Monthly Archives: June 2007

The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: The Centrality of Divine Self-Determination

Posted by on June 29, 2007 5 comments

George Hunsinger, in a review article (Scottish Journal of Theology 55[2]: 161-200 [2002]) on Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology, offers three drastic critiques of Jenson’s contribution to Christian dogmatics.  He claims that Jenson’s view of the cross is Socinian, his view of the incarnation, Arian, and his view of the Trinity, Hegelian (all three of which are, apparently equally deplorable).  Hunsinger, is I think, wrong on all counts and terribly misunderstands Jenson precisely because he does not understand, as Jenson points out in his response, that what Jenson is undertaking is ”an effort of revisonary metaphysics” (230).  Hunsinger’s critique is unimaginative because he simply applies traditional metaphysical critiques to Jenson’s revised metaphysics, and thus (of course), finds Jenson to be woefully contradictory and nonsensical.

I want to engage one aspect of Hunsinger’s critique, not so much for the purpose of exonerating Jenson (though, if that happens, so be it), but rather for continuing to explore some aspects of what a revisonary and indeed a biblical metaphysics might look like.  What I want to explore is Hunsinger’s claim that Jenson is, if not Arian, then at least neo-Arian.  Hunsinger claims that Jenson so closely identifies (in good Lutheran fashion) the man Jesus with the divine Logos, that he collapses the distinction between Christ’s deity and humanity and ends up positing that the Son of God had no existence prior to the incarnation of Jesus.  Thus, Jenson tends toward Arianism in that he claims that the Son of God had a temporal beginning.  Hunsinger claims that for Jenson, “the Son enjoys no antecedent reality prior to his coming to be in history, the eternal trinity enjoys not antecedent reality, strictly speaking, prior to the creation of the world” (171).  Hunsinger claims that for Jenson, the existence of the Son prior to the incarnation is at best “merely embryonic and potential” (172).

If this is indeed the case, then Jenson does seem to be in serious trouble.  I do think that Jenson can answer this question himself, and indeed he does at numerous points in his two volumes.  Jenson clearly does not believe that “there was when he was not” or that the Son comes into being as a creative act of the Father.  “The Son’s origin is an event not of God’s contingently willed creative action, but an occurrence in the Father’s being as God” (I.102).  Jenson likewise states clearly that, while the Trinitarian Son is Jesus of Nazareth without remainder, he is so precisely within the eternal life of the immanent Trinity.  For Jenson, “it is the Incarnate Son who is himself his own presupposition in God’s eternity: the incarnation happens in eternity as the foundation of its happening in time, in eternity as the act of the decision that God is, and in time as the carrying-out of what God decides” (I.140).   Truth be told, this should not be new to Hunsinger, this is just Jenson reaffirming and nuancing Barth’s own claim that the Son is eternally incarnandus.  However, this is precisely where the metaphysical difference between Hunsinger and Jenson becomes clear.

For Hunsinger, the idea that the Son can have a temporal beginning and be eternal is contradictory because according to the traditional metaphysics eternity is the negation of time.  This is precisely what Jenson is calling into question.  Thus, for Hunsinger, if all that was eternally present in the immanent Trinity was God’s self-determination to be for us as Jesus of Nazareth, then the Son of God “enjoys no antecedent reality prior to his coming to be in history”.  However, Jenson’s more thoroughly biblical metaphysics insists that God is the event of his own self-determination.  Thus, the person of Jesus eternally belongs to the reality of the Triune life because God determines himself to be the one who is incarnate as Jesus. 

This point is made well in Neil MacDonald’s recent book Metaphysics and the God of Israel, where he articulates a radical biblical metaphysic on the basis of the Old and New Testaments narratives of divine action in creation and in Jesus.  What MacDonald shows is that God is identical with his own act of self-determination.  For God, his self-determination precedes and constitutes his carrying-out of what he has determined himself to be.

As MacDonald says with reference to the doctrine of creation, “God does not create the world in order for it to be the case that he determines himself as creator.  God determines himself as the creator of the world; therefore, he is the creator of the world” (29).  Now, of course Hunsinger would jump all over an analogy being drawn between God determining himself as creator and determining himself as Triune.  Such would indeed imply that “there was when he was not”, for creation is not eternal.  However, the point to be made on the ontological level is that God is who he is because he determines himself to be so.  That he determines himself to be the creator at a particular point in the life of God does not mitigate this point.  God is the event of his own self-determination.  It is not incoherent in the least to say that God determines himself as Creator at a point in his life before which he had not so determined himself, but eternally determines himself as Triune (which is to say that God determines himself to be the incarnate Jesus).  Thus, if God eternally determines himself as Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus simply is eternally included in the identity of God.  And, as MacDonald further observes in discussing the atonement, “God cannot be the one who takes his own judgment on himself – in the form of Jesus of Nazareth – and it not be the case that the man Jesus of Nazareth – the Jew of Galilee – be part of who this God, the God of Israel, is eternally” (226).

Jenson shares precisely this actualistic ontology of divine freedom.  As he argues, “the one God is a decision” (I.222).  God’s act of self-determination as Jesus of Nazareth belongs eternally to the being of God.  We do not need, then to posit, as Hunsinger does, a “Logos” who is unincarnate and subsequently unites himself to human flesh in Jesus.  This is, in fact to project our humanity to crudely into the mode of divine action.  For us, we determine ourselves to be something by doing.  I determine to be a theologian by doing theology.  However, God does not determine himself by carrying out certain acts, as MacDonald shows.  Rather, God Rather, the Logos simply is Jesus because the act of God becoming incarnate belongs to God’s own eternal self-determination.  Thus, Jenson can indeed say with all consistency that “eternity is the inexhaustibility of the Son’s life” (II.219).

The issue is one of metaphysics, and centrally the role that the Bible takes in the formulation of metaphysics.  Jenson and MacDonald, in my view have helpfully questioned traditional metaphysics on the basis of a more radically Trinitarian and biblical theological orientation.  Hunsinger is unable to think “inside” of Jenson’s metaphysics, and as such finds his thought to be frustrating and untenable.  In this, Hunsinger is limited by a failure of imagination which keeps him from appropriating all the insights of Jenson’s contribution to dogmatic theology.  

Propositions On Radical Orthodoxy

Posted by on June 29, 2007 16 comments

Since Radical Orthodoxy has recently come up in a few discussions, I thought I’d post a few of my own basic thoughts about what’s really wrong with this particular theological movement.

  1. Radical Orthodoxy purports to be a theological theology.  It begins with a perfect theological instinct and aim: to show that all thought is fundamentally theological.  The theological is ubiquitous and there is no non-theological frame of reference for interpreting the world.  The question is if Radical Orthodoxy is in fact theological enough.
  2. Radical Orthodoxy is a neoplatonic theology. This point is directly related to the previous one. While Radical Orthodoxy purports to be radically theologically, it is in fact radically bound to the philosohpy of antiquity. Specifically, it is premised upon the proposition that the neoplatonic ontology of participation (methexis) is the necessary presupposition for a Christian ontology of particiaption (koinonia).  In fact it claims that the two are the same thing.  Thus, neoplatonic metaphysics establishes the conditions necessary for the incarnation, and the doctrine of the Trinity rather than the incarnation and the Trinity issuing in a distinctly Christian metaphysic.
  3. Radical Orthodoxy is a nostalgic theology.  It’s fixation on “Christianity/Platonism” as the to-be repristinated answer to all of modernity’s woes marks Radical Orthodoxy as an extremely nostalgic enterprise.  It longs for the time (real or imagined) when their particular metaphysic of participation ruled the philosophical imagination and when all aspects of life in church, state, and market were under the integrating rule of “the sacred”.
  4. Radical Orthodoxy is a bourgeois theology.  Those who are actually movers and shakers in this “movement” are aristocratic, wealthy, and western.  Their thought is forged in the academy, not in any sort of concrete ecclesial or political praxis.  This is not do demean rigorous academic theology, quite the opposite in fact.  Radical Orthodoxy tends to overdose on abstraction and jargon, and who is being quoted is far more important to it that what is being said.  As such, this movement as no real interest in the actual life of the church(es) in the world.  It is theology by a new brand of Cambridge Platonists written for their own inner circle.  As Rodney Clapp has observed, “You can’t just tell people to go to church and be better neoplatonists.”
  5. Radical Orthodoxy is a militant theology.  The fundamental desire of Radical Orthodoxy is to win.  It claims that only the Christian narrative is capable of narrating a world in which difference can exist nonviolently.  All other narratives lead to violence are as such are nihilistic.  The Christian narrative alone can outnarrate all other narratives and bring about “The path of peaceful flight…” (John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 434)
  6. Ironically, Radical Orthodoxy is thus an inherently violent theology.  It does not claim that the Triune God is the answer to the threat of nihilism, but rather that the answer is found in trinitarian theology.  Specifically in their own brand of gingerly platonised trinitarianism, that has more to do with abstractions about “exchange” and “gift” than about the actual missions and relations of the Triune persons as revealed in the economy of salavation (See in contrast D.B. Hart’s treatment of “gift” in The Beauty of the Infinite, 236ff).  Radical Orthodoxy claims that it is our theological narration of the sacred which will save the world from secular nihilism, death, and non-being.  As such it is both violent and Pelagian.
  7. Radical Orthodoxy is a revisonary theology.  It is based on a grand appropriation and revisionist readings of key figures in Christian history, such as Augustine and Aquinas.  The readings offered by Radical Orthodoxy of these figures are idiosyncratic and generally wrong.  Even from within their own movement, their revisionist readings of the Medievals have been strongly challenged (see James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy).
  8. Radical Orthodoxy is an erotic theology.  Any perusal of the literature by the major authors in the Radical Orthodoxy series will show their fascination with speculative theologies of sexuality, gender, and the body.  This is yet another example of the theological faddishness of this movement.  The bodies that are the obsession of thinkers like Gerard Loughlin, Eugene Rogers, and John Milbank are always and inevitably coupling bodies, not emaciated, battered, or mutilated ones.  Radical Orthodoxy offers and unembodied theology of the body that seems to think that the height of bodiliness is orgasm.  As such, Radical Orthodoxy is really doing nothing more for a theology of the body and sexuality than reproducing the sex-obssessed zeitgeist of our age.
  9. Radical Orthodoxy is a varied theology.  A distinction must be made between European and American contributors to the Radical Orthodoxy series and other theologians commonly associated with the movement.  Thinkers like William T. Cavanaugh, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., D.B. Hart, J. Kameron Carter, and James K.A. Smith stand quite apart from folks like John Milbank, Graham Ward, Catherine Pickstock, and Gerard Loughlin.  The orientation of nearly all American contributors to Radical Orthodoxy is based in praxis, is more strongly ecclesial, and more thoroughly pacifist.  As such the American contribution (by authors who are all associated with the Ekklesia Project) represents a far more valuable contribution to contemporary theology.

On The Rooftops: Theological Proclamations

Posted by on June 28, 2007 12 comments

Ben’s theological confessions meme is taking off at the moment.  And, as I’m the kind of person who likes to steal, bastardize, and parrot ideas, here’s something similar: Theological Proclamations.  Of course the utility of something like this is that you can be a lot less contrite and confessiony about things and feel free to let the theological crankiness roam.  I have no illusions about this becoming another meme, but if you feel like posting your own, go for it!

 I proclaim:  That Kim Fabricius has done what Carl Henry and evangelicals everywhere have always dreamed of: making the word ‘proposition’ into something theologically tolerable.  If only they liked the content of his propositions…

 I proclaim:  That narrative theology is not a dead end!

 I proclaim:  That Radical Orthodoxy is pretty much all bullshit.  Maybe all of it.

I proclaim:  That one of my biggest theological fantasies is beating John Milbank about the head and shoulders with tire iron.

I proclaim:  That Thomas Aquinas is neither the best nor worst of the western theological tradition.  He is great on some things and out to lunch on some others.

 I proclaim:  That Anabaptism and Roman Catholicism have the most to teach the church universal.

 I proclaim:  That monks, not politicos, economists, or soldiers deserve the credit for the preservation of western civilization.

I proclaim:  That infant baptism obscures the gospel and is one of the most problematic ecclesial practices to come out of Christendom.  And it did come out of Christendom.

I proclaim:  That any theologian worth his salt should drink beer!

I proclaim:  That evangelicalism in North America (at least) is a theological and ecclesial dead end.

I proclaim:  That  Moltmann my be careless and wrong about a lot of things, but he deserves a really, really, careful reading.  And you can learn some great truths from everything he writes.

I proclaim:  That German Theology is not the future.  In fact its pretty much run its course.

I proclaim:  That Lesslie Newbigin is the only modern authority that has carte blanche authority on missiological issues.

I proclaim:  That the future of theology will be in eccleisal communities, not the academy.  In fact I don’t really think that theology can really be done in the academy at all.  It just lives off its ecclesial inertia.

Radical Trinitarianism §4: Trinity, Analogy, & Participation in God

Posted by on June 27, 2007 1 comment

In the various discussions up until his point I have endeavored to lay out a radically Trinitarian approach to theological method.  What I judge to be “radical” about such an approach is its Christocentric starting point.  Under the auspices of an approach that seeks to be radically Trinitarian, Christology and theological method belong together.  In fact, I would almost want to say that they are the same thing.  When we talk about what it means to do theology, we are in fact talking about what difference Christ makes for how we talk about God.  To view theology in this way is to stand on the doorstep of a radically Trinitarian understanding of God.

A radically Trinitarian theology begins the theological enterprise with the attempt to rightly say and embody the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Thus, given that the starting point of theology is Christological, we enter the theological enterprise proper with certain central questions immediately pressing.  If the story of Jesus is the proper starting point for all theological reflection and if Christ’s story is at once the story of God and the story of humanity, then theology proper begins with the question of the identity and nature of God and humanity, and their interrelationship. 

A radically Trinitarian theology begins with a Christological center and circumference (Barth), and as such addresses the reality of God and the reality of humanity in and through the narrative of Jesus Christ.  As such, theology proper is wrongly conceived as abstract doctrines regarding the “existence and attributes of God” (Charnock).  Rather, theology proper is the theological exploration of God-with-us (Immanuel), and God-for-us (Deus pro nobis).  Theology proper, rightly conceived is the church’s exploration of the identity and reality of the Triune God in communion with created persons.

As such, the following sections will explore the nature of God’s relation with humanity in Christ.  It is here that we begin to traverse the ground which much of the recent “renaissance” of Trinitarian theology has energetically explored.  The reality of divine-human communion actualized by God in Christ raises the question of the nature of the relationship between divine and human “persons”.  What does it mean to be a human person versus a divine person?  Is the perichoretic harmony in which the Triune persons subsist analogous (or even, as some have contended, univocal) with how created persons subsist in networks of social and political relationships?  Is the Triune communion a model for human relationships?  Or does an idea such as that immanentize God and radically compromise the transcendence and sheer otherness of God?  These are the questions that proponents of the so-called “social Trinity” and their various detractors have been batting around for some time.

The following two posts in this section on Trinity, analogy, and participation in God will examine these two questions.  First, the problem of social Trinitarianism will be explored, and hopefully a way between the extremes of anthropomorphism and negative theology can be found in a Christocentric theology of the Trinity and creation.  Secondly, the issue of divine otherness and God’s relation with created persons in and through Christ will be considered.  Here, I will explore how a distinctly trinitarian understanding of God, informed by the mission of Christ in the economy of salvation yields an understanding of God’s otherness from humanity which is grounded in his pure non-competitiveness.  Likewise, such an account yields a theological account of interpersonal relations which is grounded in the theodramatic life of the immanent Trinity revealed in Christ.

Radical Trinitarianism §3.2: Christ, Church, & Scripture

Posted by on June 26, 2007 3 comments

In the previous two sections on Christology and Theological Method I have argued that theology has its genesis, not in Scripture per se, or in a general concept of God, but rather in the history of the Son of God as seen in Israel, the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and the church. It is in and through this history that we come to recognize the Triune God, the Father, Son, and Spirit as the one true God. It is likewise from within this history that the Scriptures are formed, unfolding in the life of the church as the authoritative witnesses to Christ through the Spirit.

Theology is grounded in the revelation of God in the history of Christ. It is irreducibly particular and specific. And only insofar as theology retains its particularity does it remain truly Christian theology. Only through the radical particularity of Christ is the universal and transcendental reality of the Triune God revealed and realized. From within this framework of Christocentric particularity, it becomes important to examine the relationship between the central sources for theology to which the theologian must attend. We have already discussed the role of culture in determining how theology must find ways to speak the gospel in a variety of tongues for the purpose of showing how the story of Christ is the key to all human stories. However, the reality of this all-expansive and radically inclusive narrative of Immanuel, God-with-us is the irreducibly particular story of Jesus of Nazareth.

Thus, the doing of theology is concerned with rightly narrating the story of Jesus as the story of God. What happens in Christ, Christians believe, is what happens in God. The narrative of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection for us is the reality of God. In Jesus, God happens in human flesh, “what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands”: in this Jesus, we have not the veiling of God, but his unveiling, his primal epiphany! As Paul himself declares concerning Christ,

Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:12-18)

In Christ we see, not the veiling of God, but his very apokalypsis, his revelatory unveiling before our eyes in history. To be sure, the reality of Christ is infinitely rich and beyond ever apprehending. But it is precisely this infinity that happens before our eyes in Jesus of Nazareth. For it is in Christ that “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” are hidden (Col. 2:3).

Theology must be radically Christocentric if it is to be a theology that serves the gospel. The task of the theologian is to attend to the work of hearing the word concerning Christ and passing it on (paradosis). Thus, theology is fundamentally an act of tradition. In the doing of theology we are participating in a historical community of memory whose task it is to hear anew the word concerning Jesus and pass it on faithfully to others. As such, theology is and must always be a practice which submits itself to the authoritative witness to Christ, the Scriptures.  Because theology is an action of tradition-making and tradition-participation it must be Sriptural from begining to end.

The theologian reads the Scriptures, not from a fictional vantage point of inductive neutrality, but from the standpoint of the story of Jesus Christ which stands at the center of the Scriptural narrative and which is the context for Scripture’s interpretation. The story of Christ, which is the story of God, is the hermeneutical lens for the proper reading of Scripture. Conversely, Scripture is the authoritative witness to that story which constantly reshapes our telling of it. The theologian stands in a dialectical field of discourse between Scripture and Creed, between the rule of faith which guides the church’s reading of the Bible and the genuine novum, the surplus of meaning which always refines, expands, and enriches how we understand the rule of faith as we read the Scriptures.

The Scriptures do not operate in a historical vacuum. The formation of the canon of Scripture is a deeply convoluted and messy history. There is nothing neat and tidy about it. How the church came to the point of submitting to the canon of the New Testament as we know it today is no simple story, and it is a story that is theological from beginning to end. What we have in the New Testament are those writings which the church deemed the Spirit to have led them to regard as authoritative witness to the story of Christ. The Scriptures, the church’s tradition, and the current reality of the visible church-community all belong to the same category in the theological structure of things. They are witnesses to Jesus Christ.

The church is the body of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit. It is in the church that the continued presence of Christ in the world is embodied through word and sacrament. It is only in this context, the context of the palpable, embodied, and visible community of Christ’s followers that the biblical witness to Christ is intelligible as Scripture. But neither can the church be itself without the verbum exernum of the Scriptural witness. Followers of Jesus are not infallible, and sadly neither is the visible church, as soteriologcally relevant and central as the visible church is. The Scriptures do critique and measure the church, they are the church’s canon, and the church is accountable for its faithfulness to the authority of Scripture as the Spirit inspired witness to Jesus Christ.

It is likewise in the context of the visible church that the reality of the church’s tradition, the history of the Spirit’s work in and through the body of Christ over all centuries is remembered and owned. The living tradition of the church cannot be appropriated apart from the reality of the community who lives within the stream of that historic tradition. But likewise, it is impossible for the church to be itself without reference to the stream of the great tradition. The church is the body of Christ in that it is Christ’s embodied presence in the world throughout history. No one can “create” a church; rather we can only join one. All churches, to some degree or another, stand in the midst of the great and tumultuous history of God forming a people for himself out of all nations. However, that history is not simply the history of the Spirit guiding the bride of Christ into all truth, it is also the history of a stiff-necked whore who is always resisting the Holy Spirit! The church throughout history has been suffused with the redeeming presence of God amidst human unfaithfulness to his call. Tradition is at once the history of the church’s successes and its failures.  A right appropriation of the church’s tradition requires the reality of the gospel of Christ to stand in judgment over all our attempts to be faithful to God.

Ultimately, the Scriptures, the tradition, and the church-community cannot be the source and foundation for Christian theology. Christian theology is indeed scriptural theology, it is likewise traditional theology, and it is certainly ecclesial theology. But prior to all of these things it is Christian theology. The source and foundation for all theology is Christ himself. It is in him that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are to be found, it is in him that “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9).

It is only through the hard work of being a theologian who lives wholly in the visible church-community that theology can be done with embodied grounding. Likewise it is only through the hard work of being a theologian who lives passionately through the church’s historic tradition that theology can be faithful to the God who walks with his people through history in Christ and the Spirit.  No less, the theologian must unflinchingly strive to submit to the Scriptures as the witnesses to Christ if theology is not to become a mere reflection of the zeitgeist of our current culture. To strive to be a theologian of the church, of tradition, and of Scripture is to strive to be a theologian of the gospel to which church, tradition, and Scripture all bear witness. Ultimately Christian theology is gospel theology. And the gospel is that the story of Christ is the key to all human stories. The gospel claims that what happens in Jesus life, death, and resurrection is God apocalypsed in the life of the world. The reality of this gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ is that which is proclaimed by the church, remembered in tradition, and witnessed to in the Scriptures. It is only through the diligent and faithful attention to all three of these witnesses that Christian theology is done to the praise of the Triune God.

Out of the Closet: Theological Confession Meme

Posted by on June 25, 2007 11 comments

Following Ben Myers’ new meme, here’s a list of my own “theological confessions”:

I confess:  I really do think Balthasar was a better and more interesting theologian than Barth.

I confess:  I’ve never really read much Frei or Lindbeck.

I confess:  If I wasn’t a “new monastic” free-church protestant, I’m pretty sure I’d be a Roman Catholic.

I confess:  I think Rowan Williams is the best archbishop of Cantebury and theologian of the Anglican communion since Cranmer.

I confess:  Whenever I hear the world “sola” I throw up a little bit.  In my mouth.

I confess:  I think Robert Jenson is the best theologian writing today.

I confess:  I stand with the church’s traditional teaching on marriage and sex.

I confess:  I think that T.F. Torrance, Colin Gunton, and Robert Jenson carry on and develop Barth’s theological heritage in a better and more interesting way than John Webster, Bruce McCormack, and George Hunsinger.

I confess:  I think that dogmatic precision can often come at the cost of theological faithfulness and creativity.

I confess:  I think that Henri de Lubac, not Rahner, Schillebeeckx, or even Balthasar is the greatest Catholic theologian of the 20th Century.

Radical Trinitarianism §3.1: The Gospel & the Promise

Posted by on June 23, 2007 Comments Off

Christian theology is theology forged in the realm of the Gospel. The service of the gospel is the point of theology. Thus, if the context and end of theology is found in the reality of the gospel and the shape it takes in the world, what then must theology be? Most, if not all Christian theologians would agree that the point of theology is to serve the gospel as it is proclaimed and embodied in the world. However, the wide range of possible interpretations of the gospel issue in a plethora of theologies, all of which have their genesis in the redeeming logos of God in Christ, but which are spoken in the multifaceted logoi of creation in all their diversity.

It is commonly said that the gospel does not change, but the method of its proclamation and the implications of its message should be adapted to any given cultural or historical location. In contrast, I want to argue that it belongs to the very character of the gospel itself to change, to speak in different inflections, subtleties, and rhythms. Robert Jenson makes this point best when he states that,

It is in fidelity to its own character that the gospel changes. The story about Jesus is gospel because it is the key to our stories, the liberating interpretation of the fears and commitments of its hearers. But then the story about Jesus is accurately told only if it is so told as in fact to incorporate our stories, to be about our fears and commitments. (Story and Promise, 10)

The reason that the gospel changes in every different context of proclamation (and thus the reason that there are many different theologies), is because of the very character of the gospel as a promise. The gospel promises that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the final word from God about how the entire project of creation will turn out. All acts of human promise-making, all commitments and vows which we enter into are always-already conditioned and demarcated beforehand by the reality of death. Death is the end of our promises, our commitments, and our relationships. Thus, for there to be a truly unconditional promise, a hope that is truly transcendent, it must lie on the other side of death. In short, the only possibility of an unconditional promise, yielding in unfettered hope would be a promise made on the basis of – and indeed precisely through – death and resurrection. And this is precisely what the gospel of Christ declares.

Now, this bears upon theology and the diversity of theologies precisely in that because the gospel is the unconditional promise that the resurrection of Christ, rather than our deaths will be the outcome of the world, all human ways of living and being in the world are addressed by the gospel. The gospel is the key to the stories of all people, in all cultures everywhere. Thus, the message about Jesus that is preached changes in accordance with its Pentecostal plenitude. The gospel is at once Christologically specific and pneumatologically universal. Through the innumerable logoi of all created tongues and cultures, the transcendent logos of the Triune God speaks, and in speaking it does not suppress the radical difference that lies at the heart of humanity, but rather, unites all such strands of diverse humanity “to gather into one all the dispersed children of God” (Jn. 12:52).

The Christological particularity of the gospel is mediated through a Pentecostal universality in which the self-same gospel, the story of God’s once-for-all self-giving in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ is told in a multitude of tongues. However, the gospel is always and everywhere the promise of the Triune God, that Jesus’ story is the key to all human stories. That the outcome of Jesus’ life in resurrection is the outcome of all human stories. Thus, in a culture of oppression and systemic injustice, such as that out of which Gustavo Gutiérrez writes in his A Theology of Liberation, it is absolutely essential that the gospel message be preached as God’s liberation of the oppressed people for new life in a community of shalom. This is what the gospel must mean in such a context if its character as the promise that Jesus resurrection is the outcome of all human stories is to be true.

So, if it is cogent, as I have argued, that theology takes it shape from the reality of the gospel of God, which is the promise that Jesus’ resurrection, rather than death and non-being will be the outcome of the human enterprise, it follows that the responsibility of the theologian is to discover how best to articulate the reality of that unconditional promise in the midst of the multitude of human cultural contexts. The task of theology is to faithfully show how the story of Jesus Christ incorporates, critiques, and offers hope to the national-cultural context the theologian inhabits.  This inevitably involves offering hope, and offering critique.  The fact that the resurrection of Jesus, rather than death will be the outcome of the world is not particularly good news from the standpoint of the American imperium.  The gospel confronts as well as consummates when it enters into the world of politics and culture.  The promise that Jesus’ resurrection is the final word about created reality is simultaneously a guarantee that America’s culture of violence and fear has been robbed of its power and sovereignty. 

To do theology in this way is to underwrite a distinctly Trinitarian approach to theological method. Theology begins and ends in the service of the gospel promise, the logos spoken to humanity as Christ, crucified and raised from the grave. Theology exists to bring the logos of God into the idiom of the logoi of culture. Thus, theology is at once Christocentrically particular, and Pentecostally universal. The logos of God is transcendent precisely in that the reality of God’s Triune transcendence consists in pure noncompetitive relationality. The unique Word of God which is Christ is spoken by Christ’s adopted brothers and sisters in the various and sundry words of creation without ceasing to be the transencent Word of God. Indeed, if the incarnation is truly the revelation of the Triune nature, then it is precisely in and through the diversity of the created logoi that the logos of God is most truly revealed.  There is no competition between the divine Word from above, and the creaturely response of receptive doxology (the Marian fiat), and simultaneous songs of proclamatory joy.  It is through the “flesh” of the enflamed tongues of Pentecost that the gospel, the promise of God’s salvation in and through and as Christ’s death and resurrection, is proclaimed throughout the world.  Through Christ and the Spirit, the Triune logos and the created logoi enter into a perfect realm of noncompetitive polyphonic harmony.  In the proclamation of the gospel, the Triune persons recapitulate the event of Babel, transforming the dividedness of the world into the occasion of the pneumatic and christic union as one body with many members.

The theologian’s task is to join in the chorus of Pentecostal tongues, and to show through word and deed how it truly is that the story of Christ’s death and resurrection is the true end and outcome of all human life.  This is what it means to do theology in service of the promise of the gospel, to go forth into every cultural context, and proclaim through the Spirit the depths of the riches of Christ’s drama. To show in every situation how the story of the gospel weaves our stories, and endlessly and dischordantly broken as they are, into the grand story of Christ’s death and resurrection. To be a theologian is to live in the service of this Triune promise.

Notes on Aquinas and How He’s Not a Semi-Pelagian

Posted by on June 22, 2007 5 comments

Recently there have been a few discussions about Thomas Aquinas and how he is or isn’t a semi-pelagian.  Shane first brought up the topic here, and was closely followed by Bobby’s dissenting view, here and here. I myself weighed in on the debate and finally cracked a bit further into my copy of the Summa.  And I must definitively side with Shane, that the Angelic Doctor, difficult as he may be in certain aspects of theology, is not in any way a semi-pelagian.  Here are some notes and quotations that I hope will help us bring some clarity to this debate, and the ways in which the ‘semi-pelagian’ label is flung around too flippantly in theological circles today.Here is the definition of semi-pelagianism according to The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church:

The name given to doctrines on human nature upheld in the 5th century by a group of theologians who, while not denying the necessity of grace for salvation, maintained that the first steps toward Christian life were ordinarily taken by the human will and that grace supervened only later.

J.N.D. Kelly describes semi-pelagianism as the view that:

“…all sinned in Adam, and no one can rescue himself, but the initial movement of faith (credulitas) is the sinners own. Grace surely assists the man who has begun to will his salvation, but does not implant that will” (Early Christian Doctrines, 170).

Now, Aquinas does say that the natural powers of the soul (intellection, affection, and will) are “neither destroyed, not diminished by sin” (ST 1a2ae, Q. 85, a.1).  And on that note, many passionately protestant detractors are quick to arm their semi-pelagian shotguns and start a theological fire fight.  But, Aquinas is clear that he does not believe that the natural powers of the soul, even before Adam fell, could have brought man into beatification (or maturity/fullness of communion with God). In fact, Aquinas even says that Adam would not have been able to do anything good whatsoever without God’s grace to move him to do the good:

Human nature may be looked at in two ways: first, in its integrity, as it was in our first parent before sin; second, as it is corrupted in us after the sin of our first parent. Now in both states human nature needs the help of God as first mover, to do or wish any good whatsoever, as stated earlier (…). But, in the state of integrity, in terms of the sufficiency of the power of action, human beings by their natural endowments could wish and do the good that was in proportion to human nature, such as the good of acquired virtue, though they could do no good that surpassed human nature, such as the good of infused virtue. In the state of corrupt nature, however, hey are unable to fulfill it by their own natural powers. Yet because human nature is not completely corrupted by sin, so as to be deprived of every natural good, even in the state of corrupted nature it can, by virtue of its natural endowments, work some particular good, such as building dwellings, planting vineyards, and other such things. Yet it cannot do all the good natural to it, so that if falls short in nothing. It is like a sick person who can make some movements by himself, he cannot move fully like the movements of a healthy person, unless cured by the help of medicine.

And thus in the state of nature in its integrity, on needs a strength from grace that is added to natural strength for one reason, namely, in order to do and wish for supernatural good. But in the state of corrupted nature one needs this grace for two reasons: in order to be healed and, beyond this, in order to carry out works of supernatural virtue, which are meritorious. Furthermore, in both states human beings need divine help in order to be moved to act well.” (ST 1a2ae, Q. 109, a.2 body)

In other words, Aquinas believes that even Adam, in his condition of innocence needed grace in order to move him toward any supernatural good (i.e. salvation as full communion with God). The only “good” that Aquinas sees corrupted humanity as being able to is stuff like “building dwellings, planting vineyards”, etc. This is materially no different than the Calvinist who says that even though man is totally depraved, man is not as utterly horrible as he could be. All Aquinas is saying is that basic “goods” about human nature like doing work, building things, and cultivating land are not destroyed by sin. And his point is that it is only those sort of “goods” that man’s “undiminished” reason can attain on its own. Aquinas believes that salvation lies totally outside the realm of anything that human reason could even begin to desire if not moved by grace. Thus he says explicitly:

A person’s turning to God is by free will, and for this reason one is commanded to turn oneself to God, But free will cannot be turned to God unless God himself turns it…

A person can do nothing unless moved by God… Therefore when one is said to do what lies within oneself to do, this is said to be in that person’s power inasmuch as he or she is moved by God.” (ST 1a2ae, Q. 109, a.6, r.1&2)

I hope this will help to clarify the fact that Thomas did not believe human will can begin the process of salvation, which is what semi-pelagianism purports. Rather, he held that for humankind to even will to do good or even to wish to will to do good, it had to first be moved by God’s supernatural grace. This is not semi-pelagianism, it is orthodox Christian theology. We may not agree with his anthropology, or his conception of grace and its relation to the soul, but that doesn’t make him semi-pelagian.

(See also Justo Gonzalez, A History of Christian Thought: From Augustine to the Reformation, 57-65; Jarolsav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: Volume 1,319-24 for further discussions of semi-pelagianism.)

Radical Trinitarianism §3: Christology & Theological Method

Posted by on June 21, 2007 11 comments

If theology is to be radically Trinitarian, where then must theology begin? The standard answer to the beginning point of dogmatics has long been a contentious question for Christian theologians. Do we begin with the Doctrine of God or of Scripture? It seems we should begin with God, because after all, God is at the center of everything Christians believe and do. “For from him, and through him, and to him are all things, to him be the glory forever!” (Rom. 11:36).

But, of course, as some evangelicals are quick to point out, how do we come to know God? The answer on the tip of their tongues is always and everywhere: the Bible!  But this of course unleashes a herd of methodological problems of its own. First of all the church has not always had the Bible, but it has always been busily doing theology that bears witness to the gospel. Secondly, there is of course the issue that the Bible needs to be interpreted and as such constitutes at best an ambiguous and difficult starting point for theology. Indeed, one of the key aims of theology is to guide the church into the right interpretation of Scripture, to believe for example that Jesus’ teachings about not taking vengeance are more central to the Christian life than the war-making methods of ancient Israel.

These conundrums are all to well known, and frankly, utterly boring. Both take their impetus in a foundationalist approach to theology seeks to derive either an ontological bedrock from God upon which our metaphysical claims can securely rest, or an epistemological beachhead in Scripture which can be an incontestable foundation for our claims about God. Both of these impulses are at once ahistorical and non-confessional. Christian theology, I contend is thoughtful reflection on the confession of the Christian church regarding Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as the definitive revelation of the God of Israel. Thus, the starting point of theology is Christology. The Scriptures bear witness to Christ (Jn. 5:39-40), in whom is life. And God is revealed in Christ and indeed, primordially and exclusively in Christ (Jn. 1:18).

Thus, Christian theology begins with the confession of Jesus Christ both as the Messiah of Israel’s Yahwistic promises, and as the definitive embodiment of the divine identity in the world. Christian theology begins with the confession of Christ as internal to the divine identity thus seeing the relationship between Christ and the Father as definitive of the nature of the God of Israel. The nature of Christ’s relationship to the Father, as it is unfolded in the narrative of Christ’s person and work, is likewise a narrative which depicts Christ and his Father as existing in a relationship of ontologically definitive intimacy. The relations between Christ and the Father as revealed in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are shown to be definitive of the identities of Christ and the Father, and thus of the nature of the God of Israel.

It was impulses such as these, grounded in the narrative of Jesus and his relationship with the Father that led the church to develop the various forms of the regula fide, the rule of faith. These early creeds shaped the church’s interpretation of Scripture in such a way as to orient their understanding of God to the trajectories of the gospel, namely in showing the Christ’s person and work are internal, not external to the identity of God, and coterminous with this assertion soon came the confession that the Spirit of the Father and Son, whom Christ sent upon his followers after his resurrection and ascension is likewise internal to the mystery of God.

Christian theology begins in the disciple’s confession that Christ is the Son of God. Christian theology is the working out of the confession that the divine identity of the God of Israel is what we are given in Jesus as attested to by the Spirit, Scripture, and ecclesial Tradition. The genesis of theology is in the reality of the church’s being incorporate, by the Spirit into the Son’s relationship with the Father. And thus, Christian theology is Trinitarian theology. It is theology which, precisely by confessing Christ as the incarnate God, finds itself located within the same sphere of relations which define Christ and those who make up his body. Theology then is to be radically Trinitarian, because its ultimate context is the Trinity itself. Theology exists as our human attempt to understand and rightly participate in the depths of the divine love into which we have been drawn by the Spirit of Christ. Christian theology begins with the confessional narrative of the history of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecostal breathing forth of the Spirit of the Father. And Christian theology begins thusly because the church (and thus, the theologian) is a participant in this ongoing drama of the Triune God’s redemption of the world.

All of this, of course will not satisfy everyone. Many theologians feel the need for a more secure footing upon which to do theology than the contingencies of confession and history. To found one’s theology upon a confession is an act of epistemological vulnerability (which is not the same thing as epistemological recklessness). On this point, and in all the doing of theology we must remember that we cannot be more concrete or definitive than God has revealed himself to be in Jesus. We follow a God who was tortured to death, and as such, why should needing to submit our thinking about God to the contingencies and vulnerabilites of a particular history and confession surprise us? If theology is a practice of discipleship (and it is), then we should expect it to take the same shape as its subject matter. If God is the Triune One who kenotically pours himself out into the world in the history of Jesus Christ, through crucifixion, resurrection, and Pentecost, then why should theology expect to be able to practice its task an a non-kenotic, secure, invulnerable manner? The theologian, above all must remember the words of Jesus of Nazareth who is the Trinitarian Son of the Father:

“A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household!” (Matt. 10:24-25)

Cornell West: Democracy is not my Faith

Posted by on June 20, 2007 Comments Off

I speak as a Christian- one whose commitment to democracy is very deep but whose Christian convictions are deeper. Democracy is not my faith. And American democracy is not my idol. To see the gospel of Jesus Christ bastardized by imperial Christians and pulverized by Constantinian believers and then exploited by nihilistic elites of the American empire makes my blood boil. To be a Christian- a follower of Jesus Christ- is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. This is the radical love in Christian freedom and the radical freedom in Christian love that embraces socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope.If Christians do not exemplify this love and freedom, then we side with the nihilists of the Roman empire (cowardly elite romans and subjugated jews) who put Jesus to a humiliating death. Instead of receiving his love in freedom as a life-enhancing gift of grace, we end up believing in the idols of the empire that nailed him to the cross. I do not want to be numbered among those who sold their souls for a mess of pottage- who surrendered their democratic Christian identity for a comfortable place at the table of the American empire while, like Lazarus, the least of these cried out and I was too intoxicated with worldly power and might to hear, beckon, and heed their cries.

To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely- to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic Christian identity in the age of the American empire.

H/T: Eliacin

Tragedy for The Simple Way

Posted by on June 20, 2007 Comments Off

As some of you might have heard, there was recently a 7 alarm fire in Philadelphia which decimated the Kensington neighborhood where the intentional Christian community, The Simple Way is located.  Many familes have been displaced and many other have lost all of their belongings.  Please be in prayer for this community.

Here is the most recent letter from The Simple Way:

This morning, a 7-alarm fire consumed an abandoned warehouse in our Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia. The Simple Way Community Center at 3200 Potter Street was destroyed as well as at least eight of our neighbors’ homes. Over 100 people were evacuated from their homes, and 400 families are currently without power. Despite this developing tragedy, we are incredibly thankful to share that all of our community members and every one of our neighbors is safely out of harm’s way.

This fire will forever change the fabric of our community. Eight families are currently homeless, and in many cases have lost their vehicles as well as their homes. One of our neighbors, the Mahaias Family, lost their three cars as well as the equipment one family member uses for her massage therapy business. Teenager Brian Mahaias is devastated not because he has lost his belongings, but because he fears that this fire will force him to move away from this neighborhood that is his family as well as his home.

The Simple Way has lost a community center that was home to our Yes! And… afterschool program, community arts center, and Cottage Printworks t-shirt micro-business as well as to two of our community members. Community members Shane Claiborne and Jesce Walz have lost all of their belongings, Yes! And…’s after school studio and library were ruined, and community member Justin Donner’s Cottage Printworks equipment and t-shirts were destroyed.

We are thankful that we are able to help each other during this time of need, and we will continue to keep your informed about today’s events.

We have established funds to support the families who have lost their homes, the Yes! And… afterschool program, and the Simple Way community.

A fund to support the families has been established through a partner organization, EAPE. Tax-deductible donations can be made at https://www.tonycampolo.org/online_donation.php . Please make sure to put “Kensington Families Fund ” in the memo section.

Donations to the Rebuilding Fund can be made via PayPal to contribute@awip.us.

-The Simple Way Community

Radical Trinitarianism: Index of Posts

Posted by on June 20, 2007 2 comments

This series of posts takes its impetus from the introductory and supplemental theses I posted previously on Radical Trinitarianism.  In the next few posts to come, I will attempt to offer an incohate theological exploration of dogmatics from a radically Trinitarian orientation.  I had not originally intended to turn this into a series on dogmatics, but after thinking further through the idea of Radical Trinitarianism, I found that this line of reasoning was quite fruitful, at least insofar as my own theological instincts go.

What follows will be a series of brief explorations in Christian dogmatics that seeks to be radically Trinitarian in all dimensions, and yet to avoid a certain faddishness or mere Trinitarian glossiness to what is being said.  I hope for this exploration to yield two things.  First, I hope it shows the importance and fruit of allowing Trinitarian theology to radically shift our mode of thinking in all areas of dogmatic theology.  Second, I hope that it shows how Christian dogmatics, when properly Trinitarian in form and content, are more oriented toward doxology, liturgy, and celebration which is the telos of all theological reflection.

This, then is an outline of the posts to come in my Radical Trinitarianism series.

Radical Trinitarianism

§1: Introductory Theses

§2: Supplemental Theses

§3: Christology & Theological Method

  • §3.1: The Gospel & the Promise

  • §3.2: Christ, Church, & Scripture

§4: Trinity, Analogy, & Participation in God

  • §4.1: Who’s Afraid of the Social Trinity?

  • §4.2: Theodramatic Analogy & Personhood

§5: God, History, & Drama: The Trinitarian History of the World

  • §5.1: Transcendence & Divine Noncompetitiveness

  • §5.2: From Melodrama to Drama

  • §5.3: Immutability, Covenant, & the Pasio Dei

§6: Ekklesia & Pentecost: Salvation, the Spirit, & the Church

  • §6.1: The Pentecostalization of the World

  • §6.2: The Ekklesialization of Humanity

  • §6.3: Mysterium Sacramentis: The Church as the Telos of the Cosmos

§7: Transposition & Consummation: Towards a Trinitarian Eschatology of the Cross

  • §7.1: Suffering: Horrors, Hope, & Good Friday

  • §7.2: Death: Non-Being, & Holy Saturday

  • §7.3: Resurrection: Kenosis, Plerosis, & Easter

  • §7.4: Life: Communio, Shalom, & Pentecost

§8: De Forma Trinitate: Liturgy, Life, & Joy

  • §8.1: The Great Dance: Doxological Ontology & Liturgical Identities

  • §8.2: Blood of Love, Bread of Life: Eucharist & Ethics

  • §8.3: The Great Banquet: Baptism & Feasting

  • §8.4: Triune Rhetoric: Hearing & Speaking in Communio

 §9: Inhabiting Jerusalem: Shalom, Polyphony, & the Omnipotence of Grace

Radical Trinitarianism §2: Supplemental Theses

Posted by on June 20, 2007 Comments Off

The following theses are meant to supplement and complete my introductory theses on radical trinitarianism that I posted a few days ago.  Together, these two sets of theses will form the skeleton from which I shall attempt to unpack a brief trinitarian dogmatics.

  1. A truly Trinitarian theology is thoroughly pneumatological.  It is in and through the Spirit of Pentecost that the life of the Trinity as revealed in the cross of Christ is communicated to humankind throughout all nations.  The mission of the Spirit in the economy of salvation is the pentecostalization of the world, that is the bringing together of all persons into one Christic body of communion.  The Spirit is the communal “language” of God (the Logos) transposed into human tongues.  It is from within the outpouring of the Spirit of Triune love that all created persons find their true personhood and destiny.  The Logos of the Triune life does not compete with, but fulfills the logoi of creation, suffusing them with grace and transforming them into occasions of Christic and pneumatic communion.  This is fundamentally what the church is as the community of the Spirit.

  2. What the Spirit brings about in the world through the creation of the church is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with humankind.  The telos of God’s work in the world is the being-together of himself with his created people (see Rev. 21:3-4).  The shape of this being-together of God and humanity is life in covenant.  Covenant is God’s determination to be God for us and God with us.  It is his determination for us to be for one another and with one another.  And this self-determination of God as the God of covenant is coterminous with God’s Triune being, and specifically with the history of Jesus Christ in Israel, the Church, and all creation.

  3. The history of Jesus Christ narrates the Triune God’s establishment of a new covenant economy.   What this entails is the disruption, and indeed the dissolution of all other humanly crafted modes of social life which determine the identities of human persons in terms of the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic.  The de novo social order that is brought about in the ekklesia of Christ is one in which reconciliation first appears as a reality in the world.  The inauguration of the new covenant economy dismantles the logic of cultural ethnocentrisms, racial hegemonies,  and political nationalisms.  This is the message of Pentecost.  Namely, that in the work of Christ and the Spirit a new covenant has been established which brings about the flourishing of human relationship with God and one another.  To live in God’s new covenant economy is to have our identities radically reshaped by the resurrection and Pentecost.  It is to live within the realm of Christ’s healing compassion and the Spirit’s flame of infinite love which brings about the being-together of all humanity in Christ.

  4. In the passion and resurrection of Christ, and the giving of the Spirit, the Triune God deconstructs humankind’s faulty performance of community and thus, of personal identity as ruled by the powers.  What happens in Christ is recapitulation.  Christ submits himself to the machinations of history as ruled by the logic of the powers, and in so doing, unmasks and destroys it.  Thus, Christ re-performs history through the Triune movement of his life, death, and resurrection, and thus draws creation into the new, recapitulated world of the Spirit.  Pentecost, then is the climax of the recapitulating work of Christ to remake the very fabric of human history within his own person, and thus to establish humanity as his own body, in communion with the Father through himself in the Spirit.  To live within the fabric of the new history which Christ recapitulates in his life and breathes out in the Spirit is to live within the realm of God’s own Triune life.

  5. The history that is rewoven in Christ’s person through the Spirit is the history of God’s love outstripping, absorbing, and transfiguring the logic of human violence and exclusion.  In Christ and the Spirit, the violence and the will towards death that marks the life of sin is transposed into the life of the Trinity, overcome and extinguished in the enflamed, eternal love of the Triune persons.  This is what death and resurrection means.  In Christ, the infinite peace and serenity of the Trinity is found to be unfathomably deeper than the furthest depths of human godlessness and hell.  Thus, when the depths of Satan are invaded by the luminescence of the Trinity, all darkness is cast away and in this new light, humankind is freed from the fear of death to dwell in the world of Triune shalom.  Triune redemption, both proleptically and consummately is a life of shalom.  The end which we are promised and called to in the Triune economy is a life of infinite peace, where melodrama is transfigured into drama, where discord is transposed into symphonic glory.  In the realm of Triune shalom fasting breaks forth into feasting, thirst is forever quenched by streams of living water and wine.  In short, the realm of Triune shalom is the realm of infinite joy.

  6. And this speaks also to the “point” of Trinitarian theology, if there is such a thing.  No theology is Trinitarian if it does anything less than leading the theological community into joy.  For in the end, joy is the perhaps the best description of the life in God which all theologizing about the Trinity seeks to shed light on.  To be a radical Trinitarian theologian is to live in joy.  

A Book For Each Doctrine

Posted by on June 19, 2007 7 comments

Following Ben’s helpful list of a book (well, actually two books) for each doctrine, here is my own humble list.  While I am not as well read as Ben, maybe someone will still find it useful. 

I did, however post a similar list a while back, which people could consult as well.

Theological method:
Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine
George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine

Doctrine of God:
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama Volume 5
Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God

Creation:
Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of Supernatural
Colin Gunton, The One, The Three, and the Many

Christology:
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology

Anthropology:
Alasdair McFadyen, The Call to Personhood
Ian McFarland, Difference and Identity

Salvation:
David Ford, Self and Salvation
Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace

Pneumatology:
Eugene Rogers, After the Spirit
Jurgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life

Ecclesiology:
Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio

Eschatology:
Jurgen Moltmann, The Coming of God
Richard Bauckham & Trevor Hart, Hope against Hope

J. Kameron Carter on the Pentecostalization of the World

Posted by on June 19, 2007 Comments Off

Christ’s life, which culminates in “the hour” of his passion, is the pneumatological foil to Genesis 11, the foil that reverses creation’s selfenclosure, first and ultimately, over against God and, second, but no less importantly, over against itself. Israel is crucial in effecting this reversal, for she is elected by God to mediate creation’s re-creation. Through Christ, the seed of Abraham, the world in its entirety becomes conscripted into Israel’s destiny in and for the world. Israel’s destiny is not, nor has it ever been, closed in upon itself; it is not solipsistic. Rather, her election is to be herself precisely by being more than herself, which is to say, by being for the world. Israel is called and chosen to be a non-nationalistic nation, a different kind of people—the people of God. This non-solipsistic destiny is brought to fruition in Christ, who is at once child of Israel and Son of God/Son of man. He is most truly the former as he is most fully the latter, inaugurating a New Covenant economy to the extent that he disrupts the logic of cultural and political nationalisms and identities. Having disrupted this faulty performance of language and therefore of identity, Christ re-performs it and, through the momentum of his life, draws creation into the grandiloquence of his re-performance. Such is the “pentecostalization” of the world. To be drawn into Christ’s incarnate, “passion-ate” way of existence is to be schooled in a new mode of speech and identity.

Christ’s cry of dereliction on the Cross anticipates the full “pentecostalization” of the world; indeed, it prefigures certain aspects of the miracle of languages in Acts 2. Note that the poverty or powerlessness of language signified in the cry is the very means by which Christ seizes anew the wealth of language and so re-articulates and redeems the meaning of identity, dignity and peoplehood. His life of linguistic dispossession, impoverishment, and powerlessness draws creation into the kenosis of the Logos. In this way he grants to creation a new, inflamed, Pentecostal tongue. Creation is now given “spiritual” ears to hear in Christ the language of God’s triune love. The surprising feature of this hearing, however, is that it is discerned precisely in and as the various languages (logoi) of creation itself. Creation hears the divine language by being swept into the embracing overabundance of God’s Logos, which at once creates the world and “passion-ately” releases itself into the world so that God might accompany creatures in their journey back to God and hence toward self-realization. The story of God’s journey with God’s creatures occurs, then, in history—the history and flesh of Israel, which culminates in Jesus of Nazareth. For in Jesus God has brought Israel’s history to an irrepeatably unique pitch, whereby Christ becomes translated into the languages of all nations. In brief, what emerges within this new economy of divine love is a self that is known in, through, and as another—a transformation which entails a re-imagining of identity on both personal and cultural levels. All of this means that the destiny of a given nation, its sense of peoplehood, is bound inextricably in Christ to the destinies of other nations and their sense of peoplehood. Indeed, this sense of “co-peoplehood” or “inter-nationalism” is theologically rooted in the unfolding of Christ’s existence in history as an eschatological movement towards the Kingdom of God, an unfolding in which the church haltingly and imperfectly, but for all that no less truly, participates.

J. Kameron Carter, “Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Idenity: A Theological Engagement With Douglass’s 1845 Narrative”, Modern Theology 21:1 (January 2005): 57-58

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