Monthly Archives: January 2009

Theological Interpretation of the Gospel of John

Posted by on January 31, 2009 7 comments

In my ongoing studies in the gospel of John and my attempts to devote some time to theological interpretation, I have run across a few superb theological engagements with John’s Gospel. The most recent, and perhaps most accessible work on the topic that I’ve seen is Craig Koester’s new book, The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel. This is one of the most comprehensive and synthetic theological readings of John’s Gospel I’ve yet to come across. In fact, the next time I teach on the Gospel of John I may very well use it as my textbook.

On the doctrine of God in John there are two recent works that are particularly helpful, the first is Marianne Meye Thompson’s God in the Gospel of John which is perhaps the most comprehensive and helpful book on the topic. Central to her argument is that readings of John’s Gospel that merely taut it as “Christocentric” are missing the book’s overarchingly theocentric nature, and the fact that the point of John is not simply to articulate a Christology, but rather a doctrine of God that is determined by the person of Jesus Christ.

Andreas Köstenberger and Scott Swain also examine the doctrine of God, but take a more overtly theological perspective in their attempt to explore what, if anything, John’s Gospel may have to say about the Trinity. Their book, Father, Son, and Spirit: The Trinity in John’s Gospel is perhaps the best book examining the nascent trinitarianism of the Fourth Gospel that has been written. It engages thoroughly with the question of Jewish monotheism of the second temple period, and offers a trinitarian reading of John which is neither anachronistic nor minimalistic. 

The last book I would mention is the recent collection edited by Richard Bauckham and Carl Mosser, The Gospel of John and Christian Theology. This book contains some of the best theological essays dealing with all aspects of the Fourth Gospel that I have encountered. All of these books serve as helpful examples of theological exegesis and offer great vistas on the study of John’s Gospel.

Morally Basic Political Action

Posted by on January 30, 2009 9 comments

One of the key polarities that manifests itself in political discussions today involves the most basic evils of our time that must be courageously struggled against. In other words, positions and allegiances get defined by where one stands on particular things like abortion, war, or poverty. Regardless of where one stands on these issues they tend to always be thought of as morally basic forms of political action. John Howard Yoder offers and important corrective to such trends:

“The falleness of the world is not just the fallenness of individual sinners; the world as structure is gone awry. Those of us who seek to ‘take charge’ of events by challenging the Powers at their own game, trying to manipulate events in terms of their own inherent dynamics, may be selling out morally and practically at the very point where they claim to be taking responsibility. By agreeing to play by their rules we grant their idolatrous claim to be in charge of history in JHWH’s stead. Our refusal to play the game by the agreed rules may be more morally basic than our courageous wrestling with things as they are. Jesus defeated the powers by refusing to meet them on that terrain, at the cost of his life.” (The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, 175)

In other words, our most morally basic political activity is refusing to strive to seize control of events, to carve out our own territory as if we were lords or delegates of history. Put positively, the most morally basic political action is prayer–or more comprehensively, doxology.

Some (potential) Problems with Balthasar’s Ecclesiology

Posted by on January 30, 2009 15 comments

One way to understand the nature of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “mood” as a theologian is to realize the way in which he seeks to view all of reality as fundamentally symphonic. Indeed one could characterize his whole theological career as an attempt to listen to as much of the “symphony” of creation as possible. Balthasar, throughout his work seeks to provide a vision of the divine symphony of creation and redemption that encompasses all reality without immolating any of it. Otherness, difference, divergence, all of these find their place within the broad space of God’s own symphonic drama of redemption. This overt mood, however is what I take to be Balthasar’s biggest (potential) weakness, at least in regard to the shape of his ecclesiology.

Balthasar’s ecclesiology is fundamentally determined by his attempt to integrate and synthesize the various ecclesial streams of the New Testament. This is seen most clearly in his book, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church in which refers to the main biblical traditions as the Petrine, the Pauline, the Johannine, and the Marian. The whole of his book is an attempt to take seriously the Pauline, Johannine, and Marian perspectives, while showing how they “symphonize” within the broader Petrine structure that determines the shape of his ecclesiological thought and practice.

The potential problem I see with this is the problem of ideology. Or put more gently, it is the problem that attends all attempts at biblical or theological harmonization. By legitimating different theological trajectories of the New Testament as “exceptions” or internal animating principles within his determinative Petrine synthesis, Balthasar occludes the possibility that these other biblical perspectives might bear critically on the dominate trajectory of his ecclesiology.

In short, by snugly placing Pauline and Johannine theologies within his Petrine symphony Balthasar rules out the possibility of a Pauline or Johannine account of the church exerting any real critical pressure or challenge to his distinctly Roman Catholic/Petrine views of the church, apostolicity, etc. What makes this particularly dubious is the fact that Balthasar’s Petrine ordering principle actually can claim the least purchase within the New Testament material vis a vis the other streams which he seeks to determine via Petrine centrality.

The real problem I see with this is that serious study of the New Testament, especially the Johannine corpus reveals that these broad segments of the New Testament do indeed exist in tension with and in some cases as an overt challenge toward the sort of Petrine supremacy that Balthasar seeks to reify as his fundamental ordering principle. Ultimately I fear that Balthasar’s ecclesiological symphony may in fact be a forced harmony, or even a closed totality that attempts to situate, in advance, any and all challenges thereto. And therein lies the nadir of the ideological and theological problem.

Now, all of this is, of course a distinctly protestant objection to a distinctly Roman Catholic ecclesiology. However, that being the case should not mitigate these points in advance, though of course, ecclesiological commitments tend to function that way in theological discussion sometimes. The real point that undergirds all of this is that the vocation of theology in the church is to help discern what “shape” and mode of existence and mission are most appropriate to the gospel of the crucified and risen Lord. And so, this (distinctly protestant) questioner wonders, is Balthasar’s structure of ecclesial givenness one that takes proper account of the nature of the gospel? Should the gospel lead us into a wholeness that allows us to conceptually situate all forms of disruptive difference within an articulable harmony, or should it lead us into an utter poverty that requires us to face such disruptions and challenges without knowing, in advance how everything will turn out?

Around the Traps

Posted by on January 30, 2009 2 comments

Ben gives us a couple of extremely good posts, one on the late John Updike and the second detailing what looks to be an excellent collection of essays on the practice of theology in the latest issue of IJST.

R.O. Flyer gives a perceptive analysis of the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and tells us why we can’t all like him. The fact that everyone feels compelled to laud Bonhoeffer indicates that in all likelihood many of us just don’t understand him.

Dave Horstkoetter gives some good commentary on the Obama inauguration and the theological issues surrounding the problem(s) of race in America.

There’s a guest review at Theology Forum on a fascinating-looking book by Malcolm Yarnell entitled, The Formation of Christian Doctrine. It offers a sort of Believers’ Church proposal on the nature of theology–definitely already on my list of stuff to read.

Thomas Bridges also has a great post drawing from Balthasar about the nature of Paul’s apostolicity and its ecclesiological implications.

A New Look for an Old Blog

Posted by on January 29, 2009 25 comments

I’m not one of those serial-blog-appearance-changers, but every year or so I like to shake things up. I thought that for 2009 I might try something a bit more minimalistic and professional looking. Please share away if you have feelings about how my blog should look.

And while we’re on the subject of blogging here’s a couple quotes about the problems of blogging from Alan Jacobs’ now famous article in Books and Culture:

All in all, a blog is no place for the misanthropically inclined. Charlie Brown used to say, “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand,” and I have discovered that in the blogosphere, people—in Mr. Brown’s subtle sense of the word—are pretty much inescapable. Many’s the time I have found myself hunched over my keyboard, my hands frozen above it, trying to decide which of two replies to make: the one assuming that my interlocutor is morally compromised, or the one assuming that he is invincibly ignorant. In such circumstances it’s always best just to get up and walk away, not darkening counsel by words without knowledge, or without charity anyway.

. . .

There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with sheer numbers. And the architecture of the blog (and its associated technologies like rss), with its constant emphasis on novelty, militates against leisurely conversations. It is no insult to the recent, but already cherished, institution of the blogosphere to say that blogs cannot do everything well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.

Well, here’s to being friends of information then, and hopefully maybe a little bit more.

Reading William Stringfellow

Posted by on January 29, 2009 17 comments

I’ve appreciated Stringfellow’s work in An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land for as long as I can remember, but only recently have I started acquiring his works on a larger scale and devoting myself to reading them. Stringfellow, is, for my money the greatest lay-theologian to come out of the 1960s-70s upheaval in the United States. His level of perception and theological acumen, combined with a very profound sort of situatedness in the realities of his time make him utterly unique. One possible analogy I might make is that Stringfellow is an urban sort of Wendell Berry, though a good bit more polemical.

For those interested in reading Stringfellow, one helpful thing to keep in mind is that among his 15-odd books there are two unofficial “trilogies” that really encapsulate Stringfellow’s life and though. The first of thes consists of An Ethic for Christian and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, Concience and Obedience, and Instead of Death. These three books serve as a statement of Stringfellow’s theology as a whole and present his attempt to deal faithfully and biblically with the realities of America in the twentieth century from the perspective of a proper theology of the principalities and powers. They also reflect his distinctly sacramental and incarnational theology of the word and his perspective on the theological meaning of freedom. All of it superb stuff.

His second trilogy consists of My People is the Enemy, A Second Birthday, and A Simplicity of Faith. This is his “autobiographical” trilogy if you will. The books respectively chronicle his own dealings in his life with the issues of work, illness, and death. My People is the Enemy in particular presents Stringfellow’s own life and work in the tenements of Harlem in the 60s. Never have I read more a more moving and theologically sensitive form of autobiography. It is animated throughout with humility and a form of fragile tenderness that can only be described as true strength. For anyone interested in reading Stringfellow either of these two trilogies are great places to start. That’s where I’m starting anyway.

Also, I should add that all of these books are available from Wipf & Stock Publishers.

Vinoth Ramachandra on Christian Faithfulness

Posted by on January 28, 2009 5 comments

There is a great interview with Sri Lankan lay theologian, Vinoth Ramachandra, the author of the excellent book, Subverting Global Myths. Here is a quote from the interview in which Ramachandra talks a bit about what he thinks Christian faithfulness means (or should mean) in our world:

My fundamental conviction remains the absolute lordship of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ over every area of life. My second conviction is that we cannot bear credible witness to this truth without entering, imaginatively, into the pain of those who suffer the consequences of the worship of lords other than Jesus Christ. Such false lords—idols, ideologies—need to be unmasked in every age. I try to use my speaking and writing gifts to do that, but I find myself coveting other gifts—music, novel writing, filmmaking—which may be more effective in this present age. I have discovered that it is by embracing the suffering of others—in my case, remaining in a war-torn, poverty-stricken nation rather than seeking security in the rich West—that one is given insights and sensitivities that may elude others. Another conviction is that faithfulness to Christ requires constant openness to others, even our fiercest anti-Christian critics, to see how our own faith and lifestyle may themselves be redolent with idolatry. The biggest objections to Christians and Christianity are ethical, not intellectual. I have little time for the kind of apologetics that is divorced from ethics and political life.

Some stuff we should all ponder there, I think.

Jesus, Divine Discourse, and Trinitarian Personhood: Some Jottings

Posted by on January 27, 2009 31 comments

1. All theological statements about God’s Trinitarian being must be ruled (regula) by the very particular history of Jesus Christ’s incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and promised parousia.

2.Thus, the historical realities of Jesus’s particular existence are, without remainder or qualification, definitive of the nature of God’s own eternal way of being God.

3. The historical relationship between Jesus and the one he called “Father” in and through the power and presence he called “Spirit” as recorded in the Gospels is definitive for all statements we make regarding relations between the identities of the Trinity.

4. Jesus exists in history as an individuated human person. As such his individuated personhood belongs to and characterizes the eternal reality of the Trinitarian God.

5. The relationship between Jesus and the Father in the Gospels is eminently one of prayer, of discourse and address. As such mutual address, discourse, conversation belong to the eternal reality of the Trinity.

5. Thus, if Jesus’s singular relationship to the Father in the Spirit, as revealed in history and attested in Scripture, is definitive of our doctrine of the Trinity, it is incumbent upon us to describe the reality of God’s being as a communal event of inter-personal communion.

6. This need not commit us to the theological and political implications often drawn by social Trinitarians about the Triune relations being models for human social interaction and political organization.

7. However, if we take the historical relationship of Jesus to the Father seriously as the rule of our Trinitiarian speech, we must not shy away from describing the Trinity in terms of mutuality, address, response, affection, consciousness, and personhood. To fail to do so relativizes the primacy of Jesus’s own historicity in favor of another source of knowledge about God’s eternal being.

An Authoritative Guide to Fundamentalisms

Posted by on January 23, 2009 40 comments

Recently there have been some fun and casual tossings around of the horrific epitaph, “fundamentalist.” Fundamentalist is one of those lovely words like “liberal” or “stupid ugly butthole” that people often apply to others with whom they disagree in the hopes of shaming them into submission in the course of an argument. Now, given my impassioned revulsion at over-ambitious rhetorical flourish, needless redundancy and unclear obfuscation, I think it is in all of our interests to clarify the nature of what a fundamentalist is. The entire future of theological discourse depends on what you’re about to read.

There are three kinds of sensible uses of the term fundamentalist. First there is the historic Christian notion of a fundamentalist. This is the image that people generally want to conjure up and associate with you if they are calling you a fundamentalist. Historically, Christian fundamentalists believed in biblical innerancy (the Bible is a science book that is utterly precisely factual about everything), hated evolution, loved the virgin birth, and had an unnatural fixation on being able to control the hortatory practices of the public school system. Today the remnants of these kinds of fundamentalists can be found protesting homosexuality, arguing with Mormons and such, and erecting monuments of the ten commandments on state property whenever possible.

The second type of fundamentalist is far worse and far more ethnic than the first. This is contemporary terrorist fundamentalist. The terrorist fundamentalist is usually Muslim, wants nothing more than to blow himself up taking as many people with him as possible to secure a blissful eternity. Terrorist fundamentalists are distinguished from historic Christian fundamentalists by 1) being Muslim, 2) being irrationally violent all the time as opposed to just most of the time and 3) by not being white 99.9% of the time. Usually people aren’t going to try to bludgeon you out of a theological argument by literally calling you a terrorist. But if they do let me know and I’ll mail you a dollar for being awesome (depending on my evaluation of the context of the epitaph).

The third kind of fundamentalist is what we might call the ubiquitous fundamentalist. This sort of fundamentalist is someone who strongly believes a fairly large number of things and, as such, gets in arguments with other such fundamentalists who believe different things. The reason this sort of fundamentalist is termed ubiquitous is because every single person in the world is one of them. You, me, that guy over there. Her? Her.

There is no way to avoid being this sort of fundamentalist. Now, people who disagree with you will see that you believe stuff they don’t believe and this will piss them off. Depending on how much it pisses them off they will try to make other people think that you are either a historic Christian fundamentalist or even a terrorist fundamentalist if they are particularly threatened or unsettled by your beliefs. The proper response at this point is to refer back to the above description of the ubiquitous fundamentalists, and then remind your interlocutor that in fact, you are both fundamentalists and now that we’re clear on that we should get about the business of learning how to have reasoned and meaningful arguments. This is the hardest job in the world. You’ll probably never succeed at it. I almost did once. Then I called the other guy a terrorist. It was awesome. I totally felt good about myself afterwards.

On Being a Prophet

Posted by on January 22, 2009 16 comments

First, if you are any of the following you cannot be a prophet:

  1. A Politician
  2. A Rock Star
  3. An Actor

However, if you are any of the following you have a shot at becoming a prophet (though usually it will require you to leave these professions):

  1. A farmer
  2. A lawyer
  3. A soldier

And if you are any of the following you have 0.01% chance of being a prophet:

  1. A Theology Blogger
  2. A Clergy Member
  3. An Academic of any kind

To best improve your chances of obtaining prophethood, the most important thing you can do is pursue and agrarian career and generally dislike talking to people. Your chances improve if you instinctively fight with God over whether or not you have to tell people the stuff he says.

More on Obushma

Posted by on January 22, 2009 7 comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPBoz-aQszQ]

Choosing Our History

Posted by on January 22, 2009 13 comments

One of the remarks I found most interesting in Barack Obama’s inaugural speech the other day was his claim that “The time has come to . . . choose our better history.” Now on one level this could be taken as an innocuous statement that we should in some sense prefer to affirm the noble aspects of our national history rather than those of a more ignominious nature.

However, It seems to me that there is more to this statement, in the context of the entire speech than simply that. Rather it reflects a perennial problem of popular American historical self-narration. Namely the notion that we are able to narrate our history in a way that is selective. Why does it even make sense for us to be able to think that we are able to choose for ourselves our own “better” history?

The problem with this is that our “better history” is not true apart from our less-than-better history which lies all around it. The moments of nobility and within American history cannot be isolated from the totality of its story. The whole idea of America choosing its better history reflects the fact that ultimately America as a nation is not able to truthfully narrate its own history. Perhaps the most fundamental initiatives that made our country possible are the genocide of the native peoples and the enslavement of Africans. Could Obama have said that and got away with it? Doubtful.

At the end of the day the main point is that whatever our “better history” might be it is pretty small in comparison to our whole history. More importantly, the fact is that any “better history” we might isolate and point to as “our story” is ultimately a false history. And, as Bonhoeffer has rightly pointed out it is impossible for a community of peace to exist unless it is founded on the truth.

Complicity Revisited

Posted by on January 22, 2009 8 comments

In a recent post the issue of the complicity of theology bloggers in the world’s horrors has been raised. After all, how can you voice opinions about things being wrong with the world when you have computer to write about it on? Well, for anyone who cares, here is a post I wrote a while back on this very topic.

And as an aside I always find the argument that if you critique capitalism/modernity/America you should have to refrain from using computer and go live in the woods to be a pretty funny claim.  Those who disagree with certain forms of establishment should either change their mind and become endorsers of whatever the status quo is or just shut up and go away? You’d have to be an idiot not to see whom that serves.

The truly challenging path is the one that does not allow complicity and situatedness to become permissive resignation. What is truly difficult and truly right is to strive for conversion. Our own and the world’s.

A Comment on Church and Culture

Posted by on January 21, 2009 4 comments

Various theologians such as Kathryn Tanner and Ted Smith have argued against post-liberal theologians such as George Lindbeck and Stanley Hauerwas that the relationship between the church and the world cannot be thought of in terms of a confrontational encounter between two complete wholes. Rather the church’s own identity is always in flux being partially determined by its ties to and embeddedness in the world. The church does not exist outside of the whole nexus of structures and system that make up a culture. Rather it is always already embedded within them and relationally defined thereby.

This is certainly true insofar as it goes. However, the point that I think such critics are missing has to do with the way they allow their definitions of culture to apply to the church versus other cultural formations. To be sure the church is never a complete whole that is definable in abstraction from it situatedness in it cultural and historical context. However, this is not simply true of the church but of any and all cultural formations that exist. All communal and cultural realities are not complete wholes that can be leveraged as a totality against other competing cultural wholes. Rather all cultural formations exist in a state of flux and relationality vis a vis other cultural formations.

Thus, while there are important critiques to be made of Hauerwas and Lindbeck, a more sympathetic (and accurate) reading of their underlying intention is possible. One need not say that the church has a secure identity in itself independent of it situatedness in culture and history to say that the church is just as much of a social and communal reality as other social and communal formations. One need not posit the church a completed whole or a totality to understand it as bearing the same kind of fragmentary wholeness that characterizes all cultural formations. The fact that the church is partial, fragmented, and compromised rather than a complete self-enclosed whole does not imperil the church’s claim to authentic communal-social-political reality. Fragmentation and permeability are simply characteristics of any and all political societies.

A Plea for Anti-Empire Polemics

Posted by on January 20, 2009 49 comments

The last 8 years have been fertile soil in the U.S. for deploying anti-empire polemics. A key example of this is the long in production, but only recently released Evangelicals and Empire, edited by Peter Hetzel and Bruce Ellis Benson. The book engages Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s books Empire and Multitude, both of which are supremely important books in the field. Evangelicals and Empire features a fascinating diversity of essays which analyze the various streams of evangelicalism from the standpoint of Hardt and Negri’s Empire theory as well as applying forms of theological critique their project. In the midst of this book there are some essays that are rather simplistic reiterations of common anti-Bush sentiments translated into a critique of “American Empire.” The chief example of this is Jim Wallis’ well-worn and whiney essay “Dangerous Religion.”

My point in mentioning this is not to say that critiques of Bush-style neoconservatism are wrong, rather it is that they are just far too easy. Any Christian critique of empire worth its salt must be able to do more than lob shots at the chicanery of the Bush administration. Amid the uproar of exultation surrounding Barack Obama’s inauguration Christians need to remember what it might mean to be true critics of empire. As Andrew Bacevich notes in his superb book, American Empire, the imperial pretension of the American national project are not in any way reducibile to partisan differences within the American political apparatus. The differences between republicans and democrats, between Bush and Obama, as real as they might be are ultimately only differences of degrees. At best.

If America was an empire yesterday it remains one today despite the Obama administration’s proclamations of hope and seismic change. For my part I think Obama’s election makes for no substantive change in regard to the fundamental posture that Christians must take in regard to their view of American imperial pretensions. What is needed now, in a post-Bush America is the kind of vigilance that refuses to assume that that empire has ceased to be a theological problem for Christians in America. We will almost certainly see a lapse in the rush of anti-empire publications in the next few years. For far too many “progressive” Christians being anti-empire just means being anti-Bush. What is needed now, in light of the (false) hope of the newly inaugurated Obama presidency is ongoing critique of the problems of American empire. So that is my plea. Let us not be seduced. We lived in an empire yesterday. We live in an empire today. There are just as many idols to be unmasked today as there were yesterday. Let’s not get lax about it just because Bush is gone.

Switch to our mobile site