Category Archives: Books

Should I Watch the Movie?

Books, Literature,

Book or Movie

Sometimes I see a movie is being released and make sure I read the book first, so I can enter more fully into the experience of the movie. I remember seeing the first promotional shorts of The Lord of the Rings about nine months before the first movie was released, and determined then and there to read the books. My enjoyment of the books was enhanced by the movies. I did learn early, however, that movies and books do not always agree, and sometimes, the movie does no justice to the book at all. And sometimes, the movie is better than the book. I remember seeing and enjoying The Time-Traveler’s Wife a few years ago and enjoyed it so much I soon read the book. What a disappointment! The idea was original and creative, and it was well-developed in the movie, but the prose of the book just did not do it for me. I felt let down by poor execution. Maybe if I had not seen the movie first I would not have felt this way about the book.

My dilemma: I have just finished The Book Thief my Marcus Zusak. The book was passed onto me with a high recommendation by Mike Parsons when he returned to the UK in 2009. I have only just got to it, and loved it. At the same time I have been reading around Barth and Barmen, Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church, and so history and story have been swirling around in my mind.

The book is simply and beautifully written. When I began reading I was pleasantly Book Thief Movie Postersurprised by how simple it was, not at all like some literature (and some theology) which sometimes aims at incomprehensibility. Yet as I read I often found myself caught, not only by the power and pathos of the story, by the characters and creativity of the tale, but by fresh and startling metaphors and wonderful turns of phrase. The book, or more accurately, the story, has touched me. I want to sit with it for a little while; I know I will read it again sometime, if life persists.

But should I watch the movie? Will it enrich or diminish my experience of the book? Or maybe watch it, but not yet?

What do you suggest?

The King Jesus Gospel

Books, , ,

Scot McKnightMcKnight, S. The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011); 184 pages; ISBN: 978-0-310-49298-6

Have Evangelicals “got the gospel wrong?” Scot McKnight thinks so, arguing with strong language that “Evangelicalism that focuses on decisions [instead of discipleship] short circuits and—yes, the word is appropriate—aborts the design of the gospel” (18). The problem, McKnight contends, is that many Evangelicals equate “gospel” and “salvation” or more particularly, “justification by faith,” and that this reductionist gospel deconstructs the church. “I think we’ve got the gospel wrong, or at least our current understanding is only a pale reflection of the gospel of Jesus and the apostles. We need to go back to the Bible to find the original gospel” (24).

McKnight does just that with two chapters on the apostolic gospel in the letters of Paul and Peter’s preaching in Acts, plus two more chapters on Jesus and the gospel, and the Gospel in the gospels. Using 1 Corinthians 15 as his primary text, McKnight details eight observations of Paul’s gospel, which together comprise the fundamental content of the apostolic gospel. This gospel is the announcement of the story of Jesus as the saving news of God, and as the climax of Israel’s story. The content of the gospel is Jesus, this particular person who is Messiah and Lord, Son and Saviour—King. In light of this content, then, the four gospels are the gospel par excellence, setting forth the story of Jesus and communicating the central features of the apostolic gospel. These central features also show up in the apostolic proclamation recorded in Acts, though McKnight notes two important innovations; first, Paul contextualises his proclamation in gentile contexts with a nuanced account of Jesus as the climax of Israel’s story, and second, gospel proclamation in Acts included a potent summons to repentance, faith and baptism.

McKnight is careful to distinguish the gospel itself from the salvation which flows from the gospel. His argument is that the ancient church extrapolated 1 Corinthians 15 into the rule of faith, and then the creeds. That is, the creeds exegete and expound the apostolic gospel. In the Reformation, however, the focus of faith, theology and preaching became the personal appropriation of and response to the gospel. Although a legitimate development in its context, this led in the post-Reformation period to a truncated gospel in which the gospel was wholly encompassed by this focus.

The singular contribution of the Reformation, in all three directions—Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist—was that the gravity of the gospel was shifted toward human response and personal responsibility and the development of the gospel as speaking into that responsibility (71).

King-Jesus-GospelMcKnight argues that the as a result of the Reformation, the gospel story was reframed in terms of the individual and against the church as the mediator of grace. The key innovation in this reframing was the central place given to the doctrine of original sin. McKnight perhaps overstates his case here. The reframing of the gospel through the lens of original sin occurred long before the Reformation. Nevertheless his central point stands: the reframing of the Christian story in terms of original sin and personal justification provided the theological context for the religious individualism which came to full flower in revivalist pietism, and especially so in the American context with its particular individualistic ethos.

In Evangelicalism, argues McKnight, the gospel has been equated with personal salvation, and proclamation of the gospel with the enumeration of a “Plan of Salvation” in one form or another. This reduction of the gospel to being a story simply of “salvation” has eviscerated the gospel. The heart of his concern becomes apparent in the following paragraphs:

When the plan gets separated from the story, the plan almost always becomes abstract, propositional, logical, rational, and philosophical and, most importantly, de-storified and unbiblical. When we separate the Plan of Salvation from the story, we cut ourselves off the  story that identifies us and tells our past and tells our future. We separate ourselves from Jesus and turn the Christian faith into a System of Salvation.

There’s more. We are tempted to turn the story of what God is doing in this world through Israel and Jesus Christ into a story about me and my own personal salvation. In other words, the plan has a way of cutting the story from a story about God and God’s Messiah and God’s people into a story about God and one person—me—and in this the story shifts from Christ and community to individualism (62).

Reducing the gospel to a series of abstract propositions tears us from the story that not only frames the gospel, but is the ground of our identity, vocation, and hope in Christ. It becomes concerned narrowly with personal salvation and morality rather than the lordship of Christ in all of life. As such, it deconstructs the church because there is no inherent or necessary link between a gospel which aims simply at decisions or “conversion,” and discipleship.

What response can be made to these claims? First we need, I think, to recognise the legitimacy of McKnight’s critique where such reductionism is concerned. How prevalent this reductionism is, I cannot say, though I can witness to having seen much of it in the Evangelicalism I have experienced over the last thirty years. Second, what is to be done? The answer to this question is the focus of the final two chapters of the book “Gospeling Today” and “Creating a Gospel Culture,” in which McKnight argues for a robust narrative proclamation of the gospel that sets forth the Lordship of Christ and summons people to respond, so that they may not only be forgiven, but restored to their true humanity and vocation which was defaced and lost in the Fall. The church thus becomes integral to the gospel proclaimed, and salvation a life of following Jesus in the company of God’s people. In all this McKnight does not deny the necessity of personal response and decision with respect to Jesus’ lordship and the work accomplished for us in his death and resurrection. What he does deny is that this decision and response can be abstracted from the overarching story of Scripture and concrete participation in a life of discipleship.

I suggest there is more to be said here about the role of the church in the economy of salvation, especially if the church is no longer to be viewed as a voluntary society. Although the deconstruction of the church was one of his major concerns, McKnight has not developed these points here. Those churches and traditions with a strong ecclesiology, and a covenantal and/or sacramental theology already have the resources to navigate this relation. I suspect that McKnight will be drawn in these directions as he continues to develop his thought in this area.

This is a good and relevant book, addressing an important and probably widespread misunderstanding, and written in a popular and colloquial style for an audience who are unconcerned with academic conventions or critical approaches to Scripture. Its chief virtues are its clear-sighted focus on the issue, its careful delineation between his position and the one he critiques, and its prominent use of Scripture to explore the issues and make its case. I can envisage pastors referring to this text as they help their congregations understand, live and share the gospel.

On Being a Reader – Even of Scripture

Books, Literature, Scripture, , ,

Pride and Prejudice - PenguinIn 1972, Tony Tanner’s introduction to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice notes:

For during a decade in which Napoleon was effectively engaging, if not transforming, Europe, Jane Austen composed a novel in which the most important events are the fact that a man changes his manners and a young lady changes her mind… Jane Austen’s book is, most importantly, about pre-judging and re-judging. It is a drama of recognition – re-cognition, that act by which the mind can look again at a thing and if necessary make revisions and amendments until it sees the thing as it really is (368-369).

Tanner’s introduction (see Austen, J. Pride and Prejudice, Penguin Classics edition, 1996), provides a psychological reading of Austen’s masterpiece, using the work of Hume as a lens. In his view, Pride and Prejudice deals with issues of character, decisions and “first impressions” (Austen’s working title for the book before its publication).

In the same edition an updated introduction is provided by Vivien Jones, who notes:

Written in a period of political crisis and social mobility, [Austen’s novels] are strategic critical analyses of the moral values and modes of behaviour through which a section of the ruling class was redefining itself … She writes, therefore, about femininity and about class: about forms of identity and about marriage as a political institution which reproduces – symbolically as well as literally – the social order. …

Selfconscious, rational, sceptical: Elizabeth is an Enlightenment figure skilfully integrated, through the mechanisms of romantic comedy, into the traditional Burkean hierarchy which Enlightenment values sought to dismantle…

Romantic love makes individual happiness both the motivation and the goal of moral and social change. … So the power to motivate and reward change, both personal and social, lies with the woman. … This plot formula seems to give women, and the values they represent, a lot of power and responsibility. But it is power of a carefully circumscribed kind. The social order has been modified, not radically altered. Austen’s post-revolutionary achievement in Pride and Prejudice is to put Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary femininity at the service of the Burkean ‘family party’ by writing what is still one of the most perfect, most pleasurable and most subtle – and therefore, perhaps, most dangerously persuasive – of romatic love stories (xv, xxxii, xxxv).

Jones and Tanner are two very different readers of the same story, and provide an excellent example of the reality that who the reader is and what they bring to a text makes a decisive difference to the way they read the text and what they see in it.  Tanner sees a wonderfully written romantic comedy devoid of political significance, while Jones sees a wonderfully written romantic comedy that serves as a vehicle for a sophisticated political vision that fuses elements of early feminism and conservative Burkean hierarchy, against a backdrop of revolutionary France.

It is likely that Tanner was unable to even see what Jones has seen in the story. It is not simply that Jones reads as a woman, though I suspect that is part of it. She is also schooled in feminist literature and history and so is alive and sensitive to issues in Austen’s context that Tanner simply did not see. Is Jones over-reading the novel, seeing in it things that are not there? This is a danger confronting every reader, and could legitimately be asked of Tanner as well. But no, her reading of Austen is insightful and well-supported. Both introductions are excellent and well worth reading, and Penguin is to be commended for keeping them both in their revised volume. They highlight development in Austen scholarship between the early 70s and mid 90s, and feminist contributions to literary study.

They alert us also to the significance of the reader which has evident implications for readers of Scripture. We do not simply read the biblical text in some kind of unfiltered way, gaining direct and unmediated access to “the truth.” Every act of reading is also an act of interpretation, and we interpret what we read according to the frameworks of understanding we bring to the text – whether consciously or unconsciously, whether well or ill-informed.

What has shaped you as a reader?

Review: Matthew Rose, Ethics with Barth

Books, Theology, ,

Matthew Rose, Ethics with Barth: God, Metaphysics and Morals
Barth Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp 226, ISBN 978-1-4094-0623-5

rose_series 2039 cover:metaphysics and morals

The re-evaluation of Karl Barth’s theology which has gathered pace over the last twenty years takes another step forward with this finely written addition to the Barth Studies series. Matthew Rose examines Barth’s ethics from a Roman Catholic perspective and seeks to place the eminent theologian, not only in dialogue with, but in the company of the classical tradition of Western metaphysics and morals (6). More directly,

In contrast to those who see Barth espousing act-deontology, situationalism or intuitionism, I understand him as endorsing a version of the Augustinian and Thomistic view that right living is in accord with created nature. To be good is to live in the truth about ourselves, to live in conformity with God’s intentions for created order. On my reading Barth thus holds God ought to be obeyed not out of mindless obedience but out of regard for our own good and true happiness. God requires no more, no less and no other than for us to fulfil our true being (10; cf. 42-43).

Karl Barth as a natural law ethicist? Not quite. Rose develops his argument in two parts which correspond roughly to an indicative-imperative pattern he sees in Barth’s theology (92). In the first part Rose provides a helpful presentation of Barth’s theological ontology with three chapters discussing the nature of God, creation, and humanity respectively. The God made known in Jesus Christ is that God who from all eternity and to the very depth of his being has turned toward humanity in love, uniting humanity to himself, and who has become humanity’s partisan. The whole of creation is, of course, God’s creation, and Jesus Christ is its secret: its origin and basis, telos and truth. As such, there is an inherent creaturely order that reflects God’s deepest intentions and which provides “the deep structure of the moral life” (59). This order and structure, however, is not given as a universally accessible rationality, and in this, of course, Barth departs from the classical tradition. Human being is christologically determined. Rose notes that Barth distinguishes between “real” humanity and “phenomenal” humanity: our truest and deepest humanity is in Christ, and as such is fundamentally active, relational and open-to-God, this latter not by creational grace or “nature,” but by the divine determination of election. These three chapters offer an account of the true nature of the reality within which humanity has its being, and which is also determinative for its life-act.

Part two is comprised of four chapters in which Rose explores Barth’s doctrine of the divine command (chapters four and five), and particularly, the command of God the creator (chapters six and seven). Rose defines the divine command as “nothing other than the divine nature itself interpreted with reference to human nature” (93; cf. 138, 155). Since the divine being is made known in God’s saving activity, the good is a predicate of revelation. “God’s being is itself imperatival, having the character of law” (95). Again, the divine command does not annihilate human willing but is instructive and illuminating, effecting a radical moral awakening in which the human agent discovers the truth of their own being and understand the command as their highest good. Rather than an occasionalist and particular command for each new moment, it is rather the determination of our entire being and existence to bear the image and likeness of God. In becoming “godlike,” we realise our true humanity.

Barth therefore thinks that what Christians ought to do has already been done. God has not only acted rightly toward us but has acted rightly on our behalf, making the good life something of a fait accompli. … God’s achievement is our incitement. What Barth has in mind when he speaks of obedience is consequently an active alignment of divine and human action … Acting in “correspondence” to God’s command means to be a response or echo to it in the sense of participatory engagement—a “Nachleben” (119-120, original emphasis).

Chapters six and seven supply an overview of Church Dogmatics III/4 with a brief exposition of the main lines of Barth’s discussion of the command of God the creator, with a focus on Rose’s own particular concerns. Rose argues that for Barth, the created order is inherently imperatival. That is, the structures of creaturely and human existence constitute the means by which the command of the Creator reaches us. “There is an internal coincidence between the order of creation and the order of obligation. To become aware of the theological ground of our existence therefore is to become aware of the moral law; knowledge of created order is moral knowledge” (138, original emphasis). Rose approves Barth’s “classic” view of freedom—his organising motif in the ethics of creation—in terms of teleology rather than modern conceptions of unrestrained personal autonomy. The most fundamental freedom is, of course, freedom for God. This fundamental freedom—established and made possible only by redeeming grace—grounds all other freedoms and relationships. Humanity is at its truest and realises its own true being only in this “natural” relation with God, which then issues into a fundamental relationality toward others. These relations, of course, and this freedom, are distorted, threatened, and at times, torn asunder by human sinfulness and evil which arise from the mysterious Nothingness; this is the focus of the final chapter. Rose’s main point is simple: although humanity chooses sin and is thus responsible, yet sin itself, and its ground in Das Nichtige has no ontological foundation: it is alien to human being and thus against nature. “Sin represents our insane, preposterous, bootless attempt to separate ourselves from the source of our life and being and therefore from ourselves” (190).

In a brief but important epilogue Rose considers whether, for Barth, revelation is the sole source of Christian moral reflection, and answers with a decisive No on the grounds that Barth had always acknowledged the particular work and task of philosophy, and that he allows some measure of moral knowledge arising from “truths known and knowable to all human beings” (207).

Rose knows his argument will not convince all readers: “The interpretation may … seem strained. Is not Barth being read against the grain”? (115). Rose is aware he is explicating a “minority report” in Barth (82), and indeed gives evidence of his procedure: “In expounding Barth one is therefore required to put in bolder terms what he often only expresses indirectly and by implication” (106). Nor does he always get the emphasis right (see, for example, his note that Barth’s emphasis on grace “implies a negative judgment on certain forms of autonomous human self-assertion” (150, emphasis added)). Yet he is sensitive to the problem and while keen to present and support his central thesis, acknowledges the very real tensions that remain between Barth and the classical tradition: “If Barth can accompany classical eudaimonism for a stretch of the road, he must part company with it eventually” (129). Why so? The reason lies within Barth’s strictly theological, indeed christological, rendering of God, creation, nature and humanity. Nevertheless, on the basis of these presuppositions, Barth’s ethics are a (distinctively Christian) form of eudaimonism, in which God is the source and measure of human well-being, and his command is “at bottom … an invitation to fulfil the same movement that has set us in motion” (122).

This well-written work which displays an excellent command not only of Barth’s corpus, but also the secondary literature, the historical and philosophical tradition, and contemporary disputes and discussions, deserves and rewards careful reading, even if in the end one cannot agree with all that Rose argues.

(Note: This review originally appeared in Colloquium 45/2 (Nov 2013))

Church as Moral Community – First Review!

Books,

Church as Moral CommunityThe first review of my book has been published in the April 2014 edition of Nexus, the journal for the Australian College of Theology’s research community. Written by David Griffin of Morling College in Sydney, it is almost embarrassingly positive – I could only wish that all my reviews will be this enthusiastic. Thank you David! (By the way, if you like what you read here, buy the book!)

Here it is…

The weapons we fight with … have power to demolish strongholds. (2 Cor. 10:5)

The authority the Lord gave me [is] for building you up. (2 Cor. 13:10)

In a single impressive statement, Michael O’Neil captures the whole theological and ethical drive of the early Barth: “Not only must the old be torn down, but the new must arise” (p. 157).

In this extraordinary piece of research, O’Neil presents Barth at his iconoclastic best, demolishing in order to build, and like Luther’s God, killing to make alive. It is this demolishing and killing, this via negativa, that led previous critics to accuse Barth of evacuating all possibilities for moral existence in both the church and the individual. O’Neil argues otherwise: “Barth deliberately develops his theology with an intention to form moral community” (p. 221).

While most who read Barth focus on his magnum opus, O’Neil take us back to the early years of his theological development. He carefully lays out the results of his meticulous archaeological dig into Barth’s two Romans, as well as his sermons, letters and lecturers. Here we see Barth’s early twists and turns and delights and disenchantments – all the while struggling to create a theology in response to the moral and political crises engulfing him. O’Neil has sought to chronologically uncover the “development, structure, content, parameters, trajectories and logic of [Barth’s] thought” on the subject of ecclesial and moral existence, covering the years from his break with liberalism to the second edition of Der Römerbrief. As such the book is not only a work of theological ethics, but also to a lesser degree, history, and biography.

The primary thesis O’Neil successfully prosecutes is that from his earliest days Barth was vitally concerned with ethics, the church and Christian social engagement with the world. After all, Barth’s search for a new theology was due to his liberal theological teachers’ support for a war: their failed ethics indicated a failed theology, which sent him urgently back to the Bible. Here O’Neil sides with John Webster against the older view that asserted that Barth was ecclesially and ethically thin, which was no doubt aided by his strident rhetoric, such as his description of ethics as sin, and the church as one of many human idolatries. O’Neil argues rather that such rhetoric serves to demolish the liberal, pietistic, religious and idealist views of his day in order to rebuild the church and human moral action on the proper basis of God’s act in Jesus Christ, for with “Jesus the good actually began already, the good to which mankind and nature alike are called, which towers right into our own time and goes forward toward a revelation and consummation” [Barth, ‘Action in Waiting,’ 1915, cited on p. 67f].

After an introductory chapter surveying how Barth’s ethics has been received, chapter two traces Barth’s early struggles and disputes with both liberalism and socialism from 1914 to 1917. This trenchant criticism of the church was in the service of an ethically faithful church and demonstrates that from the very start Barth possessed a pronounced ethical and ecclesial commitment.

Chapter three covers the year of Barth’s first Romans commentary (1919). Because Der Römerbrief I emerged out of his pastoral and homiletical struggles, it is necessarily concerned with concrete moral and ecclesial existence. Barth’s rejection of both pietistic withdrawal and Christian and political movements that bypass Christ is grounded in the argument that proper human and historical moral action is a response to God’s prior action in Christ where he broke through into this world. This divine action is an organic process, like a seed growing to maturity, and will finally lead to certain victory.

Chapter four covers the interval between Romans I and Romans II (1919-1922). Barth’s indebtedness to the consistent positive eschatology of Christoph Blumhardt and to the negative philosophy of Christian history of the enfant terrible Overbeck, is clearly argued. These influences sharpened Barth’s axe in preparation for the great assault of Romans II. The Tambach lecture also receives detailed exegesis at O’Neil’s deft hand, where Barth’s use of crisis, although used in Romans I, finds greater concentration, presaging its central place in Romans II. Barth’s lecture Biblical Questions, Insights and Vistas (1920) paints true human existence as oriented in an “ec-centric” way to the wholly other God in Christ, who alone brings life out of the crisis of death, noted in Grünewald’s famous painting.

And so to Der Römerbrief II, where the previous organic view of the coming kingdom of God fades away and the crisis of being caught in the pincers of the transcendent God’s tangential contact with our world, and our death, takes hold. As a consequence, true human ethical action arises only out of worship and repentance, but arise it does in concrete acts. But these moral acts are temporal moments of responsive action, enabled and informed only by God’s eternal moment of gracious action. This momentary act is pre-eminently neighbour love, the secondary overflow of our primary love for God, to be repeated anew moment by moment as our concrete situation is touched by God’s revelation.

Sound unworkable? O’Neil agrees: as Barth sharpened his iconoclastic eschatology and theological transcendence, ethical existence, if not altogether obliterated, becomes extremely precarious. So can Barth be considered to be a moral theologian? Yes, says O’Neil, because Barth is finally saved through his own internal inconsistency, where his theology finally cracks under the weight of his struggle to develop a meta-ethic, a new moral field, upon which he can build a positive account of human and ecclesial existence clear of the debris of the bourgeois theology he has laid waste about him. God’s momentary touch of the world (the theory, Romans 1-11) does indeed perdure for more than a moment (the praxis, Romans 12-13).

O’Neil thus argues that it is Barth’s concern for a meta-ethic which has given rise to the criticism that he is too occasionalist and under-specific to be of any help in developing an ethic of character and moral agency. With many citations, O’Neil rehabilitates Barth here: the radical temporality of the ethical moment is a parable of the eternal Moment, where every moral action of the moment must correspond to the reality of God’s eternity, if it is to be considered moral at all. In John’s language, we love because God first loved us.

Is the criticism that Barth is ethically thin really a reflection of Kant’s assertion that moral agency must be autonomous to be real? While not exploring this issue, O’Neil paints a convincing picture that in Barth, action that is properly ethical is action that is determined theologically because the untheological self is an impossible reality. Human existence is only truly human when it acknowledges its divine determination, for God wills our existence into existence for the purpose of doing his good will. Thus Barth’s fundamental moral question, “What shall we do?”, highlighted by O’Neil, is lifted from Acts 2:37, thereby setting ethics as a response to the Gospel.

Michael O’Neil builds his case thoroughly, exegeting Barth with careful attention to details and history. It is a delight to read his translations of parts of Romans I, as yet unavailable in English. If you are a Barth scholar, an historian of twentieth century theology, or an ethicist, this book will appeal. That Barth’s vision is eminently concrete, practical and active is evident: it was Barth who authored the Barmen Declaration.

Dr David Griffin, Vincentia,  Australia

Remembering Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Books, Theology

Bonhoeffer Memorial PlaqueSixty nine years ago, on April 9, 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazi regime for his part in a failed assassination plot on Hitler. The memorial plaque pictured here reads:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a witness of Jesus Christ among his brethren. Born February 4, 1906 in Breslau. Died April 9, 1945 in Flossenbürg.

An English officer imprisoned with Bonhoeffer later recorded Bonhoeffer’s last day: “On Sunday, April 8, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer conducted a little service of worship and spoke to us in a way that went to the heart of all of us. He found just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, the thoughts and the resolutions it had brought us. He had hardly ended his last prayer when the door opened and two civilians entered. They said, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us.” That had only one meaning for all prisoners—the gallows. We said good-bye to him. He took me aside: “This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.” The next day he was hanged in Flossenburg.” Bonhoeffer’s final text on that day was “With his stripes are we healed” (Isaiah 53; 1 Peter 2).

The idea of being a witness of Jesus Christ, and of participating in an assassination plot seem to many Christians to be incompatible. Bonhoeffer, too, wrestled with the implications of his decision and act. Seven years earlier he had written:

Every day brings to the Christian many hours in which they will be alone in an unchristian environment. These are the times of testing. This is the test of true meditation and true Christian community. Has the fellowship served to make the individual free, strong, and mature, or has it made them weak and dependent? Has it taken them by the hand for a while in order that they may learn again to walk by themself, or has it made them uneasy and unsure? This is one of the most searching and critical questions that can be put to any Christian fellowship. … Has it transported for a moment into a spiritual ecstasy that vanishes when everyday life returns, or has it lodged the Word of God so securely and deeply in his heart that it holds and fortifies him, impelling him to active love, to obedience, to good works. Only the day can decide.

The citation comes from Bonhoeffer’s Life Together (88). Over the next week or two I will remember Bonhoeffer by posting some reflections on this little treatise, which has become a modern theological and pastoral classic. Why not grab a copy and read along?

 

A New Book on Divine Providence

Books, Theology, ,

Divine Providence and Human AgencyAlex Jensen from Murdoch University was one of my supervisors for my doctoral studies and I owe him a great debt of gratitude for his friendship, support and expertise. I am pleased, therefore, to bring his new  book to your attention: Divine Providence and Human Agency: Trinity, Creation and Freedom published by Ashgate.

Alex’ concern in this book is to explore the nature of what I call a “strong doctrine of divine providence” in a context in which human freedom is fully affirmed. He insists that the sovereignty of God with respect to history must be fully affirmed lest we lose the basis for Christian hope. But so too must the modern human self-understanding as free agent within certain limitations. He seeks to understand and ultimately transcend this apparent contradiction by appeal to the the holy Trinity. This looks like a significant contribution to an important topic, and I look forward to reading it.

Alex sent me a copy of his conclusion to the book; here is an excerpt:

“We can summarise the argument of this book by saying that God acts in creation through God’s one eternal act of willing, by which God creates being, time, space, the world, its history, and all events taking place within it. This one divine act of willing is enacted in time and space by the logos and the Holy Spirit. At the same time, God grants God’s creatures genuine freedom and agency. These two things must not be separated, even if they are superficially paradoxical, because they are necessary in order to safeguard the specifically Christian experience of salvation through the saving presence of the risen Christ in the church. …

“All attempts to resolve the paradox by dissolving it into one or the other position are inadequate, as they either deny that God is indeed the creator and Lord of all things, who saves humankind by grace through faith, or that humans are free agents and act with responsibility. Both must be held together, even if this poses a challenge to modern human reason. …

“As a result, our understanding of divine eternity as well as of divine agency in the world must be developed from a consistently trinitarian starting point. So God’s one act of willing, by which God creates, preserves and providentially governs the world is threefold: timelessly eternal by the Father, put into action immanently by the Word and completed immanently by the Spirit. … Or, from a different perspective, the Word moves forward the divine act of willing in the world, while the Spirit elicits the human response to this. Most importantly, the Spirit gives faith that the Word became flesh, dwelled among us and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and in all this revealed the Father. It is therefore not sufficient, from a Christian point of view, to begin the discussion of divine eternity from a unitarian starting point, and then to bolt the Trinity onto this one God, as we observed in authors such as Richard Swinburne, Keith Ward, Paul Helm and Nancey Murphy, to name but a few.”