Category: Blog

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

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.

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.

The Eschatological Economy is now in stock at Eerdmanns and can be bought direct from them.

Apparently it will take some weeks to get the book’s details up on Amazon, since this is not done book by book but in large batches. They seem so relaxed about getting anything about their titles onto Amazon it is clear that – bizarrely, worryingly – they do not see Amazon as a crucial means of marketing. So I will delay posting anything about ‘Why I wrote this book’ and some of the other wonderful, mostly Catholic, material I have discovered on Christian formation. We are thinking about a launch in London in September in the hope that some copies will have made it to the UK by that time.

Didaskalex writes reviews of theology titles on Amazon. He has very wide tastes and is a fast worker, born to blog. I have just been admiring his summary of Patristic Teaching on Salvation – not least because I wish I could produce such sound-bites. What do you make of this? –

Patristic Teaching on Salvation:

a. Church Fathers do not limit salvation to Justification.
b. Church Fathers include the Trinity in atonement, the salvific work of Christ.
c. Church Fathers do not limit salvation to Jesus sacrifice on the cross.
d. Church Fathers consider salvation as renewal of human and universe.
e. Church Fathers never exclude cooperation of the faithful: Synergy.
f. Church Fathers teach that salvation is a continuous dynamic process, starting at spiritual birth, progressing from kenosis to theosis.

Salvation: Augustine to Anselm:

Augustine view of predestination contrasted with Pelagius freedom of choice, got more entangled with the doctrine of original sin. Although Pelagius was condemned in Ephesus, synergism that man has to cooperate with God in his salvation, was the predominant position in the East, termed semi-pelagianism. Anselm pushed the legalistic nature of salvation, into a forensic dogma, while Aquinas maintained that God wills that some, not all men be saved!

Salvation from Anselm to Vatican II:

Catholic scholastics starting with Anselm and Aquinas applied dialectics to theology reducing patristic metaphors to abstract concepts, western theology ended in sterility and provoked derision from humanists. Vatican II recovered the traditional meaning of salvation as restoration of the entire universe. Liberation and feminist theologies pressed the Roman church to admit that salvation should include transforming oppressive social conditions.

Salvation in Evangelical theology:

Protestants and reformed inherited medieval dogmas of the Western Church, even after various revisions, the legal ransom payment on the cross stayed central. Evangelicals teach that individual’s legal status must be changed from guilty to not guilty through justification by adoption, to restore favor with God. The positive desire to live righteously is termed regeneration or new birth, while sanctification or making holy comes to completion in the life beyond death, echoing the inherited Roman purgatory.

See Didaskalex

The ‘Sons’ post (below) received two comments. I’ll call them A and B. Here they are again:

(A) “The academic community needs to be more sensitive to language use. Instead of sons why not use gender-neutral terms ‘children’ or ‘heirs’ or ‘beloved ones’? By insisting on using sons it subtly reinforces the superiority of the male gender in religious arguments. Unless you make the above argument explicit at the beginning of every book or journal article the use of male language reinforces negative gender stereotypes. There are many women in the religious academic world and church community who feel that they are ‘not good enough’ to study, research, preach and teach because they have encountered years of bias. I am a female systematic theologian and know of countless women who feel inferior as a result of hearing and reading male dominated religious discourse throughout their lives.”

(B) “The reason why we should not (in general) use gender-neutral terms is that such terms just don’t say the same thing as ’sons’. Our adoption in Christ is our taking on the sonship of the Son who is the Son of the Father. It is not a matter of bias here. To speak of ‘children’ INSTEAD of ’sons’ is to de-Trinitarianize the meaning of the language and evacuate it of its essential reference to our incorporation into the Second Person of the Trinity. (Such language-replacement is theologically comparable to replacing language of ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ with ‘Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier’.)

I think two things are important:

(1) The term ’son’ when used of our incorporation into Christ does not signify a sexually-divided mode of existence. In fact, it signifies quite the opposite – a mode of existence which transcends sexual opposition, in which there is neither ‘male nor female’. So a person who takes the language to be ’sexist’ is misunderstanding it. And a person who denies it is possible to use ’son’ in this Christian way denies the Gospel.

(2) It is quite possible that, given contemporary forms of language-use and the pressure exerted upon people to conform to ‘gender-neutrality’ language which does not respect the difference between the sexes (equality doesn’t mean identity, &c) – in this situation it is quite possible that people will misunderstand Christian language about sonship. In that case, we must explain what the language means, not stop using it because someone has misunderstood it. We must be faithful to our own language.”

The first ‘Sons’ post is here.

Help! We are already into the second half of April. In January I wanted to get straight into the doctrine book, provisionally entitled The Apprenticeship, but the other books have got in the way. The first and second books, The Eschatological Economy and the collection on Zizioulas, have demanded so much time, that I have scarcely given ‘The Apprenticeship’ a week since January.

The Eschatological Economy, out at the end of April, has now got some great endorsements. I am particularly grateful to John Webster and Rusty Reno, who have produced wonderful blurbs for the back of the book, though they really didn’t owe me any favours. And Antony Solomon, who has a real knack for extracting what is most crucial, is patiently and insightfully reviewing the book section by section over at Solly Gratia.

Meanwhile I am still sorting out the second book, the collection of essays on John Zizioulas, Personhood and the Church. This is now in the Ashgate catalogue, with an October publication date. I will shortly have to email Ashgate again to explain why they still haven’t received the manuscript. The reason is that I have only just received the twelfth and last contribution, from Alan Brown. From a long labour a wonderful paper has emerged in which Alan sets out the context of Zizioulas’ theology and explains the hostility it has met. The reason for the hostility is really simple – John Zizioulas is an evangelical theologian: he gives reasons for the faith. Alan’s paper amounts to a comprehensive refutation of that, Anglican-influenced, Patristics scholarship which is determined not to allow the thought of the Fathers of the Church to teach and refresh the contemporary Church. Alan is familiar not only with contemporary Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox theology but with the hermeneutics they operate with, and he picks apart the presuppositions of Zizioulas’ critics to show that they amount to a privatisation of religion that holds the gospel captive. This massive paper, at 22,000 words three times longer than any other contribution, will make a fair splash. I will post a couple of paragraphs from it to whet your appetite. The whole volume is very much better than it was this time last year and I am really very chuffed about it.

Anyway, this means that I still haven’t really started on this year’s work, the doctrine book – let alone on the more general work of encouragement that this blog is intended for. Here for example is an email:

I am desperate for my theological thought to be challenged and stretched. Please could you contact me with advice on how to proceed and I welcome contact with any other serious Christian thinkers.

Me too. Any ideas anyone?

“Rocket fuel”

Read more hype here

Surely it cannot be all that difficult to understand what Norman Kember is about. The man is a witness. ‘Witness’ is a Christian technical term of very long standing (Greek: martyr). The witness simply goes, watches and speaks out about what he sees. He is a witness when he observes the brutal grind of life in much of the world, for example, at the Israeli checkpoints that blight life in the West Bank, and then comes home after a couple of months to tell us about them. He is a witness when in Iraq he hears about people’s experiences, and is seized and held hostage, and afterwards is able to come home to tell us about it. And he is a witness when he is seized and put to death, as one of Kember’s colleagues was.

The witness just takes the knocks he is given. He witnesses to his master’s victory by not being frightened of violence and death, or of the incomprehension and derision of the on-looking media.

In terms of family and of his own career as a doctor Norman Kember had made his contribution already. In the UK, if you are over seventy years of age it is thought that you can have nothing more to contribute, and can only hope not to become a burden. But a man with grandchildren might well decide that is something that he can do for his grandchildren’s generation. He can point towards an alternative form of politics, of truth and peace, by witnessing the violence in Iraq. At the same time Kember’s was also an act of witness against the our attitudes towards older people.

Obviously the media do not understand how there could ever be anything worth dying for. But I think we owe it them to explain, and we could do this in terms of peace, truth and justice. Or, to baffle them completely, let us tell them that Christ compels us.

Christian Peacemakers