My word is my bond? Rebuilding trust - the G20 and beyond

St Paul's Cathedral Tuesday 31st March, 2009, 11am - 12.30pm

On the eve of the G20, St Paul's is hosting a high level debate about the moral questions raised by the dramatically changing world we find ourselves in. Can opportunities for society's good come from the economic crisis? Has there been a disconnection between morality, policy-making and practice? What are the prospects for remaking the global order, rebuilding financial systems and re-establishing trust? How will a new global order actively include development goals and address climate change?

The native Dutch are moving out. Since 2004, more indigenous Dutchmen have emigrated each year than immigrants have moved in. People who have lost faith in God do not fight. They run. Since they do not believe in life after death, this life is the only thing they have to lose. One emigrant Dutchman, a homosexual author who lives in Brussels, writes: "I am not a warrior. I do not fight for freedom. I am only good at enjoying it." This mentality has affected the whole of Western Europe. A young German woman recently said that it is "better to let yourself be raped than risk injuries while resisting, better to avoid fighting than risk death." Europe has chosen the path of submission. Islamization is not the cause but the consequence of the collapse of Europe. The very word Islam means "submission." Many Europeans have submitted already. In that sense, they have already become Muslims.

Paul Belien Reshaping America

During the decade leading up to the crisis, current account deficits increased steadily and became unsustainable. Strong domestic investment (much of it in unproductive residential construction) outstripped domestic saving. Government budget discipline dissipated; fiscal policy became pro-cyclical [ie, not counter-cyclical]. Financial regulation and supervision was weak to non-existent, encouraging credit and asset price booms and bubbles. Corporate governance, especially but not only in the banking sector, became increasingly subservient to the interests of the CEOs and the other top managers. There was a steady erosion in business ethics and moral standards in commerce and trade. Regulatory capture and corruption, from petty corruption to grand corruption to state capture, became common place. Truth-telling and trust became increasingly scarce commodities in politics and in business life. The choice between telling the truth (the whole truth and nothing but the truth) and telling a deliberate lie or half-truth became a tactical option. Combined with increasing myopia, this meant that even reputational considerations no longer acted as a constraint on deliberate deception and the use of lies as a policy instrument. As part of this widespread erosion of social capital, both citizens and markets lost faith in the ability of governments to commit themselves to any future course of action that was not validated, at each future point in time, as the most opportunistic course of action at that future point in time...

Willem Buiter Fiscal expansions in submerging markets; the case of the USA and the UK

See also Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Naked Capitalism, Jesseâ??s Café Américain and Karl Denniger at Market Ticker.

Purging or detoxing debt from an economy is a strained, long-winded and ugly process. Private creditors exacerbate the crisis by imposing a tough diet on the heavily borrowed: they restrict credit; compound interest on defaulted debt; and impose higher real market interest rates. Yet regulators and politicians turn a blind eye to this financial sector quackery, cause of high mortality and unemployment rates amongst otherwise healthy companies - preferring instead to bail out the quacks. So the US faces a larger challenge. How will it cleanse itself of the money-changers that since the 1970s have acted as parasites on the healthy US economy? Those that burdened thriving companies with debt, and then siphoned off a large share of the profits in the form of interest payments? Or used direct debits to drain excessive interest payments from the bank accounts of hard-working Americans? Will they be purged from the system? Or will American politicians and regulators continue to treat them as delicate â??intestinal floraâ?? - vital to the health of the economy?

Ann Pettifor (the force behind Jubilee 2000)

John Médaille The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace is far-and-away the best book I have seen on the (bad) theology of economics. It puts economics into its political-philosophical context, with plenty of history, Catholic Social Teaching and immediate relevance to our present situation. It is a big but very well controlled book pretending to be a modest one, and the only book I have not resented buying recently: the title gives no idea of its range or intelligence. Médaille blogs at the Distributist Review

Reliance on the government as consumer of last resort has resulted in a structure that favored global production over national income, the FIRE economy (â??finance, insurance, and real estateâ??) over the real economy (real production of goods), low wages over fair ones, and gargantuan size over human scale. It is this last point that is particularly troubling, since this gargantuan institutions have proclaimed themselves to be â??too big to fail,â?? and exercise economic blackmail over the whole republic. The problem with this claim is that it is correct. But the proper response is not to give into the blackmail, not to negotiate with crooks, but to make sure that the blackmailers are never in a position to control the whole economy, to demand trillions in ransom whenever they get themselves (and us) into trouble. Now, it would be mere carping by distributists to point out the problems if we could not offer solutions. But we do have solutions, and it is time to offer them, time to end the era of big business that depends on big government, on subsidies from the general public to private profits. I have nothing against profitsâ??when they are earned; I have everything against profits that are the result of subsidies and privileges. The distributist solution to all of these problems can be summed-up in a few words: Buy it up! Break it up! Fund it right!

And keep reading The Market Ticker

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitute part of the our predicament. We are waiting…for another – doubtless very different – St Benedict.

Alasadair MacIntyre After Virtue p.263

Local forms of community? The Church, of course - the community that produces saints, like Benedict. What we need is monks, that is, people solely dedicated to singing the praises of God.

The day humanity starts eating the planet

On September 23, humanity will have used up all the resources nature will provide this year, according to the latest data from Global Footprint Network and its member organisation NEF (the new economics foundation) who devised the concept of Ecological Debt Day. Just like any company, nature has a budget – it can only produce so many resources and absorb so much waste each year. The problem is, our demand on nature’s services is exceeding what it can provide. Since the 1980s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot, using resources faster than they can be regenerated and putting carbon into the air faster than it can be reabsorbed. Globally, we now demand the biological capacity of 1.4 planets.

Our bishop is leading the fast today. There is more fasting to do on 19 October.

In 2000 we made a commitment to the poor amongst us. World leaders signed up to the Millennium Development Goals – 8 goals to halve global poverty by 2015. Those same leaders are making decisions right now which determine whether these goals will be met. On October 19 stand together with thousands of churches worldwide in prayer that the firm commitments we’ve made won’t become broken promises.

Be a part of Micah Sunday.

Meanwhile, Father Tim Finigan finds that our masters at the Treasury appear to be out to lunch.

I like the look of

Charles T. Mathewes A Theology of Public Life

What has Washington to do with Jerusalem? In the raging debates about the relationship between religion and politics, no one has explored the religious benefits and challenges of public engagement for Christian believers - until now. This ground-breaking book defends and details Christian believers' engagement in contemporary pluralistic public life not from the perspective of some neutral ‘public’, but from the particular perspective of Christian faith, arguing that such engagement enriches both public life and Christian citizens' faith themselves. As such it offers not a ‘public theology’, but a ‘theology of public life’, analyzing the promise and perils of Christian public engagement, discussing the nature of civic commitment and prophetic critique, and the relation of a loving faith to a liberal politics of justice. Theologically rich, philosophically rigorous, politically, historically and sociologically informed, this book advances contemporary discussion of ‘religion and public life’ in fundamental ways.

Introduction: life in the epilogue, during the world

Part I. A Theology of Engagement 1. Life before God 2. Life in the world 3. Life together

Part II. The Liturgy of Citizenship 4. Faithful citizenship 5. Hopeful citizenship 6. Charitable citizenship

Conclusion: The republic of grace; or, the public ramifications of heaven.

Here are a couple of titles that caught my eye while putting together a bibliography for next term's Old Testament course

Aidan Nichols Lovely like Jerusalem: The Fulfillment of the Old Testament in Christ and the Church

The highly regarded spiritual writer and theologian Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P. presents an overview of the Old Testament by showing what it is and its relationship to the New Testament. He explains that it is essential for one to be familiar with the Old Testament in order to understand properly, and in a deeper way, the richness and message of the New. In particular, Fr. Nichols shows how important it is to grasp that connection in order to understand better and to believe in the message and the person of Christ.

Ignorance of the Old Testament makes it impossible to comprehend the entire divine plan that stretches between the two Testaments. Nichols maintains that we are ill-equipped to read and understand the great theologians, saints, and Scripture commentators of the Christian era without a deep familiarity with the Old Testament. Even understanding and appreciating the art of the Church remains limited if the Old Testament is a closed book for us.

Nichols made use of studies by biblical experts from various Christian denominations--notably Evangelicals and Anglicans--in writing this widely appealing work. He also drew on the Fathers and Doctors of the Church to help illuminate the beauty of the relationship between the two Testaments.

"In this marvelous work of biblical theology and patristic ressourcement, Aidan Nichols illumines the pattern of God's promises in salvation history in a manner that will be accessible and informative to students, pastors, and scholars. Other than Pope Benedict XVI, no theologian writing today has mastered so well the approach to Scripture set forth by such giants as Jean Danielou, Louis Bouyer, and Henri de Lubac. This book should be read by everyone who seeks an understanding of Scripture and of the early Christian Fathers." --Matthew Levering, Associate Professor of Theology, Ave Maria University

Robert Wilken Isaiah: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators

In his extremely thorough work on Isaiah, Robert Wilken brings to bear his considerable knowledge of early Christianity. Drawing on writings of the church fathers — Eusebius of Caesarea, Ambrose, Jerome, Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret of Cyrus, Bernard of Clairvaux, and nearly sixty others — all of them masterfully translated, this work allows the complex words of Isaiah to come alive.

Wilken's selection of ancient commentators clearly illuminates how Isaiah was used by the New Testament writers and understood by the early church fathers. Each chapter begins with a modern English translation of the septuagint, prepared by Moisés Silva. Editorial comments provide a foundation for understanding the excerpted commentaries and other writings that follow for each chapter.

Read everything by Wilken. And you know Brian E Daley The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology

Youâ??ve written that the nation state has become a â??parody of the Churchâ?? and that we should treat it like the â??phone company.â?? How far do you think the state has overreached itself in this country?

William Cavanaugh: The phone company quote comes from MacIntyre. He says that the nation state is a dangerous and unwieldy organization that presents itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic provider of goods and services which is always about to, but never actually provides, value for money, and on the other hand, as a repository of sacred values which from time to time asks us to lay down our lives on its behalf. He says itâ??s like being asked to die for the telephone company. I think that really characterizes it very well.

On the one hand, you have this enormous bureaucratic organization which is growing constantly despite all the talk about small government. Even under Reagan and the current president the state continues to grow. People foresaw this as early as the 19th century. When thereâ??s no organic community and your society is a mass of individuals, each with their own goals, goods, and ends, you need a bigger and bigger state to keep them all from interfering with each other.

Thereâ??s a spiritual aspect to the stateâ??s claims. Thatâ??s why I call it a â??parody of the Churchâ??â??it claims to saves us. Currently, itâ??s saving us from these diabolical terrorists who are out there and want to kill us. The state presents itself as the only protection from this diabolical enemy. The irony is that the state made this enemy for us in the first place.

The amnesia about who terrorists are and where they come from is just amazing. The way the storyâ??s usually told, we were just sitting here minding our own business, and then on September 11, 2001, these crazy people attacked us for no good reason and now we have to defend ourselves. But the truth of the matter is much more complex. It has a lot to do with American foreign policy and American military meddling in the Middle East which we donâ??t want to talk about. It has a lot to do with the CIA helping to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953 and installing a Shah who ran a brutal dictatorship. These are things we forget, but that other people never forget. The state in a lot of ways is like a protection racket: it defends us against the enemies that it itself creates.

What can or should the Church do if or when the nation state oversteps its boundaries? The first thing the Church needs to do is stop fighting unjust wars. Take the just war theory seriously. Iâ??m not talking about pacifism. If thereâ??s a war that the Church judges is unjust, then Catholics shouldnâ??t fight it. Thatâ??s the way the just war theory is supposed to work. Itâ??s sometimes supposed to say â??noâ?? to acts of violence. What the theory is usually used for, of course, is to justify whatever violence is going on. I canâ??t think of a single instance where it was used to stop violence. That is the most pressing issue.

Imagine what would have happened if Catholics in the previous war had said in significant numbers, â??No, sorry, this is an unjust war; weâ??re just going to sit this one out.â?? The world would have turned upside down.

Another thing is to stop buying into the idea that all significant questions of money and power need to be funneled through the state, that the only thing we can do about issues like health care is to get the state to do something.

William Cavanaugh in interview with GodSpy

Christopher Roberts Creation & Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage

Does sexual difference matter for marriage? Are there good theological reasons why the two main characters in a marriage should be a male and a female, or is marriage a more flexible covenant, which any two people can keep? Creation and Covenant analyzes latent but under-examined beliefs about sexual difference in the theology about marriage which has been dominant for centuries in the Christian west. The book opens by studying patristic theologies of marriage, which rested on mostly implicit and often incompatible beliefs about sexual difference. However, Roberts argues that Augustine developed a coherent theology of sexual difference, according it a shifting significance from creation to eschaton. Roberts traces how Augustine's theology influenced and was developed by subsequent theologians, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Luther, Barth, and John Paul II. Finally, Roberts engages today's debates about gay marriage.

Before becoming an academic, Dr. Roberts was a journalist. On behalf of PBS television, he covered both the Lambeth Conference in England and the World Council of Churches in Zimbabwe. During those years, he was disappointed by both the liberal and conservative arguments on homosexuality. Left-wingers seemed more interested in privacy, autonomy, and experience than in theology, and right-wingers seemed to have lots of prohibitions but little good news. In the final chapters, this book tries to do better, inviting liberals to improve the standard of their arguments, and explaining what is beautiful and persuasive about the traditional case.

This book articulates often latent and under-examined, but nonetheless significant, beliefs about sexual difference in the theology about marriage which has been dominant in the Christian west. Chapter one explains that patristic theologies of marriage rested on mostly implicit beliefs about sexual difference, and sometimes these beliefs were incompatible with one another. However, chapter two argues that Augustine developed a coherent theological anthropology of sexual difference, according it a shifting significance from creation to eschaton. Chapters three through five show that for the major subsequent pre-modern theologians, the significance of sexual difference was rarely the subject of direct discussion. Nevertheless, Augustine's most important successors both presupposed and occasionally developed his beliefs about sexual difference. Bernard of Clairvaux shows how sexual difference in marriage is privileged material for allegories of God's love; Aquinas emphasised the procreative significance of sexual difference; and the Reformers argued that because God made the sexes, marriage should be central to Christian life. Chapters six and seven study Barth and John Paul II, who each discuss sexual difference with a hitherto unknown degree of sustained systematic attention. Their anthropology and biblical exegesis is rooted in Christology, which leads them to conclude that humanity is created for fellowship, and that sexual difference is necessary for this fellowship. Chapter eight explains why certain contemporary and revisionist theologies of marriage, notably ones which seek a rationale for gay and lesbian marriages, are problematic. These contemporary theologies have not yet reckoned with theologically important and defensible claims about the meaning of sexual difference. The conclusion suggests that renewed clarity and selfconsciousness about the theological significance of sexual difference should strengthen any Christian ethic of sexuality and marriage, enabling the church to be more articulate in its dialogue with contemporary culture and science, and more coherent in its own internal practices.

â??The question of the significance of sexual difference is at the heart of many divisions within contemporary society. It is producing hurtful tensions within all of the major Christian Churchesâ?¦.Robertsâ?? contribution to the debate is forceful and scholarly, while always charitable. This powerfully argued case for the abiding importance of our sexual identity shows how rich can be the contribution of the Christian tradition to our societyâ??s present search to understand the meaning of our lives. Even those who do not accept all of the authorâ??s conclusions should be grateful for this beautifully written and profound book. It will help us all in our journey towards understanding who we are in Christ.â?? - Timothy Radcliffe, OP, former Master General of the Dominican Order

â??Sexual ethics and gay marriage -- Creation and Covenant is essential reading for anyone who wants to think about these issues in light of the Western Christian tradition. Roberts helps us see and resist the Gnostic temptation that so dominates the moral imagination of modern cultureâ?¦.A very fine book - just the sort of patient survey of the classical tradition we need, and absolutely on target as far as the core theological issue is concerned. It's the sort of book that will be very helpful for teaching a seminar on sexual ethics." - R. R. Reno, Creighton University, and editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.

â??In Creation and Covenant, Christopher Roberts has done both church and society a great service. â?¦We cannot go forward with any of these issues in the future without Roberts' excellent guide to the past.â?? - Don Browning, University of Chicago and author of Marriage and Modernization Creation and Covenant

You would like a publisher's discount? How about $78, or £39? Get in touch and I'll pass you right along

One of the points made was that many religious houses, whilst centred deeply on prayer and the eucharist, have allowed the study of scripture to fall into neglect. When it does take place, it is predominantly the individual religious who ‘studies scripture’, meditating alone with his or her Bible. Aside from recitation of the psalms and the lections in worship, there is little if any communal engagement with scripture – and its use in worship is in any case a thing distinct from study.

It is not only the ‘catholic’ tradition that faces worries about the quality of scripture study in the life of the Church today. Many of those gathering in the Deep Church group in London come from charismatic and/or evangelical backgrounds, and feel that their traditions while professing to be ‘biblically based’ often engage with scripture in a relatively superficial way. This can be because a strong doctrinal paradigm acts to preempt a sustained attentiveness to the possibilities and nuances of a text – the reader already ‘knows’ what she is going to find; she thus hears what she expects to hear. It can also be because scriptural texts are deployed in relative dissociation from each other (in bite-sized chunks, used for very specific pastoral or teaching purposes, and thereby prematurely instrumentalized), or else through very controlled forms of association with specific other passages or verses (again, it is often doctrinal concerns that dictate which associations are considered legitimate).

‘Bible Studies’ in the contemporary church often manifest precisely an evasion of scripture, rather than a willingness to take it seriously. This is true at every level of the Church’s life: I saw exactly the same symptoms at work in the Bible Study groups of senior bishops at the Lambeth Conference in 1998 as in many student or parish groups.

Broadly, two tendencies tend to emerge – neither of them wholly satisfactory. The first is the reduction of scripture to propositional statements, which are then deployed as authoritative descriptions (of the world, human beings, the facts of sin and redemption, or whatever), or else as irresistible ethical instructions or injunctions. As a mode of reasoning which works from the establishment of clear first principles and then works out from them, this approach to scripture might be described as rather like ‘deductive’ reasoning.

The other dominant tendency – even more prevalent in my experience – is one which uses the reading of scripture as an occasion to tell stories about oneself and one’s own religious experience. Scripture is thus made a vehicle or opportunity for self-expression, rather than being read as something with its own internal ‘logic’ and power to resist and reconfigure the reader’s expectations and understanding. As a mode of reasoning which seeks to derive judgements from experience, this might be likened to an ‘inductive’ approach to scripture.

Ben Quash Deep calls to Deep

Ben is moving from Peterhouse Cambridge, where he was Dean, to become Professor of Theology and the Arts at King's College London

The â??common goodâ?? is more than a political slogan. Itâ??s more than what most people think they want right now. Itâ??s not a matter of popular consensus or majority opinion. It canâ??t be reduced to economic justice or social equality or better laws or civil rights, although all these things are vitally important to a healthy society.

The common good is what best serves human happiness in the light of what is real and true. Thatâ??s the heart of the matter: What is real and true? If God exists, then the more man flees from God, the less true and real man becomes. If God exists, then a society that refuses to acknowledge or publicly talk about God is suffering from a peculiar kind of insanity.

What can the â??common goodâ?? mean in the context of Nietzscheâ??s superman or Marx or Freud or Darwin? These men became the architects of our age. But they were also just the latest expressions of a much deeper and more familiar temptation to human pride. We want to be gods, but weâ??re not. When we try to be, we diminish ourselves.

Thatâ??s our dilemma. Thatâ??s the punishment we create for ourselves. Thereâ??s a terrible humor in a man who claims that God is dead, then starts believing heâ??s Dionysius or Jesus Christ, and then ends up on a candy bar made by out-of-work philosophers for middle-class consumers who just want some â??chocolaty goodness.â??

Humility is the beginning of sanity. We canâ??t love anyone else until we can see past ourselves. And man canâ??t even be man without God. The humility to recognize who we are as creatures, who God is as our Father, what God asks from each of us, and the reality of Godâ??s love for other human persons as well as ourselvesâ??this is the necessary foundation that religion brings to every discussion of free will, justice, and truth, and to every conversation about â??the common good.â?? Sirach and the Psalms and the Gospel of Luke and the Letter of Jamesâ??these Scriptures move the human heart not because theyâ??re beautiful writings. Theyâ??re beautiful writings because they spring from what we know in our hearts to be true.

Bernanos once said that â??the world will be saved only by free men. We must make a world for free men.â?? He also said that prudenceâ??or rather, the kind of caution and fear that too often pose as prudenceâ??is the one piece of advice he never followed. â??When trouble is looking for you,â?? he said, â??itâ??s primarily a question of facing it, since it would be still more dangerous to turn your back on it. In that case, prudence is only the alibi of the cowardly.â??

We most truly serve the common good by having the courage to be disciples of Jesus Christ. God gave us a free will, but we need to use it. Discipleship has a cost. Jesus never said that we didnâ??t need a spine. The world doesnâ??t need affirmation. It needs conversion. It doesnâ??t need the approval of Christians. It needs their witness. And that work needs to begin with us. Bernanos said that the â??scandal of Creation [isnâ??t] suffering but freedom.â?? He said that â??moralists like to regard sanctity as a luxury; actually it is a necessity.â?? He also said that â??one may believe that this isnâ??t the era of the saints; that the era of the saints has passed. [But] it is always the era of the saints.â??

Charles J. Chaput Archbishop of Denver Religion and the Common Good at First Things - with some discussion of George Bernanos

Jon D. Levenson is an exceptionally interesting biblical scholar - I hope you know his Sinai to Zion, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, The death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son and The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies

Now Levenson has produced another:

Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life

This provocative volume explores the origins of the Jewish doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Jon D. Levenson argues that, contrary to a very widespread misconception, the ancient rabbis were keenly committed to the belief that at the end of time, God would restore the deserving dead to life. In fact, Levenson points out, the rabbis saw the Hebrew Bible itself as committed to that idea.

The author meticulously traces the belief in resurrection backward from its undoubted attestations in rabbinic literature and in the Book of Daniel, showing where the belief stands in continuity with earlier Israelite culture and where it departs from that culture. Focusing on the biblical roots of resurrection, Levenson challenges the notion that it was a foreign import into Judaism, and in the process he develops a neglected continuity between Judaism and Christianity. His book will shake the thinking of scholars and lay readers alike, revising the way we understand the history of Jewish ideas about life, death, and the destiny of the Jewish people.

I don't expect that you will buy all these books for yourself, but you could get your college library to order them, ask your professor about them, get them put on course reading lists. You have have the email of whoever orders theology books for the library, don't you? I would glad to hear about other things you think I ought to read - via my LibraryThing catalogue.

Of course The Eschatological Economy discusses Levenson's work.

Rusty Reno on why he left the Episcopalian Church for the Roman Catholic Church

Newman is excruciatingly detailed in his account of his own thinking, but for my purposes, I can simply report his conclusion: he came to think that the basic rationale for Anglicanism lacked validity. Even more strongly, he came to think that Anglicanism was a midwife for a liberalism that led to atheism. I still do not think Newman correct in the way he sets up Anglicanism, liberalism, and atheism as falling dominos, but I have come to think that the Episcopal Church is disastrously disordered and disarrayed. Here my own reasons and analysis are of no more moment than Newmanâ??s. What matters is the way one responds to the judgment that Anglicanism is in ruins.

As he looks back in his Apologia, Newman reports that the realization that his prior confidence in Anglicanism was mistaken did not produce an immediate conviction that he must leave. He developed a figural interpretation of his circumstances that justified staying put. â??I am content,â?? he wrote to a friend at the time, â??to be with Moses in the desert, or with Elijah excommunicated from the Temple.â?? When I wrote In the Ruins of the Church, I also adopted a figural strategy to make sense of my situation. I clearly saw that the apostolic inheritance bequeathed to the Episcopal Churchâ??a liturgy more medieval than reformed, a veneration of the ancient creeds, a love of the Church Fathers, a scriptural piety that did not confuse being learned with being criticalâ??was being dismantled by a revisionist ideology that knew no limits. But I did not see myself as a prophet who hectored at a distance. I appealed to the scriptural figure of Nehemiahâ??s return to the ruins of Jerusalem. The gates of the Temple had been thrown down, but rather than leave in despair, we should follow Nehemiahâ??s pattern and live in the ruins of the Church with redoubled loyalty.

Under the influence of Ephraim Radner, I placed Nehemiahâ??s return to a destroyed Jerusalem in a larger, more comprehensive figural interpretation of our situation as late-modern Christians. In his ambitious study of the history of Western Christian theology since the Reformation, The End of the Church, Radner places the destiny of the Church within the passion of Christ. Like his body crucified and broken, the divided churches in the West are undergoing a paschal suffering. Thus, I thought of staying put as a form of spiritual discipline. If I followed the path of Nehemiah and drew near to the ruins of the Church, then I would be closer still to my Lord.

Figural interpretations are not intellectual propositions that can simply be judged true or false. They are attempts to make sense out of disparate data according to patterns within Scripture, and they either compel us as deep, structuring insights, or they do not. I imagined that Radnerâ??s larger figural interpretation of our vocations as modern Christians (and my Nehemiahan figure) had the power to justify and structure an orthodox loyalty to a ruined church. I would not have written In the Ruins of the Church had I not believed that the paschal figure of Christ really is present in the increasingly debilitated and diminished forms of apostolic Christianity that one finds in the Episcopal Church, just as Newman would not have remained an Anglican if he had not believed his own figural interpretation of his situation. The problem was not that I had failed to notice that Anglicanism was a mess. Rereading Newman, I discovered that the problem was with myself and with the way in which I had come to hold my figural interpretation. . . . .

Modern Christianity is modern precisely in its great desire to compensate for what it imagines to be the superannuation, impotence, and failures of apostolic Christianity with a new and improved idea, theory, or theology. The disaster is not the improving impulse. I certainly wish that all Christians would expect more from their teachers and leaders. The problem is the source of the desired improvement. For Newman, â??theoryâ?? is a swear word because it connotes the ephemera of mental life, ephemera easily manipulated according to fantasy and convenience. Yet in my increasing disgruntlement, there I was, more loyal to my theory of staying put than to the actual place that demanded my loyalty. It was an artifact of my mind that compelled me to stay put. Unable to love the ruins of the Episcopal Church, I was forced to love my idea of loving the ruins. With this idea I tried to improve myself, after the fashion of a modern theologian.

. . .

In the end, as an Episcopalian I needed a theory to stay put, and I came to realize that a theory is a thin thread easily broken. The Catholic Church needs no theories. She is the mother of theologies; she does not need to be propped up by theologies. As Newman put it in one of his Anglican essays, â??the Church of Rome preoccupies the ground.â?? She is a given, a primary substance within the economy of denominationalism. One could rightly say that I became a Catholic by default, and that possibility is the simple gift I received from the Catholic Church. Mater ecclesia, she needed neither reasons, nor theories, nor ideas from me.

R.R. Reno Out of the Ruins

Another famous Englishman tackled the atonement recently. On Palm Sunday Sam Wells preached How does Jesus save us?

First indulge a little wistfulness.

Wells went off to the States a couple of years ago. Had he stayed he would be in the Anglican front row - which presently consists of Rowan Williams, Oliver O'Donovan, Tom Wright and John Webster (subs. Michael Banner). Of course the chapel of Duke is an important place to have a good theologian. We English import all our spirituality from the States, in our inverse snobbery assuming that there are no substantial Christian teachers here in the UK. So strangely we are more likely to hear Wells from Duke than from where he was, in dismal Cambridge.

How does Jesus save us? (PDF) is a great sermon, though you can feel the temptations on this wordsmith. I'll make a couple of points in the hope that you'll read it all. First Wells reviews a clutch of models of the atonement.

But I want to suggest today that there’s a real danger with all five [atonement] theories. And that is that they’re theories. That’s to say, they are disembodied constructs that pay little or no attention to the context and contours of Jesus’ life.

Why turn theory and story into opposites? What is a theory if not a story compressed? Let's come back to ‘disembodied constructs’.

The single word that epitomizes the context and contours of Jesus’ life is this: Israel.

Which is to say that God is faithful to his promises to his people, promises given to us in the Scriptures. In slogan form: the gentiles will inherit Israel and Israel will inherit the gentiles, in Christ.

This is, I believe, how Jesus saves us. Not through a decontextualized theory that posits a faraway God doing curious deals in the light of arbitrary codes of debt, justice or honor

Arbitrary codes? Ouch. Nothing like belittling the whole dogmatic tradition of the Church

but through the Jews, God’s everlasting love for them, and his love through them for all the nations and the whole creation.

‘Love’ (and communion) and ‘church’ or people’ are the components of a properly theological account of how Jesus has saved us.

The Church is that body of people who declare they want to be in continuity with this story

Story? We just need to make clear how a ‘story’ may be be true and become our truth. Perhaps sanctification will get a mention in a minute. There should be a doctrine of creation, or ontology, here somewhere. We'll need just a little eschatological ontology.

The circumstantial detail is the gospel

And a theological ontology would secure, not threaten, particularity.

When you hear all these theories together

They are not theories but doctrines, the teaching of the church. There is no dogma (settled decisions of the Church taken by its councils) of the atonement. It is for the Church in each generation to relate these doctrines of the atonement, and do so by linking them to the doctrines of God, man, creation and eschatology. Then they'll make very good sense and not be so easy to belittle.

Wells rightly says that we need more than ‘disembodied constructs’.

What we need is embodied givens, embodied gifts. ‘Embodied’ refers to the ecclesiology. The gifts of God to us are embodied as this group of people, the Church, made distinct by God for the world, in particular congregations in particular places, and as the sets of instincts (‘virtues’) that they share with us.

And we need, not ‘constructs’, but doctrines, and with them all the good practices by which we can receive and learn the doctrines of the church, taught us by teachers who, like this one, understand their responsibility. Through this teaching we grow up into the whole truth - and life - of Christ. We receive Christ in those packages Christ gives to the whole Church, packages we call doctrine and sacrament (or gifts of the Spirit). That’s your pneumatology and eschatological ontology.

Anyway, Sam Wells is not too young to be a bishop. Tempt him back, somebody. Meanwhile another Anglican theologian has recently given us an account of the Christology, pneumatology, anthropology, ontology and eschatology that are required to say how Jesus saves us. Readers of this blog will not need much of a hint.

Neil MacDonald is good at titles. What do you think of his latest?

Metaphysics and the God of Israel: Systematic Theology of the Old and New Testaments or of his earlier

Karl Barth and the Strange New World within the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein, and the Metadilemmas of the Enlightenment

So what are the reviews like?

â??Neil MacDonaldâ??s reflection moves back, forth and sideways between critical biblical study, high-modern philosophy in the analytical tradition, and classical Christian doctrine. Most who have attempted such explorations have reported mostly blockades and traps. MacDonald discovers instead sudden opportunities of faithful insight and of â?? very often unexpected â?? theological construction. A remarkable and, I think, important book, to be read with attention.â?? Robert W. Jenson, Formerly Senior Scholar for Research at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, Professor Emeritus of Religion, St. Olaf College, Minnesota

â??MacDonaldâ??s is a voice crying in the wilderness. This is a brilliant effort to combine the very best in historical-critical and theological exegesis with dogmatic and philosophical reflection of a very high level. The writing style is lucid and at times almost poetic,which a theme as exalted as Godâ??s work in time requires. Sophisticated and full of insight. May his tribe increase.â?? Christopher R. Seitz, Professor of Old Testament and Theological Studies, University of St Andrews

â??Neil MacDonaldâ??s latest book is the first major effort in many decades to attempt to reintegrate systematic theology with biblical studies. The authorâ??s grasp of the whole spectrum of modern biblical scholarship, both in Old and New Testaments, is highly impressive. Because of his unique mastery of philosophical theory as well, he is superbly equipped for this exciting task. His book will certainly serve to open up a fresh dialogue, which is long overdue.â?? Brevard S. Childs, Emeritus Professor of Old Testament, Yale Divinity School

Hmm. Always interesting to see who a man's friends are.

But there is another remarkable fact about this Neil MacDonald. He teaches Christian dogmatics in London.

In order to recover its Christian roots, Europe needs the re-emergence of Christian unity. In their present state of separation, the causes of which lie in the distant past, the Christian churches cannot call effectively upon the nations of Europe to remember and reappropriate the spiritual and cultural resources of their Christian past. The ruptures of Christian unity that have led to the separate existence of confessional churches and to their endless controversies have contributed so decisively to the calamities of European history and to the sufferings of the nations of Europe, that these separate churches continuously remind educated Europeans of the historical reasons why modern culture and political order have had to be cut loose from any religious foundation. But human life needs a religious foundation lest it becomes empty of meaning and self-destructive. The cultural history of humankind provides ample evidence that this function of religion is irreplaceable. This is also true of social life and public culture. The only question, in the long run, is what kind of religion comes to be of basic importance in the life of a culture. In this respect, if Europe is to preserve what has been distinctively European in its cultural tradition, it cannot easily dispose of Christianity, provided that Christianity does not present itself as sectarian, nor sells out to secularism, but continues to incorporate within itself the best heritage of classical antiquity and therefore openness to reason as well as the true achievements of modern culture. Might a reuniting Christianity also offer evidence of having learnt the lessons of history concerning toleration and the provisional nature of human knowledge even about the truth of revelation? Such a renewal of an ecumenical and therefore truly catholic Christian church could perhaps heal aching memories in European nations of past sufferings and bitter conflicts. It might inspire a new confidence both in the cultural unity of Europe and in the prospect and vigour of its renewal.

Wolfhart Pannenberg The Churches and the Emergence of European Unity

Just seen the bibliography of Oswald Bayer at Wiki.de and remembered what a colossus Bayer is.

He is Professor Emeritus at Tübingen, a Lutheran, but more than that, he is a Luther - really shocking evangelical power, wielded with very great intellectual sophistication and gentleness. His line is that the Reformation is much more modern than 'modernity' will ever be. He has lots in common with Jüngel, but more spiritual authority (ludicrous, to say so, but...). I'll translate some of his titles:

• Promise: Luther's Reformation Turn

• Creation as Address: Towards a Hermeneutic of creation

• Living Word: Reformation and Modernity in Conflict

• Freedom as Response: Theological Ethics

• Contemporaries in Confrontation: Johann Georg Hamann as Radical Enlightener

• God as Author: Theological Poetics

• Reason is Speech (or discourse/conversation): Hamann's demolition of Kant 'critique')

Hamann is one of Germany's least explored Christian theologians. He was a contemporary, friend yet crushing opponent of Kant, with much in common with Kierkegaard and Coleridge.

Oswald Bayer would be the perfect subject for a PhD on Christian theological hermeneutics.

WHICH AMBITIOUS PUBLISHER IS GOING TO BE THE FIRST TO TRANSLATE BAYER'S WORK?

Another great European about to be launched into the insular English-speaking world is Robert Spaemann, a Catholic moral philosopher who until recently taught at Munich.

Robert Spaemann Persons: The Difference between `Someone' and `Something', translated by Oliver O'Donovan, appears in the Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics series.

Spaemann has also authored Happiness And Benevolence

Wikipedia has a little about him in English and German which has a link to his Der Gottesbeweis auf Welt and two other short pieces at Project Syndicate, itself worth bookmarking.

You read it here first

The key…lies in the fact that the Temple was understood to be not only the centre of the world but also a microcosm of the whole creation. To speak of heaven and earth passing away quite naturally evoked the image of its destruction. Conversely, to destroy the Temple was to destroy the universe.

That a temple could represent the entire cosmos was taken for granted in the ancient Near East, as any modern visitor to the temple at Karnak in Egypt knows. Solomon’s Temple was similarly constructed, albeit with its own distinctive Israelite features (notably, the bronze basin of 1 Kings 7.23-26, which was actually called ‘the Sea’). Like the Tabernacle, it was dedicated in the New Year festival which celebrated God’s creation of the universe.

According to Psalm 78.69, the sanctuary was built ‘like the high heavens, like the earth, which he has founded forever’. A careful examination of the account of creation in Genesis 1 alongside the description of the Tabernacle in Exodus 25-40 finds many points of correspondence between the structure and symbolism of the latter and the order of the former. These connections were not esoteric secrets hidden in scripture. They were very well known to Jews in Jesus’ day and were described in detail by such writers as Josephus and Philo in the first century AD.

This cosmic symbolism had a very specific purpose: it meant that everything that went on in the Temple gave a structure, order and stability to the whole world. Through its sacrifices, prayers and liturgy, the Temple was believed to integrate within itself the life not only of humankind but of all creation. For Jesus the Jew, Israel’s coming catastrophe meant the destruction of the old order. This had truly cosmological implications, as the Temple’s function of holding things together was about to come to an end.

Rather than longing for a cosmic meltdown, we must hear the groans of creation as the birth-pangs of the new age and pray, in the words of Romans 8.21, that it ‘will be set free from its bondage to decay [so that it may] obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’.

Crispin Fletcher-Louis at Third Way on Mark 13.24ff & 30f

Try Greg Beale The Temple and the Church's Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Temple for a summary of Israel’s theological cosmology

We asked ourselves two questions: if rationalist (positivist) philosophy is strictly rational and, consequently, if it is universally valid, and if it is complete. Is it self-sufficient? Can it, or more directly must it, relegate its historical roots to the realm of the pure past and, therefore, to the realm of what can only be valid subjectively?

We must respond to both questions with a definitive "no." This philosophy does not express man's complete reason, but only a part of it, and because of this mutilation of reason it cannot be considered entirely rational. For this reason it is incomplete, and can only be fulfilled by re-establishing contact with its roots. A tree without roots dries up. In this connection, the Enlightenment is of Christian origin and it is no accident that it was born precisely and exclusively in the realm of the Christian faith.....

Christianity must always remember that it is the religion of the "Logos." It is faith in the "Creator Spiritus," in the Creator Spirit, from which proceeds everything that exists. Today, this should be precisely its philosophical strength, in so far as the problem is whether the world comes from the irrational, and reason is not, therefore, other than a "sub-product," on occasion even harmful of its development or whether the world comes from reason, and is, as a consequence, its criterion and goal.

The Christian faith inclines toward this second thesis, thus having, from the purely philosophical point of view, really good cards to play, despite the fact that many today consider only the first thesis as the only modern and rational one par excellence. However, a reason that springs from the irrational, and that is, in the final analysis, itself irrational, does not constitute a solution for our problems. Only creative reason, which in the crucified God is manifested as love, can really show us the way.

In the so necessary dialogue between secularists and Catholics, we Christians must be very careful to remain faithful to this fundamental line: to live a faith that comes from the "Logos," from creative reason, and that, because of this, is also open to all that is truly rational.

Cardinal Josef Ratzinger Europe’s crisis of culture

The Muslims, who in this respect are often and willingly brought in, do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations, but by the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations. ... The same is true for the reference to God: It is not the mention of God that offends those who belong to other religions, but rather the attempt to build the human community absolutely without God.

The banishment of Christian roots does not reveal itself as the expression of a higher tolerance, which respects all cultures in the same way, not wishing to privilege any, but rather as the absolutizing of a pattern of thought and of life that are radically opposed, among other things, to the other historical cultures of humanity.

The radical detachment of the Enlightenment philosophy from its roots becomes, in the last analysis, contempt for man. Man, deep down, has no freedom, we are told by the spokesmen of the natural sciences, in total contradiction with the starting point of the whole question. Man must not think that he is something more than all other living beings and, therefore, should also be treated like them, we are told by even the most advanced spokesmen of a philosophy clearly separated from the roots of humanity's historical memory.

Cardinal Josef Ratzinger Europe’s crisis of culture

There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a "dies academicus" (open debate/general studies day?) when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of "universitas": The reality that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason -- this reality became a lived experience.

The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the "universitas scientiarum," even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: It had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: This, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

Pope Benedict Faith Reason and the University

* * *

The Pope is concerned by the threat of fideism and radical scepticism to the university, to rationality, and to our aspiration to know reality. (Even the way web-names are assigned makes it clearer in Germany that there is really just one university - one universe of knowledge - not ultimately divided by its many campuses.) It is a speech on faith and reason. Benedict regards Christianity, Judaism and Islam as three traditions of faith and reason. He tells us that 'science' and social science are also traditions of faith and reason. All these traditions ('scientific' as well as 'religious') are tempted by fideism (which leads eventually to irrationalism and even violence). But although these traditions are all sometimes tempted to avoid the public examination of rationality within which they can remain truly reasonable and rational, they all have the resources to resist that temptation, and they should all do so, and do so together in the university. If the modern university does not allow the intellellectual exploration of the Christian gospel, the university will operate on a greatly reduced concept of reason and science, and more than that, on a greatly reduced concept of man, which would be impoverishing for that society and for all mankind.

Any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: It is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science" …

In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.

Benedict says that God has made himself known, so we do not need to despair of knowing anything about him or about the creation he has set us in. This makes our knowledge of this physical world, his creation, also basically reliable and reasonable. The Christians (often along with Jews and Muslims) can point out that they are the guardians of reason against what Benedict calls 'de-hellenisation', modern irrationalism's retreat from the Logos, and so from the assumption that the world is an ordered and reliable place. The university needs Christianity, and any other tradition that reasons about faith, in order to allow full exploration of the creation and of man, the creature of God.

John Paul II decoded the new threats to the "mystery of the human person" in the post–Cold War world, and he spent much of the decade of the 1990s trying to explain that freedom detached from moral truth—the "freedom of indifference" that dominated the high culture of the triumphant West—was, inevitably, self–cannibalizing.

Freedom untethered from truth is freedom’s worst enemy. For if there is only your truth and my truth, and neither one of us recognizes a transcendent moral standard (call it "the truth") by which to adjudicate our differences, then the only way to settle the argument is for you to impose your power on me, or for me to impose my power on you. Freedom untethered from truth leads to chaos; chaos leads to anarchy; and since human beings cannot tolerate anarchy, tyranny as the answer to the human imperative of order is just around the corner. The false humanism of the freedom of indifference leads first to freedom’s decay, and then to freedom’s demise.

George Weigel John Paul II and the Crisis of Humanism

Gresham College in London has a day conference on John Paul II as Philosopher in November

The Oxford History of Christian Worship is 860 pages of wonderfully perceptive and accessible historical scholarship in the service of Christian theology. The book is sympathetic to every strand of Christian worship: there is nothing dry or patronizing here. The masterly Introduction by Geoffrey Wainwright is not only theological, it is positively evangelical: if we do not worship the true God we worship false ones.

The book starts with the apostolic tradition, the ancient oriental churches, and goes on to Orthodoxy. I was most impressed by Alexander Rentel’s fifty pages on Eastern Orthodoxy, by André Haquin on changes in Catholic worship in the twentieth century, and by Karen Westfield Tucker’s forty page chapter on North America. Other chapters deal with different ecclesiologies (Mennonite, Charismatic), territories (Africa, Asia) and themes (Music, the Spatial Setting, Women), and there are seven chapters on church and worship in the global south. The chapters lay out the theological logic of each form of worship: the content and structures of worship services are discussed, with some information laid out in boxes, and lots of illustrations.

Several chapters discuss the twentieth century, in which worship underwent rapid changes in every church. The Roman Catholic recovery of the idea that whole church is the people of God, communion ecclesiology (an unnoticed reformation?), meant that Vatican II was not simply the Catholic church ‘catching up’ with change outside it; it has also been the impetus to liturgical revision in every other (Protestant) denomination. Revision of lectionaries, service books and hymn books shows an increasing Evangelical understanding of the role of the lectionary in cementing the unity of the Church, and thus a growing Protestant realisation of the catholicity of Church. There is an intelligent discussion of Pentecostal and charismatic worship and a tentative look forward, perhaps to a church led by the charismatic churchmanship of the global south. The Oxford History of Christian Worship is a compelling read, and I was gripped even by subjects that I thought I had no interest in. It is the best purchase I have made this year.

See The Oxford History of Christian Worship at Knight's Amazon Store

Geoffrey Wainwright, an English Methodist, has been master of this field since the appearance of his systematic theology of Christian worship, ‘Doxology’. As one Amazon reviewer said – "After reading Wainwright's book, you will want to look for another one just like it - only it doesn't exist." Though it has been universally admired, ‘Doxology’ has not had enough of an impact, so much theology is still studied as though it had nothing to do with the public worship and confession of the Christian community. See Wainwright at Wikipedia and at Duke.

There is plenty of good Christian theology going on in London. It is true that theology was driven out of the one place in London that could claim to offer academic Christian teaching at an international level, the theology department of Kings College London. But it is still going just going on informally outside the university. I'll give you some examples of good Christian theologians at work in London.

My first example is Crispin Fletcher-Louis.

Crispin Fletcher-Louis is a New Testament scholar. He has made it his task to show that Israel understood that man is the representative of God in creation, the living breathing icon of God, who sums up all creation and is able to articulate and return all creation's praise to God. This colossal definition of man as the creature, officer and right-hand man of God was made visible in the Jerusalem temple, and in particular in the figure of the high priest. Fletcher-Louis sees this priestly imago dei theology not just where you would expect to find it, in the Book of Hebrews, but in every book of the New Testament. Watching Fletcher-Louis opening up a passage of Scripture is as exhilarating as your first encounters with Tom Wright were. That's right, the theological ambition of Fletcher-Louis' project is comparable with Tom Wright’s.

Fletcher-Louis has been constructing this thesis with considerable patience through a large number of articles and Luke-Acts: Angels, Christology and Soteriology. He should be in a large theology department with a team of postgraduate students around him, and getting on with this project by writing some big books.

But these are funny times.

So instead Crispin has been setting up the Westminster Theological Centre, which intends to bring the training of Anglican clergy back to London. The Westminster Theological Centre has been set up in-house by St Mary’s Bryanston Square, and it is not the only large charismatic evangelical Anglican flagship to start a new theological college. Who else but the charismatic evangelicals have the energy? Theological training has to come back to the churches, and this is a start. Of course it raises all sorts of questions, but we can look at these another day.

* * * *

Anyway, just to give you an idea of the Fletcher-Louis product I'll give you a paragraph from one of three brief and very accessible little studies he did for Third Way:

"We can now explain why ‘idolatry’ is forbidden: the only physical reality that embodies the divine presence is (ideal) humankind. Idolatry, according to the Old Testament, may thus be defined as giving to some thing else not only the worth and respect that belong to God but also those that are due to us, because it is humankind that represents and bears God’s presence… Humankind is called to be an ecstatic embodiment of divine creativity, filling the world with the presence of God’s glory and thereby providing the order and stability that God’s own authority naturally entails. … This interpretation may sound like an arrogation of divine rights which only adds to centuries of human claims for independence from God, but it is quite the reverse. This image-of-God theology disallows any identity that does not glorify the one true God. True humanity lives for the other, for the Creator it represents."

Crispin Fletcher-Louis Genesis 1.26 & Ephesians 1.22

Here is an article on Jesus and the High Priest (in scruffy PDF) that nicely summarises the Fletcher-Louis project. Next time, another theologian in working London.

It is into that ongoing life and history that we were baptized, and into its preservation, transmission, and communication that you, as priests of the Church, are to be sent. Your priestly ministry will be the daily re-enactment of the story of salvation, the daily repossession of the heritage. It will become a truly creative re-enactment and repossession not by cutting itself off from dogma and liturgy and discipline, but by having the courage to assert what the faith means as well as what it has meant. Those of us who have had the privilege of growing up in immigrant communities know the problems, but also the gratifications, of being bilingual: sometimes it is language A that best expresses what we want to say, and at other times it is language B, but one of our tasks was always to foster communication between those who, unlike ourselves, were so unfortunate as to be able to speak only one language. The priesthood of the Church is, in a sense, called to be bilingual, speaking the language of the tradition and maintaining continuity with it, but then creatively bridging the gap of communication with those who speak only "modernese." This is a risky enterprise. It is much easier to live in the past or, on the other hand to capitulate to modernity and, as the saying goes, to "let bygones be bygones."

It is to neither of these that we have been called, but to discipleship and to faithfulness and to continuity with the faithful disciples of the Church in all ages. Grounded in that continuity and making that tradition our own, we are set free to speak and to work as those who, through the Incarnation, have been privileged to share in the very nature of God the Creator and in His freedom.

The charter of this continuity and of this creativity is the summons and the promise of Our Lord Himself: If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:31.32).

Jaroslav Pelikan Continuity and Creativity

For what we have received as a heritage from our Fathers, we must earn if we are really to possess it. Each generation of the Church has had to learn this lesson anew. Continuity is not the same as archaism, and over and over the Church has reacted to the challenges of heresy and unbelief by stating its historic faith and restating it, and, as Maximus Confessor says, "giving it an exegesis and working out its implications" (PG 91:260). It, in response to Christological heresy or to attacks upon the holy icons, it was appropriate for the Fathers to recite the Nicene Creed with an extended paraphrase that spoke to these false teachings, then it remains appropriate for us also to locate ourselves within the continuity of the faith of our Fathers and, in the name of that continuity, to speak the Word of God to the world of today. For what a world intoxicated with each fleeting moment needs to sober it up is the message of the apostolic faith, but we are not simply pipes and conduits through which that message passes, but living, responsive, and, yes, creative participants in its ongoing life and history.

Jaroslav Pelikan Continuity and Creativity with thanks to Matthew Baker

I have found these three dicta from our Archbishop in from a speech on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They are not trite.

1. Christ equips us to say no to those falsehoods which allow us to ignore the places where he is to be found.

2. The Bible is not interested in resolving personal dramas of choice. What matters is that what we say or do or choose points to the truth of Christ.

3. Christ will find us as and when we are ready to be found by him, and not when we are certain that we can make him speak for our party or our programme.

Here are the paragraphs in which they appear:

The temptation is that we borrow Bonhoeffer’s language to give dignity and seriousness to some of our current controversies, when the truth is that it is only in the face of a real anti-church that these matters come fully into focus, when there is an active programme aimed at destroying the Church’s integrity and expelling or silencing those who hold to that integrity. And Bonhoeffer himself warns us about being too ready in advance to spell out what would constitute an anti-church. What is essential is the work that prepares us for discernment: the common life of adoration and confession, the struggle to bring acts and policies to the judgement of Scripture, the freedom, above all, to stand against what actively seeks, inside or outside the Church, to prohibit the proclamation of the Gospel, confident in what God has irrevocably given to the community of faith.

In October 1938, Bonhoeffer addressed a conference of younger pastors associated with the Confessing Church and serving in illegal pastorates; his subject was the question of what obedience to Scripture meant. He warns against using Scripture to demonstrate the rightness of an action or policy, making Scripture serve a programme of our own, a conception of our righteousness. It is not that we can solve the dramatic personal question, ‘What shall I do?’ by a simple appeal to the Bible, so that we are relieved of the burden of human ambiguity and even human sinfulness and error. The Bible, says Bonhoeffer, is not interested in resolving personal dramas of choice. What matters is that what we say or do or choose points to the truth of Christ. In itself it is always going to be in some degree in need of forgiveness; but it is ‘right’ to the extent that it displays the truth of Christ. ‘It is our way to let Jesus Christ find us in this way. Christ is the truth. The sole truth of our way is that we should be found in this truth’ (The Way to Freedom, 176).

As a programme, as a set of solutions, this is not going to be the answer to our divisions and quarrels as churches today. But if this is the language in which we are prepared to think about and pray about our struggles, we shall have learned from Bonhoeffer what above all he has to teach us: Christ equips us to say no to those falsehoods which allow us to ignore the places where he is to be found. Christ can lead us through culture and piety and ecumenism to a place where we must say no to any aspects of them that make falsehoods easier. Christ will find us as and when we are ready to be found by him, and not when we are certain that we can make him speak for our party or our programme, left or right. Inexorably, we are led to that twofold commendation of prayer and justice with which the Prison Letters leave us – a commendation not of abstract spirituality and busy activism, but of immersion in Christ through Scripture and the struggle to act so that God’s act will be visible. It is a legacy that will not easily let us be satisfied with ourselves; which is why it is a gift from Bonhoeffer’s Lord and ours.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Speech at the opening of the International Bonhoeffer Congress, University of Wroclaw, Poland

George Weigel on Michael Burleigh Christianity gave the West cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism, for it recognized â??neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor freeâ?? as relevant social categories â?? and thus blazed a path beyond tribalism and toward the end of slavery, that ubiquitous human institution. Modern feminism notwithstanding, Christianity also gave the world ... feminism, for St. Paul completed his instruction on Christian egalitarianism by reminding the Galatians that, in Christ Jesus, neither â??male nor femaleâ?? had a superior dignity â?? which, in that context and in much of the world today, means that Christianity is the great liberator of women.

Christianity, as Pope Benedict reminded us recently, gave the West the idea of charity as a personal and social obligation; think of the world of cruelty graphically captured in Gladiator and youâ??ll see the point. Christianity also gave the world a politically viable concept of peace, the peace that St. Augustine first defined in the fifth century as the â??tranquility of order.â??

Christianity taught that rulers were responsible, not to themselves alone (as so many rulers liked to think, then and now), but to transcendent moral norms. Would the concepts of the rule of law, and of rulers responsible to the law, have evolved in the West if, as Professor Burleigh reminds us, â??the redoubtable Ambrose, archbishop of Milan ... [had not] tamed the Emperor Theodosius?â?? Or, to cite the more familiar example, if Gregory VII had not confronted Henry II and forced him to recognize the freedom of the Church â?? a freedom that implies limits on state power? It seems unlikely, not least because these ideas didnâ??t gain currency in the rest of the world until they were brought to the rest of the world by Christians.

Why was this insistence on the Churchâ??s liberty so socially, and ultimately politically, important? Because the freedom of the Church meant that the state (or some other form of concentrated political power) would not occupy every available social space â?? that there would be room in society for other institutions and other loyalties. And that, in turn, made both civil society and the limited, constitutional state possible...

Christianityâ??s contributions to the civilization of the West have been ignored or caricatured as â??divisive, fraudulent, or oppressiveâ?? ... This caricature of a vibrant public Christianity as inherently dangerous for democracy is a caricature in service to the idea that secularism is the only possible â??neutralâ?? ground on which a democratic political community can conduct its life.

George Weigel What Christianity gave the West

46. It is not too much to claim that the development of a good part of modern philosophy has seen it move further and further away from Christian Revelation, to the point of setting itself quite explicitly in opposition. This process reached its apogee in the last century. Some representatives of idealism sought in various ways to transform faith and its contents, even the mystery of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, into dialectical structures which could be grasped by reason. Opposed to this kind of thinking were various forms of atheistic humanism, expressed in philosophical terms, which regarded faith as alienating and damaging to the development of a full rationality. They did not hesitate to present themselves as new religions serving as a basis for projects which, on the political and social plane, gave rise to totalitarian systems which have been disastrous for humanity.

As a result of the crisis of rationalism, what has appeared finally is ‘nihilism’. As a philosophy of nothingness, it has a certain attraction for people of our time. Its adherents claim that the search is an end in itself, without any hope or possibility of ever attaining the goal of truth. In the nihilist interpretation, life is no more than an occasion for sensations and experiences in which the ephemeral has pride of place. Nihilism is at the root of the widespread mentality which claims that a definitive commitment should no longer be made, because everything is fleeting and provisional.

47. It should also be borne in mind that the role of philosophy itself has changed in modern culture. From universal wisdom and learning, it has been gradually reduced to one of the many fields of human knowing; indeed in some ways it has been consigned to a wholly marginal role. Other forms of rationality have acquired an ever higher profile, making philosophical learning appear all the more peripheral. These forms of rationality are directed not towards the contemplation of truth and the search for the ultimate goal and meaning of life; but instead, as ‘instrumental reason’, they are directed, actually or potentially, towards the promotion of utilitarian ends, enjoyment or power.

In the wake of these cultural shifts, some philosophers have abandoned the search for truth in itself and made their sole aim the attainment of a subjective certainty or a pragmatic sense of utility. This in turn has obscured the true dignity of reason, which is no longer equipped to know the truth and to seek the absolute.

48. The link between faith and reason needs to be carefully examined, because each without the other is impoverished and enfeebled. Deprived of what Revelation offers, reason has taken side-tracks which expose it to the danger of losing sight of its final goal. Deprived of reason, faith has stressed feeling and experience, and so run the risk of no longer being a universal proposition. It is an illusion to think that faith, tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition. By the same token, reason which is unrelated to an adult faith is not prompted to turn its gaze to the newness and radicality of being.

This is why I make this appeal that faith and philosophy recover the profound unity which allows them to stand in harmony with their nature without compromising their mutual autonomy. The ‘parrhesia’ of faith must be matched by the boldness of reason.

John Paul II Fides et Ratio - On the Relationship between Faith and Reason

The question briefly put it this: in what sense is there or ought there to be communion between Christians whose beliefs seem to differ profoundly on a number of significant topics, from scriptural interpretation to creedal exposition to moral teaching to the church’s political orderings? Does it make sense to speak of communion at all within such circumstances? Any right answer to this question cannot escape the historical reality that the Church’s story must embody the story of a divine union whose only possibility lay in the suffering of its divine inappropriateness. The hopelessness given in ecclesial contention and division is overcome only by the divine victory givenness the body of Christ: it is act coincident with the life of the Church, however, and thus its historical form for the Church can be observed only within the scriptural realm of ecclesial conformity itself – truth and unity joined in the divine suffering of the body’s fractured life itself.

Certainly, unity and truth have struck many Christians as potentially incompatible characteristics at a given time, ranged against one another in a zero-sum game made necessary by the travails of the moment: sometimes unity at the cost of truth, or sometimes truth at the cost of unity…

But while we can note this long history of attempts to play off unity and truth against each other or to relate them to same form of resolved tension… We do not tend to see gentleness and patience as ever being in tension; we do not ever place kindness and self-control over and against each other as two elements whose individual consummation may require their subordination to one another in time…

On the matter of unity, then, we can conclude that if the church is one, its unity will involve a participation in the historical form of the Father’s sending of his Son in time, an act synonymous with the incarnation’s narrative.

Ephraim Radner ‘The Figure of Truth and Unity’ in Hope Among the Fragments: The Broken Church and its Engagement of Scripture

The truth of the God of Jesus Christ is its own reward. Communication of that truth makes for joy and a life well-lived – a second reward. Colin Gunton taught me this.

Colin Gunton showed that the doctrine of God is not only about the truth of God. It also secures our own identity, our worth and our responsible freedom as children of God. The temptation to aspire to something we mistakenly identify as greater than created humanity makes us less than human. The truth that we are not God, but creatures of God - the doctrine of creation - is the really great gift of the Christian faith to the world. This is why Gunton focused on these two doctrines: God and creation.

Gunton taught that we creatures are able to know God because the Holy Spirit enables us to confess Jesus, who confesses God the Father. Often quoting Irenaeus to say that the Son and the Spirit are the two hands of the Father, Gunton showed that the doctrine of the Trinity provides us with a doctrine of mediation - God himself is not only the (christological) content but the (pneumatological) medium and bearer of that content. He argued that God is now at work making possible not only our worship and knowledge of him, but also our recognition of one another. God is the means by which I may see you for who you are, and let you become what God intends you to be – a unique and particular person.

In the years Colin Gunton taught systematic theology at Kings College, London, worldwide interest in trinitarian theology grew dramatically. Postgraduates would come to Colin to study Barth and other heroes of the Reformed tradition, but with him they also discovered the Church Fathers and learned how to think across the whole Christian dogmatic tradition.

In the weekly seminar, Colin hosted an intense encounter of ideas. With the first-timers he always wrestled through the issues again and found better ways to frame them, forever expressing delight in the richness of the Christian tradition. We would arrive with the patronizing assumption that we moderns have discovered crises of previously unknown complexity, but in seminar after seminar Colin would enable us to see that such self-consciously 'modern' theology was self-deluding. It is much more likely that we have to catch up with the intellectual rigor of previous generations of Christian thinkers. The result was not only Gunton's powerful written work, but students who could think for themselves precisely because they could faithfully listen to what many generations of Christians had been saying. We who knew Colin Gunton are grateful to God for him.

One way of looking at the present conflict within our own churches is to see it as an insistence, on the part of the various players, to heal that sickness and to rewrite the plot of the drama of which they are parts so as to exclude the length and detail of its anguished elaboration. In contrast, the history of the Church, which is the history of the Lord writ small and long, proclaims: It is for the sake of charity that we suffer our disagreements; it is for the sake of truth that we love the liar; it is for the sake of the bride that it receive as her gift her beloved’s body as her own. The irony of Christian patience is that it is an eternal hastening into the midst of this story, rather than one that hurries to break out of it. And we are perhaps called to judge our practical reactions to the array of our ecclesial anxieties – over incompetent and unfaithful bishops, over corrupted prayers and unjust stewards, over shallow understandings and venal missions, over uncaring guardians and unheeding tenants – judge them according to the standard of such a passion.

No clear directives emerge from such a judgment. Those who wish to know if they must follow this line, or resist along that, or compromise upon this other, are given no certainties in their choices simply because they subject themselves to the scriptural shape of Jesus’ life. But at least they know that they cannot run away – and because it is ultimately his life, that there is even redemption in staying put! There are not many bodies, some true and some false, some loving and some uncharitable. These are distractions from the one story, and the embrace of this story cannot sustain the parsing of proprieties that today so grips our distorted sense of integrity. Readiness for love – truth bound in unity – is a single and extended temporal exertion. It is embodied in God's subjection to time in Christ Jesus, and the Church finds its own readiness in this form. There is no escape from this particular fate and promise. And therein are the kisses of God's peace for his people enjoyed.

Ephraim Radner ‘The Figure of Truth and Unity’ in Hope Among the Fragments: The Broken Church and its Engagement of Scripture

There are four areas where recent papal teaching has articulated a variety of propositions that need to be affirmed. Veritatas Splendor teaches that there's no freedom outside of truth, There is a slim chance that human beings could find happiness outside of some proper understanding of what it is to be human. This does not mean that there are no truths that human beings can know about themselves, it just means we owe the world to proclaim the fullness of that truth. We owe it to the world, not to come to the table, in the spirit of a pluralism of religions, or the pluralism of ideology as simply equal partners, but with conviction that we have something to contribute to shape the development of a consensus. If you've read these encyclicals, you know they stand on their arguments.

Evangelium Vitae tells us, contrary to what modernity thought, that the eclipse of belief in God has turned out to be the greatest threats to the human, not the exultation of the human. The fact that God was eclipsed, has not made human life safer, but more dangerous. The message of Evangelium Vitae, that God is the greatest friend of the human must be proclaimed without obsessing about this. Without a sense of the transcendent dimension of the human, you have what our Holy Father calls of "the culture of death." The great irony at is that at the end of the 19th century the pope had to defend faith against reason, but here at the end of the 20th the pope has had to defend reason against unreason.

Augustine DiNoia Divine Wisdom and Christian Humanism

The criteria then for thinking about the faith and about the relation of faith to culture are the criteria that come from the classical view of theological inquiry which is to see the intelligibility of what is intrinsically intelligible, naturally using all of the capacities and rigor that human reason supplies. It's not a question of being unreasonable. Intelligibility is not the opposite of reasonability, but it's the tool of reason that is applied to the reflection on a mystery that itself draws the human mind and challenges it at every point.

Not everyone coming out of our institutions have to be theologians. But it is the case, and you've all experienced this, that the people with highly sophisticated knowledge of economics, politics, physics, astronomy, law are traveling with an almost infantile level of knowledge of their faith. I've encountered them. They are traveling on the knowledge of their faith that they might remember from a 3rd grade class, or perhaps at 5th grade with their confirmation. After that they haven't learned a single thing. This makes them incapable of withstanding not only incorrect versions of Catholicism, but also versions of any kind of spirituality that are mad. The danger of irreligion is not skepticism, but credulity. People are prepared to believe anything in the name of religion, as you know.

This is why Ex Corde Ecclesia is so central, so important, so absolutely essential. Our institutions of higher learning must turn out people who know something about their faith and who are capable of articulating the ways in which it relates to whatever area of professional life, politics, science, philosophy, they are in, because God knows the clergy can't and are unlikely to do so.

Augustine DiNoia Divine Wisdom and Christian Humanism

Ex Corde Ecclesia is John Paul II's Apostolic Constitution on Catholic universities. It begins ‘Born from the heart of the Church, a Catholic University is located in that course of tradition which may be traced back to the very origin of the University as an institution…’ . My respect for Ex Corde Ecclesia and Fides et Ratio has grown and grown. When I explained to a 'Catholic' educational institution last year why I thought that Ex Corde Ecclesia was binding on it and that this was good news, my relationship with that institution was terminated. These Papal documents have real evangelical power, and our administrators certainly feel the challenge, or threat, these documents represent to the secular agenda.

We are not talking about revealing arcane truths in talking about the Trinity, we are talking about love, pouring itself out so that love will be returned. That is what the theology of the Trinity is about. Love will be returned in a way that is mutual, that is, it's not a matter of simply us loving God, it's a matter of us, altogether loving God and loving each other in God. This is the divine wisdom we have to proclaim: God wants to share the communion of the Trinitarian life with persons who are not God in Christ and the Holy Spirit.

From the perspective of the Church, this completely defines what it means to be human. That is, in view of that destiny we now understand how immense and magnificent a thing it is to be a human being. Commenting on Vatican II, the message John Paul II has affirmed over and over again to the world stresses that only Christ knows what is in man. We find the vision of what it means to be human only when we take a God's eye view.

Short of the God's eye view, we have nothing of the truth of the human person. I'm exaggerating, but we have only a very small core of the truth of what it means to be human. Only when we know that it is possible for human beings to share communion of the Trinitarian life, do we understand what being human is.

Augustine DiNoia Divine Wisdom and Christian Humanism

The Oxford Dominicans have been enjoying more publishing success as they have cleared out the desk of the great Herbert McCabe O.P. (that’s Order of Preachers, Thomas Aquinas’s Dominican teaching order). Herbert McCabe taught without bothering too much about publication, but a crucial work that he did send to the publishers is 'Law, Love and Language'.

Here Herbert McCabe shows us that ethics is about all human action and interaction, and that we are intrinsically in conversation, all our action is response to others, and this economy of response determines our environment too. There is no split here between nature and culture (between ‘is’ and ‘ought’). There is no particular need to attribute anything here to Aquinas or Wittgenstein, for McCabe is simply saying that we are not disembodied beings isolated from another in an inert or neutral or hostile world. McCabe’s argument is simply good Christian theology, so he shows that we are not only embodied, but social and linguistic beings too. McCabe’s version of ethics as all human action is therefore very much bigger than the usual accounts of morality investigated through a small number of difficult moral problems. Herbert McCabe replaces our modern dualist account of language and life (for every thing, a word timelessly exists, so language is simply the correspondence of word to thing) with a more supple dynamic (‘aristotelian’) account which allows that what we do really alters who we are, what there is and how we relate to it. What we think of things and how we name them is not just the (post-)modern power game of the individual. We inherit and inhabit our social world along with how we think of it, as we live and interact in interlocking sets of language-speakers and communities. This deflates the (post-) modern Cartesian view which makes naming an act of power by the individual who is above all relationship and responsibility. The effect of his book is to show how in hock we are to the disembodying pull of Cartesian thought, for which turns we are essentially a demonic eye that hovers above the world. In other words, McCabe has recovered important aspects of theological anthropology and the doctrine of creation.

I'll post some snippets from Law, Love and Language. You'll thank me.

By understanding theological discourse as a church practice determined by the salvific-economic mission of the Holy Spirit in doctrina and the core practices, we overcome the false alternatives between freedom and being bound, between theology being self-determined or being externally determined. Only in the Holy Spirit and in genuine poeisis of communion does theology as a church practice participate in God's liberum arbitrium [freedom]. Only by remaining bound to God's economy of salvation does it step into the ‘freedom of the children of God’, becoming thus a discipline commensurate with its object. For only within its distinct pathos does it become capable of truth.

The ecclesial koinonia is to be understood as a soteriological work of the Holy Spirit grounded as such in the communion of the triune God, a communion which through its own presence engages its salvific activity in the koinonia and indeed binds itself to the koinonia by beginning to draw the latter into the divine life. The ‘other’ side of the church as the work of the Holy Spirit is also that the triune God has bound his communion to the ecclesiastical koinonia … In its pathos the church is the actualizing agent of the salvific-economic mission of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. In this sense the church needs to be understood precisely as the public of the Holy Spirit.

Reinhard Hütter Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice

You could try Hütter's more accessible Bound to be Free: Evangelical Catholic Engagements in Ecclesiology, Ethicsm and Ecumenism. It is not only state of the art, but it is full of joy.

But what if the Church which hears (the Ecce Homo) begins to forget the absence?...worse than the world's ignorance of Jesus's absence…is the Church's failure to proclaim the absence clearly, to witness in its every act of worship that it really is ‘looking for his coming again with power and great glory’. Not the ascension itself but the ascension and parousia together, constitute the Ecce Homo! which in the eucharist is heard and repeated. Martyrdom, as the Apocalypse teaches, is the truest manifestation of Jesus's heavenly session. A doctrine of his departure that is not a doctrine of his impending return is a doctrine capable of converting absence into presence without martyrdom.

Douglas Farrow Ascension and Ecclesia.

Farrow's book is in my top ten. I haven’t yet found anything like it, and it informed a great deal of The Eschatological Economy. Andrew Burgess The Ascension in Karl Barth or Gerrit Scott Dawson Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ's Continuing Incarnation are more introductory, and Burgess has a chapter on Farrow.

The deep difficulty in Christian ethics, as evidenced in the work of public theologians such as Thiemann, Stackhouse and Garcia, is that Kant’s answers are assumed but his profound question ignored. They do not seek to refute Kant. They do not seek to point to concrete, sensuous forms of life to show that Christian faith is reasonable. Instead they speak in general terms. They speak of a cosmopolitan social ethics, a criterion of publicity, and universal human rights. Their work contributes to the production of a generic theology that makes no particular claims on people of faith or people outside faith. The result is a refusal to challenge Kant’s designation of freedom as more basic than the goodness of God. This Christian social ethics only continues the Kantian quest. We can use the language of faith and continue to speak of God and Judeo-Christian anthropology, but the concrete material reality of Christianity (Jesus’ flesh) is rendered superfluous to the moral life.

Stephen Long The Goodness of God

Oswald Bayer's Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification is very short, 88 pages, but nonetheless quite remarkable. You can see the contents page here.

Oswald Bayer, until recently professor of theology at Tübingen, is as big as Eberhard Jüngel, and his interests are much broader than justification, and much bigger than Miroslav Volf, though in the same area of Church and discipleship. This is magisterial philosophically- and hermenutically-literate theology. You can get some idea of the scale of his thought from his titles – Gott als Auctor (God as Author), Schöpfung als Anrede (Creation as Address), Freiheit als Antwort (Freedom as Answer), Leibliches Wort (Embodied Word: Reformation and Modernity in Conflict). 'Embodied Word' - with the sophisticated ontology of Luther's theology of the Word of God who speaks all things into existence. Bayer's hermeneutics are theological to a degree not yet reached by the discussion in the UK and States.

It is a scandal that this book is the only piece of the work of this colossal theologian published in English, other than the (not very well translated) articles in Lutheran Quarterly. Read Bayer’s piece on Luther in Blackwell’s The Reformation Theologians (ed. Carter Lindberg) and you will be lifted by its sheer evangelical force and intelligence, its very brevity telling you more about the Reformation as evangelical movement – and merciful act of God – than all the rest of the book.

There are other other scandalously untranslated Germans, chiefly Ingolf Dalferth (Gedeutete Gegenwart: Zur Wahrnehmung Gottes in den Erfahrungen der Zeit - 'Meaningful Present: The perception of God in the experience of time') but I'll tell you about them another day, and anyway, none are as important as Bayer.

I have put in a link to the site of Andrew Goddard, who teaches Christian ethics at Wycliffe, Oxford’s evangelical Anglican ordination college. Andrew’s site is not the prettiest, but it is increasingly full of material on Christian ethicists, and includes some properly theological and ecclesiological thinkers. Christian ethics is no longer done in complete isolation from, and ignorance of, Christian doctrine or the Christian community. Goddard’s list of theological ethicists includes much more than the merely culturally evangelical, not only because it has representatives of every conceivable denomination, but because some of these Christian teachers are producing some real works of discipleship. The Roman Catholics are producing some of the best of them. We are going to have get used to saying that John Paul II and Benedict are among the greatest evangelical theologians of our generation.

Andrew seems to be the only English man involved in the work of the Anglican Communion Institute, which is leading the way in what we could term ‘the church struggle’. He has a couple of gentle, charitable but rigorous articles on the choices for the US Episcopalian Church which you can find on the ACI's site.

We all have conversations in which we have to defend the Church against those who want the Church to merge peacefully into the world until, all distinctiveness gone, it is no longer objectionable to anybody. I have such conversations with the clergy here. I think we should all learn to quote the Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion and other documents published by the Anglican Communion so we are able to quote them as public decisions that the Anglican Communion has taken, by which it remains faithful to the whole Church, that God holds united through time and across the world, and that therefore may be regarded as properly describing who we are. I'll quote you some salient bits from the Windsor Report in future posts - you'll like it.

We spend our whole time resisting the dichotomies of form and content, or substance and methodology, that we are offered in every intellectual form. This is just how it should be. The whole Christian gospel may be summed up like this: There is no division between content and form, between method and truth – in Christ. There is therefore no separation between gospel and how we come to know it, between Jesus of Nazareth and today’s Church – in Christ. There is no separation between Son and Spirit, nor between God in himself and God as he is for us.

The concealed paganism of the West consists in a habit. The habit is of making the assumption that content can never be its own form and so of dividing the one from the other. But in the case of the gospel, the content is its own form. So the Western mind introduces a gap between content of the gospel and the means of its becoming known, and the event of its becoming known, confessed and expressed. It introduces mediations where they do not belong. These mediations are never necessary or helpful as their proponents suggest, but rather function as barriers and roadblocks. We have to refuse them, and sometimes this makes us look unsophisticated or ungrateful. But we cannot allow such intermediaries to be introduced where none are needed, precisely where God himself insists he is himself for us, our servant, provider and Lord. God in person is fully content and fully the form, that is the provider, container and delivery system of all truth and life.

No one says this like Tom Torrance, the towering figure of British theology. It has been his life’s work to say this. It appears in short form in his ‘Karl Barth and the Latin heresy’ (Scottish Journal Of Theology 39 1986). Don't be taken in by the apparently local concern of the title. Here is a great exponent of the Western theological tradition charging the Western tradition with being inadequate to the point of emptying the gospel. It is not enough to be Western (‘Latin’) and an heir of Augustine. No, it is not even enough to be Reformed. The Western tradition’s urge to divorce form from content tends to undo the gospel. This Reformed and evangelical theologian, always insistent on the priority of truth, is insistent on catholicity and thus on ecumenism. The Latin heresy that ceaselessly divides – and so attempts to divide what God has united – is counteracted by a proper obedience to the rest of the Church, the Eastern and Orthodox Church and to whole Patristic intellectual tradition – for TF Torrance always best represented by Athanasius.

Here is a bit from Torrance:

'What Karl Barth found to be at stake in the twentieth century was nothing less than the downright Godness of God in his Revelation. The Augustinian, Cartesian and Newtonian dualism built into the framework of Western thought and culture had the effect of cutting back into the preaching and teaching of the Church in such a way as to damage, and sometimes even to sever, the ontological bond, between Jesus Christ and God the Father, and thus to introduce an oblique or symbolical relation between the Word of God and God himself. Barth’s struggle for the integrity of divine Revelation opened his eyes to the underlying epistemological problems, not only in neo-Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, but in Protestant orthodoxy as well.

These were bound up with the Western habit of thinking in abstractive formal relations, greatly reinforced by Descartes in his critico-analytical method, and of thinking in external relations which was accentuated by Kant in his denial of the possibility of knowing things in their internal relations. This is what I have called the Latin heresy, for in theology at any rate its roots go back to a form of linguistic and conceptual dualism that prevailed in Patristic and medieval Latin theology.'

Read more from Torrance Karl Barth and the Latin heresy

This is either a long article – and very quotable – or a miniature systematics wrapped in a brief history of the Western intellectual tradition. But which is content and which is form?

Roman Catholics need to revisit their universities in the United States, promoting a genuine difference in scholarship and curriculum so that in five generations a Catholic intellectual culture might possibly be present and transformative of society. The Christian Church at the heart of the university will facilitate such genuine developments that can only enrich intellectual and cull life, facilitate real pluralism and dialogue, and serve the common good. Liberal society owes itself religious universities. American Catholics owe it to their Church and nation.

The other group of critics, those against ‘sectarian’ projects such as mine, and those against outside interference (the Church) in the university, are to be found in strength – within the churches, as well as from non-religious camps. I argue that such criticisms are misplaced and even self-deluding. Since all enquiry and methods of enquiry are tradition-specific, all forms of education are sectarian in certain ways. There is no high ground in this debate, only differing forms of sectarianism, be they liberal, religious, feminist, psychoanalyst, and so on. But there is an advantage to Catholic sectarianism: its conviction, founded in revelation and beautifully expounded by Thomas Aquinas, that reason has a rightful autonomy.

Gavin D'Costa Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation.

Christian ministry in a pluralistic society begins with the capacity to speak the faith intelligently and persuasively to ourselves and to one another within the household of faith. We should not be ashamed or concerned to have this as our primary goal. For the pluralism the Gospel seeks to address is as omnipresent as the air we breathe, and exists within our midst as much as outside of it. The challenge is not how to address pluralism with some sure thing we presume to know that then must be adapted or modified in order to get an effective hearing; the challenge is how to identify the faith we claim to hold, that laid hold on us in baptism, in the face of a pluralism that is already our daily bread

Christopher Seitz

Robert Jenson has been talking about the atonement at the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton. Over at Generous Orthodoxy Kevin Hector has been taking notes.

Jenson insists … ‘that the crucifixion is a sacrifice …an enacted prayer for the forgiveness of sins; in the crucifixion, Christ prays that the Father would forgive our sins, and he enacts this prayer in his self-sacrifice.’

I think we get a little further by saying that it was a labour, rather than a (self-)sacrifice. Christ is at work: he is bringing us into existence, and into life and into freedom, to the point at which we develop our own voices with which we can freely acknowledge this work of God and acknowledge all others as his creatures and be glad about them.

The ‘sacrifice’ approach works when we link it to Jenson’s view that Christ speaks everything into existence, and everything becomes what Christ says it is, when it is vindicated and received by the Father - ‘The resurrection, on this account, is the Father's acceptance of this prayer for us.’ This is a theology of the Word, or of promise, learned from Luther, that works as a speech-act theory. Christ speaks up for us, intercedes for us (Augustine provides plenty of support for this) and so we come to participate in Christ’s being and action. It is wonderful stuff. You can find something similar in TF Torrance’s Royal Priesthood, neglected, out of print, but absolutely priceless.

‘Christ's there-and-then work can have an effect on us, accordingly, in the same way that my prayer for others can have an effect on them.’ – there, you see, it is speech that does work – and the work it does is make us holy (which is what terms like sanctification, sacrament, sacrifice all point to).

You can’t beat Jenson for a sound bite:

‘What would we say about God, the world, and humanity if we matched our metaphysics to the Gospel, rather than the Gospel to our metaphysics?’

A life investigating this question would be a life well spent

You know I never read books (from idleness, not principle), but if I ever did I would take a peek inside this one:

Alexandru Popescu Petre Tutea Between Sacrifice and Suicide

Here is Ashgate's description of the book

Petre Tutea (1902-91) was one of the outstanding Christian dissident intellectuals of the Communist era in Eastern Europe. Revered as a saint by some, he spent thirteen years as a prisoner of conscience and twenty-eight years under house arrest at the hands of the Securitate. This book explores his unique response to the horrors of torture and 're-education' and reveals the experience of a whole generation detained in the political prisons. Tutea’s understanding of human needs and how they can be fulfilled even amidst extreme adversity not only reflects huge learning and great brilliance of mind, but also offers a spiritual vision grounded in personal experience of the Romanian Gulag. Following the fall of the Ceausescus, he has begun to emerge as a significant contributor to ecumenical Christian discourse and to understanding of wider issues of truth and reconciliation in the contemporary world. As Tutea's pupil and scribe for twelve years, as a psychiatrist, and as a theologian, Alexandru Popescu is uniquely placed to present the work of this twentieth-century Confessor of the faith. Drawing on bibliographical sources which include unpublished or censored manuscripts and personal conversations with Tutea and with other prisoners of conscience in Romania, Popescu presents extensive translations of Tutea, which make his thought accessible to the English-speaking reader for the first time. Through his stature as a human being and his authority as a thinker, Petre Tutea challenges us to question many of our assumptions. The choice he presents between ‘sacrifice’ and ‘moral suicide’ focuses us on the very essence of religion and human personhood. Resisting any ultimate separation of theology and spirituality, his work affirms hope and love as the sole ground upon which truth can be based. At the same time, hope and love are not mere ideal emotions, but are known and lived in engagement with the real world - in politics, economics, science, ecology, and the arts, and in participation in the Divine Liturgy that is at once the traditional offering of the Church and the cosmic drama of the incarnate Word.

Ashgate also quotes some powerful commendations

The disciplining necessity of work foreshadows the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. It is not the case that worship is optional. As Paul teaches in his genealogy of morals (Romans 1), the question is not whether we shall worship, but only what. Promethean fantasies of a purely human-centered existence are as difficult to realise as fantasies of aristocratic indolence. We are propelled by an inner need to bow down, and, as a consequence, unless true worship is always before us, there is always the danger that we will work feverishly in order to propitiate Baal, whether in his bloody martial form or in the bloodless image of lucre.

Fantasizing that worship will ‘just happen’. Running a Church is hard work, and illusions to the contrary feed clerical sloth, anger and despair. The same holds for lay people. I have often heard friends complain that their involvement in the Church is just ‘too much like work’. Or they complain about the regular routine of regular worship. They want the Church to be a form of leisure or entertainment, something fresh and new that will be a deliverance from the all-too-human limitations of the working day. Yet, this is not the meaning of Sabbath. The ‘rest’ of Christian worship occurs in, and not in spite of, the world and sin and death. The joy of worship addresses the bitter cup of sin.

Russell Reno 'Working towards Worship'

Advocacy of this kind certainly begins in worship, where people learn to lend their mouths to other people in principle, unasked. Advocacy does not consist primarily of spectacular actions which in general peter out quite quickly; it means speaking up ‘perseveringly’ on behalf of others, as is to be the case in intercession (Ephesians 6.18) Advocacy of this kind is not a natural ability – ‘we do not know how to pray as we ought’; it must be learnt. And the Spirit as the Parakletos, the advocate per se, represents believers (Romans 8.26) and teaches them as it does so. Advocacy must be learnt in the intercessory practice of the community, but it can also be a guide to mediation, to ‘good offices’ apart from prayer. Anyone who before God opens his mouth for the dumb can also raise his voice before the world and the powerful on behalf of the people who have no voice of their own, or whose voices are not listened to.

Bernd Wannenwetsch Political Worship

[This continues from the posting 'NT Wright - where to begin?', my response to the FD Maurice lectures, given by Tom Wright Feb-March 2006 - see below]

The Bishop of Durham:

Well, so it’s one sort of power-play (disclosing that my reading is in service of my tradition) or another sort of power-play (not disclosing it and thus being cunning). Welcome to the wonderful world of Nietzsche! The readings I am proposing are in fact often very critical of my own traditions, and I live with that tension much of the time. I think what you have your finger on is the fact that these are the FD Maurice Lectures at a half- (but not fully-)secularized department, in an increasingly (but not utterly) secularized university. In that setting, the problem of a private Christian language is very real, and I have spent my entire adult life trying to avoid such a thing (speaking only within the in-house world, rather than across the wall to the world outside)...

Knight:

Dear Bishop Tom,

...I began to think about you in more Church terms as a result of reading the impressive piece you addressed to your clergy on the state of play after the Windsor report. There you were talking like a Church-man and bishop. It seems to me that one can also do that to a degree in the university. I do not think that there is a simple contrast to be made between Church and secular audiences, or that well-argued Christian theology is simply a private language. When a law lecturer or medic talks in public, he or she talks like a lawyer or medic, from the assumptions, and using the conceptuality of their profession, but this does not make theirs a private language. We do not insist that they find some value-free domain and neutral language in which everything they say is instantly comprehensible to every member of the public. We are all aware of the appropriateness of the vocabulary and conceptuality of each distinct area of expertise. These two vocations require long apprenticeships: not everything can be immediately seen by the public or comprehended by those only at the beginning of that apprenticeship.

The same is true for Christian discipleship, another form of expertise. In this life, lived by faith, not everything is comprehensible all at once (Christians can point out that this is not only true of the Christian life, but of any life and lifestyle – again, demonstrating that the Christian hermeneutic is more sophisticated than the modern, not less). We argue for the truth of what we say, by demonstrating the plausibility of the Christian faith – that it is productive of real insight. This does not mean that we cannot point out that it requires an apprenticeship (indeed is an apprenticeship). We can freely concede that what Christianity is, is not entirely clear from the outset – it is an adventure.

The Christian tradition is a good tradition, and we can say this in public, and it is good for the public forum that we do so. My musings on this point are owed to the remarkable Reinhard Hütter (at Duke, ‘Suffering Divine Things, and more recently ‘Bound to be Free’) and to Bernd Wannenwetsch, who after the departure of O'Donovan and Webster is now Oxford’s finest (‘Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens’ OUP 2004).

Hütter and Wannenwetsch insist that we learn through tradition (this is the point that modernity is in denial about) and that the right tradition (relating to the distinct Christian citizenship and form of life) makes us free, mature and human, reconciled by God to one another. The Christian tradition doesn't do this all at once, but it does embark us on a long hard course of paideia, in which baptism is an important milestone.

On the secular v. religious issue, one aspect of O'Donovan’s argument is crucial: the secularizing impulse is not opposed to Christian theology only, but is rubbishing the Western tradition as a whole. It not only finds Christianity problematic, it is no willing to see any part of the Western intellectual tradition (Plato, Aristotle – founders of the Academy) as a living tradition, which we have to remain in conversation with in order to flourish. This is the sort of secularizing that we are now seeing in universities. Only the Christians can point out that moderns equally talk their own in-house, private language, that by flattering us, encourages us to think of ourselves as consumers, accountable to no one. The issue is that Christians (I at least) are so well absorbed by that language of modernity that we don't forget that it is a merely sectional language, that excludes those whom God does not exclude.

Why should a bishop be reluctant to speak from the Church in the university? I only ask you this because you are a powerful advocate of the plausibility of the Christian gospel – and precisely so a (God-given) assert to the university, as much as the Church. Few enough of your colleagues can make any contribution within the university. But every bishop can remind the university that it can only aspire to be a real public square if it properly considers the claim of the Christian tradition, understood as a demanding apprenticeship.

In all this, I am not getting at you at all, but musing appreciatively, grateful for the opportunity to think these things through with you. Despite all my understatement I hope you feel my real gratitude for your life's work

Many thanks DK

[I hadn't realised what a lot of splendid teaching material there is on the NT Wright Page - see the 'Wrightsaid' pieces, for instance]

Dear Bishop Tom,

I have enjoyed the Maurice lectures immensely. In your first lecture you told us about postmodernity, apocalyptic and time, and talked about the tension between the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’, and about true and false expectation. Your second lecture, about art, suggested that good art tells us about this tension between present and future, so we understand two things about the glory of God – that it does already fill, and that it does not yet fill the earth.

Often you introduced what you had to say with the phrase ‘the New Testament narrative shows …’, or ‘the Scriptural tradition shows…’, and at other times with the phrase ‘Art shows…’. Can I ask some questions about this?

Does the bible show us…, and how does it do so? Does art show us…, and how does it do so? Isn’t there is endless wonderful disagreement and controversy about what either the bible or art shows us? How should we assess what you say they say? What criteria do you commend to us?

Isn't bible just another text, or artwork or commodity, about which everyone’s opinion is equally valid, until we, its readers, come under some control? If your view of the bible is right, isn’t that because you have found the right control? The right control enables you, and us, to read the bible as a key to some of the other subjects you have explored …. art, culture and politics. Is there any reading of the bible that is useful until it is under some control and is honest about what that control is? The particular control that you and I advocate is that given by the Christian Church and tradition. Why be reticent about saying so? If we are not up front about this, we will be concealing our control. All other discourses – art, politics and above all, the market – conceal their hermeneutics because they want to conceal what communities, and elites, they serve. If we do not say straight out that our control is the Church and its tradition, what we have to say about art, or politics, or the bible, is just another ‘discourse’, a piece of rhetoric and power-play.

We agree, I suppose, that the bible and the Church belong to each other, each being the source and control of each other (both sourced in the kindness of God)? The bible makes Christian doctrine. The bible creates the Christian community, its form of life and the account it gives of that form of life through time, that tradition of teaching that has learned from the encounters of the bible with different cultures. Christian doctrine is the accumulated experience of the Christian community at reading (1) the bible and (2) the world. This community of the Church reads the world through the bible. Any other community or hermeneutics will read the bible through the world, and so get as many readings of the bible as there are views of the world. Have I got this right?

Why don’t we say that there is no useful interpretation of modern culture or of art that is not formed by the discipline of the Christian tradition, itself controlled by the bible (both functions of the generosity of God)? Only when we are under this control does the bible give us a distinctive Christian hermeneutic and way of approaching the world – in faith, in hope and in love, for example. Aren’t you offering the distinct Christian view without saying where it comes from and how you got to it? You are giving us your answer to the sum without giving us your workings, that is, without giving us the means by which we can follow you and come to the same conclusion.

Is there any useful interpretation of modern culture or of art that we Christians can give that is not formed by the discipline of the Christian tradition (itself controlled by the bible and by God)? Of course each of us can give our own opinions, without sourcing any of them from Christian teaching, but then the question is, what is distinct about the views we offer? Only when we are offering what the Church knows, which is different from what everybody already ‘knows’, are we doing something really useful. Are we giving what we have received (in faith, hope and love), from the Church, and which the Church has received from God? Or are we offering what derives from ourselves as individuals, so is ultimately just rhetoric and power-play?

It is good thing to be a Christian – Church-formed – reader of the bible, because such a reader of the bible may be a well-formed interpreter of art or commentator on global politics. The mind formed by the long experience of the Church shaped by the bible is a good mind, and even the secular university can concede that.

It is unfair to make this charge against you of all people because, far more than most scholars, you do display your workings. You show us the politics that drive the New Testament exegesis and hermeneutics in The New Testament and the People of God, for instance, so you offer your argument in a generously-drawn context. But, because you are a bishop (discipled by, and discipling us with, the authority of the Church) you are big enough to take this question: Have you done the same in these university lectures? In your talks so far you have not said that your views are anchored in what the whole Christian community declares publicly to the world in every act of Christian worship.

So when, in your first lecture, you took us through the doctrine of hope (eschatology), why did you not tell us that you were offering us what the whole Church offers, and teaching us what the whole tradition teaches? Why did you not once say ‘the experience of the Church on this point is….’ or ‘Christian doctrine alerts us to…’? Why not quote the teachers of the Church – Irenaeus, Augustine, Gerald Manley Hopkins – so we can look them up and begin our own acquaintance with them? Don't tell us that Hopkins is a poet – tell us that he is a theologian, found edifying and approved by the Church. It is intellectually robust and generous to wear your colours on your sleeve. It dares other discourses to do the same. Christian faith is intellectually respectable and may be argued from at the outset. It does not require that we argue to it from some other, notionally wider, more acceptable because ostensibly more liberal, position. It is not the case that if you talk from within the Church, only the Church hears you. The world will hear too the moment the Church says anything distinctly its own.

Many thanks

Oliver O'Donovan's departure from Oxford is an omninous event. I wondered whether John Webster (on the right) was over-reacting when he decamped north, but it is now clear that he was not. If you want to see what is at issue, compare Webster with the man who was put in to replace him. Webster, an evangelical theologian and natural teacher and communicator, has done some great work interpreting Barth and Jüngel, the outstanding evangelical theologians of the twentieth century, and has now started on more constructive and creative theology, to show the relationship of Scripture, doctrine and ethics. Webster promises he is at work on a theological commentary of Ephesians, so this theologian is actually doing some interpretation of Scripture to show us what difference it makes, which is exactly what theologians should do, you might think. See his Holiness – it is a gem, and the kind of thing we all wish we could write. Compare this with the man who replaced him as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, whose latest offering takes up ‘the critique of theology found in the work of Heidegger’, and whose lecture courses seem hardly aware of Christian doctrine or its great exponents. One cares for the Christian theological tradition, the other does not, indeed believes that theology is crisis, and is intent on running it down.

This is one of those moments when the struggle for the Christian faith impacts on lives and careers in the comfortable West. I doubt whether Oxford’s administrators are troubled about losing these two scholars, because it is these administrators in every university in England who are making it so difficult to do any academic theological work. Administrators, and those who sit on appointments panels, are those teachers of humanities subjects who have run out of things to say and given up teaching. If they believe that theology is in crisis, they are wrong. The humanities are in crisis. Theology is the only part of the humanities that is not in crisis. Because theology has a gospel it has something to say. Theology believes in education and passing on a tradition of thought, and it so it has plenty to contribute to the university. The administrators appoint to theological positions people who have never learned, or learned to love, the Christian tradition of doctrine, and whose assumption that the Christian tradition is in crisis is never challenged by serious engagement with that tradition. There is no one more articulate about the crisis of the humanities and its origin than Oliver O'Donovan, see his Ways of Judgment, and Bonds of Imperfection and The Desire of the Nations - though Webster is not far behind. But what makes this so unusual is that O'Donovan and Webster were Canons of Christ Church, senior clergymen of the Church of England, employed by the Cathedral to teach Christian doctrine in the university. In twenty years time, when the university has finally disappeared up its own backside, the Christians will be meeting in the back of cathedrals and re-inventing the university there, just like last time.

Adolph Schlatter lived at the turn of the 20th century and taught New Testament and Theology, Church History and Metaphysics; he was a keen churchman, and much loved pastor. The shadow cast by Harnack was long enough to keep him on his mettle and the young Bultmann had not yet made his mark, though his challenges would soon occupy formal theology. Schlatter was known for his work on God’s action in the world. He is a New Testament scholar who worked closely in the Old Testament and especially Genesis 1-3. Nowhere does Schlatter work to establish the philosophical warrant for his using the Old Testament doctrinally, to account for how God might be said to act in time and space. There is a natural movement between Old and New Testaments and into the doctrines of Christian believing and living. Schlatter takes it as a given—at the level of metaphysics—that in order to know who God is and how he acts, in ‘creation, preservation, and in all the blessings of this life’ one reads as closely as possible the sentences about this activity as the Old Testament sets them forth. One feels nothing of the later environment of the history of religions; or of theories of development in authorship of the Pentateuch or in comparative Near Eastern studies of creation accounts. And yet there is nothing of the air of creationism or defensive apologetics either, and in this he is rightly regarded a sophisticated forerunner of Karl Barth. There is just the exhilarating task of letting scripture—OT and NT—have its theological say, tracking as closely as possible the way in which it says that according to its own idiom.

I found myself asking: how can Schlatter do this? And why has it been my instinct as a teacher of the Old Testament to believe it has the capacity to speak of God as God is, and not as a God en route to some subsequent recalibration or development? Why has it become almost impossible for one to speak of the ‘ontological trinity’ in the Old Testament? Or, of the eternal word Jesus Christ bound up within the words, and sentences and paragraphs of the Old Testaments? And why would I sense the absence of this as a great loss, and so read a Barth or a Schlatter and discover in them something of the same tacit knowledge, of God’s word and self, which animated the earlier history of biblical interpretation, in figures as diverse as Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Luther?

I believe the answer lies in the way a kind of Prayer Book worship I was exposed to in my upbringing as an Episcopalian functioned to reinforce what was in the early church called the rule of faith. This same kind of exposure could account for why Schlatter was able to use the Bible the way he was, and also remain committed to preaching, pastoral care and the no doubt messy counsels of German Protestant church life and mission, before the onslaught of two world wars.

The rule of faith made certain threshold claims about the character of God in that time before the formation of a second testament of scripture, one whose name and authoritative character as a ‘New Testament’ drew for its inspiration the sole scriptural witness handed to disciples of Jesus Christ from the bosom of Israel, what would in time be called the Old Testament. The rule of faith, whatever else it may have been and however we understand its actual usage, insisted that the Risen Lord of Christian worship, Jesus Christ, was one with the named LORD of the scriptures. This Lord and creator had given his name, the name above every name, to Jesus, so that at his name, every knee would bow, to the glory of the Father. The triune God was the LORD of Israel in reality and in promise both. In turn, this confession assured that one now knew how to read these scriptures, as setting forth Christ in a wide variety of ways: not just in prophetic promise pointing beyond itself, but also primarily inside its world, as a type and a figure, alongside the new covenant church itself, prefigured, in judgment and in blessing, in Israel herself.[xi] For no other reason than this would it have been felt apt to speak of Christian ministers as new covenant priests with a High Priest Jesus Christ, or of promises related to the name of Israel’s God among the nations now having to do with naming in Christian baptism, and so forth.

It would be possible to enlarge on this theme, but the basic point should be secure. My own conviction is that precisely these threshold assumptions about God, established by the rule of faith, have their liturgical reinforcement in the Prayer Book worship of Anglicanism, and have governed my own theological instincts at levels as difficult to detect as what I sensed in Schlatter. When in the worship of Morning Prayer one says or sings a canticle, as the Jubilate Deo or the Venite, these fancy Latin names never disguised the fact that we were citing specific words from an Old Testament Psalm and by so doing were introducing ourselves at the very start of worship, at the threshold of our attending to our lives before God, to the only God with whom we had to do in Jesus Christ. The rule of faith was never anything more or less that the doxological affirmation with which these Old Testament psalms were concluded: ‘Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.’ Here we encountered, in succinct form, the logic behind prayers of this same ordered worship, addressed to the Father, in the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. No one was being called upon here other than the one Lord of the Old Testament’s scriptural declaration, understood, from the standpoint of our inclusion in Jesus Christ, as the LORD, the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit.

Read the whole of Chris Seitz The Anglican Crisis in Interpretation and the Two Testament Voice of Christian Scripture