Monthly Archives: October 2008 - Page 2

The Dwelling Place of All-Consuming Fire

Posted by on October 14, 2008 5 comments

In his article in The Gospel of John and Christian Theology, “God in the World–The World in God,” Jürgen Moltmann offers some interesting theological engagement with the concept of perichoresis nascent in John’s gospel, but perhaps more interesting are his reflections on the progression of his own theological work. Put roughly, Moltmann claims that his thought moves “from eschatology to ecology,” namely from an emphasis on the God of promise and hope, the God of the exodus to the inhabitable Trinitarian God who draws the world into God’s own life. Thus, Moltmann sees himself as moving from a radically eschatological theology, to an ecological theology of divine-creaturely indwelling.

Now, this I take to be a generally negative move on Moltmann’s part. Moltmann’s move towards a pneumatocentric ecological theology of creation seems to me to be a profound devolution from his early eschatological work in Theology of Hope and The Crucified God.

However, Moltmann does make some interesting points in this recent essay, one of which is how a theology of the dwelling of God with God’s people is not necessarily a rejection of an apocalyptic theology of God’s invasion of the cosmos in favor of a sort of ecological-pneumatological immanentism (though I think Moltmann’s later works fail his own test on this score). He points to the Torahic narrative of the dwelling of Yahweh with Israel in the Exodus and the following sojourning of Israel in the wilderness. Yahweh descends and dwells with the people in his Shekinah presence in the tabernacle which signifies not any sort of immanence of God-in-us, but rather the dynamic presence of the transcendent which leads the people in the sojourn through the wilderness. “God’s presence in Israel does not lead them to rest in the desert, but into movement towards the promised land. It is a presence inaugurating history, not concluding history.”

Thus, the notion of God’s presence dwelling in God’s people, seen in the perspective of the Old Testament narrative, does not signify any sort of over-realized eschatology in which the church somehow possess the fullness of the beatific vision in its own life. Rather, it summons us to a vision of the uncontainable presence of the God who leads us as a consuming fire into a land we do not know and a future we cannot conceive (cf. 1 Cor 2:9). The claim that God dwells with us is no domestication or institutionalization of the uncontainable presence of God, nor a denial of God’s utter freedom. Rather we claim that God dwells in his people in utter fear, in awe of the transcendent presence that has claimed us and descended upon us in the ineffable decision of election. God’s intimate indwelling within the congregation of the faithful is not any sort of a claim to preacomplished eschatological beatitude, but rather a testimony that Christ is indeed and really “with us,” always leading us to the ends of the earth and the end of the age (Matt 28:20) as a inexhaustible, uncontainable fire who descends upon us and remains.

So, in a way that is not immediately obvious, the language of the church as the “dwelling place” of God, or the “home” of the Trinitarian life on earth is not a claim to the church’s own possession or capacity. Rather it is a claim that the church is an absolute emptiness into which the consuming fire of the Triune God descends, transfiguring, consuming and leading us on into the uncharted reaches the wilderness in which we sojourn, awaiting the city that is to come, whose maker and builder is God (Heb 11:10).

Electing Not to Vote: One Thorough Review!

Posted by on October 14, 2008 6 comments

N. Dan Smith has just finished a chapter-by-chapter review of Ted Lewis’s book, Electing Not to Vote published by Cascade Books. Hard to get a more thorough review than that! I hope that folks will benefit from his erudite engagement with this rather contentious theological text. I also hope that its exhaustiveness will not deter others from buying the book and reading it for themselves however!

In the current political climate where everything in the American political process seems very high stakes, regardless of your perspective, it seems unlikely that a book that advocates non-voting will win much agreement. As such it is nice to have such a thorough engagement with what is likely to be a very unpopular thesis. The kind of honest engagement in these chapter reviews says a lot about what a serious, critical, and patient engagement with the implications of theopolitics should look like, especially when it comes to interacting with the work of others.

Illegitimate Children of Abraham

Posted by on October 13, 2008 12 comments

There are three “Abrahamic” faiths. Judaism, Christianity, Islam alone among world religions trace the beginnings of their story back to a single patriarch, all of whom claim to be his true heirs, interpreted variously of course. But herein lies the fundamental difference between Christianity on he one hand and Judaism and Islam on the other. For Christianity it is precisely not legitimate ethnic or national descent from Abraham that places one within the people of God. This is a distinctly biblical point. God is able to raise up true children of Abraham from stones (Luke 3:8), it is the Spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no value (John 6:53). The incorporation of persons into the people of God according to the Christian faith, be they Jew or Gentile is always a distinctly unnatural event.

This is clear in the Pauline corpus with regard to the Gentiles (see especially Romans 11  cf. Eph 2:12-13). However the Johannine corpus goes even further in arguing that being reborn into the true community of God’s people is a miraculous novum, not just for Gentiles, but for the Jews as well. “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:11-13). The people of God, in John’s gospel in particular are constituted not by any sort of legitimate, natural, historical succession. Rather the people of God are constituted by the miracle of being reborn by the Spirit into a radically new community that interrupts and scandalizes all “natural” communities.

Thus, from the perspective of inter-religious dialogue, one key element that distinguishes Christianity from the other two Abrahamic faiths is Christianity’s explicit denial of what the other two vehemently claim, namely that “legitimate” descent from Abraham substantiates the claims of their faith. Christians make no claim to be legitimate children of Abraham, rather they claim that their status as God’s people is derived from nothing inherent within themselves either ethnically or politically. We are the people of God solely and only because of the radical miracle brought about in Jesus Christ which shatters and scandalizes any “natural” claim to be God’s people through historical natural succession.

Can the Church Embody the Word?

Posted by on October 13, 2008 3 comments

John Webster suggests that the church can “never embody or present or realize” the “word of reconciliation” in its own midst. Webster is concerned to stress the utter gratuity and irreducibility of God’s action over against the church’s action. God saves and we do not. We are never the subject of salvation, always its object.

However, does the gratuity and singularity of God’s action entail the church’s utter extrinsity to God’s saving action? Bonhoeffer suggests, not that the church has some sort of immanent ability to embody the Word of God, but rather that the Word itself seeks the ecclesial community within which to take shape. The Word itself “has an inherent impulse toward community.”

The question is decidedly not one of the church’s capacity to participate in or extend God’s own action, rather it is a question of the character of divine action itself. The Word of reconciliation is (of course!) beyond any human ability to embody or realize in that the presence of the Word in history is an absolute novum, an apocalyptic event. Rather, the apocalyptic Word, by its very nature seeks out the church, makes it its own, and transfigures it, and conforms it ever and again into the image of Christ, entering into it from without, and just so indelibly making the church its home. The church is, as Barth liked to express it, the “crater” left by “the great disturbance” of God’s invasion of history in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The church is a the crater, the space created by the presence of God which transfigures, and recreates by first dissolving and bringing to nothing.

The church does not, then “embody” the Word in the sense of performing some sort of act of cultural-communal repetition whereby they achieves something. Rather the church is a space of emptiness, an epicenter created by the apocalyptic Word of God which is always and ever at the center of the church, as its vivifying life which is always alien, new, and irreducible to something immanent. The church does not so much embody the Word as the presence of God in Christ “Words” the church, seizing it and catching it up into the movement of God’s apocalypse which dissolves and renews the world.

Is the Church the Presence of Christ?

Posted by on October 13, 2008 4 comments

In Sanctorum Communio Dietrich Bonhoeffer claims that “The church is the presence of Christ in the same way that Christ is the presence of God.” Here is truly a radical claim, and the question I have is how it can be true or if it can.

In other words, how can the church be the presence of Christ in the same way as Christ is the presence of God? What is that way?

Ultimate Church Sign Battle

Posted by on October 10, 2008 21 comments

Source.

Nature and Grace, Barth and De Lubac

Posted by on October 10, 2008 11 comments

Henri de Lubac and Karl Barth tend to be played off against one another in regard to the issue of nature and grace. De Lubac, as is well known argued that the “natural” is inherently oriented towards its “supernatural” end in Christ. Thus there is no realm of “pure nature” irrespective of the supernatural end of redemption. Barth, it is thought argued in contrast that “nature” bears no inherent ordering towards the supernatural at all. For Barth grace is an apocalypse which shatters a completely estranged natural order. However, a closer reading of both Barth and de Lubac bears out that the difference between them should not be located in the issue of nature and grace–the differences between Barth and de Lubac, which are important are to be found elsewhere.

De Lubac nowhere suggests what Barth explicitly denies, namely that there is a natural order which participates with God in an “unbroken” manner. Nature, for de Lubac is not a divine seed, but rather an emptiness which is “ordered” to its fulfillment in Christ precisely because it exists as a privation. Nature for de Lubac is no sort of divine seed, or immanent movement toward the supernatural, rather it is instilled with a desire for the supernatural that is born precisely out of its own poverty. “Between nature as it exists and the supernatural for which God destines it, the distance is as great, the difference is as radical, as that between non-being and being: for to pass from one to the other is not merely to pass into ‘more being,’ but to pass into a different type of being. It is a crossing by grace of an impassable barrier.” (The Mystery of the Supernatural, 83) What de Lubac denied in his controversy with neoschoalsticism was the claim that the natural and the supernatural have utterly separate ends in and of themselves. His intent was never to affirm that there is any sort of immanent potentiality in nature to move towards God. “In short, for Christians created nature is no kind of divine seed. . . . The longing that surges from this ‘depth’ of the soul is a longing ‘born of a lack’ and not arising from ‘the beginnings of possession.’” (p. 84)

This notion is strikingly in line what Barth’s own claims, ironically enough the “iconoclastic” Barth of Romans. In his discussion of Romans 1 and the issue of the “natural” knowledge of God in creation, Barth argues that what is known about God is precisely that God is unknown. All humankind knows that they do not know God and that those they do know as gods are in fact no gods at all. Thus, rather than honor that which they do not know, humanity exchanges the glory of the unknown God for that of the known “No-Gods” whom they idolatrously worship. However, it is an act of suppression which never extinguishes the inner desire for that true God that all human know they do not know outside of Christ. Thus, as Barth argues “though men shall continue to prefer their ‘No-God’ to the divine paradox; though the manifestation of what cannot be made known be the impossibility before which only the thoughtless are not terrified; yet the faithfulness of God to men still abides; there still abides too that profound agreement between the will of God and that which men, longing to be freed from themselves, also secretly desire; there abides the divine answer which is given to us when the final human question awakens in us.” (Barth, Romans, 41, italics added)

Barth does not posit a realm of “pure nature” or the sort of extrinsicism what de Lubac excoriated in connection with neoscholasticism. Rather both theologians, in different, but strikingly similar ways argued that nature is itself an emptiness longing for fullness that lies utterly beyond it. Nature has no autonomous power to mover toward God, nor an immanent movement towards God operative within it. Nature is that which secretly desires that which it does not know, the “mystery of the World” (Jüngel) which dissolves and establishes the very foundations of creation in transfiguring all things into the novum of the new heavens and new earth.

The Most Influential Evangelical?

Posted by on October 9, 2008 34 comments

In response to Gundry’s claim that Dobson, a psychologist has displaced Billy Graham, the preacher as the most influential evangelical, I wonder what other candidates people might put forth as today’s most influential evangelical?

One strong possibility seems to be Rick Warren, who offers something of an amalgamation of Graham’s homiletical practice and Dobson’s psychologizing approach to Christianity repackaged in an lean CEO form. Warren’s role in the recent campaign between McCain and Obama is pretty indicative of his growing influence in evangelicalism.

But what other thoughts are there on this? Who is today’s most influential evangelical?

Toward Paleofundamentalism

Posted by on October 9, 2008 1 comment

In his provocative book, Jesus the Word According to John the Sectarian, Robert Gundry excoriates “contemporary evangelicalism, especially its elites in North America” for their attempts to engage culture in such a way as to gain influence, respect, and notoriety in the broader sphere. He styles himself as a “paleofundamentalist” and sees in the Johannine corpus a model of faithful sectarianism that insists on radical discipleship and separation from the world. Truly and odd, and interesting book.

He notes, among other things the captivity of evangelical Christianity to psychologizing messages and dumbed down concerns with “daily practicalities” for Christian living rather than substantive theological preaching or teaching. “Symptomatically,” he claims “the most influential evangelical is no longer and evangelist (Billy Graham), but a psychologist (James Dobson).”

What is funny is that Gundry has always been on the margins of evangelical theological scholarship, having been ousted from the Evangelical Theological Society many years back for his commentary on Matthew that they felt conceded too much to critical methods generally rejected by evangelicals. One thing that never ceases in evangelicalism is the game of “Who’s the Liberal?”

Gundry’s book, wittily and ironically suggests that it is his more “conservative” evangelical interlocutors that are today’s “modernists” and calls for a new kind of fundamentalism. Whatever one may think of it is sure is interesting to read someone gutsy enough to throw it in evangelicals faces for not betraying the “paleofundamentalist” vision of the gospel of John, a treasured mine of evangelism proof texts!

The Incomprehensibility of Grace

Posted by on October 9, 2008 Comments Off

“Grace is the incomprehensible fact that God is well pleased with a man, and that a man can rejoice in God. Only when grace is recognized to be incomprehensible is it grace. Grace exists, therefore, only where the Resurrection is reflected. Grace is the gift of Christ, who exposes the gulf which separates God and man, and, by exposing it, bridges it. . . . Where the grace of God is, the very existence of the world and the very existence of God become a question and a hope with which and for which men must wrestle. For we are not now concerned with the propaganda of a conviction or with its imposition on others; grace means bearing witness to the faithfulness of God which a man has encountered and recognized, and which requires a corresponding fidelity towards God. The fidelity of a man to the faithfulness of God–the faith, that is, which accepts grace–is itself the demand for obedience and itself demands obedience from others. Hence the demand is a call which enlightens and rouses to action; it carries with it mission, beside which no other mission is possible. For the name of Him in whom the two worlds meet and are separated must be honoured, and for this mission grace provides full authority, since men are shattered by it.”

– Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans 6th Edition. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 31.

Yoder, Situations, and Moral Reasoning

Posted by on October 8, 2008 1 comment

John Howard Yoder delivers a lovely zinger to the once fashionable, and still somewhat popular notion that authenticity, truly loving motivation constitutes the nadir of ethical action. Thus, the issue is not discerning the “right” action to take prior to the appearance of a specific situation, since such decisions can only be made in the moment. The only way to be truly ethical is to discover in that moment what it will mean, here and now “to love the neighbor.” This is what we commonly know as “situation ethics.” The idea is that we have an overriding principle of love of neighbor and then discover in the situation–which cannot be known beforehand–how to express that love, and thus make ethical choices.

Yoder points out however that this is not “one of several possible ways to do moral reasoning”, rather it is a way not to do it. He notes that “the function of the noun ‘situation’ is not to draw our attention to a specifiable location of the person within structures beyond the self, but rather to draw our minds away from any temporal continuity, especially from any preparation before the ‘situation’ in order to make an informed response to it.”

In other words, situation ethics is actually an escape from the hard work of moral discernment because it simply accepts the social reality that produces the “situations” which one must simply be present lovingly within. There is nothing radical about it whatsoever, rather it is a covert reification of whatever social, political, or ideological structures exist and shape the situations we encounter. To be called to be loving “in the situation” masks a perverse demand that we accept the conventions that create the situation. As such situation ethics, in any guise are always an ally of the satus quo.

Does the Church Precede the World?

Posted by on October 7, 2008 10 comments

John Howard Yoder famously makes the claim that the “church precedes the world” in at least two key senses:

“The church precedes the world epistemologically. We know more fully from Jesus Christ and in the context of the confessed faith than we know in other ways. The meaning and validity and limits of concepts like ‘nature’ or of ‘science’ are best seen not when looked at alone, but in light of the confession of the lordship of Christ. The church precedes the world as well axiologically, in that the lordship of Christ is the center which must guide critical value choices, so hat we may be called to subordinate or even to reject those values which contradict Jesus.” (The Priestly Kingdom, p. 11)

A bold and revolutionary claim to be sure. However, what does it truly mean for the church to precede the world in this sense? Or is this even conceptually possible?

The Gates of Hell and Indefectibility

Posted by on October 6, 2008 20 comments

Jesus’ claim in Matthew 16:18 stating that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church has long been the subject of ecclesiastical disputes, especially about the authority of the papacy, the church’s powers of absolution, and so on.

However, the common perspective among such readings of this verse center on the claim that Jesus’ promise (be it to Peter and his allegedly continuing office, or to the church as a whole) guarantees the church indefectiblity or infallibility. This verse is the locus classicus of the claim that the church is promised, by Christ a status impeccability and constancy in faithfulness.

Now, while such a reading of this verse has certainly become well enshrined in  ecclesiastical claims, it reflects a very irresponsible reflection on the text itself. Truthfully it seems to me that one can only get to a theology of ecclesial indefectiblity via this text by reading a whole host of theological claims back into it that are not there.

The language of “gates of hell” is the first thing that tends to get ignored in the way this passage is deployed. Jesus’ claim that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church is a military metaphor of a rather clear kind. If the church is set in conflict with the gates of hell, the the direction of aggression–defense flows in the direction of church–hell, not the other way round. In other words, nothing in Jesus’ claim leads us to think that the church will always withstand the onslaught of the powers of darkness and remains perpetually faithful, rather the verse implies the reverse, namely that the powers of hell will not be able to stand against the incursion of the church into its territory.

Jesus’ words should not be construed as promising the church institutional infallibility, such a sense is foreign to the military metaphor of the text. Rather Jesus is promising that the church’s apocalyptic invasion of the powers of hell will not be withstood. Nothing will stand in the way of the church’s invasion of the territory claimed by the devil. This verse promises that the mission of the church will never fail, not that the church is guaranteed institutional indefecibility. Rather the promise to the church is that its own defections (cf. Matt 16:23; Luke 22:31) will not bring about the failure of the church’s mission, grounded as it is in the sole lordship of Christ (Matt 16:16).

To be sure this implies a certain sort of theology about the church’s indefectibility, but only of the sort that promises that the church will never degrade in such a way as to render the completion of its mission impossible. Thus, this passage implies the church’s indefeatability; the church clearly will never cease to exist or be malformed to such a degree that its mission fails. However this by no means implies indefectibility, let alone infallibility. Rather it promises that our defections and unfaithfulness will never be such that the mission of the church will fail. It expresses the commitment of Christ to the church, to preserve it in its missional calling, which happens all to often despite our unfaithfulness rather than through our faithfulness.

Yoder on Protestant Identity

Posted by on October 6, 2008 11 comments

“All that is sure about ‘Protestant’ identity is that it is not Roman Catholic: it does not have a pope or magisterium with theologically imperative, morally binding authority, nor a structure of confession and absolution wherewith to educate and enforce. Yet that negation is not made on behalf of a counter-patriarch or an anti-magisterium, but rather by virtue of a critical principle of appeal to the sources, which can reach unpredictably farther than those who first called themselves ‘Protestant’ dreamed.”

– John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2984), 17.

The Apostolic and the Post-Apostolic

Posted by on October 5, 2008 4 comments

In conversation with Yves Congar’s Tradition and Traditions, John Webster makes the observation that one can describe the Nouvelle Théologie movement as a sort of theological mood or style that is premised on the claim that the distinction between the apostolic and the post-apostolic ought not to be pressed.

In other words, according this theological style, we should not assume much, if any disjunction between the patristic reception of the apostolic witness and the apostolic witness itself.

Now there may be merit to such a view, but of course it implies a very specific sort of theological historiography that is, in principle quite open to question, especially in light of the radical conflict over interpretation of the gospel that is present in the New Testament itself.

However, the question for all of us interested in theological history and the search for a responsible theological method for studying doctrine and the church historically is intimately connected with this issue. What is the nature of the apostolic witness and what is its connection to its ongoing ecclesial reception? How one answers that question will likely be determinative of how one approaches a whole host of ecclesiological and ecumenical issues.

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