Category Archives: Books

Neder: On Teaching & Learning Theology (Part 3)

Books, Theology

Teaching and learning theology is dangerous: so says Neder in his fourth chapter. Of course, teaching spaces should be ‘safe spaces’ in the sense that students are not demeaned, coerced, or manipulated. Unless students have confidence that teachers and classmates take their questions and ideas seriously they are unlikely to learn much.

But it’s also true that if students feel only affirmed in our classes, if our classes never disturb, unsettle, or expose them, if they never find themselves fighting for their lives, then they probably aren’t going to learn much in that kind of environment either (85).

The atmosphere of our classes ought to cohere as much as possible with the reality we are attempting to describe. And since Christian theology occurs as an encounter with the living God, a confrontation that tears us away from patterns of life that obscure or contradict the truth, at least something of the spirit of that struggle ought to be reflected in our classrooms (86).

Neder takes Isaiah’s visionary call as paradigmatic (Isaiah 6), though this is something that occurs in the divine-human encounter, something that can never be manufactured and should never be coerced. It is the subject matter—God!—who confronts the student with a call to decision, not the teacher. Nevertheless, seeking to know God or to teach in such a way that God might be known is risky. When God confronts us, we are stripped of our defences and called to decision—here and now! Christ disturbs and disrupts. He calls us ‘out’ of our own lives and into his life; he is unpredictable. Indeed, “following Jesus hurts” (98). Jesus wounds, in order to heal (95).

Conversations with Jesus rarely unfold according to plan. Jesus continually shocks and astonishes people, rattles their cages, upends their expectations, eludes their traps, and zeroes in on their deepest motivations. This makes for exhilarating reading, but the more you reflect on it, the more unsettling it becomes. . . . You begin to realize that being near him requires courage (96).

This is not to suggest that teachers should set out to disrupt or deconstruct their students’ supposedly naïve faith—such an approach is confused and contemptible. Teaching theology is an act of love; teachers are to help students perceive and respond to the truth, not scandalise or provoke them (99-100). Indeed, teachers cannot reliably discern precisely what is occurring in the hearts and lives of their students. “If students hate your classes,” Neder says wryly, “it’s probably your fault” (89). But that they enjoy your classes and are attentive and engaged does not mean that they have been engaged by the ‘subject matter.’ “Can you think of anything more inane than a Christian theologian who thinks his or her classes are successful just because everyone likes them and no one feels uncomfortable?” (89)

Students can seek theological certainty rather than God; or theological speculation or endless deliberation. They may consider doctrinal or historical exploration or clarification as sufficient in themselves. If students think like this, it may be that they have learnt it from their instructors.

We instruct students not only by what we say about God but also by how we speak about him. . . . If our way of talking about God leaves students unaware of the threat he poses to our lives, perhaps that is because we no longer perceive the threat he poses to our lives (101).

Yet the knowledge of God requires decision and commitment, and students themselves must embrace this risk. Christianity simply cannot be reduced to doctrines (or history or morality or a hundred other things we might substitute for it). Rather,

Christian existence conditions the plausibility of Christian speech . . . either our teaching . . . will suggest God’s urgent uncontrollable presence with us, his ‘terrifying nearness’ as Bonhoeffer put it, or our teaching will mislead students. There are no exceptions to this rule (103).

“Real theological education is a process of continual confrontation with God. To receive it, students have to fight for it themselves” (108).

It is clear in this chapter that Neder believes true theological education occurs when students are confronted with the reality of God—and called to decision. It also seems clear that this is not the work of the theological educator. The best they can do is hope that God is at work in their teaching, pray for it, engage in authentic theological existence in their own lives, and continually bear witness to God in their teaching.

The final chapter (“Conversation”) describes the process of teaching and learning theology: “teaching Christian theology is largely a matter of training students to have good theological conversations” (118).

Christian theology is a historically extended conversation about the meaning and implications of the gospel. It is thinking and speaking that seeks to respond in disciplined, faithful, and creative ways to God’s own self-communication (118).

The primary—fundamental and essential—conversation is with Holy Scripture itself, seeking ever and again to hear and respond to the testimony of the prophets and apostles. But this conversation requires a secondary conversation with other readers and interpreters past and present—a conversation conducted for the sake of the primary conversation. Neder insists that good teachers train students to read with sympathetic attention rather than the habits of suspicion and scepticism which characterises contemporary study in the humanities (121-122).

Despite its hegemony, there are strong theological (and non-theological) reasons to be suspicious of ubiquitous suspicion—not least of which is that suspicious readers don’t generate conversations as interesting and fruitful as do readers who befriend the texts they interpret (123).

The book closes with a brief section on cultivating classroom conversations. “Conversations reveal commitments that require closer examination, beliefs that need to be sharpened or discarded, assumptions that cannot withstand sustained scrutiny” (132). Neder finds a model for theological reflection in the kinds of questions Jesus posed to his interlocutors: questions that probe and personalise theological reflection, that penetrate to the heart of students’ deepest concerns (136-137). Good conversations occur in classrooms that are genuine learning communities—where teachers also expect to learn from their companions in the conversation. Such conversations require deep, patient, and careful listening to one another in an atmosphere of critical inquiry, grace, respect, and courtesy. They require honest discussion of one’s own ideas, an openness to new or other ideas, profound personal questions, and a stimulating breadth of opinion.

But conversation is not an end in itself:

Its purpose is to help students encounter the truth, discover their lives in Christ, and follow him into the world he loves. If the conversations that take place in our classes have the opposite effect  on students, if students acquire the habit of talking about God objectively and dispassionately, if they come to believe that the truth can be known without being lived, learned without being appropriated, and if the accumulation of theological ideas results not in existential transformation and faithful witness but in endless talking and permanent postponement of decision and action, then our teaching works against the work of the Holy Spirit (143).

Neder: On Teaching & Learning Theology (Part 2)

Books, Theology

(See the first part of this reflection here.)

The second chapter of Neder’s book considers ‘Knowledge.’ Neder argues that true knowledge of God is possible, but it also involves existential participation in the life of God—faith and obedience. Theological educators therefore have a responsibility to think with their students, assisting them to ‘engage in the art of theological imagination’ (50), so they can envision and explore the existential implications of what they are learning. Their responsibility is to think with the students and not for them; they must not confuse indoctrination with education (52)! The aim is to help students think for themselves under the lordship of Christ and within the communion of saints. Neder suggests that teachers’ attempts to side-step the existential implications of doctrine—the pastoral task of theological education—may disguise moral and intellectual cowardice.

Again, the knowledge of God is possible, though only in Jesus Christ who is the epistemological foundation and criterion of all our knowledge of God. Neder approves Barth’s recognition that Feuerbach had in fact given the church a great gift: much Christian teaching falls prey to Feuerbach’s critique, though ‘the only way beyond Feuerbach is through him’ (57).

For the church to avoid the mistake of confusing theology with anthropology, confusing talk about God with talk about ourselves, its thinking must be governed at every point by God’s own self-revelation in Christ. . . . To the extent that Christian theology loses sight of him, or submits itself to some other criterion, it wanders into the dark. . . . Learning Christian theology is a process of learning to read reality in the light of Christ—learning to ‘take every thought captive to obey Christ’ (57-58).

Thus, the knowledge of God involves decision and choice: one simply may not remain undecided in light of the reality revealed in Jesus Christ:

In a pluralistic context, committing oneself passionately to one option among many may seem arbitrary, irrational, and absurd, but the inevitable alternative is to drift along in the current of contemporary society and thus away from a life of integrity and coherence (51).

The chapter includes an excursus on the development of academic theology. Neder notes that prior to the medieval age even the most sophisticated theologians shared an essentially pastoral aim: to guide the church into the truth of the gospel and to equip Christians to live more faithfully and intelligently as disciples of Jesus Christ (45).

But the movement into the context of the medieval university does mark an important phase in a gradual parting of the ways between academic theological scholarship and the life of the church—a division that would in the modern period harden into estrangement. . . . If Christian theology wanted to be accepted as a responsible form of intellectual inquiry, it would have to submit itself to a supposedly universal and objective standard of rationality, one that floats above any specific context or tradition, even when doing so precludes primary Christian affirmations (47-48).

The third chapter, entitled ‘Ethos,’ argues that who the theological educator is communicates and authenticates their teaching—in the perspective of the hearers—or undermines it. A theological educator is a witness rather than a detached observer or commentator. Only one seized by the ‘subject matter’ [= God] of theology can communicate it. The plausibility of our teaching depends on this.

No matter how objectively true our claims about God happen to be, we cannot escape the fact that we are the ones making those claims, and the movement of our lives, whether toward or away from the truth, affects how plausible those claims will sound to students. . . . If our lives do not somehow witness to the truth, somehow reflect and attest the truth in our own limited ways, students will not find us credible… (72-73).

Good credible teachers sound like—themselves (77), though they direct attention away from themselves to another. They are aware of the limits of their knowledge, vision, and authority.  There is a coherence between their teaching and their life. But there are also significant threats to be avoided in theological education. Neder speaks of a lack of theological existence, a failure to live in and toward the truth. He speaks of vanity, an excessive concern for one’s own reputation and advancement, and of a deadening professional familiarity in which our teaching somehow becomes disconnected ‘from its living center in God himself’ (76). These dangers undermine the credibility of our teaching. Worse, they hinder the living truth from impacting the lives of students.

Just Arrived

Books, ,

This could be the biography we have been waiting for: Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict by Christiane Tietz. Karl Barth died in 1968 and until now we have not had a full and critical biography. Many books contain a brief overview of his life, and most of these draw on Eberhard Busch’s 1976 Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts.

The work by Busch, Barth’s last assistant, is justly regarded as a classic and is in itself an immensely important resource. Despite its quality and wealth of biographical data, however, it is not a critical biography. Hopefully Tietz’ volume will fill this lacuna.

I came across the German edition in Dresden in 2019 and didn’t know it existed. It was published in 2018. I bought it as a reading goal for when my German has been recovered sufficiently. To have it in English, though, is a blessing. (On a side note, I owe an incalculable debt to translators of theological works, especially G.W. Bromiley – and Bible translators, of course! May their tribe increase.)

Christiane Tietz is Professor for Systematic Theology at the University of Zurich. Before that she was Professor of Systematic Theology and Social Ethics at the University of Mainz. The book has been translated by Victoria J. Barnett, one of the general editors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition.

The book has gone to the top of my reading list for the winter break. At 488 pages it may be the only book I read over the break! But, it comes with pictures.

Neder: On Teaching & Learning Theology (Part 1)

Books, Theology, ,

Adam Neder, Theology as a Way of Life: On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), pp. 158.
ISBN: 978-0-8010-9878-9

Adam Neder has written Theology as a Way of Life to provide a theological account of teaching theology so that the teacher’s activity is not out of step with their subject matter. His approach presupposes a Christological anthropology informed by Kierkegaard, Barth, and Bonhoeffer, and is offered as an alternative to another prominent model of Christian education, championed especially by James KA Smith. Smith’s model, considered appreciably by Neder, ‘conceives Christian education as largely a process of socialization in which students are habituated into the Christian life through repetitive practices that lead to virtue’ (5), itself a reaction to the idea that Christian education is often based on the faulty idea that all Christians need as essentially thinking creatures is new information that adds up to a Christian worldview. Against Smith’s contention that ‘we are what we love,’ Neder argues that ‘we are who we are because Jesus is who he is’ (6). That is, Jesus Christ establishes the truth of human identity in his life, death, and resurrection.

Good teachers give their students freedom. They offer students space to make up their own minds, to find their own ways forward. Aware of their fallibility, the limitations of their perspective, and the difference between their knowledge of God and God’s knowledge of himself, good teachers don’t seek to reproduce themselves in students. Of course they want to be persuasive . . . but . . . their goal is not to create loyal soldiers who repeat and defend the master, but to train students to listen to God’s Word, discover their own voices, and respond to Jesus Christ’s  call in their own ways (13).

In the first chapter on ‘Identity’ Neder unpacks several anthropological and pedagogical presuppositions. First, reconciliation with God is an accomplished and objective reality for all humanity; this is our true being in Christ, the essence of who and what we are. Every person is loved, reconciled, and called by God—including all our students. Christian existence, then, is a matter of becoming who we are so that our existence corresponds ever more closely with our essence. This, however, remains a process of becoming as the Spirit grants us grace time and again to entrust ourselves to him. The corollary of this is that to turn away from Christ is to turn away from one’s own true being. Our persistent tendency, however, is to refuse to receive our lives from Christ. ‘We enter into conflict with him and thus into conflict with ourselves’ (30). Neder is arguing for a life of faith, not in place of virtue but as the means by which the Spirit enables our lives to ‘become transparent to the life of Christ’ (29). This is not so much the habituation that enables one to live virtuously (in their own power?), but a cruciform life in faith in which his power is made perfect in our weakness.

Second, since only God can reveal God, we remain always and utterly dependent on the Holy Spirit if our students are to know Christ. Only the Spirit can open their ears, eyes, and hearts to the love of God. And therefore, before and above all else, the theological educator must pray. For Neder, this is the essential pedagogical task of the theological educator.

Our lives are ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (Col. 3:3) in order to be received and embraced. That subjective response is how we become (in ourselves) who we already are (in Christ). . . . The summons to discipleship is a summons to live with the grain of one’s identity in Christ rather than against it. As this happens we become images of the image of God. Our existence, the shape of our individual lives, coheres with our essence in him (26; original emphasis).

Conceiving of the human self as a process, as both gift and task, implies that we are not simply ourselves in a straightforward way, nor do we become ourselves all at once. At best we are on the way toward becoming ourselves. At most our existence is in process of becoming aligned with our essence. But this is a constant struggle. . . . To be clear, our identity in Christ is stable and unchanging, but the existential shape of life together with him is not (27-28).

Just Arrived: Beyond Four Walls

Books

Look what arrived in the mail this afternoon!

Good friend and partner in crime, Peter Elliott and I have been working on this for quite some time now, with a big push in the second half of last year, and then a final push just a few weeks ago. Wonderful to see it now in print.

Beyond Four Walls was the title of a Conference held at Vose Seminary several years ago; this is a peer-reviewed selection of the many papers presented at the Conference. The book has fifteen chapters including three by Scot McKnight, and other chapters by theologians and ministers from around Australia and New Zealand. I will blog excerpts and summaries of some of the chapters over the next few weeks and months. There is some great stuff in this book!

My own chapter is a theological interpretation of the Book of Jonah entitled “Jonah’s Wail: The Death and Resurrection of a Recalcitrant Church.” When I told a friend who is an Old Testament scholar the title of my essay, he just groaned and said, “Don’t!”

But I did!

Beyond Four Walls: Explorations in Being the Church is published by Wipf & Stock as part of the Australian College of Theology Monograph Series. We are indebted to the ACT’s support of this project, and especially the diligent and enthusiastic help of Megan Powell du Toit.

Vose Seminary will host a book launch for this volume, probably in the early evening of October 21, COVID permitting. I will advertise the book launch once details are finalised. Vose will place an order for the volumes shortly, if you would like a hard copy, or come visit us at the launch!

Listening to Books

Books, , ,

Recently I have listened to three very interesting and enjoyable books. The first was Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology by Gary Dorrien. This is a large and somewhat sprawling book tracing the development of modern philosophical theology from Kant through Tillich, concerned mainly with the German idealists, but including other theologians especially from the UK, and of course, the melancholy Dane. Dorrien tells the story of this theology as though it was and remains the only game in town. Evidently, this is not correct, and one need not agree with his liberal theological vision to appreciate his achievement in this book.

The value of the book is the enthusiasm with which Dorrien tells his story, the detail he provides of their affairs and thought, peccadilloes and motivations; the rich biographical excursions illuminate the theologian’s thought. Dorrien traces the themes that characterise their work, and shows its development within this tradition of modern theology, explores the work of the well-known figures such as Kant and Schleiermacher, and less well known but still significant figures such as Strauss or Schelling or Temple. What I appreciated most about the book as I listened was Dorrien’s evident sympathy for his chosen topic and his heroes.  This is important, for even if in the end one does not agree with the substance of his story–that the idealist tradition is the substance and future of Christian theology–one must still understand these men on their own terms and in accordance with the convictions that animated their work. Anyone seeking an understanding of modern theology will benefit from this book.

The second book is Charles Curran’s The Development of Moral Theology: Five Strands, though it would more accurately be titled, the development of Roman Catholic moral theology. Like Dorrien, Curran takes an historical approach to his topic. His five strands in the development of moral theology are, in order, sin, reconciliation, and the penitential manuals; the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and his followers; natural law; the papal teaching office, especially its development in the twentieth-century; and Vatican II.

Curran is a distinguished and competent tour guide, pointing out the nuances, developments, and distinctions in this tradition. I found his discussion of natural law to be very interesting, especially his demonstration that there is no monolithic or consistent view of natural law in the history of moral theology, and his discussion of the modern prominence of the papal teaching office. Curran belongs to that group within Roman Catholicism that wants to be faithful to the Catholic tradition but not in a slavish sense. He argues that modern Catholic moral theology has an authority problem due to inherent tensions arising in the interaction of these various strands. He demonstrates and illustrates this problem with discussion of particular issues such as Roman Catholic teaching on contraception. Another good book that will repay careful consideration.

Finally, I listened to Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. The book is journalistic and sociological rather than theological,  though Burton does have a doctorate in theology from Oxford. This is a fascinating and for me, a quite disquieting book. Its central claim is that the early twenty-first century in the West is not a godless world as commonly claimed; rather our culture is in the midst of a massive development of spirituality in which traditional religion is not so much rejected as remixed in accordance with personal, idiosyncratic, and bespoke spiritual preferences.

Burton speaks of such things as fandom, witchcraft and wellness, social justice activism, alt-right atavism, and other prominent pursuits as ‘new religious movements.’ She argues that these movements provide a sense of community and belonging, rituals and practices, and in so doing provide a sense of identity and metaphysical meaning to make sense of one’s life and purpose. They function in similar ways that religion has functioned in previous generations. Burton writes as a millennial of millennials, at times perhaps overstating her case but also providing detailed descriptive portrayals of how these spiritualities are expressed in everyday lives.

Several things are highlighted and apparent in this telling: the spiritualities discussed are primarily amongst the young and the urban; I note the centrality of the internet and social media in these burgeoning movements; the similar centrality of marketing and a capitalist ethos that permeates, supports, and facilitates (exploits?) the expressions of these spiritualities; sex and sexuality are prominent in many of the spiritual expressions; and there is an ironic disparity between the idea of a bespoke religious experience or expression, and the fact that it is marketed to thousands if not millions of adherents.

I found the book very confronting. I cannot help but wonder at the seeming irrelevance of the church with respect to these movements. I am dismayed that failures in the church have contributed to the disconnect that this generation has with traditional – or even progressive – Christianity. But I also suspect that this is not merely a result of Christian failures, but also of the aggressively anti-Christian philosophy that has permeated our cultural institutions in the second half of the twentieth-century up to the present.

A final central thesis Burton argues is that these new religious movements are not merely ‘bespoke’ but are grounded in an intuitionalism that prioritises individual feeling and experience. At the heart of these movements is the individual and their own centrality. I suspect that this age-old temptation will not end well for most of the participants in these movements, or for the society as a whole. Some will grow out of what appears to be an adolescent fixation, though many may retain the adolescent fantasies for the whole of their life. Some will profit from the movements. Others will remain devotees. But many, too, will find themselves empty and frustrated at unfulfilled promises.

My hope is that the church will resist the siren call to adapt themselves to these spiritualities in hope of winning some of the adherents. My hope is that the church will resist the pull of intuitionalism and will continue to proclaim loudly and clearly the gospel of Jesus Christ as the true hope of humanity, and the true answer to their spiritual hunger because Jesus Christ is himself the Truth. And I hope, too, that churches might be and become vibrant spiritual communities of such love, holiness, and kindness that they become beacons of life, welcome, and hope for those who find themselves washed up on the shores of a soulless, commercialised or politicised spirituality that has promised the world and delivered – not much.

Richard Rohr’s Falling Upwards (2)

Books, Spirituality, ,

In my earlier post on Richard Rohr’s Falling Upwards I endeavoured to set forth sufficiently and sympathetically, the central tenets of his spiritual vision. It is a vision of ageing gracefully by finding a way—being led—to personal and spiritual maturity. The measures of this maturity are indicators such as being freed from the narrowness of self-serving ego needs, and of dualistic and exclusivist patterns of thought. The mature person has learnt to accept reality, and others, as they are, and have become more self-critical than critical of others. They have learnt that the secret of internal freedom and happiness is to ‘receive and return the loving gaze of God every day’ (159).

The book sets forth a range of perceptive insights and warnings that we do well to reflect upon. For example, Rohr insists that change and growth, movement and direction are integral aspects of a mature spirituality. Similarly, he warns that sin repressed or denied will surely break-out elsewhere. He wisely admonishes his readers toward practices of solitude and friendship, and reminds us that there is a connection between personal and spiritual maturity, and that we cannot ignore the one in the pursuit of the other. He speaks of the place of Jesus and of the church in his spiritual vision: ‘I quote Jesus because I still consider him to be the spiritual authority of the Western world, whether we follow him or not. . . . Jesus for me always clinches the deal, and I sometimes wonder why I did not listen to him in the first place’ (81).[1] The church he regards as ‘both my greatest intellectual and moral problem and my most consoling home’ (80). The church functions like a cauldron:

A crucible as you know, is a vessel that holds molten metal in one place long enough to be purified and clarified. Church membership requirements, church doctrine, and church morality force almost all issues to an inner boiling point, where you are forced to face important issues at a much deeper level to survive as a Catholic or a Christian, or even as a human. I think this is probably true of any religious community, if it is doing its job. Before the truth ‘sets you free,’ it tends to make you miserable (74).

At the heart of his spiritual vision lies what he calls an ‘incarnational mysticism,’ a two-sided spirituality deeply grounded and engaged in the world and in ‘mystical union’ with God (75-78). It is incarnational as it is open to, inclusive of, and embracing the world in all its diversity, suffering, and beauty; mystical in its desire for immediacy, to abide in, as we have already noted, the loving gaze of God.

Despite the various strengths and claims of the book, I find I remain ambivalent toward this vision. Behind every exposition of spirituality lies a theological or philosophical vision of God and reality that in turn shapes the distinguishing features of the spirituality being proposed. As I understand it, Rohr’s theological vision is the product of a pluralist understanding of divine operations and revelation, and of human encounter with and participation in the divine. The spiritual quest is a universal impulse and Christianity is just one expression among many religious and non-religious quests for the truth. It is one expression of the primary spiritual insights which are found also in the writings of other religious leaders, poets, myth-makers, mystics, psychologists, and so on.

The portrayal of God in this book is remarkably thin and one-sided:

There is not one clear theology of God, Jesus or history presented, despite our attempt to pretend there is. The only consistent pattern I can find is that all the books of the Bible seem to agree that somehow God is with us and we are not alone. God and Jesus’ only job description is one of constant renewals of bad deals. The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. . . . Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it (62-63).

The tactic applied here is not uncommon; find and emphasise the diversity of witness in the biblical documents and then use the fact of this diversity to discredit the reliability of the whole. This is lazy theology, though very convenient, for then one can introduce one’s own ‘reading’ as the explanation, or the meaning, or the key. In this case the knowledge we might have of God is stripped back almost to an empty abstraction. Is the gospel as vague and as bland as presented here—somehow God is with us and we are not alone? Is this really the extent of that for which we might hope? Is it the case that this ‘god’ exists merely to clean up our mess—and that we are those who will change the real? Somewhat ironically, just two pages earlier Rohr had complained that ‘organised religion has not been known for its inclusiveness or for being very comfortable with diversity’ (60). Although social diversity is an imperative, diversity in Scripture renders it questionable.

Rohr’s reading of Scripture and of the gospel thus appears somewhat reductionist, as he selects and emphasises only some aspects of the biblical-gospel narrative at the expense of other elements. His reading of the atonement, for example, is exemplarist and Girardian, and discounts the testimony and imagery of Paul, Peter, John, and Hebrews with respect to Jesus’ saving death on the cross (68-69). He interprets God’s forgiveness as a sign that ‘God is saying that God’s own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us’ (56-57). It seems to me, however, that this is precisely the opposite of what the New Testament declares, that the very act of forgiveness, together with its necessity, presupposes that the ‘rules’ matter a great deal. In this respect Rohr’s position not only diminishes the New Testament portrayal of the cross of Jesus, but also treats the idea of sin—which surely includes the inhumanity and abuse of some towards others—as something negligible or easily dismissed. The Bible, on the other hand, approaches all kinds of sin with great seriousness.

Rohr argues for a spirituality based in ‘Big Picture incarnational mysticism.’ The Big Picture is a mechanism for side-stepping the particularities and details of a biblical vision in favour of a few generic universal principles. The image of the incarnation is employed with a dual purpose. On the one hand it affirms a spirituality of service amid the harsh realities of life in the world—something I also affirm. On the other hand, however, Rohr also uses it to affirm Western cultural priorities as though these are a religious obligation. This is cultural Christianity, something he otherwise rejects when it differs from his own cultural preference. Mystic desire or experience grounds the spirituality as a religious phenomenon without tying the adherent to any particular portrayal of God beyond the notion of God as absolute and unconditional love.

In the end Rohr’s spirituality appears as related variety of the ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’ that Christian Smith argued has become a major religious faith in North America. To me, this is not so much an exposition of Christian spirituality (and certainly not a biblical spirituality), as an exposition of a generic ‘spirituality’ suited perhaps for those who might claim to be ‘spiritual but not religious.’ This is a spirituality amenable for those who consider themselves ‘progressive’ whether religiously inclined or not. Richard Rohr himself is, of course, religious—he has been a Roman Catholic priest for most of his life, and finds his ‘most consoling home’ in the church. But he also admits that this is not a necessity per se. Other religious communities could just as easily assist and guide a person on their spiritual journey. I suspect, however, that some of his followers will not have the same degree of attachment to the church that he has, and may be led by this account of spirituality away from the God and the Jesus portrayed in Scripture, and into a spirituality and form of life of their own devising. Christians, whether Roman Catholics, Protestants, or disaffected evangelicals can do better much than this.

[1] It would be of interest, however, to assess Rohr’s understanding of Jesus in light of his more recent The Universal Christ (2019) in which he aims, according to one reviewer, to distinguish between Jesus and ‘Christ,’ with Jesus understood as limited, particular, and earthbound, while ‘Christ’ is unlimited, universal, and cosmic. I suspect that this move would allow him to displace the particularity of what Jesus actually says and does as recorded in the gospels, with an idiosyncratic content predicated upon his vision the universal Christ.

Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward

Books, ,

Richard Rohr, Falling Upward:
A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
(San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2011), xxxvii + 199.
ISBN: 978-0-470-90775-7

Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of our physical life, but the whole thesis of this book is exactly the opposite. What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, where the soul has found its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture (153).

This citation gives, I think, a brief definition of what Rohr means by the title of his book. Life may be considered in two ‘halves,’ though this is a conceptual rather than temporal division. Some people, perhaps even most people, never get to the ‘second half.’ The entry to the second half of life is conveyed by the sense of falling. One falls, perhaps on hard times, or perhaps ‘from grace,’ or perhaps from a high estate or a good reputation. Usually the fall is unsought, unheralded, and unwanted but occurs anyway. But such a fall can become the entry into a new broader and deeper world, where one’s soul is rediscovered, and one’s ethos, direction, and desire are fundamentally re-ordered. To fall upward is to discover our True Self, our inner connection to all things and all people, and to live, as Rohr says, inside the Big Picture of God’s love. The great purpose of life is to ‘grow’ our unique God-given self and return or offer it in love and service to God and the world. It is to be the me I was created to be.

The first half of life is concerned with what Rohr calls ‘ego needs’: identity, security, boundaries, order, safety, relationships, affirmation, and some experience of ‘success.’ In his view we all need our ‘narcissistic fix’ and without it, we will continue in and through life carrying a woundedness that often if not usually leaves us seeking to fulfil these needs in some other way. Somewhat paradoxically, these needs are fulfilled best when one is raised in a more traditional or conservative environment with an emphasis on law and tradition, loyalty, respect, and responsibility. Such an environment disciplines the ego so that it does not become an all-consuming drive. Becoming mature requires learning to live within the creative tensions of law and freedom, and so one must ‘learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly’ (citing the Dalai Lama, xxviii). The purpose of the first half of life is to ‘write the script’ or ‘build the container’ that we will, in the second half of life, enact or fill.

Yet despite the obvious strengths of these characteristics, there is more to life than identity, security, boundaries, order, affirmation, success, and so on. Somehow we carry an innate memory of ‘home,’ a deep-seated longing that can be assuaged only as our true self rests in union with God. Such a longing might call us to leave the security of our first-phase-of-life home in search of this true home. And so we begin a journey beyond the journey of the first phase of life. Or perhaps tragedy or suffering befalls us, a crisis by which our first-phase-of-life is up-ended and we are thrust out of our life, as it were, and into a further journey. Typically, suggests Rohr, we are led into the second half of life by an experience of loss, failure or brokenness we did not want, foresee, or choose, and which we cannot handle with the resources we presently have.

Nor does one arrive suddenly at the second half of life but grows into it, a process that continues through the rest of one’s life. Whereas the first half of life is characterised by ego-goals, the second half is concerned with ‘soul goals.’ In the second half of life one has ceased from self-defining, from the endless fighting and doing to make one’s way prevail. This person rests in God and simply is—being. They have become self-critical, though not self-loathing. They engage in ‘shadow-boxing,’ confronting the shadow-side that previously they kept well-hidden from others. They acknowledge and accept the truth about themselves, leaving go of pretence or subterfuge. They are able to live this way because they have found a friend or a Friend by whom they are ‘mirrored.’ They find that they are known deeply and fully yet loved and accepted anyway. And so a deep integrity ensues in which what one is, now is what is done. One enters what Rohr refers to as a ‘second simplicity,’ an innocence, a willingness to accept mystery, doubt, etc., and relinquishes the need for certainty or control because they trust in the overarching ‘coherence, purpose, benevolence, and direction’ of the universe. That is, they have a sense of underlying meaning, a Big Truth that satisfies the soul, even in the midst of continuing trouble, heartache or suffering. The gift they have now to offer is themselves.

*****

In this post I have provided a synopsis of Rohr’s book.
In a later post I will offer my reflections on what I have read.

Pierre Maury Sermon ~ The Ultimate Decision

Books, Theology, ,

Simon Hattrell’s recent book Election, Barth, and the French Connection (Second edition) contains two lectures and a sermon from Pierre Maury, the French Reformed pastor-theologian whose 1936 lecture in Geneva so influenced Karl Barth’s reconstruction of the doctrine of election. This sermon was preached in Lent 1937, in the Reformed Church of Passy, Paris. Maury gave a series of six talks of which this was one.

Maury begins with John 14:6 and asserts that Jesus is the (only) way, and as such, the only revelation of God. This is something requiring one’s commitment, something people often struggle to give for they continually seek to establish their own way. This they—we!—must cease to do, abandoning our efforts and accepting Jesus Christ himself as our (only) way.

The Christian life, from its beginning to its end, is decision, that is to say, unreserved commitment. . . . For, Jesus Christ wants to be objective in the sense that He claims to be an unreserved commitment of God on our behalf, and on the other hand He demands that we become unreservedly committed to Him. It is this double aspect of His existence that we are now going to examine (53).

To ‘choose’ or to commit to Christ is not analogous to other human choices between a range of options, or the self-commitment of one to an imagined absolute or cause. Jesus Christ himself is the Absolute who demands our unconditional submission in the obedience of faith; that is, a free submission. This commitment, suggests Maury, comes not by means of rational argument concerning the legitimacy of Christian claims. Rather, one is engaged in relational encounter with Jesus the Word, engaged in dialogue, hearing and speaking. One is to ‘hear’ Jesus Christ—his whole life and eternal existence is a ‘word’ addressed to us. Maury recalls an experience related by Pascal in Les Pensées to make his point:

As soon as faith is fixed on this person of past history, it is quite naturally brought to discover in him a personal intention—an interaction has begun. . . . Just as long as, like all the heroes of history, He remains for us an object of reflection, of admiration or curiosity, we do not know Him; He is not Him; he is only that which He wants to be (54).

When God speaks to us in Christ it is not in order to display a truth, but to reveal to us our situation before Him, and the attitude that He adopts before us (55).

As such, Jesus Christ is decisive. He is decisive in the sense that in him all are included and contained. Our existence is, eternally and in eternity, contained, enfolded, enclosed and included in his existence. It seems that for Maury, this is the content of proclamation: a divine decision has been made; humanity is the object of divine love—all of us, and each of us.

Jesus Christ is a decision of God, therefore without any recourse, as far as we are concerned, a decision of someone other than ourselves and of which we are the object; and that is to say, in the second place, that Jesus Christ calls for a decision on our part, a final (permanent) decision. . . . It is from all eternity, in eternity, that between Jesus Christ and us a relationship is established (56).

Again:

Marvelous revelation of an unfathomable mystery! When this child is born in a manger, when this man dies on the cross and rises again the third day, the eve of the Sabbath, it is our whole life that is swept up in this commitment, it is for our whole life that something happens. He is the one by whom—for whom also—we have been created, who is there. He is there, simple and immense, simple as the simplest of the sons of men, immense because the dimensions of His existence contain us all; He is the beginning and the end of our life. In Him everything is enclosed, kept, protected. When He cries out, ‘Come to me, you who are weary and heavy laden’ (Matthew 11:28), it is all our destinies that He is calling, because they belong to Him. When He stretches out His arms upon the cross, He says that it is ‘to draw all to Himself’ (John 12:32) because no one has existed without Him and outside of Him. When He rises and is exalted to the right hand of God, it is in order to present to God—eternally, and in eternity—those who—from all eternity, in eternity—have always been, are and will always be His. I have said, I have repeated: all (57).

Jesus Christ is thus decisive in the decision that has been taken by God concerning us, our entire existence. He is decisive, too, because in his incarnation and life we are encountered by the coming and work of God.

The real mystery of the action of Jesus Christ is that ‘he does nothing by himself’ (John 5:19). That which He does for us, and that which He does in coming to us, in giving Himself to us, in choosing us, is what no person can do: it is an act of God! . . . Such is the true relationship that Jesus Christ has with those who believe in Him: a relationship where God Himself legally binds Himself to us (60, 61).

This activity, the activity of his love—his coming to us, giving himself to and for us, and in so doing, choosing us—is election, and it must be understood as the testimony of his love in its most positive sense, and not at all negatively, as a sign of partiality (60).

Not only is Jesus Christ decisive, he is also ultimate. The divine decision concerning us is ultimate, not merely as divine but because it concerns the last—the ultimate—judgement. Yet the Judge is Jesus Christ—he who has come, given himself, and chosen us! In view of all this, Jesus Christ is ultimate also for he demands our decision, an ultimate decision in which we give ourselves wholly and without reserve to him. He comes to us indeed, though in his coming he is always Lord and Master.

We need to insist on the uncompromising nature of the essence of Christian decision. … If we choose Him, it’s because He has chosen us first; if we take Him up, it is because He has seized us. Such is the seriousness of His coming into our life that it dispossesses us completely. He only comes as Master. He is the Lord Jesus. . . . The intolerable, demanding nature of faith is the mark of grace which is ours in faith (64).

Although he does not use the language of ‘irresistible grace’ it is clear that Maury holds such a concept. Jesus Christ seeks us out, confronts us, and in so doing reaches our ‘true centre’ where our destiny is at stake, laying hold of our lives ‘where all possibilities of escape are closed except this one, this obligation to say yes or no, and never ‘perhaps’ . . . ‘If we do not give our consent, it’s because we haven’t been found’ (64).

The decision required of us is the response of faith, rather than correct knowledge or full understanding. The real question confronting us is not intellectual but existential. ‘We have to come to Him with our life, because it is with His life that He has come to us’ (66). To respond to Jesus Christ in faith is to give ourselves to him as he did to us—in complete simplicity, immediately, and without reservation (65).

Maury concludes his sermon by directing his listeners to the only place where they might look for and find Jesus Christ as their ultimate decision: to the Bible. ‘It is through the Bible alone that Jesus Christ is made our contemporary. If Scripture is holy, it is because it offers us the possibility of knowing the ultimate decision of our life with no looking back’ (67).

But one can also, from the beginning to the end of the Bible, hear the living Word of God, hear God speaking of Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ, and, having heard Him, one can—no, one must—decide for or against Him. . . . Whoever looks in these pages for Jesus Christ as their Lord, sooner or later, slowly or all of a sudden, will find what they are looking for (67).

That this happens is, in the final analysis, the work of the Holy Spirit, for in every case the human decision is grounded in and enabled by the grace of the divine decision made concerning us.

*****

The sermon is prefaced, in the book, with a record of a brief correspondence between Barth and Maury, and a longer note from Charlotte von Kirschbaum who translated the Frenchman’s sermon in German, translating it three times before she was (somewhat!) happy with it. Hattrell has given us the first translation of the sermon into English. My citations and pagination here are based on the first edition of the volume.

Pierre Maury on ‘Election and Faith’

Books, Theology, , ,

In 1936 at the International Congress of Calvinist Theology conducted in Geneva to celebrate the 400-year anniversary of the first edition of Calvin’s Institutes, French preacher-theologian Pierre Maury presented a paper entitled ‘Election et Foi.’ Karl Barth would later recall that the address had made a profound impression on him, providing the decisive contribution to his own thought on the doctrine of predestination.

Maury’s lecture has been recently translated and published in English thanks to the work of Simon Hattrell, in his edited volume Election, Barth, and the French Connection: How Pierre Maury Gave a ‘Decisive Impetus’ to Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election. The volume includes testimony from those who knew Maury, including Barth, as well as three lectures by Maury that provide a good insight into his thought concerning election, and a number of additional contemporary essays discussing the doctrine in Barth and Maury’s theology.

Over the next few weeks I will provide a summary of Maury’s lectures in order to make more generally available what he said that so impressed Barth. Of course, better yet would be to buy the book!

The 1936 lecture itself, is quite short. Maury begins by indicating the approach he will take to the doctrine, which initially sounds characteristically Reformed:

We did not give ourselves life nor will we be able to avoid death. We have not chosen to live; we cannot choose to not die. It is therefore not a question here of our choice, the one that we make, but the choice of which we are the object, that which is made (or not made) of us. These are those insurmountable limits, which are imposed on us, which election calls to mind (42).

Since the doctrine of election trumps all our categories of reason and wisdom, we cannot approach it philosophically but only in accordance with faith, led and guided by the Scriptures. Hence the title, ‘Election and Faith.’ Scripture will be the guide of faith and not a teacher of philosophy. “It will lead us in some points to not follow what Calvin heard in it. But that will not be being unfaithful to him; on the contrary, that will be truly Calvinist” (43).

When we begin with Scripture, however, we find that election is christologically ordered. For Maury, the eternal and the incarnate Christ is the origin, ground, and goal of God’s election. This election is entirely free, wholly God’s initiative, and yet at the cross it is shown to have cost God everything.

We will take our stand, therefore, in speaking of predestination, on this solid ground, where the hidden mystery of God becomes the revealed grace which is offered to us. We can truly say that outside of Christ, there is neither election, nor knowledge of election . . . Outside of Christ, we know neither who the God who elects is, nor those He elects, nor how He elects them (43).

Jesus Christ is not merely the point of the knowledge of divine election, but is in himself the election:

So the election is nothing else than the eternal and temporal existence of Jesus Christ, our mediator. For it is in Him, in Him crucified, in Him alone, that God has met us. Because it is in Christ, we know that election is not some unfathomable eternal caprice or whim, a game played out in the infinitely distant idleness of eternity but a concrete reality, our reality. It bears the marks of the historical and real life of Jesus Christ, living, dying, rising for us (46).

Election is, negatively, God taking all our sin and alienation on the cross. This is grace. Here, here alone, but here truly, we see that God is love. Election, therefore, consists in the rejection of Jesus Christ.

Before the cross, too, we understand this paradox: the price of free election. For election does not cost us anything, but God it cost His Son. For God to extend grace, to forgive, is to give everything, to give everything for us who cannot give Him anything. . . . This is the night of the ninth hour. What does this darkness mean? Revelation says: punishment. And the Son believes it: punishment, God’s wrath. The only one who will understand grace in election is the same one who understands that it is fulfilled in Christ dying, smitten by God, deserted by men. The only one who will understand how election is sheer pardon is the one who, before the cross, does not come with arguments or with good works, with religious emotion or objections, but who stands there speechless because they have nothing to say, nothing to do, nothing to put forward (47-48).

The human response to this election is to choose, decisively, for or against. At the cross we see ourselves—and so judgement, rejection, and condemnation; and at the cross we see God—and so grace, acceptance, and justification. This is double-predestination, though in Maury’s hands it refers not to two separate classes of people (salvation for some, damnation for the rest), but is applied to each person. The church may and must speak of double-predestination but only in this way. That is, it may preach ‘the word of the cross.’ Indeed apart from the cross, double-predestination is solely an eschatological concept: we cannot sort anyone into these categories.

The elect, in their election, accept everything from the cross: condemnation and grace, judgement and forgiveness, demand and promise, renouncement and life. They accept, that is to say, they no longer have anything, they allow everything to be given to them . . . Predestination is therefore very much double (51, 52).

When asked, upon whom does salvation depend? Maury responds as expected: upon God, of course! Though this answer is known only in faith. Faith is a decisive human act with no opt-out clause. Faith is to risk everything in our reply to this judgement and grace addressed to us. “To accept Jesus Christ, to be chosen by God, means to choose to turn away from ourselves forever. That means to have from now on an absolute Lord . . . ” (50).

To look to the cross is to respond in kind. In choosing Christ we no longer choose ourselves but embrace a vocation to be conformed to Christ. There is a life that is appropriate to the elect: a life of continuing faith lest the believer transform God’s election into their own possession; a life of prayer since all depends on God—and the truest prayer is that which asks for the Holy Spirit; and finally, a life of obedience to the God who has and continues, to call them.

Pierre Maury, "Election et Foi (Election and Faith)" in Election, Barth, and the French Connection: How Pierre Maury Gave a 'Decisive Impetus' to Karl Barth's Doctrine of Election." Edited by Simon Hattrell, 41-59. Second edition; Eugene: Pickwick, 2019.