There is plenty of good Christian theology going on in London. It is true that theology was driven out of the one place in London that could claim to offer academic Christian teaching at an international level, the theology department of Kings College London. But it is still going just going on informally outside the university. I’ll give you some examples of good Christian theologians at work in London.
My first example is Crispin Fletcher-Louis.
Crispin Fletcher-Louis is a New Testament scholar. He has made it his task to show that Israel understood that man is the representative of God in creation, the living breathing icon of God, who sums up all creation and is able to articulate and return all creation’s praise to God. This colossal definition of man as the creature, officer and right-hand man of God was made visible in the Jerusalem temple, and in particular in the figure of the high priest. Fletcher-Louis sees this priestly imago dei theology not just where you would expect to find it, in the Book of Hebrews, but in every book of the New Testament. Watching Fletcher-Louis opening up a passage of Scripture is as exhilarating as your first encounters with Tom Wright were. That’s right, the theological ambition of Fletcher-Louis’ project is comparable with Tom Wright’s.
Fletcher-Louis has been constructing this thesis with considerable patience through a large number of articles and Luke-Acts: Angels, Christology and Soteriology. He should be in a large theology department with a team of postgraduate students around him, and getting on with this project by writing some big books.
But these are funny times.
So instead Crispin has been setting up the Westminster Theological Centre, which intends to bring the training of Anglican clergy back to London. The Westminster Theological Centre has been set up in-house by St Mary’s Bryanston Square, and it is not the only large charismatic evangelical Anglican flagship to start a new theological college. Who else but the charismatic evangelicals have the energy? Theological training has to come back to the churches, and this is a start. Of course it raises all sorts of questions, but we can look at these another day.
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Anyway, just to give you an idea of the Fletcher-Louis product I’ll give you a paragraph from one of three brief and very accessible little studies he did for Third Way:
“We can now explain why ‘idolatry’ is forbidden: the only physical reality that embodies the divine presence is (ideal) humankind. Idolatry, according to the Old Testament, may thus be defined as giving to some thing else not only the worth and respect that belong to God but also those that are due to us, because it is humankind that represents and bears God’s presence… Humankind is called to be an ecstatic embodiment of divine creativity, filling the world with the presence of God’s glory and thereby providing the order and stability that God’s own authority naturally entails. … This interpretation may sound like an arrogation of divine rights which only adds to centuries of human claims for independence from God, but it is quite the reverse. This image-of-God theology disallows any identity that does not glorify the one true God. True humanity lives for the other, for the Creator it represents.”
Crispin Fletcher-Louis Genesis 1.26 & Ephesians 1.22
Here is an article on Jesus and the High Priest (in scruffy PDF) that nicely summarises the Fletcher-Louis project. Next time, another theologian in working London.
