The Catholic Fantastic of Chesterton and Tolkien

Ralph Wood has a good article on Chesterton and Tolkien in today’s First Things in which he praises Alison Milbank’s Chesterton and Tolkien As Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real. Here’s a taste:

Unlike Coleridge and the Romantics, however, Tolkien and Chesterton never grant godlike status to artists and thinkers as having the power to invent their own self-enclosed universe. On the contrary, they share a deep Thomistic regard for the primacy of being: for things as they are perceived by the senses. Like Kant, they confess the difficulty of moving from the phenomenal to the noumenal realm of things-in-themselves. Yet, unlike him, they do not despair over the seemingly impassable gap between the inner and the outer, the mental and the natural; instead, they reveal that the world is not dreadfully dead (as we have believed since Descartes and Newton) but utterly alive and awaiting our free transformation of it. The universe that has been made dissonant also requires reenchantment, therefore, in order for us to participate in an otherness that is not finally cacophony but symphony, a complex interlocking of likenesses and differences that form an immensely complex but finally redemptive Whole. The doubleness of all things is cause for rejoicing, it follows, rather than lamentation.

As readers we are able to experience Treebeard at two levels: On the one hand, he is patently an aesthetic invention, a fictional creature. Both Chesterton and Tolkien constantly draw attention to the created character of their work, reminding us that it belongs to secondary and not primarily reality: it is a constructed thing to be enjoyed as such. Yet having encountered this fantastic tree with human features, readers can no longer look upon real trees as mere objects meant only for our manipulation. On the contrary, we can now envision all trees as analogical actualities, as transcendent symbols that participate in the reality that they signify, as having likenesses to us despite their differences from us, and thus as linking natural things with both human and divine things—and perhaps also with things demonic. It is not a long leap, for instance, from Treebeard to the trees in the Garden of Eden.

Chesterton and Tolkien have not autonomously invented their own imaginative worlds so much as they have reordered the existing world in accordance with their fundamentally Aristotelian/Thomistic perception of it. Their common conviction is that everything has its own entelechy, its own end within itself that pushes it toward completion and fulfillment within a larger, indeed a final telos.

You can read the full article here.

Barth on being an American theologian

Having recently watched Lions for Lambs, I was again reminded of Barth’s words spoken in Chicago on 26 April 1962 (audio here):

If I myself were an American citizen and a Christian and a theologian, then I would try to elaborate a theology of freedom – a theology of freedom from, let us say, from any inferiority complex over against good old Europe from whence you all came, or your fathers. You do not need to have such an inferiority complex. That is what I have learned these weeks. You may also have freedom from a superiority complex, let us say, over against Asia and Africa. That’s a complex without reason. Then I may add – [your theology should also be marked by] freedom from fear of communism, Russia, inevitable nuclear warfare and generally speaking, from all the afore-mentioned principalities and powers. Freedom for which you would stand would be the freedom for – I like to say a single word – humanity. Being an American theologian, I would then look at the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor. I have not seen that lady, except in pictures. Next week I shall see her in person. That lady needs certainly a little or, perhaps, a good bit of demythologization. Nevertheless, maybe she may also be seen and interpreted and understood as a symbol of a true theology, not of liberty, but of freedom. Well, it would be necessarily, a theology of freedom. Of that freedom to which the Son frees us [cf. Jn 8.36], and which as His gift, is the one real human freedom. My last question for this evening is this: Will such a specific American theology one day arise? I hope so.’

Colin Gunton’s ‘The Barth Lectures’: A Review

Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures (transcribed and edited by Paul H. Brazier; T&T Clark, London/New York, 2007). xxiv + 285 pages. ISBN: 9780567031402.

While he fruitfully enjoyed a life-long engagement with and formation by Karl Barth’s work, produced numerous articles on various aspects of such, and lectured on Barth most years he taught at King’s College London, Colin Gunton never fulfilled his ambition to pen a monograph devoted solely to this his favourite theologian. Had he done so, these lectures (recorded and transcribed almost verbatim by Paul Brazier, complete with charts, diagrams, live-questions and Gunton’s responses) would have served as the basis.

Chapters 1-3 attend to the intellectual, historical and theological background to Barth’s thinking. Beginning with a focus on Enlightenment philosophy as it finds voice in Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel – all three of whom ‘identified Christianity too closely with modern culture’ (p. 17) – Gunton then turns to Barth’s early theological formation in the nineteenth-century liberalism of Harnack and Herrmann, as well as to some other voices and ideas that impinged on Barth’s theological development – Johann Christoph Blumhardt (who also influenced Moltmann), Albert Schweitzer and Franz Overbeck through whom eschatology was re-confirmed on the theological radar. Barth’s engagement with existentialism (Kierkegaardian and other) and theologies of ‘religion’, ‘crisis’ and ‘dialectics’ are introduced in the second and third lectures, and re-appear subsequently throughout. Certainly, for the Swiss theologian, ‘no road to the eternal world has ever existed except the road of negation’ (p. 33). Thus when Gunton later comes to unpack something of the charge concerning Barth’s ‘irrationality’ through the continuing influence of Der Römerbrief, empiricism, and Barth’s ‘assertive style’, the United Reformed Church minister notes:

The influence of empiricism, especially on the minds of English and American theologians, cannot be dismissed. The English, or to be more pertinent, the Anglican theological mind is shaped by a philosophical tradition that does not find Barth’s approach to theology easy to understand let alone agree with … Part of our intellectual tradition makes it hard for us to understand – particularly an Anglican tradition. Anglicans on the whole like things to be nice and middle way, the via media. And there is not much of the middle way in Karl Barth! … Barth’s assertive style does make it difficult for mild-mannered establishment Anglicans to cope with. (p. 66)

Whether critiquing Augustine, Calvin, Kant, the ‘Absolutely Pagan’ Hegel (p. 17), or the ‘great opponent’ Schleiermacher (p. 15), Gunton repeatedly identifies that the crucial question for the author of the groundbreaking Der Römerbrief remains ‘how much of your intellectual method hangs on something foreign to Christianity?’ (p. 42; cf. pp. 52-3). To this end, Gunton also devotes an entire lecture (pp. 53-63) to Barth’s 1931 work on Anselm, Fides quaerens intellectum, and to the Archbishop’s understanding of the relationship between ‘proof’, ‘reason’ and ‘faith’. He later writes: ‘Barth is a post-Reformation thinker with the rallying cry, by scripture alone and by faith alone! Barth found in the Reformation tradition a conception of theology based on a view of God that is linked with human salvation. The problem for Barth with the Scholastic tradition is that they begin with a rational view of God – a rational idea of God abstracted from human salvation. Barth begins with scripture because the God of scripture is about salvation not philosophical argument’ (p. 69). And on a comparison with Schleiermacher: ‘the problem with beginning with religion is that it is not theological, it can be, it can lead into theology, but in essence it is not: religion is an experiential concept, not a theological concept. Barth wants a theology that is theological right from the very outset. Barth considers that Roman Catholics and Protestants such as Schleiermacher are wrong in thinking that there can be a non-theological basis for theology. Barth is a theologian you see, to the fingernails’ (p. 69).

From Chapter Four onwards, Gunton turns to Barth’s Church Dogmatics, acutely aware that ‘there is nothing as boring as résumés of Barth’s Dogmatics‘ and that ‘the way to get into Barth is to select and to read – read him, there is no substitute!’ (p. 71). Over the next 190 pages, this is precisely what Gunton masterfully helps us do; whether on Barth’s theological prolegomena, his witness to the three-fold Word, trinity, the doctrine of God proper, election, christology, soteriology, ethics and creation, we are all along driven by the only thing of theological interest for Barth, the question ‘Who is the God who makes himself known in Scripture?’ (p. 77). ‘When Barth is at his best’, Gunton writes, ‘he looks at the biblical evidence in detail; when he is weak he tends to evade it’ (p. 119)

A few tastes from ‘5. Barth on the Trinity and the Personal God’:

Barth is anti-foundationalist … God’s revelation is self-grounded; it does not have to appeal to anything else beyond itself. Because it is revelation through itself, not in relation to something else, because it is self-contained, lordship means freedom. This is characteristically Barthian: a characteristically Barthian phrase. Lordship means freedom – freedom for God, absolutely central for Barth’s theology. (p. 78)

The basis of all theology lies in the fact that revelation does happen … This revelation is Christological: Jesus Christ is God’s self-unveiling. The Father cannot be unveiled, but the Father reveals through the Son. This is imparted through the Holy Spirit. A little artificial I actually think, but you can see what he is actually trying to do: he is trying to show that inherent in the structure of God’s presence in Jesus Christ is a Trinitarian view of God … The point here is that in Jesus Christ we see the limits, the possibilities of the knowability of God … So Barth in a way is still retaining this dialectical structure: veiling-unveiling, knowability -unknowability, revelation-hiddenness … In the end you have only got paradox … God preserves his privacy. (pp. 79-80)

The logic is that if God is like this in time then because he doesn’t con us, so to speak, he doesn’t pull the wool over our eyes, because he is a revealing God, then that is what God is. So don’t think that the God we meet in Jesus is one God and that the God of eternity is entirely different from Jesus. The God you meet in Jesus is no different from the God you might meet if you were able to have a direct view of eternity. (p. 83)

Barth is against all mathematics in theology – he is against theories and ideas propounded down the centuries by theologians whereby examples are given of the Trinity, where three things make one; Augustine was often doing this, it is pure analogy or an attempt at analogy, which generally fails to offer any theological elucidation … I don’t like Augustine. I think he is the fountainhead of our troubles. (pp. 84, 96)

[Barth] is often accused of modalism, and I think he is near it … I think he is on a bit of a knife-edge myself, but then all theology is on a knife-edge, it is such a difficult discipline. [Barth] wants to do what the Cappadocians did, and Barth thinks he has done it better with this term – ‘modes of being’. Well, I don’t agree with him, but that is the way he puts it. (pp. 88-9)

Theology is our interpretation of God’s self-interpretation. God interprets himself to us, that is what revelation is. Our response is to interpret this faithfully, or as Jüngel would put it, responsibly … We move from faith to understanding. We move from a grateful acceptance of revelation to an attempt to understand as best we may what that revelation means for God and ourselves. And the understanding consists in the fact that we can talk of God as Father, Son and Spirit. It is so obvious that we should, isn’t it! We might talk of God as a tyrannical monad, but the fact that we can talk of God as Father, Son and Spirit is, so to speak, a demonstration after the event that we are making sense, that God is making sense, our theology makes sense. (p. 91)

And from ‘8. Ethics: Church Dogmatics Chapter VIII:

I do think that there is a problem of abstractness because there isn’t really in Barth, I think (and I say this tentatively), I think that there isn’t really in Barth an account of how this relationship between God and the moral agent takes shape. There is not much of a principle of formation. How are people formed so as to take one ethical direction rather than another? Barth is relatively weak in ecclesiology; that is, some account of how ethics are shaped by the community of belief. He is so anxious not to tie God down; that is always his anxiety, not to tie God down. (p. 133)

Throughout, Gunton is rousing his 30-40 mostly MA and PhD students (although the lectures were intended for undergraduates and so leave considerable ground un-traversed and engage minimally with secondary literature) to ‘read as much of the man himself’ not least because ‘the people that write about him are much more boring than he is’ (p. 9; cf. p. 39). In a sense, this is one book to ‘listen to’ more than to ‘read’. At times, it’s a bit like the difference between a live album and a studio version. Not all the notes are spot on, but the energy – filled with a depth of theological and pastoral insight that betray years of wrestling with the things that matter – is all there.

Such wrestling means that whether expounding a key motif in Barth’s theology or fielding questions, Gunton reveals not only a deep indebtedness to Barth’s work, but also points of divergence. He is upfront in the first lecture: ‘Not everyone buys into Barth … I don’t, all the way along the line, as I get older I get more and more dissatisfied with the details of his working out of the faith … over the years I think I have developed a reasonable view of this great man who is thoroughly exciting and particularly, I can guarantee, if you do this course, that you will be a better theologian by the third year, whether or not you agree with him – he is a great man to learn to think theologically with’ (p. 10; see the prefaces to his Theology Through the Theologians and to the second edition of The Promise of Trinitarian Theology). Clearly, Gunton is no clone of Barth. Though mostly unnamed, he draws upon Coleridge, Owen, Zizioulas and Polanyi as allies in order to attain a measure of distance from Barth’s theology (and that of Barth’s student Moltmann), notably on creation, trinitarian personhood (Gunton prefers the Cappadocians), natural revelation, Jesus’ humanity, Christ’s priesthood, the Word’s action as mediator of creation, ecclesiology, and an over-realised eschatology, among other things (see pp. 52, 74, 82, 88-90, 96, 133, 142, 148, 170-1, 186, 200, 212, 227, 236, 250, 253-4, passim). Not alone here, Gunton reserves his strongest criticisms for what he contends is Barth’s weak pneumatology (for which he blames Augustine and the filioque): there is ‘not enough of the Spirit accompanying and empowering Jesus at different stages of his ministry’ (p. 200). Again: ‘the second person of the Trinity is made to do a bit more than he does in Scripture’ (p. 212). Gunton is always cautious and respectful however: Barth ‘never really forgets anything, he is too good a theologian for that. And when you are criticizing Barth it is only a question of where he puts a weight; he never forgets anything, he is too good a man for that’ (p. 171). Even on the Spirit, Gunton suggests that he can only be critical here because of what he has learnt from Barth already: ‘That’s the great thing about Barth: he enables you to do other things that aren’t just Barth but yet are empowered by him. Yes, that’s his greatness’ (p. 200).

While the reformed theologian is ‘too-multi-layered a thinker to have one leading idea’ if there is one, Gunton suggests it is that of covenant: ‘that from eternity God covenants to be the God who elects human beings into relation with himself’ (p. 149), that from eternity the triune God is oriented towards us. Gunton’s chapter on Barth’s revision of God’s election in CD II/2 is an astounding example of his adroitness and élan as a theological educator. Not many teachers could summarise so sufficiently and with such economy (just 12 pages!) what for Barth is the root of all things, ‘creation, atonement, all’ (p. 115), that is, election. Gunton concludes by (over?)-suggesting that Barth’s effort was ‘a huge improvement in the crude determinism of the Augustinian tradition, which did not represent a gracious God. The Augustinian doctrine replaces grace with gratuity: God gratuitously chooses group A and not group B – this is not the God who seeks out the lost [even Judas] and does not reject them’ (p. 121).

This volume is significantly more than merely a course on the theology of the twentieth century’s superlative theologian. It is also a reminder that to read Barth attentively is to be introduced to a broader dogmatic and philosophical tradition. Moreover, it is to be led to do so by one of Britain’s ablest pedagogues. A foreword by Christoph Schwöbel and a warm introduction by Steve Holmes prepare us for one of the freshest introductions to Barth available. Again, we are placed in Professor Gunton’s debt.

Advent Reflection 12: Not an ethereal figure

‘So deeply is this need [for love] rooted in human nature, and so essentially does it belong to being human, that even he who was one with the Father and in the communion of love with the Father and the Spirit, he who loved the whole human race, our Lord Jesus Christ, even he humanly felt this need to love and be loved by an individual human being. He is indeed the God-man and thus eternally different from every human being, but still he was also a true human being, tested in everything human. On the other hand, the fact that he experienced this is the very expression of its belonging essentially to a human being. He was an actual human being and therefore can participate in everything human. He was not an ethereal figure that beckoned in the clouds without understanding or wanting to understand what humanly befalls a human being. Ah, no, he could have compassion on the crowd that lacked food, and purely humanly, he who himself had hungered in the desert. In the same way he could also sympathize with people in this need to love and to be loved, sympathize purely humanly’. – Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (ed. Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad Hong; trans. Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad Hong; vol. 16; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 155.

Advent Reflections for 2007

Advent Reflection 11: God’s Self-Placement

‘He was man as we are. His condition was no different from ours. He took our flesh, the nature of man as he comes from the fall … His sinlessness was not therefore His condition. It was the act of His being in which He defeated temptation in His condition which is ours, in the flesh … He emptied Himself … placing Himself in the series of men who rebelled against God in their delusion … In so doing, in His own person, He reversed the fall in their place and for their sake’. – Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark), 1956, 259.

Advent Reflection 10: That Which Christ Assumes

‘If any assert that He has now put off His holy flesh, and that His Godhead is stripped of the body, and deny that He is now with his body and will come again with it, let him not see the glory of His coming … For that which He has not assumed He has not healed … If only half of Adam fell, then that which Christ assumes and saves may by half also; but if the whole of his nature fell, it must be united to the whole nature of Him that was begotten, an so be save as a whole. Let them not, then, begrudge us our complete salvation’. – Gregory of Nazianzus (4th cent. A.D.), Epistle 101, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 7 (Peabody: Hendrickson), 1994, 440.

Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie

The latest edition of Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie is out and includes two articles of interest to me:

‘Can the Electing God be God without us? Some Implications of Bruce McCormack’s Understanding of Barth’s Doctrine of Election for the Doctrine of the Trinity’, by Paul D Molnar (pp. 199-222)

Abstract:

This article is the attempt at a dialogue with Bruce McCormack about the position he espoused in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth concerning the relation between God’s Election of grace and God’s Triunity. I had criticized McCormack’s position in my book, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity (2002), but I did not elaborate on it in great detail. To develop the dialogue I will: 1) consider McCormack’s claim that in CD II/2 Barth made Jesus Christ “rather than” the Eternal Logos the subject of election; 2) consider what Barth means when he speaks of Jesus Christ “in the beginning”; 3) compare McCormack’s thesis that the Father never had regard for the Son, apart from the humanity to be assumed, with Barth’s belief that we must not dispute the eternal will of God which “precedes even predestination”; 4) analyze in detail McCormack’s rejection of Barth’s belief that the logos asarkos in distinction from the logos incarnandus is a necessary concept in trinitarian theology; 5) discuss Barth’s concept of the divine will in relation to the concept advanced by McCormack and suggest that McCormack has fallen into the error of Hermann Schell by thinking that God in some sense takes his origin from himself, so that God would only be triune if he elected us; 6) explain why it is a problem to hold, as McCormack does, that God’s self-determination to be triune and his election of us should be considered one and the same act; and finally 7) explain McCormack’s confusion of time and eternity in his latest article on the subject in the February, 2007 issue of the Scottish Journal of Theology, and his own espousal of a kind of indeterminacy on God’s part (which he theoretically rejects).

‘The Difference Totality Makes. Reconsidering Pannenberg’s Eschatological Ontology’, by Benjamin Myers (pp. 141-155)

Abstract:

Summary Wolfhart Pannenberg’s eschatological ontology has been criticised for undermining the goodness and reality of finite creaturely differentiation. Drawing on David Bentley Hart’s recent ontological proposal, this article explores the critique of Pannenberg’s ontology, and offers a defence of Pannenberg’s depiction of the relationship between difference and totality, especially as it is presented in his 1988 work, Metaphysics and the Idea of God. In this work, Pannenberg articulates a structured relationship between difference and totality in which individual finite particularities are preserved and affirmed within a coherent semantic whole. Creaturely differences are not sublated or eliminated in the eschatological totality, but they are integrated into a harmonious totality of meaning. This view of the semantic function of totality can be further clarified by drawing an analogy between Pannenberg’s ontological vision and Robert W. Jenson’s model of the eschatological consummation as a narrative conclusion to the drama of finite reality.

Baxter Kruger has entered blogdom

C. Baxter Kruger has started blogging. When he’s not fishing, Dr Kruger (whose doctoral supervisor was James Torrance) serves as the Director of Perichoresis Ministries. He has authored 7 books, including The Great Dance, Jesus and the Undoing of Adam and Across All Worlds (which I mentioned here). I also mentioned Baxter in this review on the recent book, An Introduction to Torrance Theology.

He writes on in his first posting:

It was not the Father’s anger or the Holy Spirit’s that was poured out on Jesus; it was ours. We rejected him, cursed him, beat him and brutally murdered him. Either the Father, Son and Spirit were caught off guard by our horrific response to Jesus, or our bitter rejection of Jesus was clearly anticipated and deliberately used as the way of reconciliation.

Along with the launch of his blog, Baxter has made available a copy of his latest essay, ‘Bearing Our Scorn’. Here’s a taster from that essay:

The eternal, unflinching purpose of the Father, Son and Spirit is to share their trinitarian life with us, and to bring us to taste and feel and know and experience their shared life—adoption. But such sharing of life necessarily involves meeting us where we are in our tragic alienation. “Reconciliation means sharing in all that the other is.” But how can the Lord really meet us in our fallenness, share in our confusion, and identify with us? It would seem impossible that the blessed Trinity could so enter into our miserable, projecting nightmare as to make contact with the real us. But what is reconciliation if it leaves the real us trapped in our confusion, unable to hear and see and receive the Father’s love? What kind of reconciliation would it be that declared humanity legally clean, yet left us lost in the cosmos of the fallen mind and its appalling pain?

Steve Holmes on Bruce McCormack’s TF Torrance Lectures

Though a newcomer to theo-blogdom, Steve Holmes (not this one, nor this one, and definitely not this Transylvanian Saxon from Sibiu) is no stranger to most of us. He has kicked off his blog – Shored Fragments – with, among other tidbits, a number of helpful reflections on Bruce McCormack’s recent TF Torrance Lectures (formerly the SJT lectures) held at the University of St Andrews. Here’s Steve’s posts:

Advent Reflection 9: Going the Whole Way

‘The cross was the reflection (or say rather the historic pole) of an act within Godhead. The historic victory was the index and the correlate of a choice grid a conquest in Godhead itself. Nothing less will carry the fulness of faith, the swelling soul, and the Church’s organ voice of liturgy in every land and age. If our thought do not allow that belief we must reduce the pitch of faith to something plain, laic, and songless, and, in making it more homely, make it less holy, less absolute, less adoring. The adoration of Christ can only go with this view of Him in the long run. Nothing lower takes with due seriousness the superhuman value of the soul, the unearthliness of our salvation, and its last conquest of the whole world. It would reduce the unworldly value of the soul if it could be saved by anything less than a Christ before the worlds. It came upon me, as upon many at the first it must have mightily done, that His whole life was not simply occupied with a series of decisions crucial for our race, or filled with a great deed then first done; but that that life of His was itself the obverse of a heavenly eternal deed, and the result of a timeless decision before it here began. His emergence on earth was as it were the swelling in of heaven. His sacrifice began before He came into the world, and his cross was that of a lamb slain before the world’s foundation. There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all, His obedience, however impressive, does not take divine magnitude if it first rose upon earth, nor has it the due compelling power upon ours. His obedience as man was but the detail of the supreme obedience which made him man. His love transcends all human measure only if, out of love, he renounced the glory of heavenly being for all he here became. Only then could one grasp the full stay and comfort of words like these “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Unlike us, he chose the oblivion of birth and the humiliation of life. He consented not only to die but to be born. His life here, like His death which pointed it, was the result of his free will. It was all one death for him. It was all one obedience. And it was free. He was rich and for our sakes became poor. What he gave up was the fulness, power, and immunity of a heavenly life. He became “a man from heaven.”’ – Peter T. Forsyth, The Person & Place of Jesus Christ: The Congregational Union Lecture for 1909 (London: Congregational Union of England and Wales/Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 270–2.

NT Wright – ‘Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?’

Last night I attended a packed-out NT Wright lecture, ‘Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?’. It was the clearest I have heard the good bishop for a while (of course, this could be because I was the most awake, a rare thing in itself). Those expecting to hear a ‘scientific’ engagement with the issues may have been disappointed; for the historians (and apologists) among us, however, it was great. Nothing at all new but classic apologia – Wright-style.

This lecture has also been made available in a number of formats.

Alastair has saved us some work by posting his excellent summary of the talk here. My notes are considerably more scrappy (resembling the state of my mind) but for the record, here they are:

  • Science can never be enough for a full and flourishing account of human being.
  • Resurrection in the C1st necessarily impinged on the the public world. It meant a real physical act. To talk of resurrection is to do history rather than science because it is a unique, unrepeatable, event.
  • Resurrection is not about life after death; it is about what happens after life after death.
  • Christianity stands with the Pharisees rather than with the Sadducees or Philo on the question of resurrection.
  • The resurrected body – though created out of the ‘stuff’ of the old body – contains new properties. The resurrected body used up all the old properties (hence the empty tomb). The resurrected body has a ‘new kind of physicality’, one equally at home on earth as in heaven. It is not capable of decay or death.
  • Resurrection is not resuscitation, which is merely the return to the corruptible body.
  • No Jewish hope envisaged a two-stage process of resurrection, the second part of which was a general resurrection.
  • The resurrection of Jesus transformed Jewish notions of a messiah. No Jew expected the Messiah to be resurrected because no Jew expected the Messiah to be killed.
  • ‘Death is the last weapon of the tyrant; and the point of the resurrection is that death has been defeated’.
  • Discrepancies in the accounts in the four canonical gospels concerning the resurrection of Jesus is evidence which supports the historicity of the event. If we only had one account – or of the accounts were derived from one another – then the story would be more improbable.
  • The resurrection accounts witnessed to in the gospels are very early, arising from oral traditions.
  • 1 Corinthians 15 is a later revision from the earlier gospel accounts wherein the first witnesses were women. In the C1st, women were considered incredible witnesses. There appearance in the gospels, therefore, suggests that the gospel accounts were the earlier.
  • Christianity appeals to history and so to history it must go. And yet who we meet as we go challenges us to rethink – and reconceive – our worldview, including our understanding of history.
  • Faith does not ignore history but respects and transforms history because it is faith in the Creator-God.
  • When something turns up in science that doesn’t fit the paradigm with which we’ve been working, we must be prepared to change our paradigm even while not rejecting all that had gone before. The faith by which we know is determined by the nature of its object. This corresponds to the methodology adopted by science. Scientific epistemology occasionally requires having to change ways of seeing to that which is more appropriate to the new reality. So too with Christian faith.
  • Hope in the resurrection is actually a ‘mode of knowing’. Wright cites Wittgenstein, ‘It is love which believes the resurrection’; as it was for Peter. The reality of the resurrection cannot be known is we insist on a mechanistic view of reality. Belief in the resurrection requires a full devotion of love. This love-epistemology relates to a new ontology of the resurrection.
  • Unlike with lust, love requires a real other, a real external knower. To believe in the resurrection, therefore, is to believe in the one resurrected.
  • All knowing is a gift from God – no so less scientific and historical knowing – and ought be situated within the arena of knowing established by faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Forthcoming James Gregory Public Lectures are:

February 28, 2008: John Polkinghorne, ‘Has Science Made Religion Redundant?’

April 17, 2008: Bruno Guiderdon, ‘Islam and Science’

Bleby and Pennicook on the Holy Spirit

New Creation Teaching Ministry has made available for download the talks from the 2007 NSW Spring School. Here they are:

‘The Spirit of Glory’, Martin Bleby (50 min)

‘The Love of the Spirit’, Martin Bleby (58 min)

‘The Spirit and the Community of Love’, Ian Pennicook (62 min)

‘The Spirit and the Son – Part 2’, Martin Bleby (51 min)

‘The Ministry of the Spirit’, Ian Pennicook (47 min)

Plus 2 sermons:

‘Can These Bones Live?’ (Ezekiel 37), Ian Pennicook (36 min)

‘The Breath of God Has Come’, (Ezekiel 37), Martin Bleby (27 min)

‘Will the Love of God Finally Triumph?’: A response to David Fergusson

Professor David Fergusson is one of the ablest theologians teaching and writing in Britain today. A few weeks ago, I heard him give a delightful paper on providence, a mere entrée to a larger project that he’s currently working on. Everything I’ve read of his I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, especially his Scottish Philosophical Theology, The Cosmos and the Creator, and Christ Church and Society: Essays on John Baillie and D. Donald Baillie (which he edited). And so it was that I approached his essay ‘Will the Love of God Finally Triumph?’ with the certain sense of excitement, never dreaming that I might be disappointed with its contents. The essay, which was originally presented at the Sixth Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference, appears in a collection from that conference entitled, Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God, edited by Kevin J. Vanhoozer (pp. 186–202).

Fergusson properly begins his essay by reminding us that ‘the love of God demands an eschatology’ (p. 186) before proceeding to rehearse the three possible ways in which his title question can be answered. In the first section, he outlines the Augustinian and Reformed traditions in which the love of God triumphs only through the limiting of its scope, i.e. towards the elect. This, Fergusson suggests, is ‘unacceptable’ (p. 188).

In the next section, ‘Universalizing the Scope’, Fergusson turns to Karl Barth, and to what he considers to be an inconsistency between Barth’s doctrine of the election of humanity in Jesus Christ and his denial of an apokatastasis. After fairly outlining Barth’s position and properly emphasising the Swiss theologian’s fall-back position in the divine freedom, Fergusson elicits Berkouwer’s criticism of Barth in support:

‘In view of Barth’s emphasis on the factuality of Christ’s rejection, it is not possible to close the door to the apokatastasis doctrine by pointing to the fact that the Bible speaks of rejection as well as election and then entrust everything eschatologically to the hand of God. Did not the hand of God become visible in His works, and specifically in the one central “modus” of his work in Jesus Christ, in election as the decretum concretum, in the triumph of grace?’ (p. 192)

The third, and final, section is entitled ‘Against Universalism’. It is in this section that Fergusson outlines his own proposal for answering the question he began with. He begins this section, by asking ‘what is wrong with universalism in any case’? (p. 196). After noting the ‘burgeoning literature on this subject’ (p. 196) he proceeds to note that ‘one of the more perplexing aspects of the current controversy is the way in which critics of the universalist case concede that it would be nice if it were true’ (p. 196-7). He cites Stephen Davis and William Lane Craig as examples of those who would like to believe that ‘universalism were true, but it is not’ (p. 197). He then comments: ‘Such remarks are puzzling. Are we saying that God’s final scheme is undesirable? Are we even suggesting that our own moral preferences are somehow better than God’s. Can we claim to be evangelical if we hold that it would be good if universalism were true while also lamenting wistfully that it is not what God has on offer? There is a good dominical response to this: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him” (Matt. 7:11)’ (p. 197). I believe that we ought to hear these questions with their full force, regardless of where we end up on this vexed question.

Fergusson proceeds to note that universalism’s attraction is its ‘ability to present a vision of cosmic fulfillment in which God executes justice, not only for human beings whose lives have been maimed by nature or society, but also for the whole creation … Universalism should not be tempered therefore until its profound attractions are understood. We might try to avoid it by proposing that the grace of God is offered to all in Christ but, for those who reject it, God’s scheme of justice demands eternal punishment or at least annihilation’ (p. 197).

Fergusson rehearses the well-worn argument that any certainty in an apokatastasis, while a theoretical possibility, is ultimately ‘as deterministic and destructive of human freedom as the doctrine of double predestination in hyper-Calvinism’ (p. 199). The theoretical possibility Fergusson entertains is entirely dependent on an advance in human free will. He employs the usual rhetoric of love needing to be a free human response, an ontological reality that makes the possibility of rejecting God a final possibility. One of the problems with this common argument is that Jesus potentially died for no-one. And so parroting Davis’ and Craig’s response to universalism, I confess that it would be nice if the free will argument was true, but it’s not. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the only two tenable (i.e. biblically and theologically defensible) positions available for this soteriological question are either (i) a robust reaffirmation of limited atonement (the negative side of which includes the possibility of annihilation), or (ii) some form of christological universalism (as opposed to the Hickian vision).

Fergusson’s final answer to the question that he started off with, that is, ‘Will the Love of God Finally Triumph?’, seems to be answered by, ‘Only with our help’! He concludes: ‘An eschatology needs to express the ways in which our lives are bound up with those of our neighbors and with creation as a whole and involve decisions and projects of eternal significance. By so doing the eschatological vision of the kingdom of God can furnish us with a sense of the permanence and grandeur of God’s love. The possibility that we may inexplicably exclude ourselves from this ultimate community is a condition of the significance , of our God-given freedom’ (p. 202).

My question is this: In the light of God’s action in Christ, is Fergusson’s vision all that we can reasonably hope for? I hope not, and Barth’s witness in 4/1 reminds me why I have good reason to hope not:

The ordaining of salvation for man and of man for salvation is the original and basic will of God, the ground and purpose of His will as Creator. It is not that He first wills and works the being of the world and man, and then ordains it to salvation But God creates, preserves and over-rules man for this prior end and with this prior purpose, that there may be a being distinct from Himself ordained for salvation, for perfect being, for participation in His own being, because as the One who loves in freedom He has determined to exercise redemptive grace – and that there may be an object of this His redemptive grace, a partner to receive it … The “God with us” has nothing to do with chance. As a redemptive happening it means the revelation and confirmation of the most primitive relationship between God and man, that which was freely determined in eternity by God Himself before there was any created being. In the very fact that man is, and that he is man, he is as such chosen by God for salvation; that eschaton is given him by God. Not because God owes it to him. Not in virtue of any quality or capacity of his own being. Completely without claim. – Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1 (ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; trans. G. W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 9–10.

Pilger on Britain’s New Labour

I don’t normally read The Guardian, but yesterday’s carried this piece by John Pilger (whose essays I always read). In his typically undisguised style, Pilger argues that Tony Blair and ‘his cult’ have ‘destroyed the very liberalism millions of Britons thought they were voting for’. He writes:

In the murdochracy that Britain has largely become, once noble terms such as democracy, reform, even freedom itself, have long been emptied of their meaning.

Gone is the bourgeoisie that in good times would extend a few rungs of the ladder to those below. From Blair’s pseudo-moralising assault on single parents a decade ago to Peter Hain’s recent attacks on the disabled, the “project” has completed the work of Thatcher and all but abolished the premises of tolerance and decency, however amorphous, on which much of British public life was based. The trade-off has been mostly superficial “social liberalism” and the highest personal indebtedness on earth.

And, according to Pilger, things are not looking any different under Brown:

Behind a facade of liberal concern for the world’s “disadvantaged”, such as waffle about millennium goals and anti-poverty stunts with the likes of Google and Vodafone, the Brown government, together with its EU partners, is demanding vicious and punitive free-trade agreements that will devastate the economies of scores of impoverished African, Caribbean and Pacific nations. In Iraq, the blood-letting of a “liberal intervention” may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, while the British occupiers have made no real attempt to help the victims of their lawlessness. And putting out more flags will not cover the shame. “The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30% compared to the Saddam Hussein era,” says Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at Basra children’s hospital. In January nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then international development secretary, describing how children were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations under UN security resolution 1483. He refused to see them.

Whole British communities now live in fear of the police. The British are distinguished as one of the most spied upon people in the world …

The cause of any real civil threat to Britons has been identified and confirmed repeatedly by the intelligence services. It is “our” continuing military presence in other people’s countries and collusion with a Washington cabal described by the late Norman Mailer as “pre-fascist”. When famous liberal columnists wring their hands about the domestic consequences, let them look to their own early support for such epic faraway crimes.

Britain is now a centralised single-ideology state, as secure in the grip of a superpower as any former eastern bloc country.

Dear John, ‘Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path …’ (Isaiah 30:10b-11a)

Loius Charles Birch

Loius Charles Birch (b. 1918) is an Australian geneticist, biologist, ecologist and theologian who has written widely on the topic of science and religion, winning the 1990 Templeton Prize. Birch has written a new book, Science and Soul, a memoir in which he looks back with gratitude to the long list of world-famous scientists and philosophers of religion who have influenced his work – Theodosius Dobzhansky, J.B.S.Haldane, Paul Erlich, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Margaret Mead, and many more. In this podcast, Charles Birch talks about his life and his belief in a God that feels and grows as we do. While at the end of the day he bears witness to a god who isn’t worth worshipping (he is a process theologian after all), the interview is interesting. He discusses Paul Tillich (whose lectures he attended), Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Reinhold Niebuhr, theology in the post-WWII period, the rising popularity of fundamentalism, ethics and rights of non-humans.

For those who are interested in more, you can also download this file on Birch which includes a medium bandwidth video extracts from the TV Program, transcripts of the full unedited interview, thumbnail-sized video of the full unedited interview, a brief biography, a study guide, tv script and a list of links to related resources.

HR Mackintosh, ‘The Person of Jesus Christ’: A Review

Scotland has produced a fair share of weighty theologians, and Paisley-born Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870-1936) is among her best. From 1904 to 1936 he served as Professor of Systematic Theology at New College (TF Torrance took his systemetics class during 1935-36), where he himself was formerly a student. Between his student days and his teaching days, Mackintosh served churches in Largs (1896-1897), Tayport (1897-1901) and Aberdeen (1901-1904), and also spent time in Freiburg, Halle and Marburg, where he befriended the great Wilhelm Herrmann. Mackintosh’ most significant work was The Person of Jesus Christ (republished in 2000 by T&T Clark) in which he closely followed PT Forsyth’s kenoticism (still, to my mind, the most compelling presentation of the doctrine; though I am awaiting the full exposition of McCormack’s kenoticism). He also penned Christian Experience of Forgiveness, a brilliant work which creatively restates the doctrines of justification and atonement, urging that justification is forgiveness and that the cross is forgiveness’ cost to God.

Discerning Reader has recently published the following review of his The Person of Jesus Christ:

‘Locating a Christology book that is both solidly doctrinal and warmly devotional is rare, but The Person of Jesus Christ by Hugh Ross Mackintosh rewards on both counts. It is at once an exposition of the figure of Christ as God and man, and a celebration of Christ himself. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Christian student meetings in 1912, Mackintosh’s lectures give the impression of being more of a personal meditation on the person and work of Jesus Christ than a scholarly paper devoid of any emotion. This is an advantage, as it is doubtful a lesser work would have lasted in print these almost one hundred years since its first publication.

An eminent scholar in his own right, in our time Mackintosh has been obscured by his considerably more famous pupil, Thomas F. Torrance. Fittingly, Torrance has written an introduction as a postscript appreciation for T&T Clark’s reissue of this worthy little work. In the introduction, Torrance iterates the value of Mackintosh’s book, explains how it came to be published, and briefly outlines the control center of Mackintosh’s theology, the atonement. Mackintosh himself called the atonement “the subduing magnitude of the Divine sacrifice.” It should be noted that ‘subduing’ is a word frequently deployed in this short book; one gets the distinct sense that Mackintosh was often rightly overcome by the enormity of his subject matter.

The main body of the work sets out “to contemplate the Lord Jesus Christ reverently in … his attitude to men in Palestine … as he still speaks and lives within human souls … [and] to indicate his connexion with the inner life of God.” No problems are more sublime, Mackintosh says, and no problems are so intensely practical. Here is a professor who sought not to live in the ivory tower, but to commune with Christ and his fellowmen in the highways and byways of life.

Every section is simply beautifully crafted. Only one page into the work, I was struck by the way Mackintosh sets up the confluence of the Father and the Son: Jesus “cannot think of himself without thinking also of God who sent him and who is perpetually with him … I am he, he said; I am the Sent of God, in whom every promise is answered and every human prayer fulfilled.” Mackintosh goes on to investigate Christ’s claims to Messiahship, his forgiveness of sins, his miracle-working, and the meaning of his sufferings.

The second section opens by considering Christ in light of our experience of him as Christians: “in many instances … Christ has transformed [our] lives. Men and women like ourselves have been re-created by his influence, changed in the depths and inmost secrets of being. In every man that change takes a different, because a personal, shape. His redemption is as original and individual a fact as the colour of his eyes. Each rising sun, touching the wing of sleeping birds, wakes over the woods a fresh burst of melody, as if the sun had never risen before; and just so, wherever a man finds and grasps redemption, faith in the heart is a new creation, as if he were the first to discover Jesus.” As if the second section needed anything more to commend it after that stunning turn of phrase, Mackintosh later provides food for thought by distinguishing “between a merely past and a present Christ, when we have the courage to ask, not only what we think of him, but what he thinks of us. For that is to bring the question under the light of conscience, with the result that his actual moral supremacy, his piercing judgment of our lives, now becomes the one absorbing fact. His eyes seem to follow us, like those of a great portrait. When men accept or reject him, they do so to his face.”

Finally, Mackintosh explores Christ’s role “in the relationship of God to man which no other can ever fill.” In this section, Mackintosh propounds an understanding of God’s majesty and holiness that is not in the least at odds with Divine Love, and ends with a gospel call of Christ’s lordship over all of life. His admiring student T.F. Torrance rounds out the book with an appreciation essay originally published in the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology thirty years after Mackintosh’s death. In it, Torrance continues to grind away at the reality of Christ in Mackintosh’s life and thought, and traces the intellectual genealogy of Mackintosh’s theology. Most winsomely, Torrance paints a vivid picture of a sixty-five year-old Mackintosh entering the classroom, brow still furrowed from pondering the intricacies of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Besides the extraordinary writing craft Mackintosh obviously possessed, two other things stood out in this book. Firstly, that Mackintosh was a friend of Wilhelm Hermann, the liberal theologian who had an early influence on J. Gresham Machen. Like Machen, Mackintosh was able to distill genuine Christological insights out of Hermann’s liberalism. And although he would often publicly disagree with Hermann’s theological positions, ad hominem attacks had no place in Mackintosh’s vocabulary. Secondly, I was struck by a seemingly different historical picture than I learned in high school and university. I had always understood the years leading up to World War I in terms of fin de siècle ennui (industrial-age world-weariness) but here is a professor of the period describing what he identifies as a then-contemporary fascination with the figure of Jesus Christ, both as a historical figure and a Savior.

The Person of Jesus Christ is simply one of the best books I have read all year. As C.S. Lewis admonishes us, we should be reading at least two to three books written by dead authors to every book written by a current author. This little gem, as Torrance calls it, is worth the money spent. The passion and wisdom of this bygone, departed Scottish professor belongs on your bookshelf.’

Introductory bible texts

A most conscientious first year theology student recently asked me for some recommendations of introductions to the old and new testaments for his holiday reading. It’s been a while since I read an introduction to the testaments, so I basically suggested to him what I found helpful when I was a first year student. Here’s what I suggested to him (denoted with *) … plus a few that I didn’t mention:

Introduction to the Old Testament

*Adrio König, Here Am I: A Christian Reflection on God

Brevard S. Childs, Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context

*Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture

*Christopher J. H. Wright, Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament

Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments

Gerhard Von Rad, Old Testament Theology: The Theology of Israel’s Traditions

*John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology (3 vols)

Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy

*Walter Brueggemann, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination

Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament (2 vols)

*William J. Dumbrell, The Faith of Israel. A Theological Survey of the Old Testament

*William J. Dumbrell, Covenant & Creation: A Theology of Old Testament Covenants

William J. Dumbrell, Search for Order: Biblical Eschatology in Focus

*William Sanford La Sor, David Allan Hubbard, Frederic William Bush, and Leslie C. Allen, Old Testament Survey: The Message, Form, and Background of the Old Testament

Introduction to the New Testament

*Adolf Schlatter, The Theology of the Apostles

*Donald A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, Introduction to the New Testament

Donald A. Carson, The Gospel According to John: An Introduction and Commentary

E. P. Sanders and Margaret Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels

*George Eldon Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament

*Herman Nicolaas Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology

J. Christiaan Beker, Paul The Apostle

Joel B. Green (ed.), Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation

John H. Hayes, Biblical Exegesis: A Beginner’s Handbook

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans

Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation

*Merrill Chapin Tenney, New Testament Survey

N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology

Philip E. Hughes, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews

Richard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage

Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

Richard B. Hays, The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul As Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture

Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation, A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

Robert H. Gundry, Survey of the New Testament

Now what have I left off this list that is as ‘must’ as they come? For those who can remember that far back, what did you find most helpful (or otherwise) as a first year biblical studies student?

NB: This list plus a few others have been added to this blog’s Reading List.