Author: Douglas Knight

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Anglicans, authority and charity

Theological commissions within provinces need to be made more conscious of, and conversant with, Communion-wide dimensions of theological discourse. In particular, we need to develop the habit, and thence the virtue, of that charity which listens intensely and with good will to widely different expressions of sincerely held Christian theology, at the levels both of method and of content. As a Communion, we need a common forum for debate, a common table to which we can bring our questions for a proper family discussion.

It is because we have not always fully articulated how authority works within Anglicanism, and because recent decisions have not taken into account, and/or worked through and explained, such authority as we all in theory acknowledge, that we have reached the point where urgent fresh thought and action have become necessary.

The Windsor Report paragraph 41

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The Church is a participation in divine being

Here is another excerpt from ‘The Critics of ‘Being as Communion”, Alan Brown chapter’s in Personhod and the Church: The Theology of John Zizoulas, due to appear at the end of this year:

“Baptism is a new birth in which the human being is newly hypostasised in the mode of being of Jesus Christ. This ontological re-constitution and in-corporation is not, however, a re-constitution and in-corporation into a separated and individualized hypostasis, but rather one into the hypostasis of the one who is the only-begotten of the Father, existing in and only in an absolute perichoretic reciprocity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. As such, the communion of the Church is a participation (an already eschatological participation) in the mode of divine being itself, the mode of catholic, koinonetic love. Consequently, for Zizioulas, it is not possible to ‘project’ the mode of being of the Church onto the divine being, since the mode of being of the Church already is the mode of being of divine being;

For Zizioulas, there are not ‘two communions’, one divine and one human – rather there is one divine communion, in which humans participate, this participation being the ecclesial mode of being that is the Church.”

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The long way to Anglican unity

The most articulate discussion of the struggle for discipleship in the Anglican Communion has been going on over at Titusonenine. Here are excerpts from comments by Ephraim Radner and IRNS –

“Windsor itself is not just about practical actions, taken within some vacuum of public affirmation and meaning. There is an entire theology about the church, however broad, that upholds its recommendations, and this theology includes the character of teaching, witnessed life, and the place of Scripture as informing and even directing thisâ?¦ there is every reason to believe that â??bare actionsâ?? are and will be considered inadequate if they are not tied to clear and clearly-interpreted commitments. The matter of trust for the Communionâ??s future life is at stake in this.

No one can underestimate the destructive degree to which ECUSA has thrown a poisoned apple into the everyoneâ??s midst. There is every sign that Rowan Williams knows this, and may well realize that the poison has already been ingested by everyone. There is little cause for optimism here, and every cause for pleading with the Almighty.”
 Ephraim Radner

“In my own diocese, a reappraiser and I asked the bishop the same question on the same day and received answers to suit our own particular reappraiser/reasserter positionsâ??in other words opposite responses from the same mouth. That is not leadership and is precisely why we are in the mess we are in.”
 SD

“By remaining neutral as regards Lambeth 1.10, TWR [The Windsor Report] implicitly OKâ??d the idea that one could remain neutral, or even opposed.
There is no question that Lambeth 1.10 is the present teaching of the Anglican Communionâ??thank God!â??but there is equally no question that TWR leaves the question of changing that teaching open. Until it is clear that changing that teaching is NOT openâ??that some doctrines are not open to â??developmentâ?? or â??evolutionâ?? from one species of doctrine to anotherâ??then we will remain in a never-ending doctrinal guerilla war, a war that TWR has failed to mediate.
Broadly speaking, TWR addresses two interrelated questions, â??developmentâ?? and authority in matters of doctrine within the Anglican Communion (or â??receptionâ??). I believe that it solves neither of them, and in fact at best confuses the issues. The main reason why parties can continue to either disagree or even simply talk past each other while claiming to adhere to the Windsor Report is not because one side or the other is disingenuous (although there is certainly plenty of that to go around), but because the Windsor Report failed so spectacularly.” Iâ??d Rather Not Say

Read some more of this discussion at Titusonenine. For a longer statement on the decisions the Anglican Communion has to take, read Ephraim Radner’s If there is a future for ECUSA and the Anglican Communion…

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Oswald Bayer

Oswald Bayer

Oswald Bayer’s Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification is very short, 88 pages, but nonetheless quite remarkable. You can see the contents page here.

Oswald Bayer, until recently professor of theology at Tübingen, is as big as Eberhard Jüngel, and his interests are much broader than justification, and much bigger than Miroslav Volf, though in the same area of Church and discipleship. This is magisterial philosophically- and hermenutically-literate theology. You can get some idea of the scale of his thought from his titles – Gott als Auctor (God as Author), Schöpfung als Anrede (Creation as Address), Freiheit als Antwort (Freedom as Answer), Leibliches Wort (Embodied Word: Reformation and Modernity in Conflict). ‘Embodied Word’ – with the sophisticated ontology of Luther’s theology of the Word of God who speaks all things into existence. Bayer’s hermeneutics are theological to a degree not yet reached by the discussion in the UK and States.

It is a scandal that this book is the only piece of the work of this colossal theologian published in English, other than the (not very well translated) articles in Lutheran Quarterly. Read Bayer’s piece on Luther in Blackwell’s The Reformation Theologians (ed. Carter Lindberg) and you will be lifted by its sheer evangelical force and intelligence, its very brevity telling you more about the Reformation as evangelical movement – and merciful act of God – than all the rest of the book.

There are other other scandalously untranslated Germans, chiefly Ingolf Dalferth (Gedeutete Gegenwart: Zur Wahrnehmung Gottes in den Erfahrungen der Zeit – ‘Meaningful Present: The perception of God in the experience of time’) but I’ll tell you about them another day, and anyway, none are as important as Bayer.

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Remind the Anglicans who they are

The Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission asks for your comments on the following issues:

1. Anglicanism has always given a high place to the reading of Scripture as the ground of its worship and teaching. How is it possible for Anglicans in different parts of the world to listen to the Bible together?

2. The Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (ATDC) and the Windsor Report are both emphasising the notion of ‘covenant’ as a basis and expression of communion. If a covenant is more than a constitution, what implications does this have for decision-making by churches that are in a covenantal relationship with each other?

3. How do you think the genuine and meaningful expressions of communion that your church experiences with Anglican Christians in other parts of the world will be able to survive current disagreements in the Anglican Communion?

4. What sort of language (theological and otherwise) is appropriate for speaking about Christian people with whom you disagree?

We also welcome contributions from individuals, and especially lay people, so we will be pleased if you feel able to spread the contents of this letter as widely as possible.

Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission

These are very reasonable questions. Wouldn’t any list of Christian characteristics, such as ‘godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness…’ (1 Timothy 6.11) be the way to reply? The Anglicans are God-marked people, distinuished by all the spiritual gifts that make up Christian discipleship.

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O'Donovan on judgment

The defining role of secular government is to exercise judgment. The court is the central paradigm of government – all government, in all its branches. In Ancient Israel, the simplest model, such as we find in the narratives of David and Solomon and in the Psalms, is that the monarch is a judge who sits in court. “Morning by morning I will destroy all the wicked in the land,” he declares according to the psalm, in what is probably a kind of oath of office; thus, daily assizes are the proof of a just king. Ancient Israel also knew, however, that the task of judgment required not only that the monarch sit in court but that he also found courts.
To provide a court in which a judge sits is no less an act of judgment than to sit in court himself. He considers the situation obtaining, in which those who are wronged lack access to public interest and vindication; he finds it wanting; he redresses it by inaugurating courts. He does not found the judiciary from outside, as it were, like a businessman founding a University chair without himself being a man of learning. The founding of the judiciary is precisely the founding judicial act. It gives judgment in favor of the oppressed.

Oliver O’Donovan Government as Judgment

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Atonement – one or many models?

Given the diverse spiritual needs of people, focusing on but one aspect of saving power really amounts to confusion regarding atonement. By contrast, if there is no confidence regarding the proclamation of saving power in Jesus Christ at all, then ministry and mission live under a cloud of gloom. The heart may yearn for the proclamation of the power of the cross, but the will to do so is absent. Much of the lack of clarity and loss of nerve stems from the fear that atonement is the weak point in the Christian message because there is but one theory (namely, penal substitution) and it is flawed. Whether one openly subscribes to such a view, or quietly fears that it is true, in either case the drive to proclaim the cross is undercut. This paralysis regarding the cross, however, leads to a general shutdown of all systems: If one cannot find a way to confess the saving power of the cross, then Jesus becomes irrelevant and the church has no good news. The situation is not improved, as we shall see, by substituting the threefold outline of Gustaf Aulén. While he appears to recognize three theories rather than one, in the end the three are reduced to only one acceptable theory, i.e., Christus Victor. Against the imperialism of those who argue that atonement is but one general theory or that everything can be squeezed into three theories, this study shall present ten distinct theories, thereby demonstrating the breadth of Christian witness to the fullness of Christ.

The ten theories gathered under these four headings are:

I. Christ Died for Us: Sacrifice
II. Christ Died for Us: Justification by Grace
III. Christ Died for Us: Penal Substitution
IV. Liberation from Sin, Death, and Demonic Powers
V. The Purposes of God: The Renewal of the Creation
VI. The Purposes of God: The Restoration of the Creation
VII. The Purposes of God: Christ the Goal of the Creation
VIII. Reconciliation: Christ the Way to the Knowledge of God
IX. Reconciliation: Christ the Reconciler
X. Reconciliation: The Wondrous Love of God

Peter Schmiechen Saving Power: Theories of Atonement and Forms of the Church. Read Peter Schmiechen’s Introduction

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Books

Amazon offers a bewildering range of ways of plugging a book. You can write reviews, compile lists and run blogs pushing your friends and their books. Now you only have to post a review of a book, or make a list of favourite books and you are rewarded with your own Amazon homepage. It is a formidable way of taking people who are looking at one book by the elbow and conducting them towards another one.

Most academics have better things to do than thinking out book lists for Amazon, but I don’t, and I found Al Kimel (Pontifications) and David Yeago (Pro Ecclesia luminary) offering very useful lists of recommendations for students there. Al Kimel is a Jenson and Torrance fan, though he keeps Pontifications readers on a diet of J H Newman. David Yeago offers Readings in the Christian Theological Tradition and Personal Enthusiasms in 20 Century Theology.

Telford Work is also very good at book lists. His site is a model of what can be done to help students find the right titles and learn what is expected of them. His pep talks to students about reading, learning, writing essays and plagiarism are so good I would copy them without qualm, were it not that I know he would catch me.

But I am encouraging poor habits in you. Get back to your books. Whether late at night or first thing in the morning, it is for reading the bible, not skimming the internet.

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Theological ethics in England?

Andrew Goddard

I have put in a link to the site of Andrew Goddard, who teaches Christian ethics at Wycliffe, Oxford’s evangelical Anglican ordination college. Andrew’s site is not the prettiest, but it is increasingly full of material on Christian ethicists, and includes some properly theological and ecclesiological thinkers. Christian ethics is no longer done in complete isolation from, and ignorance of, Christian doctrine or the Christian community. Goddard’s list of theological ethicists includes much more than the merely culturally evangelical, not only because it has representatives of every conceivable denomination, but because some of these Christian teachers are producing some real works of discipleship. The Roman Catholics are producing some of the best of them. We are going to have get used to saying that John Paul II and Benedict are among the greatest evangelical theologians of our generation.

Andrew seems to be the only English man involved in the work of the Anglican Communion Institute, which is leading the way in what we could term ‘the church struggle’. He has a couple of gentle, charitable but rigorous articles on the choices for the US Episcopalian Church which you can find on the ACI’s site.

We all have conversations in which we have to defend the Church against those who want the Church to merge peacefully into the world until, all distinctiveness gone, it is no longer objectionable to anybody. I have such conversations with the clergy here. I think we should all learn to quote the Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion and other documents published by the Anglican Communion so we are able to quote them as public decisions that the Anglican Communion has taken, by which it remains faithful to the whole Church, that God holds united through time and across the world, and that therefore may be regarded as properly describing who we are. I’ll quote you some salient bits from the Windsor Report in future posts – you’ll like it.

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Christians versus Sociologists

I had a wonderful day last Wednesday teaching a day-long course on ‘Church, Society and Sociology’ to students at OASIS (a new outfit for me). I inherited some content from whoever gave the course in previous years, but bulked it up a bit with a strong narrative and did the whole thing with pictures via PowerPoint. We started with the sociologists Weber and Durkheim, saw that these gentlemen expressed many of the things that we think are unique to our own contemporary crisis, thereby revealing that the things we think are true only for our own society being said a century and more ago. I said that it is not just a matter of these thinkers’ ideas but also of how knowledge and science are divided and arranged, and how they were understood as solutions to what was taken to be the inevitable problem of conflict in society. I said Weber and Durkheim may be better understood through Kant and with Tom Paine, Robespierre, the American Founding Fathers as part of the impulse to found society afresh on new ground – and so, devious as ever, Knight got the conversation around to Plato and the Republic, so we could have straight compare-and-contrast exercise – Plato (noblest of the pagans) on one hand, Christian gospel on the other.

We looked at Augustine’ claim to have found the wisdom Plato was searching for, and that, in the Christian case it comes with means of forming that wisdom in persons by means of a long training that Augustine termed discipleship. Augustine said that there were two ways of life, under two jurisdictions (cities) each with its own account of human being, so we have two competing accounts of who we are and two competing histories. We decided to tell keep these histories distinct but in parallel. One, the Christian version, took us from Augustine to Benedict to Aquinas to Luther and on. The other took us a non-Christian route, from Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Marx to the sociologists and positivists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all the way to Benjamin and Adorno.

It was very simple a tour of the great history of ideas, showing two opposing stories, the Christian and the non-Christian. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much for ages, and the students didn’t seem to suffer too much. I found pictures from Google Images and Wikipedia. It was easy to follow, students made all the right interjections and enjoyed the magic lantern show, so I will do it again. Everybody likes a picture show, but I’m stating the blooming obvious again.

I ended with MacIntyre, pointing out that we need a new Benedict, Milbank and his return to Augustine against the pagans of ‘social theory’, and Benedict XVI who obviously also believes that we need to recover the disciplines of discipleship of Saint Benedict, and thus the Christians out-narrate the sociologists. Obvious, really.