good and the forces of evil. But good scholarship is not about polemics first and foremost. Simple either/ors are a bad habit, because the truth is rarely that simple. Your work will gain in sophistication and ultimately in its polemical usefulness if you can avoid a 'goodies' /'badies' mentality.
8. Find surpring friends. Look for surprising agreements or harmonies with your work in other writers/thinkers. Show how someone completely different to you comes to the same conclusion. This is a very powerful strategy for apologetics, too.
9. Find the toughest opponent. Fall under their sway, if only for a week or two: be convinced by their case for a time. Then your reply will carry authority. Your work is only as strong as the opponents you defeat! My tendency when I started was to find any nutter to have a debate with, because debating nutters is always easier than debating reasonable people whose assumptions on the whole I share but who come to different conclusions...
10. Don't talk about you work when you don't feel up to it. One of the shattering experiences for a graduate student is when a family member or friend asks you, 'so, what are actually doing then'? and NOTHING COHERENT comes out of your mouth. This happens to me ALL THE TIME. And you walk away feeling very discouraged about it. Have a prepared speech perhaps! However: I have found writing and talking about my project in other contexts extremely helpful - I find blogging like this. It is a way of accessing other areas of your brain because it is writing/talking in a different mode, somehow.
11. Trust your methodological instincts; go with what you know. You got this far because you have some idea of what theological work is about. You have read quite a bit already. So, use what you already have to your advantage! I often feel intimdated by those theologians who know more philosophy than me (that's most of 'em): I forget that my training was far more in the area of biblical studies and biblical theology. I need to lean more on this, and see it as an advantage, while at the same time not neglecting to deepen my philosophical understanding.
12. Keep doing ministry. Keep serving the people of God, because the tendency of the doctoral student is to wallow in the solitary self-indulgence of it all. Keep preaching/teaching/ministering. After all, what are we doing it all for? If you aren't already doing some ministry in the church, my question is: what are doing entering into graduate theological study? Are you sure you are called to this?

Addenda: I was going to say something about prayer, but I feel foolish and not a little shame hectoring anyone about prayer. I was also going to say as matter of importance: learn to write well. There is an AWFUL lot of bad and unclear and dull writing out there. Write well.

Canon and on

In recent discussions I have had here in Oxford the issue of the development of the canon has loomed large. Post-liberalism tends to agree with Roman Catholicism that the canon is the creation of the church, or is even a practice of the church. Quotes aren't arguments, but, here are three that caught my eye:

The idea that the Bible should rule the church is not poplar today, when leading scholars in the fields are immersed in their own mythology of cultural relativity, but it is a concept which would have seemed perfectly in order to all the Fathers of the church. Gerald Bray, Creeds, Councils and Chirst, p.52

The apostolic succession of the Church must mean that it is guided by the Canon, that is, by the prophetic and apostolic word as the necessary rule of every word that is valid in the Church. K.Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.1, p.104

…the theological issues related to the historical development of the canon may appear rather perplexing to biblical scholars and theologians who would not want to conclude that the biblical canon is a creation of the church. E. Schnabel, "History, theology and the biblical canon: an introduction to basic issues" in Themelios 20:2, 1995, 16.

Vale Bruce Metzger

Bruce Metzger, the doyen of textual critics in the modern era, died very recently.

I was interested to read him this morning saying this in his book The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance:

Although the fringes of the emerging canon remained unsettled for generations, a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament was attained among the very diverse and scattered congregations of believers not only throughout the Mediterranean world but also over an area extending from Britain to Mesopotamia. (p. 76)

Of course, it is our postmodern tendency to emphasis the diversity and forget the coherence and unity... or to imagine that such unanimity must only have been achieved by the exercise of a centralised power and the engines of ecclesial bureaucracy.

Rahner on sacraments

Rahner posits the Chuch as the basic sacrament. The other (seven) sacraments occur when the church 'addresses itself to and involves itself totally in existentielly [sic] decisive sitiations in human life'.

He says that, if institution by Jesus is a criteria, then NONE of the sacraments can be traced back to Jesus for certain (following modern Biblical scholarship). Instead, the sacraments flow from the institution of the church by Jesus. The sevenfold sacraments are an interpretation by the church of its sacramental existence.

Man must respond in faith, hope and love: the sacraments are not 'magical', though they have been misunderstood as such.

He goes on to adopt an almost Calvinist description - in all the sacraments is 'the efficacious word of God.' They are a 'tangible word of God'. But also: 'It is precisely in a sacramental word, where the chuch addresses God's word to an individual in his quite concrete salvific situation, that the individual precisely as individual is addressed by the word of God in a way which is not found in the general word of preaching even in a really existentiell sermon...'

Harnack on Marcion

The legendary church historian Adolf von Harnack wrote about Marcion:

The innovations of Marcion are unmistakable. The way in which he attempted to sever Christianity from the Old Testament was a bold stroke which demanded the sacrifice of the dearest possession of Christianity as a religion, viz., the belief that the God of creation is also the God of redemption. And yet this innovation was partly caused by a religious conviction, the origin of which must be sought not in heathenism, but on Old Testament and Christian soil. For the bold Anti-judaist was the disciple of a Jewish thinker, Paul, and the origin of Marcion's antinomianism may be ultimately found in the prophets. It will always be the glory of Marcion in the early history of the Church that he, the born heathen, could appreciate the religious criticism of the Old Testament religion as formerly exercised by Paul. The antinomianism of Marcion was ultimately based on the strength of his religious feeling, on his personal religion as contrasted with all statutory religion That was also its basis in the case of the prophets and of Paul, only the statutory religion which was felt to be a burden and a fetter was different in each case. As regards the prophets, it was the outer sacrificial worship, and the deliverance was the idea of Jehovah's righteousness. In the case of Paul, it was the pharisaic treatment of the law, and the deliverance was righteousness by faith. To Marcion it was the sum of all that the past had described as a revelation of God: only what Christ had given him was of real value to him. In this conviction he founded a Church: Before him there was no such thing in the sense of a community, firmly united by a fixed conviction, harmoniously organized, and spread over the whole world. Such a Church the Apostle Paul had in his mind's eye, but he was not able to realize it...

Harnack could see the real power of Marcion's idea. He felt the temptation that Marcion felt, to make a separation between the two testaments, to put the stress on the radical newness of Paul's gospel and to highlight his critique of the old faith. Marcion was a remarkable planter of church communities - Harnack even goes so far as to make him the inventor of the Catholic church. Without Marcion the church would not have been able to conceive of its scriptures; it would not have been able to conceive of itself.

Rowan Williams and Orthodoxy

Of course in thinking about heresy (see previous post), it is worth thinking about what orthodoxy is. Rowan Williams has a very influential view which he established in his book about Arius: that heresy actually arises from the attempt to go further than our talking about God ought to go; that it results from rationalism - any 'attempt to clean up or rearrange Christian language which results in a major reduction of available resources of meaning.' It usually results when theologians value 'conceptual economy and precision over richness of symbolic resource' (as Higton puts it) 'when they make the attempt to tie things down too neatly, to control the various and excessove language of worship and devotion too closely.'

So, orthodoxy for its part is actually a refusal to go further in explaining, a deliberate drawing of the doctrinal circle in a wide rather than a narrow way. It is a victory for poets over bureaucrats: for those who want language that generates new possibilities of meaning over against those that would close them down and specify and deaden. The Nicene formulae (and their later Chalcedonian counterparts) refuse to explain how their may be a Son and Father who are equally God; or a person who is God and man. For Williams, then, the job of doctrine is to teach us silence as well as to circumscribe and guide our speech. Orthodoxy becomes then the steel framework around which Christians in each generation must build and rebuild, with considerable effort and not a little pain.

Now, parts of this vision strike me as problematic and a kind of postmodern retrojection back on the 4th century (he does this, bizarrely in my opinion, with Cranmer as well!) It could easily be caricatured as a very Anglican, very English approach to doctrine - i.e., the English are happy for minimalist view of the role of laws and constitutions because so much of their culture proceeds by convention and agreement. Notably, in the US, the opposite is true: laws and conventions have to do what they say on the packet. Americans (and other colonials!) find the vagueness of the English not liberating but rather frustrating, and a little dishonest (it isn't, but that is how it is perceived). Williams (showing his Hegelian colours) does rather focus on the agonising process of deliberation as an end in itself over against the decision/s of any such debates, too.

BUT: there is also something very appealing about Williams' notion of orthodoxy too. Earlier, for example, in talking about the atonement we struck an attempt to exclude the very old and certainly biblical idea of sacrificial substitution from an orthodox understanding of the atonement; and on the other side, Vanhoozer's warnings about rationalism and reductionism as tendencies in evangelical theological thinking. Both pitfalls are avoided if orthodoxy is practiced as Williams would have us practice it, certainly.

Necessary Heresy 1: Marcion, or how big is the Bible?

This week at St Ebbe's I am starting a series of three lectures entitled Necessary Heresies: What the Heretics Have to Teach Us.

We start on Wednesday with Marcion. Marcion - the wealthy son of a bishop (how did THAT happen?) - gained a great deal of influence in the 2nd century church and beyond for his teaching that the wrathful God of the Old Testament was in fact a different deity to that of the New. He rejected the OT as scripture, and also everything but the letters of Paul - and edited those as well! The Christian gospel was as he saw it a repudiation of everything that the OT stood for. Creation was the product of a malicious and wrathful demiurge, from whose clutches we were to be saved by the Son.

What is interesting here is the interplay between the scriptural/textual issue and the theological one. Marcion would have no truck with allegorising the distasteful bits of the OT away to make them palatable. He just wouldn't see them reconciled with the loving deity of the New - and so he rejected them on the basis of this theological criterion.

It is significant that Adolf von Harnack, the great German liberal-Protestant church historian, thought Marcion was the most significant theologian between Paul and Luther. Partly, this is because Marcion did get something right: he did understand the radical newness of the gospel - its breaking out of boundaries and its dissolving of religious strictures and superstitions. He did understand the import of Paul's radical critique of the torah. He did understand the heart of the gospel is not bare law but divine love.

But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! It was of course the mission of 19th century liberal Protestantism to follow Marcion in his excision from the canon of the Bible parts that did not apparently square with gospel as they had determined it. The church of yore determined that this was not a step that was true to its own identity as a listening church, or as a Church of Jesus the Messiah: and this crisis forced it into recognition of the authoritative list of books that comprise the Bible, including the canon of the OT.

Is this heresy alive and well today?

Vanhoozer and the atonement, more of.

[For your greater edification and entertainment, a photo of me graduating with the Master of Studies (Research) degree from Oxford, a degree I didn't even know I was enrolled for or intend to achieve! But they let you wear a fancy gown, so - what the hey!]

I have been enjoying re-reading some of the essays in The Glory of the Atonement (ed. Hill and James). The survey of the biblical and historical material is thorough and careful and leaves me in no doubt that, if one wants to excise sacrificial language from the atonement (see below) or remove the substitutionary aspect, one does so against the overwhelming testimony of the scriptures and the tradition. Which is not to say that there isn't a subjective side to the atonement: it is just that if one has only the subjective side, it ain't enough.

Anyhow, Vanhoozer's essay is my favourite so far ("The Atonement in Postmodernity") - partly because it serves as a handbrake on some of the other essays. He goes so far as to accept the postmodern critique of theoria, at least up to a point. He writes:

The postmodern challenge requires us to develop a nonreductive doctrine of the atonement that perceives the saving significance of Jesus' death in terms other than this-worldly economies of exchange...

What the doctrine of the atonement attempts haltingly to articulate is the equal ultimacy of God's love and God's light (justice, holiness). On the cross neither mercy nor justice loses out; the cross is rather their mutual fulfillment. It is precisely for this reason that theories of the atonement must resist explanations that reduce the significance of Jesus ' death either to unconditional mercy or to uncompromising justice.

George Pattison on Girard and the atonement...

George Pattison in his book A Short Course in Christian Doctrine adapts Girard's work to Christian thinking about the atonement thus:

Earlier, I looked briefly at René Girard’s theory of sacrifice. …Scapegoating works in the sense that it unifies society (“One man must die for the people”!), but it works only at the cost of a massive collective self-deception, a refusal of the self-knowledge that we are each complicit in and responsible for the violence that the act of scapegoating seeks to purge. Seeing Jesus as the scapegoat who bears our sins and thus takes away the sin of the world is, according to Girard, completely to miss the point of what we actually find in the Gospels. For what we see there is the historically unique witness to the profound injustice of the scapegoat phenomenon and, for the first time in history, a victim who refuses to accept the justice of his death, who, in effect, proclaims that one man should not die for the people. For if each person is, in themselves, a reflection of the image and likeness of God and called to fellowship in the divine life, then no act of killing can be “God’s will”. [Thus the passion narrative] offers a decisive insight into the systemic, structural injustice of the human condition and, through this self-knowledge, demystifies and frees us from the otherwise universal mechanisms of mimetic desire and their inevitable violent outcome. The cross, as witnessed in the Gospels, does set us free. But it does not do so because it is the supreme sacrifice. Rather, it does so because it exposes sacrifice for what it is: murder. If we understand this, then that path is for evermore closed and we are set on the new path of mutual responsibility and care. Where the Church persists in interpreting the death of Jesus in sacrificial terms, however, we may suspect that the lesson has not yet been learned. It is salutary to reflect that the Victorians’ preoccupation with sacrifice and atonement provided an all too easy context for the mystification of what happened in the First World War as a Christ-like sacrifice. Only too late did Europe realize that this was…just plain slaughter.

My question is: has there ever been a time when the church did not interpret the death of Jesus in sacrificial terms - let alone in the explicit and persistent language of the NT itself? The language of 'as witnessed in the Gospels' can only be true on a very bad reading of them. Can we retain some of the insight about the cross - that it puts an end to sacrifice and exposes the death of Jesus as a vile murder of an innocent man - and yet still say as orthodox Christians always have, that it was a sacrifice, supremely so?

Mission is unsafe

Not only are the disciples of Christ called to follow after him: they are also sent by him into the world. The mission of Jesus further exposes his disciples to risk, because he sends them into situations where they will be opposed and rejected, beaten, tortured and killed. They are sent out ‘like sheep into the midst of wolves’ (Mt 10:16). They are not to creep unobserved into the corners of the world; Christ rather calls them to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations, ‘in Jerusalem, Samaria and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8) – which activity is most certainly for the public sphere. The churches thus are rightly addressed by Peter as a diaspora (1 Peter 1:1-2): they are a scattered gathering. The gospel expands space and foreshortens time: so, there is now not a location in particular that is more (or less) the site of God’s encounter with human beings. In fact, any place on earth will do. The scattered disciples take refuge in the eschatological and heavenly Jerusalem (as in Heb 12:22-3): they are present with the ascended Christ in heaven as he is ‘with them always, to the end of the age’ by the power of his Spirit.

Calvin on the Extent of the Atonement

My study-room mate here at Wycliffe Hall Russ Dawn has written an interesting paper comparing and contrasting Calvin and his successor Theodore Beza on a number of issues including the extent of the atonement. On the one side, R.T. Kendall claims that Calvin did not teach limited atonement, whereas Beza did. Richard Muller replies that Calvin upheld the Lombardian distinction between the sufficiency of Christ's work for all sin, and the efficiency of that work only for the elect. Russ writes:

It is not patent, however, that Muller has resolved all the difficulties. Kendall, for instance, recognises that in Calvin's thought, although Christ died for all, he only intercedes for the elect, but he interprets this as meaning that for Calvin the decree of election 'is not rendered effectual in Christ's death but in His ascension and intercession at the Father's right hand'...In the final analysis, the best reading is that Beza and Calvin differed on the extent of the atonement. Beza clearly espoused limited atonement, whereas Calvin could clearly express universal atonement, or less clearly express limited atonement. It would be a selective, possibily tendentious reading of Calvin to place him squarely in the camp of the doctrine of limited atonement.

Kendall himself says:

Fundamental to the doctrine of faith in John Calvin is his belief that Christ died indiscriminately for all men. Equally crucial however is his conviction that, until faith is given, 'all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.'

This might be somewhat overstating the case: Calvin doesn't clear up this issue because it wasn't a question he was particularly conscious of. However, what IS interesting in Calvin is that (as with the sacraments) faith, which is itself a gift of God by the Holy Spirit, is needed in order to effect salvation.

Eliot and the city

Some of Eliot’s most important poetry addresses and exposes the false security of urban and suburban life. The strongest polemic from an explicitly Christian perspective is found in the Choruses from ‘The Rock’ where he rails aggressively against modern civilization in all its banality as ‘the land of lobelias and tennis flannels’. Eliot declaims against the city in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. However, even his pre-conversion poetry abounds with the same themes: one thinks of the torpor of Prufrock’s bourgeois routines measuring out his life ‘in coffee spoons’ and making an epic of his boredom and petty insecurities; or of the smog that blankets the city of ‘Preludes’; or of the hallucinatory patchwork of encounters in the London, the ‘unreal city’ of The Waste Land. Even before the introduction of an explicitly Christian theme to his poetry we can see the poetry itself as presented as a revelation of the true insecurity and instability of the city of man. The powerful sense of loss and bewilderment that pervades the earlier poems is coupled to a sense of becoming numbed: the sheer grind of urban life is stupefying. What does mark out a change - and which arguably makes the earlier poetry better as poetry - is that this earlier phase you get the sense of claustraphobic entrapment in modern city life which the poet himself cannot evade: This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. In Choruses from 'the Rock' there is more over-againstness; a more polemical and critical edge, perhaps, but with also an alternative vision offered.

We see this also in Murder in the Cathedral when the chorus - who are in their way voices from Eliot's past poetry, with their description of household drudgery and imprisonment of a life lived in fear - are tempered by the group of Priests and by Thomas himself. Thomas ought to have learnt through bitter experience that civilisation is not enough to secure human life against barbarism; but the temptation to return to that safer path - to share in the construction of an apparently greater shield of protection from the worst that humans can do to one another - is very great.

David Bentley Hart gets Calvin badly askew

David Bentley Hart restates the view (popular with the Radical Orthodox) which traces the decline of Western Christianity to the nominalism of the medieval period: when God became a kind of pure will. He sees Calvin as the moment when that poisoned stream becomes a flood:

...this state of theological decline was so precipitous and complete that it even became posible for someone as formidably intelligent as Calvin, without any apparent embarassment, to regard the fairly lurid portrait of the omnipotent despot of book III of his Institutes - who not only ordains the destiny of souls, but in fact predestines the first sin, and so brings the whole drama of creation and redemption to pass (including the eternal perdition of the vast majority of humanity) as a display of his own dread sovereignty - as a proper depiction of the Christian God. One ancient Augustinian misreading of Paul's ruminations upon the mystery of election had, at last, eventuated in fatalism... p. 134

This is a very nasty (and inaccurate) reading of Calvin, for whom God is primarily the life-giving and tender Father of his creation, and and loving redeemer of his people. This thought permeates the Institutes, rather than the pure omnipotent will of the scholastics. Again, the mode and style of Calvin's work makes all the difference - something you would think Hart would be hip to.

Gerrish on Calvin's Eucharistic Theology

Gerrish's great book Grace and Gratitude is one I have owned for many years and only now begun to read. Oh well...

He gives a terrific account of Calvin's pastoral concern in the Institutes - something he learnt from Erasmus; but that in addition, as his work progressed, he was concerned to show the thematic (if not 'systematic')coherence of his theology. The doctrines are not isolated entities, but mutually conditioning of one another.

Hence Gerrish's study of Calvin's Eucharistic theology is a useful introduction (well, so far!) into Calvin's work as a whole.

What becomes clearer in the final edition of Calvin's Institutes is that the father's liberality and his children's answering gratitude, or lack of it, is not only the theme of the Lord's Supper but a fundamental theme, perhaps the most fundamental theme, of an entire systeme of theology. It conveys, as nothing else can, the heart of Calvin's perception of God, humanity, and the harmony between them that was lost by Adam and restored by Christ...Piety and its renewal as faith in Christ - that is the subject of Calvin's pietatis summa. The holy banquet is simply the liturgical enactment of the them of grace and gratitude that lies at the heart of Calvin's entire theology... (p. 20).

Pierced for our transgressions

In response to some very silly books attacking Penal Substitutionary Atonement, including those by Steve Chalke and Joel Green, the Oak Hill trio of Mike Ovey, Andrew Sach and Steve Jeffrey have produced a book I am looking forward very much to reading: Pierced for our Transgressions - Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

The table of contents looks fascinating: they give exhaustive answer to the many objections raised against PSA. Their account of the heritage of the doctrine is very interesting: the attacks on it have tried to relativise it by making it a product of particular medieval or renaissance conditions. (I would also say that particular conditions of modernity and the way in which we deal with criminality in our culture - ironically because of our Christian heritage - have lead to the doctrine being seen as distasteful and immoral: Foucault's Discipline and Punish is fascinating as an account for the genealogy of punishment in Western liberal society.)

However: there is a tendency in evangelicalism to make the doctrine under attack loom larger than it ought, or to make it the sine qua non of the preaching of the gospel. (PSA is not the gospel, though it is (I believe) a glorious doctrine explaining how exactly the gospel is good news.) This leads in practice to a trotting out of PSA formulae at every point, even when it isn't warranted by the text.
As
K.J. Vanhoozer writes (and his evangelical credentials are sound!):

the economy of covenantal grace is not exhausted by the logic of penal substitution even though the latter has a legitimate place.

Graeme Goldsworthy interviewed

A very interesting interview with my old teacher Graeme Goldsworthy is here. It is great to see his work gaining a worldwide readership and having an influence on the pulpit.

Rowan Williams on speaking parabolically

In an essay entitled 'The Judgement of the World' Rowan Williams proposes the intriguing idea of parabolic speech as a catalyst for a new kind of life: for conversion. The parables that Jesus told have the capacity to tranform people's perceptions: of themselves and of their communities. And indeed, his own life was a larger parable of the gospel of challenge and transformation. Jesus' telling of parables and teaching his disciples how to receive them is a preparation for us of the pattern of loss and recovery of the self that we will see in his death and resurrection story.

He goes on:

The transfiguring of the world in Christ can seem partial or marginal if we have not learned, by speaking and hearing parables, a willingness to lose th eidentities and perceptions we make for ourselves: all good stories change us if we hear them attentively; the most serious stories change us radically....And if we can accept a very general definition of parable as a narrative both dealing with and requiring 'conversion', radical loss and radical novelty, it may not be too far-fetched to say that the task of theology is the exploration of parable, and so of conversion.