Category Archives: Doing Theology

From text to Word

Posted by on March 7, 2011 25 comments

So much depends, I believe, on the current theological milieu (or the little corner of it in which I tend to find myself) coming to see Scripture once again not merely as “text” or “script” but as Word, that is as the living and active witness to the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. This is to be further understood as a deep and pressing need to move from an immanentist vision of Scripture, as the sort of cultural product of the church by which it authorizes and codifies its own life and practices, to a transcendent view of Scripture; or rather simply a view in which God is taken seriously as the free, living, and speaking Lord of the church. For too long Scripture has been cast in contemporary theology as an inert text, there to be subjected to the cultural-linguistic meditation of the self-sufficient (or, more prettily put, Spirit-imbued and thus, immanently authoritative) church. That Scripture might be a field in which God (conceived not as the church’s cultural aura, but as the Triune Lord who loves and speaks in freedom to, in, and beyond the church) truly speaks, in ways we do not expect or anticipate, is simply a notion not taken with much seriousness. It is brushed aside casually as a sort of primitive fundamentalist past that we have all hopefully outgrown.

The great error of all of this is that it effectively reduces God to — at best — an immanent force animating the church’s culture. Some will think this overstates the problem. Perhaps (though I’m not convinced). But still, we are left to wonder why there is so much skittishness in these theological circles to actually giving serious weight to the notion that God might really be active among us and beyond us. That God might really speak in a way that lays us bare and before which our prior conceptions, processes, and status quos (even our ecclesial ones) must simply bow.

This is how I continue to feel more and more convicted the more I am asked to preach, and the more I find myself reading Scripture. It was also stirred anew in me recently when Jason posted this excellent and challenging quote from John Webster on the nature of Scripture, which puts the matter better than I can:

. . . Scripture is a transcendent moment in the life of the church. Scripture is not the church’s book, something internal to the community’s discursive practices; what the church hears in Scripture is not its own voice. It is not a store of common meanings or a Christian cultural code – and if it engenders those things, it is only because Scripture is that in which Jesus Christ through the Spirit is pleased to utter the viva vox Dei. Consecrated by God for the purpose of Christ’s self-manifestation, Holy Scripture is always intrusive, in a deep sense alien, to the life of the church. All this is to say that the church assembles around the revelatory self-presence of God in Christ through the Spirit, borne to the communion of saints by the writings of the prophets and apostles. This divine revelation is “isolated” – that is, it is a self-generating and self-completing event’.

~ John Webster, Confessing God, 189.

Would we dare affirm this? That God really speaks, with God’s own voice, a voice that is not ultimately reducible to our own? An if not, why not? Anymore I don’t know what other hope I could possibly have.

Resentment and theology

Posted by on December 6, 2010 16 comments

Resentment is a pattern of desire such that someone is much more occupied with the obstacle to their project than with the project itself. The sign of grace is when someone finds that their desire has been reformed, so that what had seemed like an obstacle becomes relatively indifferent, and they are ever freer to open up a new and creative project. The difference is that between the pattern of desire which creates suicide bombers and that which creates ministers of the Gospel.

~ James Alison, On Being Liked, 130.

Blogging as theological discourse

Posted by on July 19, 2010 18 comments

Ok, I’m back. After a week in Chicago for EP and then another week vacationing in California with the always-dangerous Andrew Kooy, I am back. Stay tuned to the Valdenkor blog for some forthcoming recountings of the culinary chronicles of Andrew and myself from the past week.

In the meantime, here is a segment from the conclusion to the presentation I gave with Jana Bennett at EP on “blogging as theological discourse”:

So, in conclusion if I were to venture some guesses about how we might best go about this open-ended and uncertain work of “seeing how this will work”, I would offer four guidelines, which I offer no less to myself than to others:

  1. Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse must be open to critique, re-formation, and revision in light of the voices of others. Blogging, by its very nature is open and participatory towards a variety of discursive voices. Moreover, blogging tends to generate a variety of discussions outside of the medium of blogs themselves.
  2. Blogging generates a multi-level discussion. It is precisely in attending to these discussions with care for the voice of the other and allowing them to shape future discussions and explorations of the themes discussed that we blog faithfully. In short, blogging must be shaped by the conversation it generates if it is to be truly fruitful.
  3. Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse must embrace its open-ended and fundamentally itinerant nature. Blogging, if it attempts to accomplish the work of books and journal articles, will simply be a poor exercise. Blogging’s piecemeal, fragmentary, and dynamic nature must be embraced, and precisely so, be discovered as a mode of open and unpredictable discourse. It is a dialogical space for pilgrims, wayfarers, and strangers who are enabled in this space to discover unexpected conversations about the call of God on our lives. In this sort of itinerant space we have the opportunity to allow ourselves to be known, in all our facileness, haste, and vulnerability, and to simply be conversationally present without pretension to over-importance, establishment, or self-validation. This, at least, is what I believe theological blogging must aspire to be.
  4. Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse ought always to be shaped and birthed from a life of lived prayer in the context of the church in its mission to the world. Blogging, at its best should arise from reflection on the concrete life of the church for and in the world, and, precisely as such, it must be grounded in prayer, that is, in the cry for the kingdom which gives the church its shape, life, and calling. To seek any form of faithful theological discussion outside of a common life of prayer for the coming of the Triune God to transfigure, renew, and interrupt us, is to engage in false and futile pursuits. This is not a pious gloss. Prayer is essential for good conversation about God. This applies to blogging no less than to any other mode of theological conversation. Perhaps more so.Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse must, by the Spirit, learn proper patience in the midst of the immediacy of response that blogging tends to generate. Haste is perhaps the greatest temptation of blogging. Only by being given over to patience, the fruit of the Spirit which takes shape in our life together under Christ’s lordship, can we pursue this sort of discussion in a truly fruitful manner.

The discussion in the workshop was, I think, quite good, especially in that it allowed a number of folks who have been involved in the online discussions on this blog to engage in face-to-face conversation about the whole dynamic of theological discussion in the medium of blogs.

Kingdom-World-Church: Some Provisional Theses

Posted by on June 8, 2010 252 comments

by Nathan R. Kerr, Ry O. Siggelkow, and Halden Doerge

In a recent conversation on this blog regarding an important review, by Ry Siggelkow, I (Nate Kerr) suggested in the comments that to think rightly what it means to say that “mission makes the church,” that mission as lived proclamation of and witness to Christ’s Lordship is indeed constitutive of the church’s existence in the world, we will need to engage in a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the church’s relation to the world in light of the apocalyptic inbreaking of the Kingdom of God that happens in the historicity of Jesus Christ. In the course of those comments I offered to write a “guest post” in which I gave some indication of what I think those reconsiderations might entail. This is that post—which has come together with more than just a little help from my friends, Halden and Ry. Together we offer these reflections in hope that they may contribute to the task of theology in the service of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We should like to begin these brief reflections with an oft-quoted passage from the conclusion of John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics:

The believing body is the image that the new world—which in light of the ascension and Pentecost is on the way—casts ahead of itself. The believing body of Christ is the world on the way to its renewal; the church is the part of the world that confesses the renewal to which all the world is called. (Yoder, Body Politics, 78)

This passage and others like it from Yoder’s oeuvre have been the impetus for a number of contemporary modes of “ecclesiocentric” construals of the Kingdom of God in relation to the world. The church’s missionary thinking, so the argument goes, is ecclesiocentric just to the extent that the church ontologically precedes the world and, ultimately, supercedes the world with respect to the Kingdom’s eschatological fulfillment. As the late twentieth-century theologian and missiologist J.C. Hoekendijk has argued, however, such “church-centric missionary thinking” is itself a false start. For from within such ecclesiocentric thinking, Hoekendijk claims, the call to mission, or evangelism—that is, the call to proclaim and to embody “the gospel”—often turns out to be “little else than a call to restore ‘Christendom,’ the ‘Corpus Christianum,’ as a solid, well-integrated cultural complex, directed and dominated by the Church” (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 15). That is to say, the church aligns itself with the Kingdom and against the world by way of the production of its own alternative, habitable culture. As John Flett has convincingly argued, mission thereby becomes tied inextricably to the extension of this “culture”; this culture, this particular way of life, just is the gospel that is proclaimed, and the church’s missionary relation to the world cannot but be a function of its own culture—gospel proclamation turns out to be a matter of the church’s propagation of its own way of life, and evangelism a mode of integrating the world into this particular habitable culture.[1] Thus, on such an ecclesiocentric reading of the church-world relationship, the church is most missionary precisely at that point at which the church is most intentionally “self-regarding” (Hauerwas). And herein lies the reason why we must insist upon resisting such an understanding of the church as ontologically “prior” to the world as such, in relation to the Kingdom: viz., it presents us with not only an ecclesiologically but missiologically idealist logic—such an intentionally self-regarding conception of mission requires the construction of another (“the world”) as productive and reflective of its own identity.

The problem with such an ecclesio-concentric understanding of the church’s relation to the Kingdom and the world, says Hoekendijk, is that it misconstrues the basic scriptural sense in which the kingdom of God is first and foremost the Kingdom for the world. The Kingdom is oriented from beginning to end towards the oikoumene—the whole world.

For this oikoumene the Kingdom is destined; world (kosmos/oikoumene) and Kingdom are correlated to each other; the world is conceived as a unity, the scene of God’s great acts: it is the world which has been reconciled (II Cor. 5:19), the world which God loves (John 3:16) and which he has overcome in his love (John (16:33); the world is the field in which the seeds of the Kingdom are sown (Matt. 13:38)—the world is consequently the scene for the proclamation of the Kingdom. (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 41)

In short: “Kingdom and world belong together.” The order of God’s economy is thus “God-World-Church, not God-Church-World” (71). This is the order of God’s own missionary existence in Christ. And by participation in this missionary existence of God, we must give new expression to the church’s own missionary existence: the order of this existence must be that of Kingdom-World-Church, not Kingdom-Church-World.

What we should like to propose, then, is that the quote from Yoder with which we began these reflections should be read through the perspective of this alternative Kingdom-World-Church order. Precisely as such, we might better come to understand the implications of Yoder’s insight that mission has to do with coming to “see the church in relationship to the world rather than defining ecclesial existence ‘by definition’ or ‘as such’” (Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 78). The church only exists as “living from and toward the promise of the whole world’s salvation.” (Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, 12).

As such, the church thereby exists as one dimension of a thoroughgoing apocalyptic realism. That is to say, the church exists insofar as it is constituted by the manner in which, in the apocalypse of Jesus Christ, “the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world,” proving victorious over the fallen powers of this world for the sake of this world’s salvation (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 54). What really matters, then, for the church, is its mode of participation “in the reality of God and the world in Jesus Christ today” (55).[2] And that reality is without reserve that of the apocalyptic rectification of all things to God in Christ. That event of apocalyptic rectification is constitutive of reality itself; and the event of the church takes place firmly within that reality of the reconciled world “that is real only through the reality of God” disclosed in Jesus Christ (54).[3] The church thus exists as an ergon Kyriou (a work of the Lord), which means to say that the church exists for the sake of the unique and special share that it is given in the cosmic meaning of the sovereignty of this world’s living Lord. But precisely as such the church does exist, and its existence is precisely that of a special function and task. As to the nature of that special existence, function, and task, we should like to conclude these reflections. We shall do so by putting forward some provisional theses on the existence, nature, and task of the church. There could be more, of course, and these could be articulated with more depth and precision. But these are, after all, mere theses—and provisional at that.

Read more »

The hard labor of theology

Posted by on June 7, 2010 16 comments

The more I read James Alison the more he continues to be rather shockingly profound, perhaps most clearly in the humility and simplicity of his work — which also always seems to embolden and enliven it. Here he is on the nature of doing theology:

Theology is perhaps for those of us who can’t find an obvious sense in what may be very simple perceptions, ones which are understood intuitively by better Christians than ourselves; theology would be for those of us who are obliged to the hard labor of dragging our obstinate intellects through the spines and thistles of our own self-deceit so as to bring each thought, each remnant of intellectual pride, captive before Christ (2 Cor 10:5), ploughing out meaning from arid and sterile soil. (Raising Abel, 15)

Sounds about right to me.

Donald Miller, Theology, and Relationship

Posted by on May 21, 2010 13 comments

Derrick, recently returned in a sustained manner to the blogosphere, has stirred up the waters with a post (rightly) critiquing Christian hipster and coffeehouse favorite author, Donald Miller on the issue of theology, relationship, and the knowledge of God. Miller, for his part seems to have responded, both via blog and tweet.

Derrick, of course, is right, at least in my judgment. The problem with contrasting  “theological” pursuit with “relational” encounter with God is that it fails to see how utterly theological realtionality is. There is no such thing as some sort of “bare relation” that does involve theological reflection. Indeed, on this point I’ll go out and surprise all of you by saying that Milbank is absolutely right, everything is theological, whether it is acknowledge or not.

Of course Milbank wasn’t the first to come up with that, but still.

P.S. If you want something deeper and more interesting than Donald Miller critique, though I suggest Derrick’s most recent post on deification and ontology in Maximus the Confessor.

An apocalyptic “style”

Posted by on February 14, 2010 3 comments

David Toole has some comments about what that notion means:

An apocalyptic style is a way of acknowledging the strangeness of this biblical world and, by extension, the world generally . . . [apocalyptic style] founds itself not upon the identity of the same but upon the otherness of a world that never ceases to be strange. In this world, history continues not because of what kings and presidents might do but because ravens keep alive a prophet starving in the desert (1 Kings 17) and because even as kings and presidents count their people and take their polls and plan the future, the word of God comes into the wilderness (Luke 3). (Waiting For Godot in Sarajevo, 210)
Or, one might say that an apocalyptic style is a mode of doing theology which takes the utterly miraculous nature of biblical faith seriously. Of course, this can be a pretty embarrassing thing to do.

In defense of ass-kicking

Posted by on January 13, 2010 36 comments

In recent discussion about some comments by Gene McCarraher in the in-progress TOJ interview, some interesting stuff came about the relative merits of kicking ass, argumentatively speaking. The passage that occasioned this discussion in the interview is as follows:

I was giving a talk in Chicago a few months after the invasion, and a student asked me a question that just knocked me for a loop. “If the government is protecting me from harm,” he asked, “isn’t it OK for them to lie to me? I mean, if I’m safe, and if it’s for my own good that they’re lying to me, what’s the harm?” I couldn’t believe that a post-sixties college student would even think of asking such a stupid question. I asked him, “So, when do you want the government to not lie to you? If it’s for your own good that they lie to you, why should peacetime make any difference? Why should they tell you the truth at all? For that matter, why should they tell you anything? Why should you want or care to know, ‘as long as you’re safe’?” His very question indicated to me that, for a large cohort of this college generation, truth, falsehood, and evidence just don’t mean very much. “Whatever.”

The discussion brought up the question of whether it was more profitable to kick ass or to foster a “prophetic capacity to see that patience is a far more revolutionary way to engage this generation, to stoke its creative impulses, and stir it from sleep.” From that point the discussion went on to what I take to be a rather good accord, so what follows should not be construed as a critique of the commenter, but rather as something of a spin-off about the merits of ass-kicking as such.

For my money a good verbal ass-kicking is not opposed to a proper revolutionary patience. In fact, to turn a Yoderian phrase here (via Rom Coles), I think ass-kicking is perhaps a vital form of “wild patience.” After all, ass-kicking is not assault or murder, its a form of rebuke, of chastening, of discipline. Certainly ass-kicking can reach a point where it is excessive and sadistic, and finding that line is always the challenge (witness my own, perhaps overblown tendency to verbally kick Mark Driscoll’s ass).

The point though—and I mean this in a very experiential way, having been the recipient of many utterly needed ass-kickings—is that without ass-kicking there’s not much chance of real knowledge, let alone intellectual or personal transformation. Without regular ass-kickings we’re left with precious little besides benign strokings. That helps no one. Ever. While ass-kickings may sometimes kick up plenty of unhelpful dust, they also have far more of a creative capacity to uncover things that are hidden, to bring to light that which needs to be exposed.

That is why ass-kickings can be painful. But it is also why they are much more fruitful and redemptive than any amount of stroking and self-confirmation.

Powers and Practices §1: Chris Huebner

Posted by on January 6, 2010 9 comments

One of my new aims this year is to blog more consistently about what I’m reading. One way I’m going to do that is by doing more chapter by chapter reviews/notes on books. I’m hoping to do one of these most weekdays. To kick it off, I’m starting with Powers and Practices: Engaging the Work of John Howard Yoder, edited by Jeremy M. Bergen and Anthony G. Siegrist (Thanks to Herald Press for the review copy). Hope it’s helpful.

This book is one of a couple recent projects that is not merely doing work on Yoder, but thinking with Yoder in conversation with multiple other — and highly diverse — thinkers and ideas. Powers and Practices is a welcome collection of essays contributing to important theological work that takes Yoder seriously — something I am very much on board with.

The first chapter in the book is by Chris Huebner, entitled “The Work of Inheritance: Reflections on Receiving John Howard Yoder.” This essay is a very helpful and readable introduction to Yoder’s mode of theological reflection, and specifically his understanding of “inheritance,” that is of faithfulness to “tradition” or “history.” Huebner notes that “Throughout his meandering engagements and conversations, we constantly find Yoder striving to articulate a posture with respect to history that does not reflect a possessive will to somehow manage and control it” (p. 20). According to Huebner:

[Yoder's] work is everywhere laced with notions of memory and hope, of historical discernment and openness to the surprises of the new. But these themes are not to be understood in a manner that suggests a simple or straightforward activity of repetition, of narrowly factual accuracy, or of what we might describe as archival sensibilities. Neither do they present a vision of hope that consists in the desire to realize some given end, as if the future somehow rests squarely on our shoulders. They reflect neither a primitivist or preservationist reification of the past, not a progressive construal of hope as a future goal to be achieved. Rather, we find in Yoder a vision of inheritance that is interruptive and radically transforms those who are in a position to receive it. Indeed, echoing Barth, he emphasizes that it is not so much we who remember, but rather that we are made a part of God’s memory, and in being so remembered have our very we-ness redefined. At the very least, the question of receiving an inheritance is, for Yoder, fare from straightforward. Inheritance names a kind of work, a life’s work of ongoing transformation in which the very identity of the one said to be doing the receiving is somehow part of whats at stake. (p. 21)

This is crucial to understanding what it means to appropriate tradition and history in the task of theology. For Yoder “inheriting a tradition is thus crucially not uni-directional. It does not consist in a linear gaze backward to the past, nor does it give rise to a clear and unambiguous path looking forward. Rather it involves a constant ‘looping back’ to the origins in light of unpredictable, often surprising encounters with other dialogue partners” (p. 23).

In conversation with Wittgenstein, Romand Coles, and Rowan Williams, Huebner hints at what this notion of “the work of inheritance” means both for theological approaches to tradition and history, and more specifically, for our own approach to the work of Yoder. What this involves then is not an attempt to systematize Yoder or get him “right.” Rather we ought to engage in the ongoing and open work of “looping back” to Yoder and inheriting his ad hoc and diasporic mode of theology in conversation with others. And as Huenber notes, this is a more fruitful and faithful way of engaging Yoder’s work, indeed the conversations into which we can bring Yoder often tend to be “more fruitful that some of Yoder’s own encounters with those same figures” (p. 25). This, importantly gives us a way to be both “for and against” Yoder as with think with him in vulnerable receptivity to other, often unexpected dialogue partners.

The Meaning of Natural Theology: Open Thread

Posted by on November 2, 2009 27 comments

I imagine that natural theology is near the top of the list of theological issues that are most fervently argued about and simultaneously most misunderstood. At least since Barth and Brunner’s head-on collision over the matter it has been the subject of voracious conflict with both sides claiming that the other doesn’t really understand the issues.

So, here’s the question: What, in a couple sentences do you understand natural theology to be? Sub-question: Is natural theology licit, that is, does it impart knowledge of God?

Go.

Doing Theology Against Ourselves

Posted by on October 8, 2009 16 comments

In relation to the last post, lets probe a bit further. Assuming — as seems eminently reasonable — that most theologians’ actual shape of living tends to depart sharply from the theological projects they promote, how shall we evaluate this? One’s immediate reaction is usually one of indignation: “How could so and so write all this books about the nature of fidelity in the Old Testament and then abandon his wife to run off with his secretary as soon as he retired?”

Now, of course that’s an utterly fair question to pose to such a person, but that doesn’t tell us how we should subsequently view that person’s theological writings. In fact, if we insisted that the only theological writings we gave serious weight to were ones whose authors clearly conformed to in their lives, we’d have precious little to read (including some fairly sizeable parts of the Bible I daresay).

I would suggest that the frequent discord between theology and theologians isn’t actually such a bad thing, at least in one sense. If theologians could only writing in accordance with their moral achievements no one could ever write in a way that called herself into question. Theology would merely be an exercise in self-congratulation if we only recommended our own achievements. That our attempts to talk about God often end up condemning us is, you might say, far better than the alternative. If our God-talk simply validated us, clearly we’d be doing something far worse. Though, of course this happens all the time, too.

Doing Theology with/as Caiaphas

Posted by on October 8, 2009 76 comments

Its hard to find a more scandalizing bunch of people than theologians, and not in the good way. One would think that among a guild of professionals dedicated to getting to know God as well as possible you’d see less infidelity, churlishness, affluence, and apathy towards injustice than in other professions. However this hardly seems to be the case. As I look at my own shelves of favorite theologians, I see at least a few adulterers, more than a couple of which were rather predatory towards the women they pursued. Likewise I’m hard pressed to find very many theologians who took the intentional practice of the Christian faith with much seriousness. Indeed, even going to church seems too much to ask from many theologians. Here a story comes to mind about how Jürgen Moltmann lies in a hammock every Sunday and thinks about ecclesiology — I don’t know if its true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

I won’t even touch the degree to which most theologians do everything they can to avoid contact with, exposure to, or even having to see the poor.

Anyways, the question sometimes comes up — and Dan has pressed this question very well — as to how we can take this sorry lot seriously when they try to tell us about God. Somehow, pondering this question led me back to this particular story from the gospel of John which details the beginnings of the Jewish clerisy’s plot against Jesus:

So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council, and said, “What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.”  But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God. So from that day on they planned to put him to death. (John 11:47-53)

It would be hard to imagine a person more opposed to the gospel of Jesus than Caiaphas and those plotting to put him to death. But what we see here is a sort of ironic twist in that the speech of Caiaphas ends up bearing witness to some aspect of the truth of Jesus’s mission.

This, I think, is what happens all the time in the work of theologians. Rebellious, untruthful, flawed, and even malicious people are seized by the Spirit in ways that bear witness to the truth of who God is. Certainly we should not resign ourselves to this state of affairs, but at the very least we may benefit from such a hermeneutic for reading theological works. Like Caiaphas, many theologians, including ourselves, often end up “not speaking on our own” when we say something true about God.

Another biblical account that seems to illustrate this may be the story of Baalam and his ass.

The Temptations and Ethics of Blogging

Posted by on August 18, 2009 24 comments

Ben has recently done us all a service in his superb work on the nature of blogging as theological discourse. Without a doubt blogging is changing the nature of theological writing, both for good and for ill in many respects. In thinking on this for the last week or so, I’ve come to see that one of the key temptations that blogging offers is its lack of accountability. If you publish a book you have to live with it for at least a good little while. On the other hand, blog authors retain a very high level of control over the material they publish and its availability. If you write something foolish, rude, or stupid you can easily delete the material, and, unless some dutiful reader is saving your material themselves, there’s a good chance you won’t ever have to really be accountable for such writing. It vanishes into the void of the interwebs, to never trouble you again.

This is one of the temptations blogging poses. It offers a golden opportunity to speak far too quickly, and after tempers have cooled to simply make a poorly-placed rant go away. As such blogging presents a temptation to opportunism and cowardice in writing. Without patience in writing (which blogging doesn’t itself instill or foster) we’re likely to end up posting quite a few rants that later on we kind of wish we really hadn’t written. I know I have. And then that delete key starts to look pretty nice indeed. We are able to edit our blogs constantly, shaping them into the perfect picture we want to portray of ourselves, our writing skills, and our opinions.

I came across a rather bizarre and extreme example of this recently. A blogger had posted a massive rant inspired by a news story he had read which alleged that the British government was planning to install thousands of closed circuit cameras in the homes of families who were big social problems (history of crime, drugs, etc.). This led to some quite delusional railings about totalitarianism, in which the Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls was likened to Hitler and Stalin in some pretty explicit terms:

Alexander Solzhensitsyn[sic] spend years in the Gulag because as a young army officer he wrote as letter criticizing Stalin, which was opened and read by army censors. That was pretty efficient totalitarianism, wasn’t it? No, it was inefficient and mickey mouse. Stalin eat your heart out! You never had electronic survellience[sic] methods like this. You were small time as dictators go. Let Ed Balls teach you a thing or two.

I’ve commented a time or two on the lunacy, mendacity, fatuity and immorality of this government on this blog. They hand out condoms to 12 year olds. They publish pamphlets telling parents not to tell their children to abstain from sex outside of marriage. They are trying to get abortion commercials on TV in prime time. But this one reveals just how totalitarian they are.

The Nazis might just as well have conquored[sic] Britain in 1941. All those brave men who gave their lives in the Battle of Britain died – for what? So a supposedly democratic government could spy on citizens in their own homes? So the government could undermine parental rights, adopt policies designed to destroy families and then swoop in to take over child-rearing? They died for this type of behaviour? They died to make Orwell’s prophecies come true?

There was no need. All they had to do was invite Hitler in. Wait – maybe that is just what they did when they elected the Labour Party.

Now, I’m certainly a fan of rhetorical flourish. Far be it from me to deny this. But I do think that when we make explicit comparisons between contemporary events and figures and the greatest mass murders in modern history, we had better be careful and correct. However, as it turns out the story behind this whole rant was a complete fabrication (which the right wing newspaper it appeared in has yet to retract or acknowledge). I pointed this out to the author at which point he followed up the post with another that simply continued to press his case without acknowledging, say that maybe all the Stalin and Hitler comparisons were a little out of line:

Given the prevelance[sic] of CCTV cameras all over Britain and the impossibility of having staff literally “supervising” every family 24 hours per day it appears that someone jumped to the conclusion that the CCTV cameras would be installed. This does not appear to be the case, although it is interesting that so many are ready to believe the government capable of such a thing.

If the government continues to pursue policies that divide and degrade families (such as facilitating teenaged[sic] girls having abortions without parental notification and promotiong[sic] contraception to children as young as 12), there can be little doubt that massive and intrusive behaviour-control methods of intervention will be required to maintain social order. The family historically has been the means by which children are socialized and taught self-discipline. Things were almost this bad in 18th century Britain and the whole society was changed by the Methodist revival. Unfortunately, the Methodists have morphed into the Labour Party and no one is looking to the church for help now. Without this bulwark against original sin, social chaos is inevitable. If it isn’t done by CCTV cameras, such intervention will likely be done in some manner.

Here is another temptation the blogosphere can present us with: the temptation to simply dig our heals in and bury our head in the sand when caught in a, shall we say, factually-deficient rant. It is all to easy to simply get hard-nosed and leave any semblance of humility behind. When I pressed the author on exactly this point, at first he accused me of being a totalitarian stooge for the Labour Party and then a few minutes later the posts both mysteriously vanished, never to be heard from again. I happened to have saved them and that is the only reason you’re hearing anything about them.

Now, of course this is an absurdly comical example of what I’m talking about in regards to blogging as theological discourse. Clearly the sort of rampant pugnacity and careless reactionism displayed here is quite inflated and most of us can pat ourselves on the back and assure ourselves that we are nothing like that. However, to do so would be a mistake. This cautionary tale serves as a helpful example of the temptations to opportunism, cowardice, and blind stubbornness that we all face in blogging. It testifies to the ongoing need for theology bloggers to resist the sort of haste that blogging so easily engenders. This medium is a great one in many different ways, but it must be disciplined by humility and patience if it is to bear the fruit of which it is capable.

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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.

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