Monthly Archives: August 2008 - Page 2

The Worst Theologian Ever?

Posted by on August 14, 2008 76 comments

We’ve categorized theologians in many ways on this and other blogs. But here’s the new question: Who do you take to have been the worst theologian in the history of the church?

Some qualifications: The person can’t be a “heretic” in the sense of one who was in reality just not a Christian in any normative sense; they have to be at least broadly orthodox. Also, by “worst” I don’t mean just dumb or something like that. Rather I mean worst in the sense of most destructive to the church. So, who would you nominate?

Rethinking Protology and Eschatology

Posted by on August 14, 2008 17 comments

I’ve commented before on the issue of protology and eschatology, arguing along with Robert Jenson for understanding the future, rather than the past as ontologically primary. The future, rather than the past is determinative for the ultimate shape of our being. However, in line with Jenson’s own thinking, any conception of eternity is some sort of union of the past and the future, it is some form of temporal transcendence which encapsulates the present by bracketing the past and the future thus rendering all three tenses of time somehow meaningful and coherent. As such our notion of eternity, and the ontological priority of the future cannot simply play protology and eschatology off against one another as if there were no reality whatsoever to the Alpha, leaving the Omega alone with ontological status. Whatever else eternity is, it must include the reconciliation of past, present, and future in such a way that all temporal realities find their redemption and transfiguration, not their abrogation.

Thus, it seems possible to hold that we can indeed posit something like John Milbank and David Bentley Hart argue for in their narration of an ontology of original peace. What we cannot do is allow ourselves be sucked into the sort of timeless, cyclical ontology of emanation and return (as I fear Milbank sometimes comes close to). However, avoiding this problem should not necessarily deter us from openness to a notion of primordiality or original harmony. This original harmony must, if it is to be a fruitful concept be understood in an Irenaean manner in which the original harmony of creation is retroactively determined by and towards its eschatological end in Christ. We cannot dispense with the Alpha, but we must insist that the glory of the Omega, while in total continuity with the Alpha, is in some sense more glorious, just as the New Jerusalem is more glorious than the Edenic Garden. The end is greater than the beginning, and precisely in so being, infuses the beginning with meaning and beauty.

Nature, Grace, and Apocalypse Revisited

Posted by on August 14, 2008 24 comments

In previous discussions on a theology of apocalypse, the issue of nature and grace continued to come up as a crucial issue. It seems  that the key question to those espousing an apocalyptic theology relates to what sort of doctrine of creation one would have to uphold to preserve a radically apocalyptic theology of discontinuity between nature and grace (which I think the New Testament requires). Do we have to posit a notion of sin that is so radical that creation essentially loses its status as creation and as such must be completely anihiliated by grace in order for redemption to take place? Are the options either the complete and total destruction of creation by grace on the one hand, or the analogia entis and natural theology on the other? 

I suggest that there is a way forward if we rightly conceptualize the apocalyptic relationship between nature and grace as grounded in creation’s finitude rather than its fallenness. The Reformed notion of finitum non capax infiniti might be an important axiom for how we understand the relationship between nature and grace and the issue of analogy. Could it be that by virtue of it’s finitude, the entrance of the triune God’s infinite grace and love into creation in the story of Christ must always and only appear as an apocalypse? Certainly it is sin that renders this apocalypse violent, but could it not be the case that creation as finite will always stand in an apocalyptic relationship with the triune God? Could it be that we will never be seamlessly enfolded into the Trinitarian communion, instead being always erotically enraptured, ek-statically dislocated ever and again in an endless apocalypse of divine glory for all eternity? Perhaps the beatific vision, in this perspective, is not a final event of optical immediacy in which we finally see it “all” (as Dante does at the end of the Divine Comedy), but rather the beginning of the eternal, true apocalypse, which, purged of the violence of sin now becomes the endless rapture of having our visage constantly shattered, our consciousness infinitely exceeded by the boundless effulgence of the Trinitarian glory. 

In this perspective, the apocalyptic character of divine action is not ultimately determined by the reality of sin. Sin is merely a passing moment within the eternal apocalypse that all creatures experience in being saved and brought into the life of God. God’s action toward creation is apocalyptic, not because of sin; sin is completely incidental to how God is God towards us. As David Bentley Hart points out, “God simply continues to give, freely, inexhaustibly, regardless of rejection. God gives and forgives; he fore-gives and gives again. There is no calculable economy in this Trinitarian discourse of love, to which creation is graciously admitted.” (The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 351) God’s action towards us is apocalyptic, not because of sin, but rather because of the radical difference between God and God’s creatures. Precisely because the Trinitarian discourse of love is incalculable, it will always be disruptive, invasive, dislocating, as it draws us ever deeper into the infinitely alien riches of divine splendor. In the effusion of God’s infinite beauty into finite creation, the occurrence of communion between the infinite and the finite cannot be anything other than an apocalypse, an apocalypse of divine radiance and luminosity which endlessly and eternally draws us ever further up and further into the inexhaustible depths of God’s Trinitarian plenitude.

God’s action is apocalyptic because the unveiling of an infinite, transcendental beauty, can always and only be entirely beyond what can be assimilated by a finite creature. This is precisely why the revelation of God as Jesus Christ is so enigmatic, so scandalous, such a stumbling block to our finite, created rationality.  But this beyondness in which God is never apprehended is not an apophaticism, if anything it is some sort of super-kataphatism; we are not proceeding by the via negativa but rather by an overabundance of revelation. It is not that we cannot rightly speak of God, it is that we cannot speak enough of God with our created tongues. The event of Pentecost seems to be an apocalyptic event of precisely this sort.

What apocalyptic thinking does for us, then, is to reorient our notion of what it means share in the life of God as a creature. To share, as a finite creature, in the life of the infinite God is to be eternally disrupted, constantly dislocated, endlessly bewildered by “the beauty of the infinite.” Because we are finite, our experience of beatific participation in God cannot be anything other than this sort of apocalyptic experience. As seen in the resurrection, the work of God is, as Hart says “a transgression of the categories of truth governing the world, precisely because it is an aesthetic event, eyes and hands can tell it, time comprehends it, it has shape and quantity and splendor, it allows scrutiny and contemplation and astonishment, it intrudes and invites and seizes up with it strangeness and its beauty.” (The Beauty of the Infinite, 335) Thus, we must conceptualize God’s Trinitarian action in the world for our salvation as apocalyptic, not because of a theology of creation exhaustively immolated by sin, but rather because the infinitude of God’s Trinitarian being always exceeds the capacity of finite creatures to plumb its depths. It at once evokes and evades, invites and intrudes, reveals and veils. As such, our experience of participation God’s life is one of constant dislocation in our homecoming, an endlessly jarring, ever surprising existence of being changed from glory to glory. The beatific vision is eternally iconoclastic and eternally koinonial. This is the great mystery of God’s apocalypic salvation of all created reality.

Bonhoeffer on the Marks of the New Testament Church

Posted by on August 13, 2008 4 comments

In Sanctorum Communio, Dietrich Bonhoeffer outlines eight “major themes in the New Testament view of the church”:

  1. The Christian concept of the ekklesia is the fulfillment of the Hebrew concept of the gathering of the people of God (qahol).
  2. The church exists solely through the action of Christ, though in a twofold dialectical manner: on the one hand the church is complete, actualized in Christ in its being but on the other hand the church is still in the process of growing, it exists as a potentiality being realized by the Spirit, it is unfinished, awaiting eschatological perfection.
  3. The church and Christ are repeatedly identified with each other. Where the church is, there Christ is.
  4. The church is a collective personality which can rightly be identified with Christ, though, in view of the doctrine of the ascension, a complete identification of Christ and the church must be denied.
  5. The church is the presence of Christ in the world in the same way that Christ is the presence of God. As such it is a form of revelation.
  6. The purity and perfection of the church must be understood eschatologically to avoid self-righteous sectarianism.
  7. The church is visible as a corporate social body in worship and life together; it is invisible in its eschatological being as the body of Christ.
  8. It is Christ alone, not some sort of organic ecclesial reality that exists “before” and “above” the members of the church. The church is not an organism that precedes, or exists above the Christian as a given reality; the only reality that fills this role is the ascended Christ himself. The church is rather the event of “Christ existing as church-community” that takes place by the Spirit of Christ brining about an ecclesial life together between people. Notions of the church as “organism” should therefore be avoided.

The Purple Crown: A Review

Posted by on August 13, 2008 8 comments

The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom is the second book in Herald Press’s excellent new series, “Polyglossia: Radical Reformation Theologies.” Chris Huebner’s book, A Precarious Peace opened up the series with a book of supreme quality, erudition, and sophistication. Tripp York’s The Purple Crown proves to be a solid addition to the series and a helpful study on the nature of Christian martyrdom. He opens the book with a discussion of the early church’s experience and theology of martyrdom, especially emphasizing the connection between martyrdom and baptism, as well as the relationship between martyrdom and liturgy. For the early Christians, martyrdom was, in fact a public liturgy in which the powers of the kingdom of God entered into contest with the powers of Satan. 

The second chapter puts forth a theology of the body in light of martyrdom. York argues that martyrdom is impossible unless the Christian body has been duly trained for it through the discipline of ecclesial-liturgical askesis. Christian liturgy is a form of bodily training for martyrdom; without such training the body will not be able to endure the heavenly contest between God and the Devil that takes place in the site of the martyr’s body. The material reality of the body is crucially important to York’s account here. Because the body is the mode through which humanity enters into communion with the divine (chiefly through the Eucharist), the body is of the utmost soteriological importance. The body is the site of salvation itself. This is why Christians cannot offer up their bodies (or the bodies of others) for anything other than God’s own kingdom. The body, being  the site of salvation, cannot be given over to any ideology or community that is not salvific.

The third chapter is one of the most interesting ones in the book, as it deals with perhaps the most crucial question for a Christian theology of martyrdom, namely that of Christians who are named as martyrs who were killed by other Christians. Here the issue of the sixteenth-century conflict between Catholics, Protestants, and Anabaptists is particularly important. On both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide there was mutual killing which both sides narrated differently. Those of their own who were killed were holy martyrs, while those who they themselves killed were criminals being duly punished by law. The Anabaptists occupy a somewhat different place in this narrative as they alone were solely on the receiving end of violence in the sixteenth century. As such, they developed a very strong theology of martyrdom as delineated in the tome Martyr’s Mirror. 

York explores these debacles and attempts to hold them open rather than find a way to neatly close them. The question of how to make sense of a Christianity that persecutes itself cannot be easily closed, especially in view of the fact that the self-descriptions of the bodies involved in this historical debacle all invariably identified those against them as the antichrist, rather than as fellow-Christians. In the end, York shows his preference for the Anabaptists, a point that clearly has a strong case to be made for it. However, he also notes that, in addition to embodying a witness of nonviolence in the face of extreme persecution, the Anabaptist tradition includes within it an impetus towards a hermeneutic of martyrdom that is capable of recognizing the martyrs outside of one’s own camp. This is seen in the fact that, within Martyr’s Mirror there are included many stories, including at least one of the martyrdom of a Lutheran pastor. In the end, York struggles to leave the whole question of how to interpret the sixteenth-century debacle open, but one wonders if, by leaving it endlessly open, he has not in fact found a way of taming the problem itself. Sometimes telling us to “live in the tension” is itself a way of dissolving the tension.

The fourth chapter of the book is a foray into the work of William Cavanaugh, John Howard Yoder, and Augustine on the issue of the relationship between the heavenly and the earthly city. Herein York give a cogent account of the sort of theopolitical vision that has become commonly identified with the work of Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder. The church is public and political by virtue of its own reality as a community constituted by baptism and the Eucharist. It is in the church’s worship, rather than its attempts to “get involved” in the world that the church embodies its particular politics.

The fifth chapter is something of a biographical summary of the life and martyrdom of Oscar Romero. The book closes with an epilogue on the non-sacrificial economy of gift that is embodied in the witness of the martyrs. Keying off the work of David Bentley Hart, York argues that the martyrs embody a different order of vision, a different optics in which the Eucharistic mystery is lived out in conflict with the powers, showing forth to the world the luminescence of the divine economy of grace.

On the whole, York’s book is a solid and helpful account of martyrdom. The book does not quite live up to Huebner’s book which preceded it, but it should not be slighted for that reason. If anything, what could have helped York’s book more would have been more attention to connection. One of his best chapters is the fourth one, in which he helpfully lays out an Augustinian-Yoderian mode of theopolitics. However, this whole chapter offers hardly any mention of martyrdom at all, or the connection between this theopolitical vision and a proper theology of martyrdom.

Another key point that should be considered is whether or not York makes too much of the connection between the Eucharist and martyrdom. He claims that “the importance of the Eucharist for a faithful account of martyrdom cannot be overstated” (p. 152). I think, however that indeed it can be overstated, and York has perhaps overstated the importance thereof. Surely the Eucharist is central in forming a martyrological imagination, but it does so as a part of the whole sacramental and communal universe of the journey of discipleship. Eucharist alone cannot make martyrdom possible; the amount of Eucharist that was happening in Nazi Germany belies such a simplistic answer to such questions. Certainly York does not intend any such simplistic answer, but it is important to be cautious against “Eucharist” simply becoming a cipher that answers every theological question, as it, and so many other concepts and practices are wont to do.

Ultimately, York’s book offers a helpful addition to the Polyglossia series, and is a very cogent articulation of the theopolitics of martyrdom. It is to be commended to anyone interested in martyrdom and its implications for discipleship and ecclesiology.

Theological Self-Branding

Posted by on August 8, 2008 7 comments

Recently my friend, David Horstkoetter posted two lists detailing theological words that he did and did not like. And David Congdon, another friend has followed suit. Both sets of lists are fun to read and I find myself in general agreement with many of the impulses and sentiments behind what words are and aren’t found appealing in these lists. And clearly of the making of blog-lists there is no end. I’ve certainly populated this place with a ton of them. So none of this should be taken as a reflection on either of my friends any more than it is a reflection on me. My question is about this whole phenomenon of making lists that express personal theological tastes and sensibilities.

Reflecting on this dynamic of list-making, especially one as up front as ‘theological stuff I like and stuff I don’t like’ made me think more deeply about the dynamics at work in these sorts of modes of theological self-expression. These sorts of lists are often a sort of personal self-branding in which we express our individuality, personal sensibilities, social standards, and theological sophistication. Lists like these make it clear what sort of people we would and wouldn’t like, the kinds of books we think are worth reading, and the ideas and habits we disdain. In short, list-making can be a very subtle form of narcissism. Who is at the center of such lists but ourselves? Clearly all we end up doing in these lists is offering as compelling a picture of who we are and what we are into as possible, to the shaming of others if necessary.  

Theological lists of favorite books become a way to show others how much we read and how damn good our reading habits are. Movie memes get a chance to show off how conversant we are with contemporary culture through film. And on it goes. What worries me about this is that such tendencies toward self-expression through this sort of branding tends towards the commodification of theology and its concepts. I am free to assemble my own theological persona as a pastiche sexy labels, authors, and adjectives. This seems to veer dangerously close to an oddly perverse sort of commodity fetishism: now our theological ideas and sensibilities become the capital through which we define and assert ourselves over against others; they become the medium of social relationships within the theological community.

I doubt this will mean the end of my list-making, but such reflection on the potential narcissism of such self-branding modes of writing is certainly important, if for nothing else, to provide a measure of self-examination to accompany our making of such lists. The infinite undulations of the capitalist serpent are quite ubiquitous. If we allow the hegemonic inclination towards constructing and asserting synthetic, branded identities to become embodied in our theological habits we will certianly do ourselves and others quite a disservice. As such, perhaps we should be open to considering that writing a list or contributing to a meme is the most precarious rather than the most trivial of all theological forms of writing.

Martyrdom and Narrative Closure

Posted by on August 7, 2008 4 comments

A further thought on the nature of martyrdom: It seems that what makes martyrdom what it is is determined by the community of memory to which the martyr belongs and who narrate that memory. That a person’s death is a martyrdom is a hermeneutic statement about the whole shape of that person’s life and death. It is to say that, given that this person has died, that their life has been terminated and is now a completed whole, this life says this. For someone’s life to be martyrological that life must be a finished life, a completed story. As long as I am alive, the story of myself is open to revision. Only with my death will the who of who I am be permanently settled and open for final evaluation. To call someone a martyr is to claim that their life, now being closed, completed, finalized makes this statement, bears this witness, proclaims this reality.

Thus, it seems that martyrdom should be understood as a possibility, and indeed an imperative for all Christians. Of course, at this point we have extrapolated the meaning of martyrdom out to its furthest possible point. And at this point it raises the question, if this sort of notion of martyrdom is correct, does one necessarily have to be violently killed to be rightly accounted as a martyr?

The Ecclesial Supersession of Humanity

Posted by on August 7, 2008 Comments Off

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio, he concludes his early chapters on a theology of sociality, the primal state, and the doctrine of sin with the conclusion that humanity as created and fallen is, as such a “collective person” who is “capable of being addressed ethically.” As this collective person, humanity as such is one entity, one reality bound in sin through being in Adam. Humanity as we commonly think of it, and hear its story in salvation history is humanity-in-Adam. All other communities derive from and are embraced by this comprehensive community that is humanity.

Bonhoeffer then argues that, given the fact that all the contingencies and vissitudes of human life and community are embraced by the wholeness of Adamic humanity, the reality of sin can only be overcome when the collective person of Adam is “superseded by the collective person of ‘Christ existing as church-community.’” As such, the church, created in Christ is, for Bonhoeffer, the supersession of humanity. The unity of the new humanity in Christ supersedes the integrative reality of humanity in Adam.

Thus, according to this perspective, it is the ekklesia, the church that is the most ultimately broad and universal community. In short, the church is catholic. Here Bonhoeffer is extremely close to Henri de Lubac’s argument in Catholicsm: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man in which he argues that the church fulfills and completes the fundamental unity of all humanity toward which all things are created. Humanity is created, according to de Lubac towards and for a universal unity which the church then provides, integrating into its life the totality of created reality. The only difference between Bonhoeffer and de Lubac on this is Bonhoeffer’s notion of supersession. It may simply be a different in cadence and inflection, but Bonhoeffer’s notion of the ecclesial supersession of humanity is clearly indebted to a more severe understanding of sin than de Lubac would likely be comfortable with. The summing up of all created personshood within the new humanity is a dynamic and apocalyptic overcoming of the reality of creation under sin. The completion of humanity, its final inductment into its eschatological destiny only comes, for Bonhoeffer, through an apocalyptic supersession. Ultimately the church supersedes, and only thusly fulfills the true end of all created reality.

Martyrological Epistemology

Posted by on August 6, 2008 10 comments

In his superb book, A Precarious Peace, Chris Huebner explores the connection between epistemology and martyrdom:

“Martyrdom names and approach to knowledge and a way of life more generally which assumes that the truth of Christ cannot somehow be secured, but is rather a gift received and lived out in vulnerable yet hopeful giving in return. On such a reading, the martyr is not one who dies for or because of her beliefs. Rather, the death of the martyr is in some meaningful way the very expression of belief itself. Martyrdom does not arise out of a feeling of control over death. Rather, it is but an expression of a way of life that gives up the assumption of being in control.” (p. 137)

This opens up a crucial vista on the nature of truth, the gospel, and the promise of peace through Christ. The martyr does not give “evidence” for the truth of Christian belief so much as embody a particular way of knowing that refuses to understand truth as a possession. The reality given to us in the gospel, the peace of Christ, is not something that is settled, stable, or under our control, or even ever able to be totally assimilated by us.

“Peace is itself and agonistic reality. It does not name a settled territory that we can fully embody or own. It is not something we own as a first instance called knowledge, which then informs our actions. Rather, it is a gift that might be given through us only when we no longer seek violently to control it.” (p. 142)

Thus, a martyrological epistemology, a mode of knowing and bearing witness to the truth of the gospel as given to us in Christ will take the form of constantly laying ourselves open before the ever-new Word of God which speaks Christ unexpected peace to us in the form of gratuitous and unprecedented gift. Thus the Christian way of knowing, in step with the martyrs, must eschew attempts at offering a total perspective, a closed circle, an indubitably justified belief:

“The knowledge of the martyrs is not preoccupied with epistemic justification but is shaped by the epistemological virtues of patience and hope. It is an agonistic mode of knowledge that proceeds in fragments and ad hoc alliances, not the development of large-scale totalities. This knowledge resists closure, refusing the lie of the total perspective and the search for a purified idiom of speech, recognizing that language about God is finally not limited to our current vocabularies.” (p. 143)

The epistemology of the martyrs is constituted by the refusal to totalize our way of knowing the truth, but rather to live in a constant state of kenotic openness to the gift of God’s truth in Jesus Christ. And only by embracing such a martyrological way of knowing can we be grasped by the truth, stand for the truth, and be found in the truth without reducing that truth to our own possession which we are driven to violently defend

The Freedom that Can do no Other

Posted by on August 5, 2008 46 comments

Recently Paul Molnar and I debated a bit about the nature of divine freedom. I think Alan Lewis puts the issue perfectly in his amazing book, Between Cross and Resurrection:

“God is free, not as one who could do otherwise, but as the one above all who can do no other. Self-bound to one sole way of being, God is committed, necessarily but thus freely, to the cognate course of action. God’s lordship in bowing to the contradiction of the godless cross and godforsaken grace does not reside, as Barth occasionally and illogically asserts, in a prior self-sufficiency and secure immutability, but — as he more often understood and later followers more emphatically underscored — in the uncoerced impulse to self-consistency: love’s determination not to be deflected from its purposes but to flourish and perfect itself through willing self-surrender. What judges us as burdensome imperative illuminates God as free but binding indicative: the truth — for our Creator and therefore for ourselves — that only one who gives up life discovers and fulfills it. On such a basis alone can we understand how the cross and grave truly reveal God’s inmost triune life.” (p. 211-12)

God’s freedom consists not in an abyss of infinite potentiality, in an endless array of unconstrained options that are open to God. No, God’s freedom simply is what we behold in the event of Jesus’ apocalypse: his cross, burial, and resurrection. God is not free in that God could have done other than this. God is free in that God did in fact do this thing. The resurrection is God’s freedom. Any definition other than this must, inevitably find its source of theological knowledge somewhere other than in God in Christ.

Bonhoeffer as Martyr

Posted by on August 5, 2008 6 comments

In his book, Bonhoeffer as Martyr, Craig Slane makes the following argument:

“Martyrdom is a circumlocution of sorts for the quite personal and fatal consequences of the ontological collision between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. As a collision of kingdoms, martyrdom is, and always has been, rife with political overtones. And as contemporary martyrs have shown, seldom is it ‘neat around the edges.’ On a clearly reasoned yet sophisticated theological foundation, Bonhoeffer freely brought his faith into the polis–brought his confession into action–entering into solidarity with and sacrificing himself for the Jews of the Holocaust, and thus, like Jesus, he laid down his life for others. I conclude, therefore that Bonhoeffer deserves to be styled a true martyr of the church.”

This reflection is helpful in that it directs attention away from the subjective intentions, feelings, and alleged motives of potential martyrs. Too often we embrace a highly instrumentalistic and moralistic notion of martyrdom. To be martyred is to be killed because of one’s own moral effort in regard to our confession. We are killed because of our explicit and intentional efforts to bear witness to Christ through not compromising our confession, not denying Christ, and so on. 

However, as Slane shows, though the lens of Bonhoeffer, this notion is all wrong. Martyrdom is not about moral resoluteness or the absence of compromise. Clearly Bonhoeffer did view himself as compromised and was plagued with crucial questions of moral doubt throughout his life of striving for faithfulness to Christ. What makes Bonhoeffer a martyr is that the church has discerned in his life and death, the collision between God’s kingdom and the powers of Satan. Insofar as anyone dies in that conflict, regardless of their intentions, compromised status, or moral incoherence, their lives become a witness, martus. To be a martyr is precisely not to perform a valiant moral act, but rather to be caught up in the reality of Gods’ kingdom in its irruption into the world. To live and die martyrologically is to be drawn, by Christic and pneumatic grace, into participation into the Trinitarian life of God’s kingdom. As such, we can never martyr ourselves (against the Islamic notion thereof); we can only hope to become martyrs, hope that our living and our dying will be found in the realm of the kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of Satan.

The Apocalyptic Politics of Karl Barth

Posted by on August 4, 2008 Comments Off

Paul Chung on Barth again, this time on on the ecclesial-political form of life appropriate to our participation in the apocalyptic history of Jesus:

“In respect to the establishment of God’s lordship in Jesus Christ on earth, there is no place for us to remain neutral, nonparticipants, or merely spectators toward others and ourselves. In protest and opposition to the unreconciled world and the reality of nothingness, we are called to be living participants in the prophetic history of Jesus Christ. Human beings under the grace of reconciliation are free ‘to live in contact, solidarity and fellowship’ with God as well as with the reconciled world. Therefore we live ‘as companions in the partnership of reconciliation, as brothers and sisters in the fulfilled covenant of God.’ Human beings under the glad tidings of reconciliation can live and work ‘in contact, solidarity, and fellowship both vertically and horizontally’.

In fact, it is impossible to have the attitude of an ostrich, burying one’s head in the sand. This prophetic history of Jesus Christ can be depicted and understood eschatologically as the supratemporal, transcendent future that has not yet arrived but has begun with Jesus Christ. In other words, a biblical and eschatological perspective tells us about the present irruption of God’s future, or the advent of the new human being here and now, or the present passing of the old reality, the disruptive truth of the new and true reality.”

Paul S. Chung, Karl Barth: God’s Word in Action (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, Forthcoming). 370.

A Theology of Adjectives

Posted by on August 4, 2008 2 comments

I have recently called for a proper theological account of the use of adjectives in theology. One of the great banes of contemporary theology is the sort of sloganeering which tends to dominate discussions. Adjectives tend to become gaudy baubles which adorn the views advanced by the author, while the views of his oppositional interlocutors are confined to an arid desert of bland description and stale summarization. In short, adjectives become a theological form of passive-aggressive weaponry, and indeed sometimes an entirely aggressive form of armament. And I am as guilty of that as anyone.

Against this, I propose that the use of adjectives in theological discourse should primarily function, not to differentiate claims one is advancing from claims one is disputing, but rather in the mode of doxology. Theological use of adjectives should represent, not a way of gussying up one’s theological claims over-against competing claims, but rather as a mode of doxological excess in which our attempts to speak about God are drawn into God’s infinite plenitude, glory, and beauty. Our use of adjectives should be evoked by the reality of God in Christ about which we enter into discussion rather than contrived for the instrumental purpose of persuasion and rhetorical victory.

Clearly there is a place in theology for polemic and rhetoric. However, the fundamental point I want to advance about our basic theo-grammatical sensibilities is that the beauty of theology’s language, its deep structure, its poetic-linguistic richness must fundamentally derive from, refer to, and be grounded in the beauty of theology’s object: the Trinitarian God revealed in the cross and resurrection of Christ. Our use of thick description, of adjectival depth must be rooted in and evoked by the God to whom we seek to bear witness in our theologizing. The proper mode for the use of adjectives in theology is ultimately, and fundamentally doxological rather than argumentative. This is really just a point about the nature of theology as a whole.

Reclaiming Johannine Theology

Posted by on August 2, 2008 13 comments

Paul is all the rage among contemporary theologians these days, and indeed things have pretty much always been this way. In virtually every introduction to the New Testament that I have read, and even books as wonderful as Richard Hays’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament, certain non-Pauline segments of the NT get pretty short shrift. This is particularly true of the general epistles which are regularly left entirely out of standard NT introductions and theologies. This, I regard as a pretty big problem.

In particular this is problematic in light of the importance of the distinctive voice of the Johannine corpus in the witness of the NT as a whole. Lately I have been immersed in the Gospel and Epistles of John (First John is not an epistle however, but that’s another matter) and am becoming more and more convinced that these books of some of the most theologically intricate and subversive in the entire canon. The depth of Johannine sophistication, particularly in regard to issues of Christology, Trinitarian doctrine, and ecclesiology is consistently underestimated in the broad sweep of Christian theological reflection on the NT. Moreover, there is a fundamental and deeply theological and literary unity to the Johannine corpus (including Revelation) that is more intricate and intentional than perhaps any other discernible group of books in the NT.

Fortunately scholars like Raymond Brown, David Rensberger, and J. Louis Martyn have done a great job approaching the Johannine corpus from the point of view of sociological analysis, biblical theology, and exegesis. There is much to learn from these and other thinkers who have investigated deeply into Johannine theology, and the ecclesial roots of these writings in the “Johannine Community”, which, even if reconstructions such as Brown’s are a bit overconfident, do make clear a very different and very radical form of Christian community and life taking place alongside the Pauline and Petrine churches during the first and second century of the church’s existence.

My point in all this is merely to argue that just as theologians and philosophers are beginning to “rediscover” Paul as a significant source for theological reflection, a similar recovery of John promises to be equally insightful. The Johannine corpus is layered in a radically Christocentric cosmology, a distinctively Trinitarian aesthetic, and a vibrantly missional-communitarian ecclesiology. A recovery of the Johannine Gospel promises to be be as fruitful for confessional theology as the recent resurgence of theological interest in Pauline studies, perhaps even more so. I hope to help facilitate more discussion along this line with a lot more future writing and commentary of the Johannine corpus.

Christian Politics as Anarchic Liberation

Posted by on August 1, 2008 6 comments

Commenting on Karl Barth’s radical theological politics in the second edition of Karl Barth’s Romans commentary, Paul Chung makes the following argument:

“…Christian politics, which is a demonstration, witness and parable of the eschatology of God as totaliter aliter, becomes meaningful in light of God’s gracious action in Jesus Christ. Theological radicalism of eschatological vigor as seen in [this] christological exclusiveness leans toward an anarchism in its sociopolitical application. Real revolution comes from God, not from human revolt. We have a hope that is the coming world, where revolution and order are one. For Barth, God’s grace is the sign that has the significance of the absolute, the categorical imperative. Barth’s negative dialectics cannot be adequately understood without the principle of the great positive possibility, which is the truly revolutionary action of love. Love sets up no idol, and it is the good work by which one overcomes evil. As the denial and demolition of all that exists, love is the inversion of all concrete happening. ‘Love is the destruction of everything that is—like God [sicut deus]: the end of all hierarchies and authorities and intermediaries.’”

Paul S. Chung, Karl Barth: God’s Word in Action (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, Forthcoming), 227

What do you think of this? Is the radical sort of “anarchic liberation” that is given to us in Christ’s redemption the end of mediation; the transposition of creation into a realm of immediate effulgent love? Or is the freedom of the gospel another sort of freedom, not from mediation and authority, but a radical inversion of the sinful instantiations thereof, consisting of a sort of perichoretic intensification of our mediatedness in relation to God?

It seems to me that Barth’s argument is precisely against the notion that human constructions, intermediaries, and powers are dismantled before the Word of God in Christ which kills and makes alive. This need not mean the end of mediation, per se, as long as we see that the mediated character of our relationship to God is always God’s own self-mediation of Godself to us in Christ in the Spirit. But what does even that mean? What might it mean for God to mediate Godself to us? How is that any different that God being immediately present to us? It seems to me that all this talk of mediation needs to be tempered with an account of divine action. Only then will we really have answers for these sorts of questions.

However, the ultimate question that this quote, and Barth’s Romans commentary advances has to do with Christian politics: is Christian politics best understood as this sort of anarchic liberation? If not, then how should Christian politics be understood? If so, what then does that mean for us?

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