Category Archives: Theology

Reading Karl Barth’s Doctrine of God (1)

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Selection: The Church Dogmatics II/1:3-12,  §25.1 “Man before God.”

Barth begins his treatment of the doctrine of God with a chapter entitled “The Knowledge of God.” The chapter has three sections, the first being “The Fulfilment of the Knowledge of God” itself comprised of two sub-sections.

In the first sub-section, “Man before God,” Barth provides a description of how the knowledge of God occurs—from a human perspective. He begins by assuming that the knowledge of God is a reality in the church: “In the Church of Jesus Christ men speak about God and men have to hear about God” (3). That this knowledge occurs in the church is a result of the gracious gift of God by which God has made himself known and makes himself known. True confidence must begin here—with the actuality rather than the possibility of the knowledge of God. We do not ask whether God might be known but rather how far God is or might be known (5). This is an epistemological claim: the knowledge of God occurs only in its occurrence—where God is actually known, where the fulfilment of this knowledge takes place. There is no neutral position or standpoint whereby one might test, explore, or prove the knowledge of God without having already heard the Word of God and been brought within the circle of the knowledge of God.

God is a unique Object, known only as he gives himself as an object of human knowledge. God is not one amongst others, not one in a series, nor an abstract postulate such as a ‘Supreme Being’ or ‘First Cause.’ God—the true and living God—is not a god one might identify or choose for oneself; such an entity could never be God. For Barth, this principle is self-evident for there is, in fact, only one God—the self-existent One who exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To have knowledge of this God is to have the knowledge of God. To have knowledge of some other god or concept or being is not the knowledge of God.

The knowledge of God with which we are here concerned takes place, not in a free choice, but with a very definite constraint. It stands or falls with its one definite object. . . . Because it is bound to God’s Word given to the Church, the knowledge of God with which we are here concerned is bound to the God who in His Word gives Himself to the Church to be known as God. Bound in this way it is the true knowledge of the true God (7).

This, therefore, is the ‘very definite constraint’ with which the church is ‘bound,’ that is, God is known only as he gives himself to be known in his Word. “Any escape out of the constraint of the Word of God means crossing over to the false gods and no-gods” (7).

Confident Christian speech about God—good apologetics—must begin under the discipline of this constraint. Nor is it the case that we choose the constraint: we rather find ourselves constrained by the Word that has come to us. “We can only come from the real and original constraint by the Word; we cannot come to it” (9). Barth cites Psalm 127:1-2 (Except the Lord build the house, their labour is but lost that build it), giving it epistemological force. “Good apologetics is distinguished from bad by its responsibility to these words” (9).

Barth’s first point, then, is that the knowledge of God is mediated knowledge; there is no unbound, non-objective, or immediate knowledge of God. We know God only through the mediacy of his Word in the church where he gives himself to be known as an object of human knowledge.

If God gives Himself to man to be known in the revelation of His Word through the Holy Spirit, it means that He enters into the relationship of object to man the subject. In His revelation he is considered and conceived by men. Man knows God in that he stands before God. But this always means: in that God becomes, is and remains to him Another, One who is distinct from himself, One who meets him. Nor is this objectivity of God neturalised by the fact that God makes man His own through the Holy Spirit in order to give Himself to be owned by him (9-10).

In making himself an object for human knowledge, God remains nevertheless “the primarily acting Subject of all real knowledge of God, so that the self-knowledge of God is the real and primary essence of all knowledge of God” (10).

Several observations about Barth’s point can now be made: first, any true human knowledge of God is always a gift of divine grace. Barth takes it as axiomatic that genuine knowledge of God is beyond human capacity. God is not an object of human observation or enquiry in a manner similar to other phenomena. Rather, God makes himself an object of human knowledge by giving himself to be known by humanity as this object. Unless God does this, humankind cannot know God. That God has done this is an act of divine condescension and grace, an act of the Holy Spirit who makes the human subject capable of the knowledge of God (10).

Second, the knowledge of God is a personal and relational knowledge: God comes to the human person as Another, meeting them as this Other, and giving himself to be known by them. The human subject finds themselves encountered by God—a transcendent Subject who makes himself an object for their apprehension—and so come to know Him and not merely about him. While God knows himself perfectly and immediately, they know him only mediately and contingently yet still truly. The knowledge they have is an aspect of God’s own self-knowledge.

Third, as noted, this knowledge of God is also a mediated knowledge, a knowledge given to us by his Word in the church. Only by starting out and staying on this path can one attain the knowledge the God. God can only be known where God has given himself to be known: other paths lead to false gods and no-gods, gods of human invention and so not at all the knowledge of God. Barth warns against mystical attempts to ascend to God immediately:

This ascendere and transcendere means abandoning, or at any rate wanting to abandon, the place where God encounters man in His revelation and where He gives Himself to be heard and seen by man. . . . If we really soar up into these heights, and really reduce all concepts, images, words and signs to silence, and really think we can enter into the idipsum [the ‘self-same’; the thing itself], it simply means that we wilfully hurry past God, who descends in His revelation into this world of ours. Instead of finding Him where He Himself has sought us—namely, in his objectivity—we seek Him where He is not to be found, since He on His side seeks us in His Word (11).

 

Center for Baptist Renewal Reading Challenge

Theology

I have only now become aware of this reading challenge from the Center for Baptist Renewal, and too late to join it this year, obviously. I don’t think I would have had time for it this year any way.

The list of readings provides a great introduction to the history of Christian theology, and maybe I will tick off the readings a little at a time. I have read only one of them entirely (Athanasius), though parts of many of them, but the idea of a systematic reading of twelve seminal works in twelve months is attractive. Though, given my time constraints I may well take longer than a month for each anyway. And it may be that I would swap some of them. For example, I have a copy of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, but not On the Apostolic Preaching.

Worth considering, I think!

Calvin, on the Theologian’s Pastoral Task

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I came across this note as I read a little of Calvin this evening. I was in the Institutes I:14:iv on the doctrine of creation where Calvin is beginning his discussion of the angels. He writes to head off the kind of teaching that indulges in endless curiosity and speculation not tethered to Scripture. His words are still apt today:

Let us remember here, as in all religious doctrine, that we ought to hold to one rule of modesty and sobriety: not to speak, or guess, or even to seek to know, concerning obscure matters anything except what has been imparted to us by God’s Word. Furthermore, in the reading of Scripture we ought ceaselessly to endeavor to seek out and meditate upon those things which make for edification. Let us not indulge in curiosity or in the investigation of unprofitable things. And because the Lord willed to instruct us, not in fruitless questions, but in sound godliness, in the fear of his name, in true trust, and in the duties of holiness, let us be satisfied with this knowledge . . . 

The theologian’s task is not to divert the ears with chatter, but to strengthen consciences by teaching things true, sure, and profitable.
(See: Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Library of Christian Classics. Editor: John T. McNeill; Trans. Ford L. Battles, volume 1:164.)

Calvin reminds us of the limits our knowledge and so counsels epistemological humility. It is evident that he views Scripture as an inspired and authoritative source of theological knowledge, and that what is given us in Scripture might be profitably taught, learned, and believed. But not everything we might want to know is given us in Scripture. Standing behind this admonition is Deuteronomy 29:29: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”

Of course, not all questions are fruitless. Many questions are necessary if we are to understand Scripture in both its parts and as a whole. Many more are necessary if we are to understand its significance and relevance to our everyday lives. Calvin certainly understands this as his own work testifies. But he is against the kind of mystical or merely academic approaches to Scripture and theology that neglect what he considers basic: the pastoral purposes for which Scripture is given – something also found in Deuteronomy 29:29.

The pastoral orientation of Calvin’s theological work is clear. In this, he differs not at all from Luther–see my discussion of Luther’s pastoral theology. In the citation given above, Calvin provides a framework for discerning that which is pastorally useful: that which edifies and strengthens the conscience; that which nurtures godliness and the fear of the Lord, true trust, and holiness. We might want to add to the kinds of pastoral outcomes we seek to nurture in the lives of God’s people: engagement in community and mission, the pursuit of just relationships, concern for the poor, etc. Nevertheless, Calvin’s concern for trust, holiness and a good conscience before God is also warranted.

I found this a salutary reminder that theological enquiry is never an end in itself but a means of being drawn more deeply into a life of faithfulness before God, and a participation in his creational and redemptive purposes – as revealed in Scripture.

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.

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).

Theology & the University: An Interesting Discussion

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The Brisbane Chapter of ANZATS (= Australian & New Zealand Association of Theological Schools) conducted an interesting discussion today that I was able to join by Zoom. The discussion was titled, “Theology and the University: Queen of the Sciences?” Two essays were distributed prior to the discussion, and three papers given during the session on related themes.

The two essays distributed were John Webster’s “Regina Artium: Theology and the Humanities” (from, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason) and Linn Marie Tonstad, “(Un)Wise Theologians: Systematic Theology in the University,” IJST Vol. 22, Number 4 (October 2020).

Webster argues that theology is not merely one discipline amongst the humanities but is in fact the ‘Queen of the (Intellectual) Arts.’ Using especially Bonaventure and also Augustine as his main conversation partners, Webster argues that all created intelligence and all creaturely intellectual work is a ‘gift from above’ (James 1:17), creaturely thought illuminated by the ‘Father of lights.’ This is a theological appraisal of the origin and goal of human intellectual endeavour.

For Bonaventure, theology describes what, according to Holy Scripture, the world is: the temporal passage of created being back to its creator. This history is irreducible to other terms, and so there can be no profane understanding of the arts of the mind, because creatureliness is basic. For Augustine, too, the arts of the mind are not secular, but of divine institution; but they are caught up in wickedness, and discriminating use of them – most of all in the interpretation of the Bible – depends on their being broken away from captivity to vice (187).

But this view of theology is difficult for many to accept:

Talk of divine motion . . . seems to us to threaten rational autonomy and responsibility. . . . God does not move the mind as an archer propels an arrow . . . God moves from within, not simply as a causal force from without. Yet in order to grasp this, we have to detach ourselves from the assumption that the natural life of creatures is secular life (188).

That is, all creaturely existence, including the work of the mind, occurs within the encompassing context of the divine origin and goal of all things. All the intellectual arts from designing and weaving a basket to abstruse philosophy are intended to lead us to God. In our fallen condition, however, this intention is hidden from us. It is the task of theology not merely to inquire about God, but to consider all things relative to God as origin and end.

This is why theology may be called the queen of the arts, though that appellation only makes sense against the background of a now lost understanding of the hierarchy of studies in which theology is the point at which the divine illumination of all things is made an object of contemplation (191).

Linn Marie Tonstad rejects this view as an attempt to justify theology’s place in the university, and indeed as an imposition of power with respect to the other disciplines in the humanities. She is concerned especially, with more aggressive approaches (she names Milbank as an example) which would launch a counter-attack against theology’s despisers whether by telling a better story, undermining the other’s foundational commitments, etc., in order to insist that unless these other disciplines are ordered to theology and so find a means of “participating in God’s self-knowledge . . . they are objectively and demonstrably null and void” (502).

Tonstad argues that theology is subject to the same epistemological and socio-cultural limitations and pressures that assail all the disciplines, and attempts to ‘master’ another is not only wrong-headed but ultimately futile. The university context inevitably shapes the way in which theology is practised:

The university values what is new and ground-breaking; it values the originality ascribed to a single scholar; it values radical programs or critiques of existing structures, discipline-shifting paradigms; . . . The pressure to distinguish oneself within a field offering shrinking rewards becomes ever more intense. . . . Theology, as a result, becomes a practice of self-protection (505-506).

She reasons from 1 Corinthians 1 that appeals to wisdom can be an attempt to mastery, but God chooses the foolish things of the world to bring to nought the things that are. Therefore, theology ought aim at foolishness and unmastery, a non-defensive theology of failure utterly aware of its own contingency and susceptibility to judgement.

Such a non-defensive position does not seek to colonize other disciplines by instructing them in their proper ends or by accusing them of being about nothing. For the text instructs theologians that God sometimes chooses what is nothing for God’s own ends, and it is not the business of the theologian to determine when God is doing just that (511).

I find I agree and disagree with both scholars and perhaps Tonstad’s suggestion that the university context distorts theological inquiry is most apt. She focusses on the economics of the university—neo-liberalism and capitalism are the enemy—though I wonder if the modes of rationality in the modern university are equally or even more problematic. This, too, may be part of her critique, especially when she speaks of the university rewarding the novel and the radical. As one engaged in queer theology—and a tenured professor at Yale—she also benefits from the system she critiques. The same was true, of course, of the late John Webster who enjoyed a celebrated career in prominent institutions in the United Kingdom. Webster’s rigorously theological approach to the question, though, has the merit, of insisting that human intellectual gifts and inquiry are graced, even if, under the conditions of the fall, they do not exhibit or realise the full intent of that grace.

In my view, the true home of theology is not the university but the church, though I suggest that Tonstad would reject this suggestion as well. The Yale theologian rightly warns against the kind of wisdom that seeks mastery or dominance over others, and rightly emphasises the contingency and limits of theological assertion. Her concern that theology be much more self-critical than critical of the other disciplines is not misplaced. My worry, however, comes from what she does not say here. May the Christian have theological confidence at all? Does the fact that we cannot know the truth comprehensively mean that we cannot know it at all? It seems she has problematised theological activity in order to propose a posture appropriate for theology while eroding or denying the possibility of any normative truth claims. While she has rightly intuited the social location of Paul’s ‘Corinthian wisdom,’ it seems she has emptied it of its content, and so of its saving power.

Theology, as faith seeking understanding, has its own particular rationality as Webster insists. Certainly, it may be a critical venture, demanding the utmost exercise of our intellectual gifts. Yet it arises on account of faith and is directed toward the building up and promulgation of faith through the ministry of the church. Separated from this context, theology may be tempted to substitute a mode of rationality and an ethos contrary to its one foundation, Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 3:11). The task of theology whether academic or ecclesial is not merely “therapy for [theology’s] desire for recognition” (Tonstad, 511), but the knowledge of him “who is made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30).

‘Prophetic’ Proclamation or Didactic Doctrine?

Theology, ,

In 1963 Emil Brunner wrote that, ‘A further consequence that necessarily follows from the basic error of orthodoxy is the overvaluation of doctrine in the life of the church and in the faith of the individual’ (Truth as Encounter, 178)—this from a man who spent his life teaching and writing books on Christian doctrine! Brunner has not had a change of heart whereby he now considers doctrine to be deleterious to the life of faith or the life of the church. To the contrary sound doctrine is greatly desired and necessary. Still, he asserts that doctrine can be ‘overvalued.’

First it is necessary briefly to note the ‘basic error of orthodoxy’ to which Brunner refers. The error is what he calls objectivism, the idea that somehow God’s activity stands complete in and of itself whether or not there is any human response or correspondence to that activity. This view pictures God’s work in impersonal terms and as such departs from what Brunner considers a more biblical portrayal of God as relational and personal. Thus, Brunner views with suspicion concepts of grace, the church, or the sacraments in which the divine activity is institutionalised or rendered automatic or mechanical in its operation. Brunner uses the practice of baptism as an example. Baptism is a work of divine grace in which God is active forgiving sin, cleansing, and regenerating. But it is not an act of God solely, for the human agent is also active having been moved by grace in faith and confession. Any practice of the sacrament that either implicitly or explicitly diminishes or removes the human element so that the requirement of faith is removed ‘destroys’ the character of the sacrament (181-184). Brunner’s view is that God’s grace and truth is always an ‘event’ in which the person is encountered by God in such a way that their personal response is called for and called forth.

With this background we can begin to explore Brunner’s point in the citation above. Brunner insists that the primary commission received by the church is not doctrine but proclamation.

Proclamation, I suppose, must always have a doctrinal content, but it is itself something other than doctrine. It is faith awakening, faith-furthering, faith-wooing address. Genuine proclamation always has a prophetic character – even if we preachers are no prophets; pure doctrine, on the other hand, has a didactic character (178).

As Brunner uses the term, prophetic refers not to foretelling future events or preaching about social issues or condemning various evils—two common misconceptions. Rather it is hortatory address, calling people to respond to God and his promises. It is to be a messenger of the covenant as the Old Testament prophets are sometimes characterised, calling people to faith in God. The prophet confronts the hearer with the reality of God and calls for a decision. Teaching, on the other hand, is didactic, instructional, the communication of information that may or may not have any direct existential claim upon the hearer.

Brunner rejects, therefore, a direct identification of doctrine with ‘the Word of God.’ The Word of God is the event whereby a person is addressed by God through the human word of proclamation in such a way that the response of faith and obedience is aroused. In the modern period especially, Brunner contends, proclamation is more necessary than teaching if the church is to fulfil its missionary commission (198). This is even more the case in the postmodern and post-Christian environment in which we now live.

Once let the relation between the Word of God and doctrine be rightly understood, and there will hardly be room any longer for the view that the single thing which the church could do for the awakening of faith is the conceptual clarification of the Holy Scriptures. Has it, then, not yet been noticed that the most perfect knowledge of Biblical concepts and the entire acceptance of Biblical doctrine is wholly compatible with the completest want of actual faith – and indeed that this is anything but a rare phenomenon? (180)

I am sure that Brunner’s reflection provides crucial guidance for the present task of preaching. Matthew’s gospel tells us that Jesus went about teaching (didaskōn), preaching (kērussōn), and healing. Teaching is certainly necessary for those who are already Christians. But even more now than in Brunner’s day the church in the west exists in a missionary context. We would do well to infuse all our sermons with a kerygmatic element—proclamation, and not simply teaching. Such preaching points to the beauty of Jesus Christ, his sovereignty, grace, promise and redemption, and on this basis, calls people to repentance and faith. Such preaching seeks not merely to inform but to call for an informed decision. That such a decision is actually made is not our work, however, but the work of the Holy Spirit. For this we can and should pray.

More Reflections on COVID-19

Theology

This remarkable image from an unknown artist is used in volume 2 of the COVID-19 reflections in Stimulus: A New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice. All three parts of the present issue have now been published, and there are some very good articles among them, including an article by Rev Dr Steve Taylor, Principal, Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, New Zealand, reflecting on the image above.

I have read a couple of articles from part one, quite a few from part two, and none yet from part three which was published only yesterday. I look forward to reading some more. Of what I have read so far, I have enjoyed most the articles by

  • Steve Taylor, ‘A Covid Christology’
  • Myk Habets, ‘The Proof is in the Providence’
  • Bill Loader, ‘Corona on the Side of the Road’

There is more to read and I am sure, more gems to find. The editors put out a call for papers in late March or early April and within a couple of weeks received over sixty responses. Instead of producing their normal volume of four essays, they have gone for a bumper approach. After peer review about forty papers were deemed to fall within the parameters and standards of the journal, and they have published them all in the three part-volumes.

If you are interested, my own paper ‘A Gift of Friendship’ is in part three.

 

Reflections on COVID-19 – Stimulus Journal

Theology

At the end of March, the editorial team of Stimulus (a New Zealand journal published by Laidlaw College) met and discussed putting together a special edition of Stimulus based around the COVID-19 event. They were aware that the church of God (like all people) had been thrust into something unprecedented and were grappling with what it all means. They wanted to hear the voices of thinking Christians during the time of lock-down. They also wanted them to come from that time and be read while everyone was still facing the challenge.

Their initial call for papers on April 1 resulted in over sixty submissions. Each piece was sent to blind peer review, and over forty contributions fit the journal’s criteria. Given that the usual issue of the journal has only four major essays, the editors were confronted with a happy dilemma. In the end they decided to release this special issue in three ‘volumes,’ the first of which is now published and available here. The next volumes will be released in coming weeks.

Enjoy!