Sean the Baptist (in the UCA)

Getting Barth Wrong: The Refusal of Human Agency

A number of people have devoted significant amounts of energy to show that Barth's commitment to the priority of divine action does not entail a concomitant refusal to attribute significance to human agency (John Webster's work on Barth's ethics comes immediately to mind). But today I came across John Flett's account of mission theologians who did read Barth in this way and who denied him any relevance for a theology of mission as a result (in his excellent book The Witness of God).  Here is the most extreme version of the misreading:

'Barth is consumed, even obsessed, by the desire to suppress the least tendency to minimize or relativize God's activity, and to establish with relentless completeness that human activity or participation is totally non-existent in the whole story of salvation.'

Hendrik Kraemer, Religion and the Christian Faith (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956), 192.

Theological Papers on the Proposed Preamble of the Uniting Church

As some readers of this blog will know, at last year's UCA Assembly, substantial consideration was given to a proposed Preamble to the Church's constitution. The motion passed at Assembly and has now been sent for consideration by the Synods / Presbyteries etc. There are some fairly clear theological issues involved in the proposed wording, although the way in which those issues are understood and handled is much more difficult and complex.

Anyway, there are four papers discussing the theological issues that have been made available here.

Manifold Witness: The Plurality of Truth

This is the title of a recent little book by John Franke who teaches at the Biblical Theological Seminary in Hatfield, Pennsylvania. As someone who has argued for a similar construal of the nature of biblical interpretation, I was interested to read Franke's theological defense of notions of plurality. The book is easy to read, and Franke is a good theologian. I guess, however, that it is written to help those whose own cultural or ecclesial location already tilts them in the directions that he lays out. My own experience in speaking about interpretative pluralism among Baptists in the UK suggested that for many people, there needs to be a much more extensive and rigorous demonstration of why many of the inherited and assumed epistemological models are problematic. (Incidentally, it is his concern to do this kind of ground clearing work that makes Douglas Campbell's book on Justification Theory in Paul 200 pages longer than it might have been - and all the better for it). Franke's book therefore provides a starting point - but the questions raised here require deeper levels of engagement with the tradition, the traditional views of truth, and with the contemporary implications for ecclesial life, biblical interpretation and theological method than we find here.

Here is an excerpt from Franke's conclusion:

'Plurality in the Christian community is not a problem to be overcome but is instead the very intention and blessing of God who invites all people to participate in the liberating and reconciling ministry of the gospel of Jesus Christ. the plurality of the church constitutes the manifold witness to the plurality of truth lived out in the eternal life of God, made known in the revelation of the Word of God, and exemplified in the pages of Scripture. We cannot bear this witness alone. we were never intensed to do so. we need each other. It cannot be otherwise.'

John R. Franke, Manifold Witness: The Plurality of Truth, Living Theology. Nashville: Abingdon, 2009. pp.136-137)

One might compare this view with that expressed in the quotation from Timothy Ward in his book on Scripture and God which I mention here. Mark Thompson also has a lengthy review of the book in which he argues for the kind of direct, unmediated form of divine revelation that Ward also endorses.

Radical Orthodoxy for Dummies

Go here for more information.  Ouch!

Bonhoeffer Blog Conference

Halden announces the first ever Blog Conference to engage with the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He writes:

I am happy to announce the First Annual Bonhoeffer Blog Conference.  The topic for this conference will be: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Contemporary Theology.  The aim of this conference is to foster sustained reflections on Bonhoeffer’s last major theological work, Ethics and to explore its implications within contemporary theological, ecclesial, and political contexts.  While some spots are already filled (which will be announced later), there is plenty of room for submissions and proposals.  Any submission related to this general focus would be open to consideration.  Creative approaches to the work of Bonhoeffer is encouraged.

I anticipate that this conference will take place in early November, 2008.  Submissions can be emailed to me at halden-at-wipfandstock-dot-com.  Also, if you wish to promote this event on your own blogs, that would be appreciated.

It looks like an important event.  If it persuades a few more people to read the Ethics over the summer, then that will be no small gain.

Your First Day on Earth

One more thing about yesterday's sermon.  Instead of taking the 'waking / watchfulness' texts and relating them to the usual idea of 'live today as if it were your last', we were encouraged to think about waking to each day 'as if it were your first'.  That idea, combined with the exegesis of the 'left behind' motif in Matt. 24.40-41 mentioned in the previous post, just brought back to mind the following quotation from Marilynne Robinson's Gilead:

'I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.  I know all this is mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that.  There is a human beauty in it.  And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.  In eternity, this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.  Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.' (p.65)

In Love...

Several posts today, but this will be the last for the day.  Scott Cairns' rendition of St Isaac of Nineveh gets it exactly right.

Love's Purpose

In love did He bring the world
        into being, and in love
                does He guide its difficult,
slow-seeming journey now
        through the arc of time.  In love will He
               one day bring all the world to a wondrous,
transformed state, and utterly
        in love will it be taken wholly up
                into the great mystery of the One
who has performed these things -- and all of this so that
        in love absolutely will the course
                and form and governance of all creation
at long last be comprised.

Scott Cairns, Love's Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life (Brewster: Paraclele, 2007), 74-75 (see sidebar for link)

Rowan Williams on the Function of Theological Language

Snappy title eh!

I was sat yesterday afternoon in the cafe of the Royal Northern College of Music, while my eldest took some musical lessons as a way of keeping up her parents' middle-class credentials (and frustrated resentment at the fact that they were never taken to music lessons).  Here is a quotation from Rowan Williams that set all sorts of interesting trains of thought running:

'...theological language has to open out on to a sort of darkness - not the darkness of obscurity or confused ignorance, but the darkness of sheer resistance to the finite mind on the part of the divine.  And at the same time, theological language must be the language of a community of persons actively engaged in the common life of building the Body of Christ.  Doctrinal formulae are neither a set of neat definitions nor some sort of affront to the free-thinking soul; they are words that tell us enough truth to bring us to the edge of speech, and words that sustain enough common life to hold us there together in worship and mutual love.'

Rowan Williams, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (edited by Mike Higton; London: SCM, 2007), xiii-xiv.  NB: the publication details of this volume are confused.  Amazon lists one version with the wrong title and cover, but published by SCM, and another, cheaper version, published by Eerdmans, with almost the right cover.  The pic and link are through to the SCM site: this is the version in UK shops.

The essays that follow in this collection all revolve around this central insight into the function of theological language and the task of doing theology at all (essays on the via negativa, Hegel, Balthasar, Barth and particularly that on Bonhoeffer and Wittgenstein were the focus of a very pleasurable 2 hours yesterday, although each one could take two hours to read properly).  It is an insight that: demonstrates why Williams, despite the present challenges that surround him as Archbishop, is a hugely significant theologian; makes me wonder whether as Baptists we need to do more work on the whole issue of language and our speech about God; suggests an idea for a blog meme.  For the last of these, see the next post.