Category: Blog

Vigen Guroian
The Fragrance of God Reflections on Finding God through the Beauty and Glory of the Natural World
10 May 2007 7.30pm

Dr. Vigen Guroian is Professor of Theology at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland and a Senior Fellow of the Center on Law and Religion at Emory University. In the past he served as the Academic Director of St. Nersess Armenian Seminary. With many articles on theology, ethics, politics, and literature, he is the author of nine books including Ethics after Christendom, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, Rallying the Really Human Things: The Moral Imagination in Politics , Literature and Everyday Life, and Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening. An avid gardener himself, Dr. Guroian has recently spoken on the US public radio programme “Speaking of Faith” giving a talk entitled “Restoring the Senses: Life, Gardening and an Orthodox Easter.”
Dr. Guroian will be present to discuss his book, read from it, and autograph copies.

The book launch is hosted by the Armenian Institute with Darton Longman and Todd Armenian House, 25 Cheniston Gardens, London W8

FAITH & PUBLIC POLICY FORUM

WEDNESDAY 2 MAY 07

‘Religion, Citizenship and Liberal Pluralism’

Lord Raymond Plant, Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Philosophy, King’s College London

All seminars are held between 5.30pm and 7.00pm in room 3c, Old Committee Room, Strand, London

A church, in fact, when it’s working, when it’s alive and healthy, is a place that tells you the world is too small. That may sound a rather odd way of putting it, but the church should be a place that tells you that the world is too small. That is, the world of rational calculation, the world of profit and negotiation, the world where we know exactly how to measure success and failure, and the world which teaches us ways of successfully managing the uncomfortable edgy feelings at both extremes so that we don’t have to pay too much attention to them. A church says that that’s not enough, the world is too small. You need bigger words than the world will allow; you need a bigger heart than the world would allow because you need words for gratitude and ecstasy just as you need words for terror and pain and misery. And the world is not going to give you that space. And the church is, because the church celebrates a hospitable God in whose embrace is room enough for the whole of you.

Archbishop of Canterbury at the CTE Forum in Swanwick 2003

Next Friday evening (27 April 07) Archbishop Rowan Williams is speaking on discipleshipship at Fulcrum in London. See you there?

“Get rid of the cross or we will burn your Churchesâ??. This is the threat aimed at the Chaldean Church of Sts Peter and Paul, located in the ancient Christian quarter of Baghdad, Dora.

The Islamic group active in Dora seems to have delivered an ultimatum to the Christian community there: convert to Islam or die; moreover reports say that they have delivered a Fatwa forbidding Christians to wear the cross or make any religious gesture. It also permits the confiscation of goods and properties belonging to the Christian families who find themselves forced to flee their homes for safety at short notice.

Baghdadâ??s Christian communityâ??s worries have been added to by the US militaryâ??s decision to forcibly occupy Babel College, property of the Chaldean Church. The Babel, the only faculty of theology in the country, houses on of the most ancient religious libraries in the region, full of priceless manuscripts. Because of the increased insecurity in the city and continual abductions of religious the faculty had transferred to Ankawa, in Kurdistan January last, leaving the building empty.

Asia news Threats to the Church in Iraq

Anglican Mainstream’s article On the cross gives a handy summary of the debate on penal substitution – and see Mike Ovey’s new Pierced for my Transgressions – evidence that there is just a little theology going on in London.

Like so many other horrific accounts of Christian persecution in Iraq, this story went unnoticed in the West…

Since the invasion of Iraq, militants have bombed 28 churches and murdered hundreds of Christians.

The latest report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that two million Iraqis have fled since the invasion, and almost a third of these are Assyrian – who are down from 1.4 million in Saddam’s Iraq to fewer than 500,000 today.

Now, while one of the world’s oldest Christian nations faces extinction at the hands of Islamic extremists, the West does nothing.

Ed West We must not let this ancient Church slide into oblivion.

Christians of Iraq includes the Minority Right Group Report Assimilation, Exodus, Eradication: Iraq’s minority communities since 2003

(PDF)

The communities covered in this report make up about 10 per cent of the Iraqi population. They include Armenians, Bahá’ís, Chaldo-Assyrians, Faili Kurds, Jews, Mandaeans, Palestinians, Shabaks, Turkomans and Yazidis. Many of these groups have lived in Iraq for two millennia or more. Though they have survived a long history of persecution that goes back far beyond Saddam Hussein’s rule, there is a real risk that they might not survive the current conflict. Because they are caught up in violence between the majority Sunni Arab, Shia Arab and Sunni Kurdish groups, and are also specifically targeted for atrocities, assimilation or mass displacement and exodus, some may now be facing total eradication from this ancient land. These communities are invisible in the eyes of the world.

We are near the end of term at last. We have all had some virus which has slowed things right down.

I was about to give up on Wednesday’s paper for Heythrop, but in the last twenty-four hours managed to write something on Williams and O’Donovan on secularism which seemed to go all right. A reasonably-sized group, most in their fifties, their questions expressing the apparently unchanged English Catholic assumption that the ‘Church’ is a vast oppressive institution. I forget how surprised people are when you talk about the Church as the act of God and act of love, or indeed about society as created by love. I have not managed to write anything on Benedict on secularity, secularism and reason, which was what I first intended that paper to be.

I got the ‘Theology of John Zizioulas’ proofs back to Ashgate with index and Liviu’s bibliography; its cover uses the one reasonable photo of the man I got last year and all in all it looks OK.

So, this weekend, intercessions, evensong and sermon. My cough is going to make us all wish we had changed the rota. Then a short paper on Zizioulas on bishop and ecumenism for the STT, then the Spaemann review and we have another go at setting this Deep Church seminar on its feet. Then the Eschatology paper. Then Easter and new baby. Then the Dogmatics lectures. Those are the edited highlights from me. I am catching up on email now, I promise.

So you Londoners, I hope you will come to the next Deep Church session, and that you will book your place at the big theology-in-London event of the year, the Colin Gunton day conference in September

Journal of Theological Interpretation

Critical biblical scholarship as developed and defined since the mid-eighteenth century has played a significant and welcome role in pressing us to take biblical texts seriously on their own terms and diverse contexts. With the postmodern turn, additional questions have surfaced—including the theological and ecclesial location of biblical interpretation, the significance of canon and creed for biblical hermeneutics, the historical reception of biblical texts, and other more pointedly theological interests. How might we engage interpretively with the Christian Scriptures so as to hear and attend to God’s voice? The Journal of Theological Interpretation aims to serve these agendas.

1.1 (Spring 2007)

Richard B. Hays Can Narrative Criticism Recover the Unity of Scripture?

Murray Rae Texts in Context: Scripture and the Divine Economy

Michael A. Rynkiewich Mission, Hermeneutics, and the Local Church

R.W.L. Moberly Christ in All the Scriptures? The Challenge of Reading the Old Testament as Christian Scripture

Michael J. Gorman “A Seamless Garment”: Approach to Biblical Interpretation?

There is still a fair flow of publications from those who studied under Colin Gunton at Kings College London. I have been meaning to introduce each of these to you properly, but the months slip by, so here is a short list.

Justyn Terry‘s The Justifying Judgement of God: A Reassessment of the Place of Judgement in the Saving Work of Christ, in which Karl Barth plays a fair role, has just appeared from Paternoster.

Peter S. Oh‘s Karl Barth’s Trinitarian Theology: A Study in Karl Barth’s Analogical Use of the Trinitarian Relation examines Barth on analogy, and suggests that another look at Kierkegaard, from whom Barth learned his antipathy to analogy, would show that analogy is intrinsic to a theology of persons, and then goes on to develop this insight into a whole ecclesiology. It has an introduction by Christoph Schwöbel. Tough conceptual stuff, but the theological gain is real enough.

Then coming from T&T Clark in May 2007 is Iain Taylor‘s Pannenberg on the Triune God.

Colin Gunton‘s own The Barth Lectures edited by Paul Brazier, and also introduced by Christoph Schwöbel, is out from T&TClark in July, as is Alan Spence‘s Incarnation and Inspiration: John Owen and the Coherence of Christology.

(Have you Gunton readers seen Hans Schaeffer Createdness and Ethics: The Doctrine of Creation and Theological Ethics in the Theology of Colin E. Gunton and Oswald Bayer ?)

Then two very important books from two friends of mine who studied Christian Ethics under Michael Banner

Brian Brock‘s Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Scripture in Christian Ethics is now out from Eerdmanns. Christian Scripture and the Christian community are in some kind of constitutive relationship (yes, apparently this is still news for the ethics crowd) then comes a good review of the best of recent theological-hermeneutical literature (Webster, Watson…), then finally Augustine, Luther and Brian Brock himself guide us the psalms, and in the hands of these masters our education really begins. Theology comes from worship and serves worship.

Very soon we will see Christopher Roberts‘ Creation & Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in and for the Moral Theology of Marriage. I used to wonder why Chris was so concerned to show that marriage unites two people of different gender. Well I now I see why. In the last week in the UK I have heard just one or two Roman Catholic spokesmen quietly inform the British government and people that marriage – this man-woman covenant thing – is not a creation of the state, and may not be be re-defined on the whim of a government. Marriage – the union of two people of different gender is not only the foundation of all human society (and therefore of the state) but is the very premise of human being as such.

Brock and Roberts. I have been pilfering ideas from these two for years. For instance, I had no idea about the totus Christus until Brian pointed it out to me in Augustine. Nothing has been the same since.

And Michael Banner himself (now Dean of Chapel at Trinity, Cambridge) is one of the best kept secrets of British theological ethics. His Brief History of Ethics, unlikely to be brief, and might just be major, is out from Blackwells in the autumn.