Tag Archives: Review

How to Think Theologically (Stone & Duke)

Books, Theology, ,

Learning TogetherHoward W. Stone & James O. Duke, How to Think Theologically
(Second Edition; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

I picked this book up at the book table during our recent ANZATS Conference. The next day they replaced it with a third edition copy – D’Oh!

Stone & Duke have written their smallish, easy-to-read book with students and interested lay people in mind. Their basic premise is that all Christians are theologians simply because they are Christian. Their passion, however, is that Christians approach all of life with a theological frame of mind; that they learn to live in the everyday rough-and-tumble world informed by and responsive to a developed theological framework which helps them in their decision-making and action. In a word, their desire is to nurture informed Christian life rather than supply an academic method for “getting the right answer.”

The book is divided into three sections with chapters 1-4 laying the foundation for theological reflection. The chapters explore what theology is and how it is approached, adopting the ancient characterisation of theology as “faith seeking understanding.” The authors rightly insist that theology is a human activity, a response to God grounded in faith. Theology is personal but not private. It is an interactive practice, dialogical, corporate and communal, grounded and occurring in the Christian community. These chapters address the distinction between “embedded” or implicit and possibly pre-reflective theology, and “deliberative” theology, which is an explicitly chosen and committed theology, based in critical reflection on one’s beliefs and practices.

Stone & Duke use the metaphor of a craft to describe theology. Theology is something learned and developed through practice and growth in skill. The task of theology is to interpret all of life through a lens of faith, bringing all the various features, facts and experiences of life into explicit relation to Christian theological categories and truth claims. But even this lens, and these categories need to be assessed, and Stone & Duke provide four tests for assessing our theological perspectives:

  1. Is it “Christian” – i.e., conformed to the gospel?
  2. Is it intelligible, and plausibly coherent?
  3. Does it have moral integrity?
  4. Is it valid – i.e., true to life, Scripture, and actually true?

Ho to Think TheologicallyThe authors identify the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral—Scripture, tradition, reason and experience—as the resources (rather than “sources”) required for theological reflection. Of these, Scripture is primary, but reason is the most active, at work in our interpretation of Scripture, in the exploration and evaluation of tradition and experience, and in the work of building connections between theology and all the other disciplines of academic inquiry.

Chapters 5-7 form the heart of the book, and provide the three categories of thought that are to guide life-related theological reflection. The first category is the gospel which more than anything else, is the story of the love of God revealed Jesus’ life and ministry, death and resurrection, and the meaning of this story as it is unpacked in the writings of Scripture. Theological reflection involves bringing all of life into explicit correlation with the major features of this story including what it means to embody this story in the world, and how this gospel is communicated and its benefits received by people through faith.

The second category concerns the human condition, by which Stone & Duke mean the reality of sin as the basic problem of human existence, and how that problem finds resolution through the provision of salvation and the means of grace. The authors insist that without clear thought around these matters, we will fail to address the issues of real-life at the level required to see God’s transformative work. The final category of thought required for fruitful theological reflection is vocation which addresses the inescapable question: “What must we do? How are Christians called upon to act?” (100). In many situations a variety of responses and actions are possible, so Stone & Duke provide guidance for choosing the most fitting response, which include assessing the real reasons for why we typically act as we do, identifying distinctly Christian reasons to guide our response. The point is “to choose one particular view or action that is the most fitting expression of Christian faithfulness in a given situation” (107).

It is worth noting that Stone & Duke do not prescribe the particular way in which these critical categories of thought must be believed. In fact, just the opposite. They insist that there are varieties of ways in which issues of gospel, sin and salvation, and vocation have and are understood in the Christian tradition, and that deliberative theological reflection will be open to explore, question and evaluate each of them. Their intent is to help communities of believers come to grips with the content and meaning of these doctrines within their own traditions and situations.

The final section of the book (chapters 8-9) detail some of the practices involved in critical theological reflection and the spiritual disciplines which support it. These chapters locate the practice of theological reflection in the community of faith, and insist that theological reflection be aligned with spiritual formation. Participation in Christian community and practices of spiritual formation help serve to keep theological reflection from becoming merely an individual and purely cognitive exercise in which the believer’s faith becomes privatised and intellectual rather than spiritual. For these authors, “spiritual formation is a bridge between theological reflection and day-to-day experience” (127).

We need a theology that prepares us for the difficult business of being Christian in the fray of the real world, undergirds our commitment, and guides our action. … To act in accordance with our Christian commitments, often there will not be the luxury of extended theological consideration. The theological work has to be done in advance—deliberative theological reflection—so that its results can inform our every choice. … [As Christians we] need a foundation of prior deliberative theological reflection to prepare us as best as possible for dozens of daily choices as well as the life-altering decisions we face. … We believe that developing basic clarity on the issues raised by the three diagnostic exercises (gospel, the human condition, and vocation) will stand the Christian in good stead when facing the myriad of difficult situations that every day presents (129-130).

Paul commended the Roman church saying, “I myself am satisfied about you, brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another” (Romans 15:14). This useful book will help contemporary Christians and churches follow in Rome’s footsteps, providing a means to develop the skills of theological reflection with an eye toward this kind robust discipleship and praxis. The clear framework and practical case studies illuminate how congregations might actually practise theological reflection. Leading congregations in intentional and systematic reflection on the gospel, the human condition, and vocation will help them think Christianly, something urgently needed in a culture in which we are very often more shaped by the culture than we are by Christ.

The King Jesus Gospel

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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.

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