Category: Blog

The three previous thinkers (Pannenberg, Jüngel and Moltmann) find strategies of accommodating to the Weberian-inspired ‘fact-value split’ of the modern academy, in which reason is seen as instrumental while the final purpose of life is deemed to be wholly subjective. Via accommodation, they also ‘Weberianize’ the Church in the process. In a Weberian mode, mainline Protestantism tends to manage bureaucratically the confessional diversity that it fosters. When it seeks a ‘public’ voice, it does so under conditions of modernity, transforming the promise into ethics, feeling or theory.

… In contrast, Jenson wholly disavows this split.

Mark C. Mattes The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology p.120

14th November – Rev Dr Graham Tomlin, St Paul’s Theological Centre

27th February – Rev Dr Steven Croft, Fresh Expressions

21st May – Rev Dr Steve Griffiths, Ridley Hall’s Director of Youth Work
Training

deepchurch.org.uk

The sanctified disciplines of the Church represent a far more sophisticated hermeneutics than is available to our secular colleagues. The Church is the communion sanctified by the Spirit for the world, and the saints and teachers are sanctified for the church, and so dedicated to the task of keeping the church distinct from the world – for the world’s sake. The Church must hear its own sanctified teachers, and it must teach what it receives from them. The Church is the mediation, spiritually discerned and received, that the Spirit provides by which we can be brought to Christ. The teaching of Church, its saints and teachers, must be taught for its own sake. It must also be offered to the public arena, and examined and tested there. On occasion the Church can learn some lesson from the world in the gospel that it had neglected. The church needs the university to test its teaching, and the university needs the huge ambition of the Christian doctrine of man in order to raise the ambition of the humanities.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit – Colin Gunton and the doctrine of God

The Christians present in the United Arab Emirates represent about 35 percent of the population, for a total of more than a million faithful, a majority of them Catholic.

They are all immigrant workers, and many of them, because they live on the outskirts and don’t have easy transportation access to the city, cannot regularly attend the official places of worship. This is the situation of the thousands of Indians who work on the construction sites in Dubai and are housed in the largest village-dormitory in Asia. According to unofficial estimates, this houses a population of about thirty thousand workers. Or there are the immigrants who work in the oil industry, who are cut off in isolated desert villages.

Another case is that of the Filipina housemaids who, because they don’t have enough free time or enough money for transportation, remain bound to the places where they work. In consequence, small prayer groups – which are organized according to language and place of origin and meet in private settings like apartments, dormitories, and storage sheds – have become a very important and widespread form of religious expression for the Catholic communities. These are necessary moments of encounter, but they are also risky because of the rules imposed by the local authorities, who grant freedom of worship only in officially recognized places like the territory’s parishes. In this context, the Charismatic groups from India or the Philippines take on an important role in spearheading initiatives in support of immigrants living in the most difficult conditions. These are often not limited to religious initiatives, but also include services of practical assistance, as in the case of the Legion of Mary mentioned above.

reprinted by Sandro Magister

If the Catholic community is engaged on these issues, working closely with evangelical Christians, observant Jews, and people of goodwill and sound moral judgment of other faiths and even of no particular religious faith, grave injustices and the erosion of central moral principles will be, to a significant extent, averted. Indeed, with respect to both marriage and the sanctity of human life, earlier reverses may themselves be reversed. If, on the other hand, the Catholic community compromises itself, abdicates its responsibilities, and sits on the sidelines, the already deeply wounded institution of marriage will collapse and the brave new world of biotechnology will transform procreation into manufacture, and nascent human life into mere disposable â??research material.â??
An alert and engaged Catholic community would recognize that these issues are in our hands. We cannot do it by ourselves; but our allies cannot win without us, nor can they lose with us. Our activity in the political sphere and in other dimensions of the culture will make the critical difference. I believe that Catholics need to be told so by the leaders of the Church in no uncertain terms. We faithful need to be challenged to make the difference we can makeâ??by the example we set in our own lives and by carrying out our duties as citizens of a democratic republic. God, in his wonderful and mysterious providence, has set before us an opportunity for a special kind of greatness, the greatness that comes only in times of the most profound danger.

This is no time for Catholics to be looking inward, gazing at our navels, too embarrassed (or desirous of the approval of cultural elites or fearful of their disapproval) to speak to the moral crisis of the culture. On the contrary, now is the time to bring our Christian witness, the very practical and effective love of Christ, unabashedly to the culture. Bishops need to lead on this, but not by becoming politicians; the primary responsibility to work in the political sphere falls to the laity. But bishops and clergy do their part when they challenge those of us in the laity to fulfill that great responsibility. Their role is to encourage, exhort, and even cajole us to do the right thing. Moreover, they should never hesitate to reprove us when we fail in our obligations to defend human life, marriage, and the common good, as far too many Catholics, including Catholics prominent in public life, have done and, alas, are doing.

Robert George Danger and Opportunity

The Eschatological Economy: Time and the Hospitality of God is a book about Christian theology proper, that is, about the economy of God. In six chapters, Knight discusses the realms of being and becoming from the perspective of the scriptures, historical theology, systematic theology, and philosophy, and suggests a direction in which the Trinitarian doctrine of God defines the world and human existence.

Fundamental to this task is a theory of persons in relationship that unfolds to a series of new analogies for God’s work in creation, the human being, the church, and the modern world. Knight argues that the modern world is based on a truncated economy of nature that is unable to establish its identity. Thus, he offers a manifesto for theological discussion and religious language that places the economy of the one God at the center of the modern understanding of life.

As a result, Knight defines the responsibilities of contemporary theology as restating and reformulating the public and political purpose of the doctrine of God. This challenging book is an ambitious project that engages the powers of the theological discipline by changing the terminology of the discussion and bringing into conversation an almost unmanageable variety of voices and aspects.

The persistent reader is rewarded with a plethora of new ideas that will challenge the modern debate on questions of the continuing significance of theological inquiry, the responsibility of the church, and the understanding of God’s work driven by an eschatological vision of the end, the hope that God has for humanity.

Wolfgang Vondey Regent University Religious Studies Review 33.1 (2007): 42.

The answer to the â??worship warsâ?? is in the back of the pew in front of you. There, languishing between the storied suffering of Job and the royal wisdom of Proverbs, lies the Book of Psalms â?? one hundred and fifty of the greatest praise and worship songs ever.

How many churches squabbling over music have sung even one, first verse to last? How many have even considered it?

Christians these days are rethinking what they sing. Not all thatâ??s old is good. Not all thatâ??s new is bad. But the Psalms and biblical canticles are the measure of both. Any congregation that rallied around that point would eventually find its musical taste transformed. The best would drive out the pretty good, regardless of age. Almost miraculously, water would be displaced by wine.

Our songs shape our piety. More than most preaching, theyâ??re the things that stick with us after weâ??ve exited the pew and passed through the back door. If we wallow in schlock and schmaltz, our devotion grows schlocky and schmaltzy. Our faith becomes long on sentiment, short on substance.

It is one thing to sing a line such as â??now I am happy all the day,â?? to quote a traditional old hymn with a lie in its refrain; it is another to sing, with the author of Psalm 119, â??It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.â?? We can (and should) outgrow ditties and bad hymns. We cannot outgrow the Psalms. Psalms mature us.

Paul Buckley Sing psalms

Colin E. Gunton’s The Barth Lectures, edited by Paul Brazier, and introduced by Stephen Holmes, is just out from T & T Clark.

Alan Spence‘s The Promise of Peace: A Unified Theory of Atonement appeared last year. Now he has produced Incarnation and Inspiration: John Owen and the Coherence of Christology. There are rumours of a John Owen conference in the UK next year. Another Owen fan is Kelly Kapic, whose Communion with God: The Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen, also started as a London PhD. Its first chapter is online at Baker Academic (PDF).

Andy Goodliff keeps a good list of theology books – here is his notice of The Rhythm of Liturgy, the latest from the increasingly impressive John Colwell, a baptist with an Anglican ecclesiology, who with Alan Spence, is one of those rare birds, a dogmatic theologian in London.

Whereâ??s Al, they have all been asking.

So what a relief to find Al Kimel’s Pontifications again. Pontifications was the place where all theological blogs met, and we all learned a wider churchmanship. I owe him a colossal debt. But clearly it is tough-going â?? â??in some way the sorrows have intensifiedâ??. Now heâ??s in dark new format, with some archives but without any links. (Hint – amend links)

Here he is on Renewing the renewed liturgy

What is the way forward? By all means, let us reread and reappropriate Sacrosanctum Concilium, and in light of this document let us critically evaluate the liturgical experimentations of the past forty years. And let us also learn from the liturgical experience and practice of the Byzantine Churches.

Here are my concrete proposals:

(1) Abandon the versus populum, immediately! Let priest and people face God together. The single most destructive feature of the â??renewed liturgyâ?? is its anthropocentric orientation. The people of God are sanctified by worshipping God, not by celebrating each other.
(2) Restore the chanted liturgy. Prayers are to be sung according to the ancient forms.
(3) Ban the musical compositions of Marty Haugen and David Haas and anything similar. Gregorian chant must be restored as the primary music of the Latin rite. Given the magnitude of the problem, it is probably best to simply ban all music composed after 1960. Perhaps one day the good music that has been composed during the past forty years can be retrieved, but that day is not now. Catholic priests and musicians today do not know what sacred music is.
(4) Restore the use of incense.
(5) Eradicate ritual informality.
(6) Drastically reduce electronic amplification.
(7) Encourage eucharistic adoration both within and outside the Mass. Let the people prostrate themselves before Christ Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. A bow of the head is not sufficient!

All the Anglicans say Amen.