Monthly Archives: May 2009

The God of Atheism

Posted by on May 29, 2009 10 comments

Seriously, how much does Herbert McCabe rule? Reading Eagleton lately has made me need to go back and read the real thing. Unlike the new atheists that Eagleton roundly eviscerates, McCabe displays with the utmost profundity that all true criticism of “the gods” that enslave humanity comes precisely from Christianity itself:

“Christianity begins with out father Abraham and with Moses and the rejection of the gods. It begins in that crucial period in the history of humankind when some men and women in the Middle East were called to reject the religion and worship of the gods and to listen, instead to the Voice commanding them to justice and mercy and righteousness among people. This Voice they called the Lord, and he is not a god, or else he is the God to end all gods. He proclaims himself, you might say, as the god of atheism: ‘I am the Lord . . . I brought you out of slavery . . . you shall have no gods.’ The Lord, if he is God, is the God of human liberation from slavery and idolatry of injustice.” (God Still Matters, p. 233)

You could say that McCabe may well be the harbinger of a new form of radically theocentric Christian atheism.

Theology Blogging Pet Peeve

Posted by on May 28, 2009 23 comments

Ok, one thing I seriously can’t stand among theology bloggers is when the blog consists of virtually nothing other than of notifications about the author’s most recently published books, articles, or reviews.

Admittedly there aren’t tons of blogs that perpetrate this, but there are plenty where such announcements take up far too large a percentage of the posts on a blog. Not that theology blogs shouldn’t include this, its just that if you’re going to be serious about calling it a theology blog and not simply a self-promotion web device, you need to be sporting some content and discussion.

These are my feelings on this matter.

A Missionary Ethic of Incarnation

Posted by on May 28, 2009 1 comment

“If we cannot transcend the vulnerability of belief by positing as accessible a nonparticular ‘natural,’ might we then celebrate confessionally that light and truth have taken on the vulnerability of the particular? That would then call for and empower a missionary ethic of incarnation.

“The Challenge will still remain to find ways to translate and to work at a reciprocal adjudication of the varieties both of perception and of evaluation, where one provincial vision clashes and overlaps with another. But the way to do that is not to imagine or proclaim or seek or discover some ‘neutral’ or ‘common’ or ‘higher’ ground, but to work realistically at every concrete experience of overlap and conflict.”

~ John Howard Yoder, “The Hermeneutics of Peoplehood,” 44.

1,000 Posts and Counting…

Posted by on May 28, 2009 6 comments

This marks my one thousandth blog post. Thanks and appreciation to all who read the stuff I write and somehow find it interesting.

Here’s to doubling my total before the end of the year!

The Bible is God!

Posted by on May 27, 2009 33 comments

Crazy insane video after the jump. Enjoy.

Read more »

Good News About the New Dogmatics

Posted by on May 26, 2009 2 comments

Oh thank God.

The Holiness of Book Acquisition

Posted by on May 25, 2009 9 comments

Turns out that radical biblioholism goes back to the earliest days of Christianity. Mike Gorman has recently posted this great quote from Epiphanius on how acquiring books makes us less inclined to sin:

The acquisition of Christian books is necessary for those who can use them. For the mere sight of these books renders us less inclined to sin, and incites us to believe more firmly in righteousness.

If only this were true, I’d be pretty freaking holy.

More of Eagleton’s Quips

Posted by on May 25, 2009 7 comments

Eagleton seems to be the king of disarming, funny one-liners. For example:

With dreary predictability, Daniel C. Dennett defines religions at the beginning of his Breaking the Spell as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought,” which as far as Christianity goes is rather like beginning a history of the potato by defining it as a rare species of rattlesnake. Predictably, Dennett’s image of God is a Satanic one. He also commits the Ditchkins-like blunder of believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world, which is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus. (p. 50).

Hilarious to be sure, but am I the only one starting to wonder if Eagleton relies a little too heavily on his fantastically brash “thinking this is ‘rather like’ this ridiculous other thing that makes you look stupid”-type statements?

Eagleton on Dawkins and Creation

Posted by on May 25, 2009 5 comments

Terry Eagleton’s new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution is, like most Eagleton books eminently entertaining and easy to read. I’ll have more developed (and actually rather critical) thoughts on the book later, but for now I’ll leave you with one of Eagleton’s trademark rhetorical flourishes:

Creation “out of nothing” is not testimony to how devilishly clever God is, dispensing as he can with even the most rudimentary raw materials, but to the fact that the world is not the inevitable culmination of some prior process, the upshot of some inexorable chain of cause and effect. Any such preceding chain of causality would have to be part of the world, and so could not count as the origin of it. Because there is necessity about the cosmos, we cannot deduce the laws which govern it from a priori principles, but need instead to look at how it actually works. This is the task of science. There is thus a curious connection between the doctrine of creation out of nothing and the professional life of Richard Dawkins. Without God, Dawkins would be out of a job. It is thus particularly churlish of him to call the existence of his employer into question. (p. 8-9)

Cavanaugh on the Eucharist

Posted by on May 25, 2009 1 comment

William Cavanaugh has an article in the Other Journal on torture and the Eucharist in America. It won’t be anything new to folks that have read any of his books, but its worth a look if you haven’t. Here’s a quote:

The Eucharist is not just about seeing the world in a certain way, but about acting. Social imagination is not merely a mental act. The Eucharist is about the construction of a social body — the Body of Christ — that is capable of resisting the imagination of the state when resistance is called for. In the early Church, the term anamnesis was not a recalling to mind, but a re-membering of Christ’s body, that is, an action that knit together the members of the Body of Christ. 

This image is used over and over again by Paul. The idea of individual bodies being members of a larger social body is not new to Paul, but is found in the ancient Greek idea of the body politic. For the Greeks, the idea of a body politic tended to stress order and obedience, especially the obedience of those excluded from citizenship, namely women, children, and slaves. In the Church, by contrast, all these are included in Christ. Moreover, for Paul, “[T]he members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor” (I Cor. 12:22-3). Most importantly, in the body of Christ both pain and joy are communicable. “When one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (I Cor. 12:26).

In this reality of shared pain, we see the distance between friend and enemy overcome. For the sharing of pain goes beyond a sharing with other members of the Church. If the Church is the Body of Christ, the sacrament and sacrifice for the world, then we are to be broken and given away as food for others. The Church is, as Paul says, to “make up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24), by suffering together with the victims of violence. If it is the case that the Eucharist makes the Body of Christ, then the Church does not simply commemorate God’s “no” to violence, but embodiesGod’s answer to violence in the world. We ourselves prefer to absorb the violence of the world rather than to perpetrate violence.

Scripture and Catholicity

Posted by on May 22, 2009 16 comments

From a provocative lecture by Oliver O’Donovan, that Byron helpfully points us to:

“No collective spiritual exercise, no sacrament, no act of praise or prayer is so primary to the catholic identity of the church gathered as the reading and recitation of Scripture. It is the nuclear core. When Paul instructed his letters to be passed from church to church and read, it was the badge of the local church’s catholic identity. This is not to devalue preaching, praise, prayer, let alone sacramental act; these all find their authorisation in reading. As we know from St Thomas Aquinas, the act of breaking bread and sharing wine is not a eucharist unless the narrative of the institution at the Last Supper is read.”

~ Oliver O’Donovan, The Reading Church: Scriptural Authority in Practice”

Quite a claim if you ask me. Indeed, quite a distinctly Protestant claim, at least in sentiment. What might it mean to consider the public reading of Scripture as the primary mark of catholicity? Food for thought.

New Christian Book Ideas

Posted by on May 22, 2009 3 comments

The Internet Monk has a rather hilarious list of potential new Christian books he’s working on. A few of my favorites:

The Snack: The Snack is the story of a man who receives a message from God in a Little Debbie oatmeal cake and is told by God to meet him at the Montgomery Biscuits’ stadium for a weekend series. There God appears to him as an umpire, a vendor and a little kid who keeps kicking his seat..

Twilight: The Christian Version: Christian vampires in Arkansas have been living peacefully in their out-of-the-way compound until one of them starts a CCM group and falls for a groupie. Lots of scenes of the young lady admiring her vampire boyfriend’s ESV Study Bible and protecting her from liberal Methodists.

Exposing The Scandal of Christian Stay-At-Home Dads: In the midst of a complementarian revival, some men refuse to take off the apron and put down the diapers. This book will examine the damage being done to Christian children whose mothers are doctors and whose dads stay home to cook and care for them.

Mark Driscoll’s Really Awful Sermons on The Song of Solomon Illustrated: Available under the counter. ID required.

N.T. Wright Is A Cross-Dressing Communist Sissy Who Cheats At Scrabble And Really Worships The Devil: I’d serve as editor for this serious and dispassionate examination of N.T. Wright by various well-known reformed bloggers.

Jesus Wants You Rich! And Driving A Porsche! With Two Hot Blonds Inside!: A basic guide to American approaches to discipleship.

My Journey to Cleveland, Tennessee: With all the “My Journey To Rome” type books, I thought I could convert to a well known Pentecostal denomination, and describe the various steps in the process. “I found myself strangely drawn to the idea of pushing people until they fell on the carpet.”

How to Waste Time Watching TV and Movies and Call It “Sermon Research.”: Again, self-explanatory.

Love Is An Irritation: A Christian young man has three friends reveal that they’re gay, so he begins a ministry to be as irritating to as many gays as possible in revenge. Soon is speaking in churches all over the midwest.

Proclamation and Theology

Posted by on May 21, 2009 Comments Off

Again from Barth:

Like the subject-matter of Christianity, Church proclamation must also remain free in the last resort, free to receive the command which it must always receive afresh from the free life of the subject matter of Christianity. Church proclamation and not dogmatics is immediate to God in the Church. Proclamation is essential, dogmatics is needed only for the sake of it. Dogmatics lives by it to the extent that it lives only in the Church. In proclamation, and in God, revelation and faith only to the degree that these are its objects, dogmatics is to seek its material. (CDI/1, 87)

The Constant Uneasiness of Theology

Posted by on May 21, 2009 6 comments

Barth’s ruminations on theological method are interesting on multiple levels, not the least of which is the way his thought bears on how we understand the relationship(s) between Christian theology and ideology (critique).

The Church can neither question its proclamation absolutely nor correct it absolutely. It can only exert itself to see how far it is questioned and how far it ought to be corrected. On its human work it can only do again a human work of criticising and correcting. And because this is so, it will be far from thinking that it either wants or is able to rid itself of the attack on its proclamation, the uneasiness which God Himself has prepared for it. (CD I/1, 75-76)

Here Barth makes a supremely important point about the nature of theological thinking: its irreducible contingency. Theology is not and never can be absolute, rather it is a contingent human work. As such it cannot expect to arrive at absolute, necessary, indubitably certitude. Rather the church should not want to escape from its situation of contingency, because it is in this state of constant uneasiness before God that we learn obedience, and that we learn to live in the sort of patience that attunes us to receive God’s own liberating address.

Thus, the church’s theological task, vis a vis ideology is never done. We can never hope to extricate ourselves from ideology, from the need to have our conceptual formulations critiqued and reconstituted. We can inhabit this place of uneasiness, however, precisely, and only because of God’s active faithfulness in Christ who meets us in our contingency and speaks his liberating word of reconciliation and redemption. Only by virtue of God’s own invasive, redeeming, and transfiguring action do we have the hope of passing, in Nate Kerr’s term, from ideology to doxology.

Serious Theology

Posted by on May 21, 2009 1 comment

Barth certainly can always boast of his energy. Even in the most technical sections of the Church Dogmatics (and CD I/1 is almost certainly that) there is nothing but pure energeticness when it comes to the material of theology: the proclamation of the gospel:

Again, how disastrously the Church must misunderstand itself if it can imagine that theological reflection is a matter for quiet situations and periods that invite contemplation, a kind of peace-time luxury for which we are not only permitted but even commanded to find no time should things become really serious and exciting! As though there could be any more urgent task for a Church under assault from without than that of consolidating itself within, which means doing theological work! As though the venture of proclamation did not mean that the Church permanently finds itself in an emergency! As though theology could be done properly without reference to this constant emergency! Let there be no mistake, Because of these distorted ideas about theology, and dogmatics in particular, there arises and persists in the life of the Church a lasing and growing deficit for which we cannot expect those particularly active in this function to supply the needed balance. The whole Church must seriously want a serious theology if it is to have a serious theology. (CD I/1, 76-77)

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