Monthly Archives: November 2009

Is Blogging Superficial?

Posted by on November 30, 2009 58 comments

Kent has pointed us to a comment made by J.I. Packer about the usefulness of blogging/reading blogs:

I’m amazed at the amount of time people spend on the internet. I’m not against technology, but all tools should be used to their best advantage. We should be spending our time on things that have staying power, instead of on the latest thought of the latest blogger—and then moving on quickly to the next blogger. That makes us more superficial, not more thoughtful.

Now on the one hand I suppose it could be true that there are tons of people out there writing and reading blogs to stroke their own sense of coolness and contemporaneity. However I think Packer’s comment really just reflects little more than the all too familiar phenomenon of cross-generational disgust. So much so that it actually obscures some of the important issues, such as Packer’s claim that we ought to be spending our time on “things that have staying power.” I’m not sure what exactly Packer has in mind by this, but it sounds far too calculating and utilitarian to be virtuous. Rather than seeking “the new” we ought to be seeking more obvious, substantial, and permanent things that have abiding power (Like Packer’s many published books perhaps?).

Might not a more charitable and realistic reading be that what is being pursued by many bloggers is not simply novelty but truth? It seems to me that consciously seeking exposure to new ideas, books, thoughts, and arguments should not be denigrated but encouraged. What seems decidedly less virtuous is Packer’s recommendation of pursuing things having “staying power” over against “the new.” Seems to me that this is nothing more than an encouragement to be satisfied with the familiar rather than allowing one’s thought to be challenged by a wide exposure to ideas. What’s virtuous or radical about that?

Trinitarian Asymmetry

Posted by on November 27, 2009 2 comments

Leithart has another great thought-porovoking post on trinitarian theology, this time reflecting on the asymmetry of the trinitarian relations. He concludes with a few reflections:

First, it is the failure to reckon with the asymmetry of the relations that has sent certain forms of social Trinitarianism down a blind alley.  The Trinity is not a modern egalitarian democracy.  The Persons are indeed equal, but asymmetrically so.  Second, and this is equally important, more traditional Trinitarian theologies need the help that social Trinitarianism provides.  At its best, social Trinitarianism has been a plea to take the Personhood of the Persons seriously; it has been a plea for a Scriptural exposition of the ontological life of the Trinity in which the Persons converse together as they do in the gospel story.  Third, the response to Trinity-as-democracy should not be the implicit subordinationism that has infected some traditional Trinitarianism; we don’t need to resort to a unilateral hierarchical Trinity, paternal monarchianism or paternal causality, to avoid the problems of social Trinitarianism.  An asymmetrical account of Triune life takes the pleas of social Trinitarianism seriously, and can get at all the dynamism and personal interactivity that social Trinitarianism wants, without threatening to collapse into tritheism.

Why Conservatives Shouldn’t Make Manifestos

Posted by on November 20, 2009 76 comments

Today saw the release of the “Manhattan Declaration,” a sort of ecumenical conservative manifesto with 148 signatories from Roman, Eastern, and Evangelical denominations. Its a consolidated statement of the usual stuff super conservative Christians care about — abortion, gay marriage, and well, I guess the freedom to not perform abortions and gay marriages, they call this religious freedom.

On the one hand there’s really nothing that needs to be said about this. After all there is nothing really said here that hasn’t been utterly clear for some time. We all know that abortion and gay marriage, framed under the language of religious freedom are pretty much all the Christian political right cares about.

Naturally in the long tirades about a holistic ethic of life there’s no substantial discussion of poverty, let alone militarism and war. Likewise in the flowing praises of marriage as the bedrock of civilization and Christianity don’t see fit to mention any of the things Jesus or Paul actually had to say about marriage. This is standard sub-biblical conservative fare.

This is also precisely why stuff like this shouldn’t be considered a manifesto  in any realistic sense of the term. The document styles itself as standing in the line of Barmen and even MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. This is bullshit. Its simply a consolidation of widely-held conservative opinion. Hell, they even claim that their views represent the majority of Americans while they style it as a bold sort of minority courage against the powers that be. That’s the best thing about popular conservative Christianity. You can be an oppressed minority while still really representing pretty much all the real people.

Its actually painfully obvious what this is all about. Its simply another instance of the conservative Christian unrest that always gets shrilly trumpeted whenever there’s a democrat in the White House. As such this is actually a perfect example of the sort of anxiety I discussed yesterday. What animates this document is nothing more — and I really mean that, quite literally nothing more – than a gnawing fear about not being in a position of cultural power.

We are offered here a vision of Christianity completely and intentionally sold over to ideology. There is no proclamation of the living God, of the crucified and risen Christ here. All we are offered by this document and the movement it represents is a life ruled by the very powers Christ has freed us from. The desperation for control, domination, and security that this movement needs to be called what it is, a falling back into the elemental spirits of the cosmos, a return to the world system that Christ’s death and resurrection has made nothing. It is nothing less than the rejection of actual faith in the coming kingdom of the living God.

The Church’s Unrest

Posted by on November 19, 2009 10 comments

Jürgen Moltmann’s The Church in the Power of the Spirit continues to be one of the most impressive books I’ve yet encountered from him. In fact, I’ve found Moltmann’s work here quite helpful in light of the recent discussions about the viability of Hauerwas’s ecclesiology that have emerged from Nate Kerr’s book, Christ, History and Apocalyptic.

Hauerwas certainly has a strong tendency to see the task of the church in light of the challenges of modernity. In light of the modern situation — of individualism, Western ideology, etc. — the church must be intentional in the work of ecclesial culture-making in order to form different, truly virtuous persons who can inhabit the world differently, thereby bearing witness to the gospel. The social challenges of modernity require an ecclesial response of resistance and counter-construction.

Whether this critique ultimately sticks with full force to Hauerwas doesn’t matter too much for the purposes of my point here. Clearly it is undeniable that this sort of theological anxiety about modernity is widespread. It can be easily found all over conservative evangelicalism with its deep-seated terror that “we” are losing control of America. However it is no less present in the political sentiments of John Milbank and his own critiques of modernity and arguments for some sort of global Christian socialism.

Moltmann, however cuts past this. The unrest that the modern situation poses to the church is decidedly secondary — at best — to the unrest that lies at the heart of the church itself. The church is unsettled, unstable precisely because it bears witness to the triune God present through Christ in the Spirit. The crucified Christ is not a stable center, but a transcendent voice that cannot be domesticated by the church into their own possessed message. The presence of Christ in the Spirit pertains to nothing less than the total transformation of the world into the messianic kingdom of God. This is not a reality the church possesses within itself, but rather one that it obediently receives, never quite knowing what it will ultimately mean. “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9). Thus, as Moltmann argues:

[I]t can by no means be merely the unrest of our time which causes the unrest of the church. Nor can it merely be the present revolutionary situation which makes it essential for the church and its teaching to find new bearings. . . [I]ts ‘unrest’ is implicit in itself, in the crucified Christ to whom it appeals and in the Spirit which is its driving power. The unrest of the times points it to this inner unrest of its own. The social and cultural upheavals of the present draw its attention to that great upheaval which it itself describes as ‘new creation’, as the ‘new people of god’, when it testifies to the world concerning the future of ‘the new heaven and the new earth’. What is required today is not adroit adaption to changed social conditions, but the inner renewal of the church by the Spirit of Christ, the power of the coming kingdom.

Note, in this schema the sentiment that animates the church is one of eschatological joy. Our own “unrest” lies in our hope for the coming renewal of all things in Christ, a renewal that we cannot grasp, control, possess, or ever fully anticipate. The church, oriented by this sort of doxological, eschatological hope is not overly worried about the supposed threats of “modernity” to “traditional Christianity” or other such melodramatic notions of where Western civilization is going wrong. In the place of furtive anxiety about losing control of the cultural formations of the West we are invited into a missional messianic life of trust and hope in the the coming kingdom of God.

All of this turns of course on a sort of reckless confidence that the triune God of the Bible is, in fact, living and active. That this kingdom actually is being brought about in Christ and the Spirit. This orientation requires an utterly foolish trust that God truly acts and is acting. That the kingdom of God is indeed coming as a gift that we could not secure for ourselves.

Does Mission Make the Church?

Posted by on November 18, 2009 46 comments

According to the early church’s own self-narration in the book of Acts it would seem so. In Acts 2 clearly it is the pentecostal coming of the Holy Spirit which initiates the new messianic reality through the apostles. But, the logic of the Spirit’s movement is not Pentecost-Church-Mission, but Pentecost-Mission-Church. The Spirit descends upon the apostles (2:2-4) who then proceed to proclaim the gospel (2:14ff). Only after the proclamation, the enactment in the Spirit of their missional vocation, do the apostles baptize those who are caught up into the gospel’s truth. Only after the missional proclamation of the truth about Jesus does the rudiments of a common missional life, the life of the ekklesia, begin to emerge (2:42-46).

The church, then is a response to the pentecostal mission of the Spirit through the apostolic proclamation of the truth about Jesus. And this response is one of being given over to the form of radical love displayed in Christ’s own revelation of Israel’s God. It is a movement of fellowship, solidarity, service, and mutual dispossession (v. 45).

Thus, the logic of mission and church is something like the following: the messianic mission of Christ calls forth the pentecostal mission of the Holy Spirit which brings about the aposolic mission of proclamation in word and deed of the radical love of Jesus. This apostolic mission takes shape in the ekklesia, a movement of communal cruciform love and service to the world.

Tradition and Messianic Liberation

Posted by on November 18, 2009 2 comments

Jürgen Moltmann, in The Church in the Power of the Spirit argues that appeals to the church’s tradition as a source of stable, timeless permanence are misguided on the basis of the very nature of tradition itself:

The tradition to which the church appeals, and which it proclaims whenever it calls itself Christ’s church and speaks in Christ’s name, is the tradition of the messianic liberation and eschatological renewal of the world. It is impossible to rest on this tradition. It is a tradition that changes men and from which they are born again. It is like the following wind that drives us to new shores. Anyone who enters into this messianic tradition accepts the adventure of the Spirit, the experience of liberation, the call to repentance, and common work for the coming kingdom. Tradition and reformation, what abides and what changes, faithfulness and the fresh start are not antitheses in the history of the Spirit. For the Spirit leads to the fellowship of Christ and consummates the messianic kingdom. (p. 3)

The tradition, thus construed, cannot be a stable source of rest, of self-confidence and coherence. Rather it consists in being given over to the ongoing missional activity of the Spirit in transforming the world into the kingdom of Christ.

Summarizing Jenson on God and Time

Posted by on November 16, 2009 1 comment

Peter Leithart has perhaps the best post-length summary of Robert Jenson’s controversial and oft-misunderstood theology of God and time:

Is God eternally and infinitely the eternal and infinite God that He is? Of course. He’s God.

Is God dependent on creation for His fulfillment? Of course not. He’s God.

The biblical God uniquely does not try to escape time. All other gods do; that’s what makes them gods.

The world is what it is. History is what it is. No use worrying what might have been.

God promises to show mercy, and give Himself to His people. These promises are given to a real people, in real time.

Those promises come true, or they don’t.

If they don’t, then God is not in fact the God who shows mercy.

If they do, then God is in fact the God who shows mercy. He could not be the God who shows mercy if He failed show mercy. By definition.

Given the kind of world that is, this mercy must involve the Cross and Resurrection. God could not be in fact the God who whose mercy without crucifixion and resurrection.

Think of the contrary: God could be a God bursting with mercy and grace, but refuse to make or keep promises. But then He wouldn’t be the God of mercy and grace.

Or, what amounts to the same thing: God could be a God of mercy and grace “in Himself,” without reference to the creation. But then God would no longer be the biblical God, but an idol who does what all gods do – provide security against time.

One of those deserted island kind of things

Posted by on November 16, 2009 66 comments

What is the one novel for you? The one that you would take up, forsaking all others if you had to choose. And why? Tell us.

Yoder on Just War 5

Posted by on November 14, 2009 15 comments

I’ve been reading The War of the Lamb, the most recent posthumous work of John Howard Yoder’s to be released. I’ll have more to say about some of the problems of the published form of the book later. (Short version: I deeply suspect that Stassen has taken too many editorial liberties in the interest of enlisting Yoder in support of his “just peacemaking” program. But I have to investigate more before I make any strong accusations of that sort.)

However, despite what the back cover claims, that in this book Yoder argues that “Christian just war and Christian pacifist traditions are basically compatible,” Yoder’s true voice cannot be edited away. The book actually provides the most clear statement of Yoder’s firm rejection of just war theory as a credible form of moral discourse:

This is a conversation [between just war and pacifism] I have already analyzed more deeply than most people have. I know from having tested it for thirty years from inside that the just war tradition is not credible. I don’t dialogue with the just war tradition because I think is is credible, but because it is the language that people, who I believe bear the image of God, abuse to authorize themselves to destroy other bearers of that image. (p. 116)

This is perhaps the clearest statement I’ve yet seen from Yoder about his own rationale for his dialogical engagement with just war theory. Those who construe it as some form of advocating “compatibility” between just war and pacifism are doing violence to Yoder’s work. Yoder’s engagement with just war was of a distinctly pacifist sort. He engaged the just war tradition because he loved both those who held to it and those who suffer under its abuse. Indeed, as Yoder makes clear in the The War of the Lamb, his discourse with just war is simply one of the ways he tried to practice the gospel call to love our enemies (see pp. 110-11).

South Park Does Glenn Beck

Posted by on November 13, 2009 4 comments

Just too good not to share:

Homosexuality Trumps the Homeless

Posted by on November 13, 2009 47 comments

This is shocking, at least from the standpoint of the gospel. Apparently there is some legislation in DC that would require employers to not discriminate against same-sex couples (i.e. they’d have to give them medical benefits). In response to this the Catholic archdiocese has threatened to shut down their public social services to the homeless unless the legislation is changed.

The fear is that they would be forced to “extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples” which they feel is an unacceptable encroachment of the state into their religious freedom. Note however that they aren’t concerned that they’d be forced to employ homosexuals, only that they’d be forced to give medical benefits to current employees who are in same-sex relationships. So, apparently its ok to employ the gays as long as they don’t have to recognize them as such in some official sense.

Now, lets just bracket the issue of whether or not Christians should accept same-sex marriage or not on the basis of Scripture. What should be outrageous to all Christians, regardless of their perspective on that issue is the way in which the poor and the marginalized are simply a bargaining chip in an ideological game over homosexuality. Is it really more important to the church that it be able to not give medical benefits to those in gay relationships than that it care for the poor as Jesus commanded us? Because that’s what’s really be being said here. This is no heroic moral resoluteness that refuses compromise. Apparently, at least for this archdiocese, being able to keep their hands clean of “endorsing homosexuality” is more important than caring for those whom the powers are making nothing. All Christians should be horrified by this callous casting aside of the poor for the sake of ideological posturing. Truly disgraceful.

Best AAR Discovery

Posted by on November 12, 2009 21 comments

I think my favorite find of this year’s AAR was McLean’s pub. Despite the undeniable weakness of most Canadian beer, you can’t deny the unequivocal awesomeness of drinking beer from your own tap:

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Back from AAR

Posted by on November 12, 2009 1 comment

Sorry for the week of silence, folks. I was basically cut off from the internet during my time at this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting. It was definitely an enjoyable time, if a  pale shadow of the former glory that was the joint meetings of AAR and SBL (but don’t worry, those days will be back in a year or so and continue on for the foreseeable future).

I thoroughly enjoyed presenting Ben Myers’ paper, “Apocalyptic Gospel” at the Theology and Apocalyptic session, which will likely be one of the most interesting discussion groups at AAR in the future. The ensuing discussion was excellent, indeed some of the best I’ve experienced in these sorts of forums. I definitely plan to remain involved with this group and hopefully present something of my own at next year’s meeting.

It was also a pleasure to spend many evenings with old and new friends, which is, to my mind the best thing about AAR. But, now I am back, energized, have some new books and blogging shall resume at once. For those who also went to AAR, what did you find most enjoyable this year?

Palin Poetry

Posted by on November 5, 2009 5 comments

The Trinity and Attributes

Posted by on November 4, 2009 44 comments

To continue on the trinitarian theme, let me ruminate on something I’ve thought for a long time. In a typical discussion of the doctrine of the divine attributes most theologians have been careful to say that all three of the divine persons posses all the exact same attributes equally and identically. Thus, the Father is omnipotent, the Son is omnipotent, the Spirit is omnipotent, etc. Some of this impulse is rooted in the affirmations of the Athanasian Creed. Regardless, though there is a general assumption that the divine persons are identical in every way, excpet in regard to their particular relations. Thus the Father is exactly like the Son in every way except that he is the Father, etc.

Now, obviously this approach has some difficulties. Most notable of which is the fact that its been pretty hard to figure out what “Father-ness,” “Sonship,” and “Holy Spiritude” really mean. The best we’ve ever been able to do is talk about eternal generation-type terms like begetting, being begotten, spirating, being spirated, and so on. Of course what those relations mean and how they are different from each other has never really been well-described.

But, what would happen if we didn’t just assume that the divine persons must be identical in every way except for the illusive categories of relations of origin? Why must we assume that the Father, Son, and Spirit must be exactly the same in all of their characteristics in order to be equally and fully divine? Does it not make sense to see them as perhaps quite different in their attributes, but by virtue of their complete, eternally actual indwelling of one another together constituting one divine reality, the Godhead? This would definitely make sense of the scriptural language which routinely speaks of the divine persons in very distinctive terms. Jesus is “the power and wisdom of God”; the Spirit is “the truth”; and so on.

On this reading it is not necessary to jump through hoops to prove how Jesus was omniscient when the gospels pretty clearly show that there was stuff he didn’t know. Equality in deity does not require identicality of attributes between the persons. Only a prior ontological commitment to what has been termed “substance metaphysics” would incline us to assume that it would. Rather it is precisely the differences between the Father, Son, and Spirit, utterly and sublimely united in one eternal divine reality, that constitute the perfections of the Trinity.

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