Daily Archives: April 25, 2008

The Best Theologian-Writer?

Posted by on April 25, 2008 53 comments

One of the wonderful things that is a sad rarity in reading theology is to find a theologian who is also an excellent writer.  Sadly the greatest of theologians are often some of the worst writers you’ll ever read.  I remember my glee in reading Alan Lewis’ wonderful book Between Cross and Resurrection because not only was it some of the best theology I had ever read, it was definitely the best theological writing I had yet encountered.  David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite was another such joyous experience of great theology being wed to beautiful writing. 

Other theologians I’d put in the good writers category would be Robert Jenson, Herbert McCabe, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.  Where else have people read theologians whom they consider to be good writers?  In what great theologians does true literary ability meet theological acumen?

More Yoder, More Tradition

Posted by on April 25, 2008 Comments Off

“What we then find at the heart of our tradition is not some proposition, scriptural or promulgated or otherwise, which we hold to be authoritative and therefore exempted from the relativity of hermeneutical debate by virtue of its inspiredness.  What we find at the origin is already a process of reaching back again to the origins, to the earliest memories of the event itself, confident that that testimony, however intimately integrated with the belief of the witnesses, is not a wax nose, and will serve to illuminate and sometimes adjudicate our present path.”

–John Howard Yoder, “The Authority of Tradition”, in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: UNDP, 1984), 70.

Switch to our mobile site