Category: Contemporaries

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?

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