Category: Blog

You are wondering where this blog is going. You are not alone. The thing is that I have been tinkering with all three books, with the result that none of them has moved forward very fast. The Eschatological Economy proofs arrived last weeks, with the instruction that I had to get them back within three weeks, and do the index. After a day, and thanks to the ‘Find’ function on a PDF file, the index no longer looked such an impossible task. I have quite enjoyed showing the links between chapters to emphasise the book’s unity. I have entries for ‘agency’, ‘analogy’, ‘being’, ‘becoming’, ‘blood’… The hassle is that a number of footnotes don’t work and I want to delete them, but cannot do so now without pages changing. If pages change I will have to re-do the index. I also have been trying to re-write the Introduction to the Zizioulas book, and hope that Demetrios will offer some critical comment on it when he appears tonight. Because they are fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, these are the days I invite tall bearded Greeks round. I hope to be shot of books 1 and 2 in a month, and then can get going on the doctrine again, and try to take an interest in where we are in the church year.

I know what I would like this blog to be like. Pontifications. Now that is a blog. There isn’t another one like it. The first great thing about this was that it was anonymous, which gave it are a sort of seriousness. The second thing was that the man behind it, Alvin Kimel, really worked at it, posting a phenomenal amount, and of top quality stuff from all parts of the Christian tradition. He has taste, and I have to admit that he has broadened my taste. He posted lots of C.S. Lewis, Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers and Newman. I read his extracts from these writers who I had assumed i knew all about without ever actually having read them. I read, and I was impressed and thrilled. I scoff no more. Kimel quoted passages which sounded as though they were written this morning, absolutely fresh, to the point and accurate about our present predicament. Of course we always think our predicament is unprecedented. You can still see these wonderful extracts.

I can’t compete with Kimel’s Pontifications but imitation is flattery, and all that. He wrote, still writes, pieces about the struggle for the Episcopal church in the US, so it had a hard news feel to it, which this blog wont have. His blog showed him agonising about whether to stick with the Episcopal Church, which seemed to understand nothing about Christian obedience. Kimel gave up on it, which was a bit of a bombshell, and joined the Roman Catholics in the autumn of 2005. Though Pontifications is no longer his sole work, you should go and have a look, and explore his archives, for the wonders that are there.

So it is time to get this blog up. It is going to be a disrupted beginning. Today I have been left in charge of the bouncing babe all morning, for the first time. This is only possible because he is now taking a bit of rice in milk. He is not at all keen on the bottle but he will have to get keener. So circumstances – the yelling in the background – will mean that this blog stays fairly spontaneous for a bit.

Here are my thoughts. I will do say three entries a week, one will be me chuntering on, two will be paragraphs culled from a classic and a contemporary piece of theology. I want to show you who is worth reading, talk about the movements I think are worth learning from and pursuing, and try out my own work on you.

So I am going to recommend some authors and books to you. Nothing controversial there. Of course the book I really want to put in front of you is my own – but I can at least talk through some of the exploring that went on in the course of writing it. More of that later.

And I think it would be easiest to let the church year serve as our agenda. I want to talk a little about the Sunday service, its three readings from Scripture – and that will give us the opportunity to talk through some real Christology – who Jesus Christ is and what difference he makes.