The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Theology: Conscience

Bonhoeffer (Ethics) sees conscience as a manifestation of the “disunited” man after the fall.  Instead of finding knowledge in union with God, conscience draws us to ourselves.  We want to know the truth and the good by reference to ourselves as the origin.  Conscience “derives the relation  to God and to men from the relation of man to himself.  Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard  for the relation to other men.”  From this “right relation to himself,” the conscientious man wants to “recover the right relation to God and to other men.  In short, “this  good, which consists in the unity of man with himself, is now  to be the origin of all good.”  Self-knowledge becomes the measure and goal of life.

The result is only further fragmentation: “Knowledge now means the establishment of the  relationship to oneself; it means the recognition in all things  of oneself and of oneself in all things. And thus, for man who  is in disunion with God, all things are in disunion, what is  and what should be, life and law, knowledge and action, idea  and reality, reason and instinct, duty and inclination, conviction   and advantage, necessity and freedom, exertion and genius,   universal and concrete, individual and collective; even  truth, justice, beauty and love come into opposition with one  another, just as do pleasure and displeasure, happiness and  sorrow.”

Theology Theology - Creation: Learned ignorance & Poetry

Bavinck says, in defense of the necessity of anthropomorphism, that “We simply must acknowledge that even thought our finite understanding of God is limited, it is no less true!  We possess exhaustive knowledge of very little; all reality, including the visible and physical, remains something of a mystery to us.  Our talk of spiritual matters, including those of our own souls, is necessarily metaphorical, figurative, poetic.  But this does not mean that what we say is untrue and incorrect.  On the contrary, real poetry is truth, for it is based on the resemblance, similarity and kinship that exist between different groups of phenomena.  All language participates in this rich interpenetration of visible and invisible.  if speaking figuratively were untrue, all our thought and knowledge would be an illusion and speech itself impossible.”

Theology Theology - Creation: Speech, Justice, Love

The Farrer quotations come pouring in.  OK, trickling.  Here’s one from a reader, Jeff Peterson:

“Man, once endowed with speech, starts making an inventory of the universe. The speaker, having labelled everything else, labels himself, and becomes an item on his own list. He is now no more than a pebble on the beach, a part of the description he constructs; he falls under the net of an impartial rule, an equal justice binding on himself as much as on his neighbour. That justice is the child of speech, is evident; less evident, perhaps, that charity is; but no less true. If I talk, I can give a description of the world in which I am not the centre. But equally, if I talk, I can give a description in which my neighbour is; can make him a focus, an eye, a heart, a man round whom the universe revolves; another self, an object of sympathy and concern. He is the centre of things, just as much as I; but if so, neither he, nor I, nor any other man is the centre. Speech makes a further advance, and spins a story in which our fellow creatures and we are equally the characters; and having reached that level, is found to be saying over, however haltingly, the speech of that creative Word, who commands the existence, and assigns the parts of us all.”

Theology Theology - Trinity: Infinite God

As Robert Jenson and Michel Rene Barnes have emphasized, Gregory of Nyssa’s theology (in, eg, Against Eunomius) centers on a meditation on God’s infinity.  Greeks were reluctant to say that God is infinite, since an infinite thing cannot, by Hellenic lights, have a nature.  A nature is what defines, limits, circumscribes something.  An infinite something cannot be anything at all.  The problem is epistemological too: If something is note defined and delimited, it cannot be known.  Knowledge grasps a fixed and finite set of characteristics.

For Greek thinkers, this is connected to the timelessness of God.  Time brings development, change, movement beyond present limits.  Since God is timeless, he is finite, limited.  In-finite is the one negative that cannot be applied to God.

For Gregory, though, God is infinite.

Continue reading…

Bible - OT - Isaiah Theology: Empire, Exile, and Monotheism

Isaiah says more about the uniqueness of God than any other Old Testament writer (especially Isaiah 43-45).  Why did Yahweh wait so long to say this?

Did he perhaps have to set up empires, deliver His people into exile, and then send them back before He could persuade the world that there was One Lord, Savior, Lawgiver?  Was the exile and restoration somehow the first real proof of monotheism?

Theology: Ninety-Five Steps

Christian Smith’s How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps is fairly predictable.  His criticisms of evangelicalism are on target in the main, and his Catholic arguments are pretty standard.  Smith is careful about his audience: He is addressing “normal science evangelicalism,” and he knows that other varieties of Protestantism exist.  Unfortunately, like most Catholic apologists, he doesn’t really spend much time talking about those other varieties.  His arguments glance off of liturgical Protestants who are not “allergic” to Mary or ignorant of church history or hostile to the medieval church, Protestants who are already disenchanted with the linear and overly cognitive approach to Christian faith among some evangelicals, Protestants who have already read their share of Newman, Vatican II, and John Paul II and like de Lubac more than many Catholics do.  Targeting normal evangelicals makes his job considerably easier.

Along the way, though, Smith makes some intriguing observations.

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Theology: God’s diverse will

Bavinck has these wise words about God’s will: “We can make as many distinctions in the will of God (as it relates to his creatures) as there are creatures; the free will of God is as richly variegated as that whole world is.  Most important is the fact that God is father to all his creatures but not in the same way.”  Ultimately, the “actual will of God is the will of his good pleasure” and “this will is identical with God’s being and efficacious.”

Theology: Scholasticism and liberalism

In a Mars Hill Audio interview, Ellen Charry observes that the Protestant theologians of the seventeenth century, even before the Enlightenment, had a tendency to detach truth from historical reference.   The truth of theology was seen in the coherence of the system of truth found in Scripture, rather than a truth of reference to historical events.

Charry’s comment was a passing one, no doubt a drastic oversimplification.  Protestant scholastics, after all, defended the historical reliability of Scripture as well as its systematic coherence.  But, the comment seems worthy of investigation, since it might provide a historical link between Protestant scholasticism and the development of liberal theology.

Theology: Presbyterians and Independents

Like our interpretations of ancient rabbinic debates, our interpretations of church historical debates often deal with theological content abstracted from the political circumstances that actually gave rise to the content.

In his classic The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Sacvan Bercovitch points out that debates between Presbyterians and Independents regarding free will were really about the question of England’s national destiny.  Both sides used the “leading nationalist expositors of Revelation,” but they diverged on the “relation of human willing to divine will”: “One side of the debate, led by the Independents, maintained that the divine agency was all-sufficient. . . . England would be carried into the glorious future on the crest of prophecies fulfilled, whether their countrymen liked it or not, irrespective of human initiative.  The other side of the debate, led by the Presbyterians, insisted on man’s participation in the process of fulfillment. . . . Stressing God’s current signs of favor or displeasure, they advocated concrete improvements, discipline in church and state, an adequate sense of responsibility.”

Theology: God Ever New

God is a spring.  So says Gregory of Nyssa: “As you came near the spring you would marvel, seeing that the water was endless, as it constantly gushed up and poured forth.  Yet you could never say that you had seen all the water.  How could you see what was still hidden in the bosom of the earth?  Hence no matter how long you might stay at the spring you would always be beginning to see the water.  For the water never stops flowing, and it is always beginning to bubble up again.  It is the same with one who fixes his gaze on the infinite beauty of God.  It is constantly being discovered anew, and it is always seen as something new and strange in comparison with what the mind has already understood.  And as God continues to reveal himself, man continues to wonder; and he never exhausts his desire to see more, since what he is waiting for is always more magnificent, more divine, than all that he has already seen.”

Theology: Fruit in its season

Luther explained the simile of Psalm 1, which compares the righteous man to a tree that “yields fruit it in its season,” with another simile, a comparison of Christian life to a loving marriage: “When a husband and wife really love one another, have pleasure in each other, and thoroughly believe in their love,” Luther asked, “who teaches them how they are to behave one to another, what they are to do or not to do, say or not to say, what they are to think?  Confidence alone teaches them all this, and even more than is necessary.  For such a man there is no distinction in works.  He does the great and the important as gladly as the small and unimportant. . . . He does them all in a glad, peaceful, and a confident heart, and is an absolutely willing companion to the woman.”

Theology: Use of Doctrine

Jay Richards scores a heavy hit against Lindbeck’s theory of doctrine with this: “rule theory . . . seems to deny what almost everyone assumes the Creed and Definition – and the doctrines therein – are: claims about God and Christ.  This definition of doctrines . . . doesn’t capture what nearly everyone means by the word.”

That’s a hard saying for a theory that equates use and meaning, and Richards goes on: “Lindbeck applies the mantra that use governs meaning . . . selectively . . . For surely one of the functions, one of the uses to which we put language is to assent to belief in certain propositions, notions or perceived truths.  Why does this use not govern meaning as well?  What if one of the uses of language is to make reference to things that are extra-linguistic?”

Richards’s observations vindicate the wisdom of John Frame’s approach to Lindbeck (and, of course, to nearly everything else): A valuable perspective, but not the whole story.

Theology: Athanasius

My volume on Athanasius, a contribution to the Baker series on Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality, is now available from Amazon.  Click the link to the right.

Theology: Augustine and saeculum

In responding to Witherington the other week, I criticized what I called the “two-step” that is evident in a good bit of Christian political thought – the move from explicitly Christian norms that apply to the church and the private sphere to “natural” norms for the public sphere.  I urged instead what I described as an Augustinian logic, and attempted to make sense of acts of public justice, including public violence, without abandoning the evangelical demands of Jesus.  Steven Wedgeworth wrote to suggest that Augustine himself advocates natural law, and engages in this very two-step.  Here I want to briefly defend and clarify what I said about Augustine.

First, my main beef is with theologies that implicitly or explicitly endorse secular order, in the sense of a bounded public space where religiously grounded moral norms and religiously founded rationality are ruled off limits.  I think secular political order is mainly a phenomenon of the past four centuries.  There would be some versions of this in pre-modern Christian political thought, but it would be complicated and improved by other commitments.  What I had in mind was something like Niebuhr’s tragic moral man/immoral society dualism.

Second, that position is not, I think, what Augustine teaches.  Here I am relying on a recent, as-yet unpublished paper by Paul Griffiths.

Continue reading…

Theology: Jenson in nuce

Jenson offers a corrective to Thomas’s cycle of exitus-reditus, according to which all things that come from God are ordered to return.  This is “misleading,” Jenson says, “since saving history is God’s journey with us, not our journey away from and back to him.”

That is about as good a summary of Jenson’s life’s work as you could ask for.

Theology: Sonar force

Ong again: “Sound signals the present use of power, since sound must be in active production in order to exist at all. . . . Sound can induce repose, but it never reveals quiescence.  It tells us that something is going on. . . . A primitive hunter can see, feel, smell, and taste an elephant when the animal is quite dead.  If he hears an elephant trumpeting or merely shuffling his feet, he had better watch out.  Something is going on.  Force is operating.”

Which is why God creates by Word.

Theology: God in our image

Anne Lamott writes that we know we are making God in our image when all His enemies happen to correspond with our own.

Theology: Just war and natural revelation

In his Karl Barth and the Problem of War, and Other Essays on Barth, Yoder examines places where Barth’s views on pacifism and war conflict with Barth’s insights in other areas of theology.  Yoder gives us a Barthian critique of Barth.

One crucial point concerns natural revelation: “The point at which Barth is most completely ‘non-Barthian’ is the point at which, when we ask him what it means for God to speak here and now, he presents us not with the Word of God spoken to the situation, but with the bare situation.  Barth has told the pacifists that they are sinning against God’s freedom by denying to God the possibility that he might command war.  The pacifists can answer that if God command Karl Barth to go to war he should certainly obey, but what they have not yet seen is that this was truly a command of God.  When the reader looks for the identification of God’s commandment, Barth brings forth in the last analysis not a word which was spoken through him as if by a prophet in the Old Testament sense, not a mystical intuition or conscientious conviction of divine leading, not a clear ethical value judgment, not a revelatory vision or audition, not an interpretation of Scripture, but simply a political situation in which he saw nothing else for Switzerland to do.”

Barth’s vigorous Nein! to natural revelation, and to liberal theology’s use of natural revelation especially, left him without a theological ground for claiming that a historical situation might constitute a command of God.  Yoder says elsewhere that the just war tradition rests on appeals to natural law in the sense of “the way the world works”; but this criticism of Barth shows a deeper sense in which just war theory depends on an affirmation of natural revelation.

Theology: Iron in the fire

Theologians have long been fascinated by the way iron takes on the properties of fire, and have used the analogy for all sorts of things.  Luther said that the Word confers its qualities to the soul He indwells as the fire confers heat to iron; some church fathers use the iron in the fire as a Christological analogy; it’s been used as a Eucharistic analogy too.

Cyril of Alexandria uses it as a way to explain the passibility of the impassible Word in the incarnation: “It is like iron, or other such material, when it is put in contact with a raging fire.  It receives the fire into itself, and when it is in the very heart of the fire, if someone should beat it, then the material itself takes the battering but the nature of the fire is in no way injured by the one who strikes it.  This is how you should understand the way in which the Son is said both to suffer in the flesh and not to suffer in the Godhead.”

Philosophy Theology: Christ-marked

In his excellent Christian Ethics in a Technological Age, Brian Brock argues that despite modernity’s best efforts, “the Father of Jesus Christ has not allowed a secularizing West to succeed in erasing the heritage of centuries of divine judgment and reshaping of Western self-consciousness and institutions.”  Brock takes a dim view of Christendom, quoting Kierkegaard’s definition of Christendom as “mankind’s continued effort through the centuries . . . to defend itself against Christianity,” but he also knows that “it is a defense not easily accomplished.”  Thus, a non- or even anti-Christian thinker of the modern era cannot be taken at his word: “All heretics are only relatively heretical: one cannot oppose theology without being a theologian, that is, without waging war against some specific, if imagined, god.”

His opening chapter applies this logic to Heidegger’s account of technology.  Embedded in that account he finds insights from the theology that Heidegger never escaped – “an interest in the plenitude of creation beyond the thoughts of creatures inherited from the medieval Scholastics” and “a theory or revelatory transformation inherited from the Reformers.”  Heidegger wants to ask “How does something outside of me come to me and make me into its likeness?”  Brock wants to re-frame the question, originally theological, by putting it back into its proper setting: “How does Christ come to us and meet us, transforming our being and action by making his subjects.”  This is not a falsification of Heidegger; rather “the best way to read his work is as a set of reflections on questions whose terms have been set by the living Christ, and whose continued profundity will depend on reviving its attachment to its true orienting and enlivening source.”

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