Daily Archives: April 3, 2009

Catholics, Protestants, and Ethical Behavior

Posted by on April 3, 2009 7 comments

I certainly don’t place too much stock in Gallup polls, but this is quite interesting. According to this study, among regular church attenders, both Catholic and Protestant, almost across the board regularly attending Catholics are more likely to approve of behavior that their church deems unethical than are their Protestant counterparts.

Rod Dreher makes a rather pointed comment about the whole thing:

This is a conundrum to me, one I thought about a lot when I was a Catholic, and troubled over. Why is it that Catholics have a Pope and a Magisterium — a clear teaching authority — as well as a complex, coherent and profoundly intellectual moral theology … and yet these things, which ought to give it a tremendous advantage in maintaining the obedience of its flock, avail the Catholic Church little? It shouldn’t be that way, logically, but it is in practice.

Stats breakdown from the poll after the jump.

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Rowan Williams on Barth

Posted by on April 3, 2009 2 comments

From an interview with Rupert Shortt in God’s Advocates:

What caught me and still catches me about Barth is that sense of exuberant bloody-mindedness, enlarged upon at huge length, the gusto, the verve of the theology, with all its outrageous misunderstandings of other people and its wonderfully sanctified egotism. Its a great performance, The Church Dogmatics, and Barth enjoys being Barth and in spreading himself like this, and in that enjoyment does convey, I think, uniquely among twentieth-century theologians, a sense of the exhilarating otherness of God.”

H/T: Peter Leithart

Rebirth and Revolution

Posted by on April 3, 2009 1 comment

At Adbusters, Micah White argues that “capitalist-materialist disenchantment of the world” must be undone by “a vision in which mystery has a place.”

All that is wild about the world has been systematically penetrated, catalogued and destroyed. The explicit intention of the scientific mindset, to pierce the mysteries of Being, has led to a world empty of excitement in which not even endless consumption can fill the void. We are both cut off from the natural environment, enclosed in sprawling concrete cities, and cut off from any previous philosophical or religious conception of the world that celebrated possibility, contingency and mystery. How would it change things if we rallied in support of nature not because of climate change (an abstraction identified by science and therefore conceivably able to be “fixed” by science) but instead because the nymphs Socrates felt at the river are no longer with us.

Just look at the left’s demands for a new world: we want “clean” energy, full employment, a middle-class standard of living for everyone and “green” corporations. To acquire these desires, we insist that more scientific research must be funded. All our dreams for the future rely on scientists, technocrats, capitalists and the highly educated. That is a fundamental error. Unless the revolution can be accomplished by us, each of us as we are right now, whether we be poor or rich, educated or not, literate or not, then we will continue to perpetrate the myth that only Western style progress is the way forward.

What we need now is a spiritual rebirth that grants the magic back to the world. Only then, through the development of a parallel culture, will we be able to see that the way forward may be to go back.

But the problem is that our spirutal feelings/experiences/rebirths are the very commodities that are traded in the current economy of global capitalism. What is ultimately decisive about capitalism is that no one needs to believe in it, but we all must participate in it. We need more than this to posit anything truly revolutionary.

Ha!

Posted by on April 3, 2009 Comments Off

Will the hilarity never cease?

Journalists who dialed in to a White House conference call Thursday hoping for a media-friendly reception got a far friendlier response than they were counting on.

Instead of hearing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Advisor Jim Jones on the other end laying out foreign policy and security threats, reporters were greeted by a recording on a phone sex line.

“Do you have any hidden desires? If you feel like getting nasty, then you came to the right place,” said a suggestive-sounding woman.

The White House says an aide merely mistyped the 800-dial in number — a mistake not likely to happen again.

Evangelism after Christendom

Posted by on April 3, 2009 3 comments

J.C. Hoekendijk has numerous penetrating things to say about evangelism in a post-Christendom context. Not one to soften anything he says, this quote, like so many others of his has a bit of a strong edge to it:

Traditional method of evangelism generally presupposed the existence of  Christendom, of the corpus Christianum. Wichern, the father of the Home Mission movement in Germany, provided the classic formulation of this idea: the task of evangelisation is the winning back of the masses in Christendom that have fallen under the power of sin, and are no longer reached by the ordinary methods of the Church’s working. The presupposition that we are working in the Christian world has given its character to all our idea of evangelistic work. It was a work of winning people back. Its aim was to bring back to people’s memory something that they already knew.

There is a fundamental similarity between the methodology that Hoekendijk describes here and the entire tradition of American Protestantism, which, historically is based in the tradition of revivalism. Both the first and second Great Awakenings were predicated on this notion. In both cases there was something there, immanent within the cultural complex that could be awakened and revived.

Hoekendijk goes on, in talking about evangelism in a post-Christendom context, however:

Since Christendom in that sense no longer exists, such a method of working no longer has any significance. In many parts of the world, we find ourselves in that which is in effect a non-Christian society. Here new experiments have to be tried, and in these the mission field can give much guidance. Many of the new evangelistic experiments which have been made in this No-Man’s-Land shew remarkable similarity of structure. The pattern of work of these new methods may be summarised as follows: to make clear the meaning of the word of proclamation (kerygma) by means of a life lived in fellowship (koinonia) and finding its expression in simple service (diakonia).

This strikes at the heart of so much of what Hoekendijk has to say about the nature of the church and/as mission in the modern world. What is central for any theology of the the church’s missionality is this notion of comprehensive shalom, which finds expression in the threefold pattern of kerygma, koinonia, and diakonia. Most of Hoekendijk’s work centered on exploring different methods of instantiating and embodying these ecclsio-missional qualities, in fact for him, they server as the very definition of the church as the sign of God’s kingdom.

Dissent in Ecclesial Context(s)

Posted by on April 3, 2009 3 comments

I have been mulling this over lately. What exactly does dissent mean within the context of the church? Here I don’t really have in mind fundamental theological dissent. Not things like trying to be a Muslim and a Christian, or argue about the fundamental definition of being Reformed. Rather I have in mind things like sincere questions and longings about the state of the church of which one is a part, particular in regard to issues like ministry, mission, discipleship, etc.

What role does the dissenter have within the local congregation? How does one go about this without simply being a critic? What does dissent mean for the life of the church as it is concretely lived? What should it mean? What should such conversations look like?

Free Lectures by Robert Jenson: The Regula Fidei and Scripture

Posted by on April 3, 2009 10 comments

Jason has recently finished posting notes on Robert Jenson’s 2009 Burn Lectures delivered at the University of Otago on the theme, ‘The Regula Fidei and Scripture’:

These lectures are fantastic examples of why Jenson is such a great theologian, and, equally importantly they point out the importance and vitality of the task of theological engagement with Scripture.

Even more exciting is the fact that Jason also has now helpfully pointed us to video podcasts of those lectures which are now available for download as MP4s:

  • Lecture 1: Creed, Scripture, and their Modern Alienation
  • Lecture 2: The Tanakh as Christian Scripture
  • Lecture 3: The New Testament and the Regula Fidei
  • Lecture 4: The Apostles’ Creed
  • Lecture 5: The Creed as Critical Theory of Scripture
  • Lecture 6: Genesis 1:1 and Luke 1:26-38

Thanks to Jason for this wonderful service. For Robert Jenson fanatics like myself, this is wonderful news.

Bit of Barth

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“There is no such thing as life in itself: there is only life in relation to God. That is to say, there is only life under his judgment and under his promise; there is only life characterized by death, but qualified, through the death of Christ, as the hope of life eternal. Rigorism and free detachment are both under krisis. But both are also directed towards life. . . .

There is no such thing as death in itself: there is only death in relation to God. That is to say, there is only death as both barrier and place of exit the death of that which we call life, but which, through the resurrection of Christ, is qualified as the sign of reconciliation. Rigorism and free detachment are, therefore, both under krisis.  Both are in different ways directed towards death.”

~ Karl Barth, Romans, 512.

Against Conservative Nostalgia

Posted by on April 3, 2009 1 comment

Smashing quote from Caleb Stegall:

I have no patience for those who blame the world or the age we live in or the flood of Progress for their failure to have the life they supposedly want. This victim mentality is even uglier in conservative nostalgics (and I say that as one who is intimately familiar with the emotion). It needs to be ruthlessly dealt with. The worst thing that can happen to gatherings like FPR is that they have a tendency to become a place for parlor dress-up mind games for spoiled misfits each nursing their own grievances. A kind of virtual second life for conservatives who get to imagine the world they want without engaging in any of the real work, sacrifice, pain, and suffering that is required to attain the real thing. If preventing that hurts a few feelings, so be it.

H/T: Rod Dreher

The Proexistence of the Church in the World

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“The church lives for the world. She can only ‘share in the gospel’ if she really desires to serve all (I Cor 9:19-23). Whether a church really has apostolic substance will always become apparent in her diakonia, in her servant form. On the other hand, the church can only really be the church if she is a sign and prophetic witness of the approaching Kingdom. In her existence she will establish the sign of the redemption of God’s kingdom: communion, righteousness, unity, etc. The church cannot be more than a sign. She points away from herself to the Kingdom; she lets herself be used for and through the Kingdom in the oikoumene [whole world]. There is nothing that the church can demand for herself and possess for herself (not an ecclesiology either). God has placed her in a living relationship to the Kingdom and to the oikoumene. The church exists only in actu, in the execution of the apostolate, i.e., in the proclamation of the gospel of the Kingdom in the world.”

~ J.C. Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out, 43.

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