Sorry. What with the grind of term and the excitement of events this autumn I never got around to doing any actual blogging. I haven’t posted anything of my own since August. It takes me much longer to post something I have written that to post a couple of paragraphs, already polished and published, by someone else. There is no limit to the number of times I can change what I have written, and a day later it will still look like gibberish to me – to you too probably. I wasn’t born to blog, being neither spontaneous nor self-controlled enough.
But I have enjoyed everything I have posted here, in particular that Regensberg moment, but also all the rest of Pope Benedict’s wonderful teaching that the secular or public sphere depends on the church, and reason and the possibility of truthful discourse depends on the gospel. I was amazed that the British media, and British evangelicals, failed to see what was at stake here. So once again:
Fellow members of the British public square: Benedict is arguing for the public testing of ideas and all the other good practices required for rationality and society.
Fellow evangelicals, Benedict is a Christian. It may be that this Christian is being hammered by the media because the world sometimes opposes the gospel; the extent of the world’s opposition may even be indication of the depth of the gospel he is holding out to it. When the mob is giving some Christian a kicking, joining that mob may endanger your salvation.
You phenomenologists, Benedict is intellectually far more rewarding than all of the the epigones of Heidegger put together.
Benedict produces wonderful, insightful evangelical teaching. His output, written and apparently off the cuff is extraordinary. I enjoyed his visit to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Constantinople for a brief reprise of the ‘two lungs’ of the Church. The unity of the Church is all the evidence of his power and love that God offers the world. No part of the church catholic will grow without finding the humility to examine the teaching and perhaps even accept the discipline of the rest of the Church.
There have also been a good number of pieces from Archbishop Rowan Williams, on the church, public sphere, university and Christian calling, and from Oliver O’Donovan at Fulcrum on how to we may learn the skills of judgment, and so learn how to make decisions on the vexed questions of church order and sexuality, and how to live together within those decisions. I am staggered by how slow we are in the UK to take up the material provided by Williams, O’Donovan, and even more provided by the Church’s own councils. About the discussions of the future of the Anglican church and covenant, I refer you to the Windsor process and covenant discussion documents. I find it extraordinary that there is no theological discussion of these thoroughly theological documents in any academic theological setting, in London or the UK. Let me know if you hear of any.
There is a mountain of work in front of me, almost none of it paid, but I am going to enjoy it anyway. There are books on their way, and still more rumours of books, that will delight readers of Colin Gunton and of John Zizioulas. It is good to see the emergence of some serious scholarship on the theological revolution represented by Zizioulas’ eschatological ontology. Of course, since this is a theological revolution, is also just a recovery of what we should never have forgotten. So get yourself a copy of Communion and Otherness for a happy new year. Meanwhile brother webmaster is building a content management system for a renewed ‘Resources’ website, with new buttons to click on, but one that I will be able to work this time, he thinks. When that is done, I will mend broken links to Zizioulas’ work.
