Apparently my blog was hijacked today. Apologies if it hit your virus filter, and apologies also for the messy look while I clean this up.
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Month: April 2009
An excellent essay by Craig Detweiler.
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The Torture Lawyers
When I first heard that the Obama administration was considering whether to prosecute lawyers who crafted the “torture memos,” I was very concerned. It sounded like a witch hunt, and worse, like an impingement on the sacrosanct freedom of legal counsel to render advice. This piece by Brian Tamanaha, however, powerfully explains why my concern was to a large extent misplaced. Tamanaha, by the way, is no wishy-washy liberal. His book Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law is an important argument for the recognition of normative-moral principles for legal theory, which every Christian interested in legal theory should read.
A group headed by Francis Collins announces today the launch of the BioLogos Foundation, an effort to improve dialogue between Christian faith and the natural sciences. Collins provides some additional background on a new blog, “Science and the Sacred,” associated with the project. This is exciting. I hope and pray that it represents a new, constructive phase in the maturation of evangelical perspectives on the natural sciences.
This is the first post in what perhaps will become a series on comparisons between the Catholic and Protestant traditions. Perhaps I’ll add some thoughts on the Easter Orthodox tradition as well. The purpose here is reflective rather than polemical.
For this post, I offer a quote from Thomas Howard’s book On Being Catholic. Tom was my freshman English literature professor in college. He converted to Catholicism during my sophomore or junior year and had to leave our school because of its evangelical-Reformed confessional posture. What a shame — he was a brilliant and warm teacher. So here he is on the nature of the worship service:
But we were speaking of the obvious differences between Protestant worship services and the Mass, the most immediately obvious one, to a casual glance, being the difference between a meeting, on the one hand, organized around the idea of people listening to a lecture and, on the other, an enactment. And enactment, of course, takes ritual and ceremonial form — a principle we see when we mortals come up to the great moments of human existence, namely, birth, marriage, and death, and attempt to ‘enter into’ the mysteries at stake in these events. We do not settle for speaking to each other about these things. In some profound sense that belongs to our humanity itself, we know that we must ‘enter into’ the significance of these events, and this entering into, inevitably, takes ritual and ceremonial form.
Enactment and entering into events that transcend language. Does that stir a longing in your soul?
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Faith Thinking
This is Part I of my review of Faith Thinking: The Dynamics of Christian Theology by Trevor Hart. This was the first book assigned in my Missional Theology I course at BTS.
Trevor Hart’s Faith Thinking is a prolegomena to Christian theology in the tradition of “faith seeking understanding.” In essence, Hart seeks to envision Christian theology as the extension of a MacIntyreian tradition, utilizing the epistemological resources of “critical realism.”
In his introduction, Hart outlines his project and discusses the contours of “faith” and “theology.” “Faith,” he notes, “will always seek to enter into a fuller and deeper knowledge and understanding of that which matters most to it.” This means that, although faith is situated within a tradition, it is not merely a rote repetition of that tradition. Faith is concerned both with the “internal coherence” of contemporary expressions of the tradition and the “external reference” of those expressions to other sources and facets of knowledge. Faith is integrative. It must “seek . . . to come to terms with the problems and the possibilities of integrating our faith in its various aspects into a wider picture of things entertained by society; thereby inhabiting a more or less integrated world, a universe rather than a multiverse.”
“Theology” is an attempt to understand the object and place of faith. Theology, then, is an effort to understand reality – the universe – from a stance of faith. Christian theology, in particular, tries to “sketch an intellectual contour of reality as it appears from within the stance of a living and active faith in Christ . . . .” If all Christians are called to seek after God’s purposes, then all Christians to some degree or another are engaged in the theological task.
Although Hart does not say so directly, his project clearly is an effort to view Christian theology from the perspective of critical realism. “Critical realism” is an epistemological position that is both realist and critical. It is “realist” in that, as with Enlightenment empiricists and rationalists, it affirms that human beings are capable of true knowledge of a real world that is not merely constructed. It is “critical” in that, as with contemporary postmodernists, it recognizes that all human knowledge is constrained, situated, incomplete, and provisional. In contemporary theology, critical realism is represented in the thinking of Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre, Leslie Newbiggin, N.T. Wright, Alister McGrath, and others, many of them referred to by Hart throughout the book.
In my Missional Theology class at BTS, we’ve been discussing the nature and task of “theology.” One aspect of the discussion is the role of scripture in theology. Some folks think of theology as a house, with scripture as its foundation. This is an interesting analogy, particularly when we consider the creativity of the architect and the need to remodel the house at times when the landscape or neighborhood changes.
But, I wonder if the “foundationalist” metaphor for scripture is a good one. If scripture always has to be received and interpreted, and if we require the Holy Spirit to “illuminate” scripture for scripture to function as God intends in the Church, does the analogy of scripture to the unchanging foundation of a house stretch things too far? I wonder if the Apostle Paul’s frequent use of the analogy of a “body” in relation to the Church provides some different resources for thinking about the relationship of scripture to theology?
I wonder if scripture is more like the physical structures of the brain. Those structures regulate how we are capable of perceiving and thinking about the world. They are adapted to give us useful data — though not perfectly complete God’s-eye data — of the world we live in so that we can function effectively as human beings. Perhaps scripture is more like this than like the foundation of a building. Scripture regulates how an organism, the body of Christ, perceives and thinks about God and about how to live in the world God created.
I recently discovered the Trinity Forum, an outstanding resource on faith and culture from a Reformed perspective. I’m looking forward to their new initiative on faith and science, funded by the Templeton Foundation. A forum that includes Francis Collins and Dallas Willard as well as Trinity Forum President Luder Whitlock is bound to be interesting and hopefully productive.
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Reasons for Belief
A wonderful article by former skeptic A.N. Wilson (HT: Andy Crouch). His summation:
Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.
The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story.
J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it.
But an even stronger argument is the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives – the lives of the men and women with whom you mingle on a daily basis, the man, woman or child next to you in church tomorrow morning.
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Conspire Magazine
This looks excellent.