In an attempt to articulate some of the basic moods, motifs, and styles that determine my own way of trying to approachtheology, I’ve decided to do a short series of posts on this. As Robert Jenson has stated, it is the fate of all theological systems to be dissected. While I don’t have anything approaching a theological system, I am happy to offer some of these more self-revealing statements of my own theological proclivities, priorities, and sentiments to be dissected in whatever way people see fit. Personally, I think writing something like this would be a good exercise for anybody who does theology intentionally.
So, that said, here are the posts that will be forthcoming in the next few days:
My Theology Is…
- §1: Christocentric-Trinitarian
- §2: Logocentric
- §3: Ecclesiocentric
- §4: Apocalyptic
- §5: Iconoclastic
- §6: Sacramental
“Paul preached and then explained in various pastoral, community-forming letters, a narrative, apocalyptic, theopolitical gospel (1) in continuity with the story of Israel and (2) in distinction to the imperial gospel of Rome (and analogous powers) that was centered on God’s crucified and exalted Messiah Jesus, whose incarnation, life, and death by crucifixion were validated and vindicated by God in his resurrection and exaltation as Lord, which inaugurated the new age or new creation in which all members of this diverse but consistently covenantally dysfunctional human race who respond in self-abandoning and self-committing faith thereby participate in Christ’s death and resurrection and are (1) justified, or restored to right covenant relations with God and others; (2) incorporated into a particular manifestation of Christ the Lord’s body on earth, the church, which is an alternative community to the status-quo human communities committed to and governed by Caesar (and analogous rulers) and by values contrary to the gospel; and (3) infused both individually and corporately by the Spirit of God’s Son so that they may lead ‘bifocal’ lives, focused both back on Christ’s first coming and ahead to his second, consisting of Christlike, cruciform (cross-shaped) (1) faith and (2) hope toward God and (3) love toward both neighbors and enemies (a love marked by peaceableness and inclusion), in joyful anticipation of (1) the return of Christ, (2) the resurrection of the dead to eternal life, and (3) the renewal of the entire creation.” (Michael Gorman, Reading Paul [Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008], 8).
“If the human race fell in a mere man named Adam, what happened to the human race in the death, resurrection and ascension of the incarnate Son of God? Why is it that the Church has been so quick to give Adam such status in the whole scheme of things and so slow to recognize the surpassing greatness of Jesus Christ? Is the incarnate Son less than Adam? Is Jesus Christ less a factor in human existence? Adam is only a man, a mere shadow when compared to the incarnate Son of God.
Let’s just be honest: ikons are cool again. We don’t know when it happened that non-Eastern Orthodox Christians began to be fascinated with the tradition of Christian iconography, but we can certainly see that it is legion today amongst Christians from nearly every sub-tradition of the faith. Whether we are evangelicals, Catholics, emergent types, or neo-monastics, the lure of the ikon as a tool of spiritual formation is ubiquitous in the church today.
One of the most provocative claims made by Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian theology is that temporality has its source in the eternal life of the Trinity. In his view God is temporality itself, containing the reality of history within God’s own life. This is important to understand in light of God’s claim that the event of Jesus’ resurrection constituted the identity of God. The reason that this does not endanger the freedom of God is because the whole reality of history is itself incorporate into the eternal life of temporal infinity which is the event of God’s being God.
Thus for Jenson the doctrine of the Trinity “states the plot of the temporal event which is the reality of God.” He claims that the gospel “uses the word ‘God’ for the event that what happened with Jesus gives our lives plot by reconciling past and future in the present” (Story and Promise, 117). What is particularly interesting about this is the way in which Jenson unapologetically links the three persons of the Trinity with the temporal realities of past, present, and future. 
Perhaps the recurring issue in discussions of Christian discipleship regards simply whether or not it is something that Christians should think they can actually do. Not long into the established church’s history the notion became prominent that the ethics of Jesus, particularly as recorded in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) and other prominent texts in the gospels (cf. Luke 6:17-46; 14:15-34), simply cannot be done by people who live in the real world. They are rather “counsels of perfection” which are either only for a specific clerical or monastic caste (as in Medieval Catholicism) or they are simply there to remind us all of our complete inability as sinners to conform to God’s commands (as in Luther and most of Protestantism after him).
What I want to suggest then, is that the call of Jesus to discipleship is not merely a moral call to a really, really difficult way of living for the sake of becoming virtuous. Rather it is a call that fundamentally challenges the conventional metaphysics of violence whereby we construe the entire shape of the cosmos. The call to discipleship is a call to nothing less than a subversion of conventional metaphysics. A call which suggests that it is in fact supremely difficult to live in this world as a murderer, a liar, or an adulterer. As Stanley Hauerwas has rightly remarked, becoming a liar is a substantial moral achievement. Practicing these acts are what is hard; they are what put us at odds with the shape of the cosmos. Truth-telling, confession, the love of enemies, and the sharing of possessions are not, according the metaphysics of discipleship what make for a difficult life. Rather they are the true shape of human life which, if entered into constitute a cessation of striving against the grain, of kicking against the pricks. In other words, it is the case, as John Howard Yoder said, that “people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe.”
Recent Comments