Here is a new song I’ve recorded. Actually, it’s an old Appalachian gospel song. I found a great digital library of Applachian folk music at Berea College, and I’m doing some new arrangements of public domain songs. Included below is my new arrangement and the recording from Berea’s archives.
Author: David Opderbeck
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Why Study Systematic Theology?
A video from the University of Nottingham, featuring Karen Kilby. Putting aside that these folks look like systematic theologians, I love Kilby’s description of what systematic theology is and why we study it: “a theologian is one who prays and stumbles in their prayer, and starts to think about their stumbling.”
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Measuring Bin Laden's Death
As an American citizen, and a beneficiary of the freedoms of Western democratic culture, I’m grateful that Osama bin Laden is dead. Without doubt, this mass murderer, this leader of terror, this ideologue of hatred, earned his own reward.
I don’t want my relief and gratitude, however, to pretend at joy. As a Christian, I can take no joy in violence, even necessary violence. There is no redemption in bin Laden’s death as a death. Though bin Laden died, his victims are not raised. As bin Laden lived, he died, a circle of death complete and unbroken, violence to violence, dust to dust. It is all death, all an enemy — our most wanted enemy and the Last Enemy in unholy communion.
There is only sorrow in death and war. Perhaps in some deaths and in some kinds of wars there is an underside of sorrow that becomes a sort of hope. A world without master terrorists, in pragmatic terms, is a much better world.
Yet, the making of this better-but-not-best world reminds us of this persistent idea of the “best” world. Here is a glimmer of a world in which the cycle of terror and retribution ends, a world in which a just man dies to free the unjust, a world in which the death of a servant calls all power to account, a world in which the one who died rose again and defeats death forever. That is the undiscovered country we long to reach.
Related: Daniel Kirk on The Economy of Death
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The Cape Town Commitment
The Cape Town Commitment, a statement of Christian mission from the Lausanne Movement is, I think, an excellent contemporary expression of missional theology. I might nuance a thing or two differently here and there, but overall this is an encouraging and robust summary of what missional theology and practice is all about. (HT: Scot McKnight)
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Evolution and Randomness
Here’s a good video explaining why “random” natural processes do not elide the notion of God’s sovereignty:
It is easy to criticize a book like Rob Bell’s “Love Wins.” Books like this, which are written for rhetorical effect and popular impact, usually aren’t very well grounded Biblically or theologically. As Scot McKnight noted in his series of posts reviewing Love Wins, there are plenty of important nodes of Biblical interpretation and theological inquiry at which Love Wins, at best, is shallow and confused.
All of this, I think, is quite unfortunate. The questions Bell raises, even if he raises them using unfair, leading rhetoric, represent critical theological inflection points at which mainstream evangelicals in America continue to feel the weight of fundamentalism’s withdrawal from the broader Church and culture.
Here is what I see as some of these key inflection points:
Christology: What does it mean that Christ is the incarnate Son who died for the sin of the world and rose again victorious over sin and death? And what does it mean that the incarnate Son is the pre-existent Logos, through whom the universe was created and in whom the universe holds together?
Protestant fundamentalism lacks a Christology in which Christ could be any sort of active agent outside the walls of the fundamentalist’s own social / religious network.
Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring the implications of a robust Christology for relations with non-Christian religions and for the theodicy problems presented, for example, by the unevangelized, the mentally disabled, and apparently virtuous practitioners of other religions.
Pneumatology: What role does the Holy Spirit play in the world outside the Church? Does the Holy Spirit work in culture generally, or only in the Church, or primarily in the lives of individual Christians? Is the Holy Spirit’s work always or typically visible and recognizable?
Protestant fundamentalism, in its non-Charismatic versions, views the Holy Spirit primarily as the agent of individual conversion and guidance. In Charismatic / Pentecostal versions of fundamentalism, the Holy Spirit typically is linked primarily to the health and wealth of the individual believer.
Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring whether and how the Holy Spirit precedes the proclamation of the Gospel and influences culture in both visible and hidden ways.
Ecclesiology and Sacramentology: What role does the visible Church play in the economy of salvation? When the visible Church prays for the salvation of the world (as in many traditional liturgical prayers), does that prayer truly effect anything in the history of salvation? When the visible Church practices the Lord’s Supper / Eucharist, does that practice enact anything with respect to God’s plan of salvation?
Protestant fundamentalism approaches the practice of prayer and the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper primarily individualistically – prayer is directed towards changing individual people and Communion is a personal remembrance only. Protestant fundamentalists who engage with culture tend to do so through the venue of power politics.
Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring how the Church, as the instrument of God’s salvation, affects culture and history through its practices of liturgy, prayer, and the Eucharist, often in subtle ways.
Missiology and Eschatology: What is the function of the Church and of individual Christians in relation to the world? Why is care for the poor and oppressed a primary hallmark of the Church and of Christian faith in the scriptures? How does the Biblical theme of God’s concern for the poor and oppressed relate to God’s plan of salvation and to the equally Biblical themes of sin, retribution, and atonement? Should most individual Christians continue to practice ordinary occupations, raise families, and participate in broader civic life, or in view of the state of the world and of Christ’s return should most or all Christians withdraw from the world and focus primarily on evangelism?
The missiology of protestant fundamentalism focuses almost entirely on effecting individual conversions. In the post-war missions boom among protestant fundamentalists, this approach was fueled by dispensational premillennial eschatology, in which a primary motivation for missions was to rescue a small remnant from the approaching Tribulation (and, paradoxically, to speed the Lord’s return).
Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring the robustness of the Biblical concept of “salvation,” the connections between the meaning of the doctrine of election and the Bible’s teachings about the God’s concern for the poor and oppressed, and the implications of the Biblical emphasis on physicality and resurrection for the eschatological future.
It’s important to note that when I say “Christian theologians are exploring…,” I mean Christian theologians working within the broad framework of creedal orthodoxy. Of course, there also are theologians in various Christian polities who are radical pluralists and who seem unconcerned at all about the confessional claims of the creed. But I am speaking of the leaders of the Catholic and Orthodox churches (including some great scholarly Popes and Bishops), of Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican thinkers who have contributed to volumes on Nicene faith, of Pentecostals teaching in historically fundamentalist schools, and of evangelicals teaching in many of our colleges and seminaries.
It’s also important to note that when I say “Christian theologians are exploring,” this does not represent only a recent development. All of the nodes I mention above have been the subject of theological inquiry for centuries. It is true that the challenges of modernity have accelerated many of these questions, but that is not surprising – modernity was and is a challenge, as were each of the various cultural and intellectual settings in which Christian faith has been expressed in the past.
The question is, how will we who identify as broadly evangelical respond in this moment? Can we use this as one opportunity to enter into the bigger theological conversation?
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Christopher Benson on Love Wins
An excellent column in First Things by Chrisopher Benson. He explains how a non-universalistic reading of Karl Barth helps with the gap between the Scylla of universalism and the Charybdis of restrictivism. If I have to have a view on all this, the neo-Barthian view that Benson sketches out seems the most tractable to me. (As a side note, what a shame that FT editor Joe Carter cluttered up the comments with a mistaken and pinched argument about what an “evangelical” voice would say here as opposed to a “mainline” voice. Somebody, please, rescue First Things and return it to its glory days of serious theological and social discourse!!)
Snippets from Benson:
The recent brouhaha over Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, reminds me of why I’m not at home among exclusivists or universalists. If forced to choose, I would sit at the hearth of exclusivists any day of the week, as their message does a better job of cohering with the scandal of the gospel.
The universalist message, by contrast, conforms to “the pattern of this world” (Rom. 12:2), tickling the ears of all those who want to hear about how “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross,” as theologian H. Richard Niebuhr observed 75 years ago in Kingdom of God in America.
What is the core claim of exclusivism? Catholic theologian Paul Griffiths answers: “belonging to the home religion is necessary for salvation. This . . . is to deny salvific efficacy to any alien religion. But it is not to assert salvific sufficiency to the home religion; exclusivists may or may not add to the core claim the view that belonging to the home religion is sufficient for salvation.” Those who add to the core claim are restrictivists. Those who relax their understanding of what it means to belong to the home religion are usually called inclusivists.
“Inclusivism is, in its deep logical structure, either simply a form of exclusivism or a position closely derived from it,” says Griffiths. ” Both positions answer the question of how religion provides an advantage to be had in no other way. Exclusivism . . . makes belonging to the home religion essential for salvation, but it also, in some of its variants, offers a relaxed understanding of what it might mean to belong to the home religion. Inclusivism in its most common form simply makes this relaxed understanding explicit by saying that consciously (publicly, explicitly) belonging to the home religion is not necessary for salvation.” I welcome inclusivism as a happy alternative to restrictivism and universalism.
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Exclusivists and universalists are presumptive demographers: The former claims hell is crowded and the latter that hell is empty. By contrast, inclusivists are agnostic about the population in hell, refusing to name and number the individuals who inhabit the place of torment. God alone keeps the statistics. There’s a family resemblance between exclusivists and inclusivists insofar as they both affirm the existence of hell and believe “there is salvation in no one else [Jesus Christ], for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The feud relates to how this salvation gets worked out.Exclusivists require a public and explicit confession of faith in Jesus Christ and a life marked by good fruit. Inclusivists acknowledge that faith and good fruit are hallmarks of Christ-followers, but are reluctant to make judgments about the destiny of ignorant or impossible souls, emphasizing that “with God all things are possible” (Mt. 19:26) and that “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). By “ignorant” I mean the unevangelized and by “impossible” I mean the unrepentant.
According to inclusivists, God’s rescue operation is for the entire cosmos (John 12:32, 2 Cor. 5:18-19, 1 Tim. 2:4). This doesn’t mean that all people are saved, as universalists claim, but that all are invited to the eternal banquet. People respond to the invitation with acceptance, rejection, or apathy. What happens to the rebels, fence sitters, and oblivious? While the Bible informs us that “the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9-10) and specifically names “the works of the flesh” that bar admittance (Gal. 5:19-21), no Christian occupies the seat of judgment that belongs to God.
There may yet be opportunities, either in temporal life or postmortem life, where individuals can encounter and receive an optimal presentation of the Gospel, “not a mixed message of joy and terror, salvation and damnation,” as Karl Barth railed against in Church Dogmatics.
“In itself,” Barth said, “[the Gospel] is light and not darkness,” though he recognized it throws a shadow. Universalists err because they deny the shadow, as Bell’s sunny title—Love Wins—implies. If and when exclusivists err, it’s because they dim the light in their stinginess about God’s mercy. Each one of us responds to the light we have. Professing and practicing Christians respond to the light as if it’s high noon. Spiritual seekers respond to different intensities of light, as if the sun is rising or setting.
The inclusivist option has been embraced by John Wesley, C. S. Lewis, and Billy Graham. Hints of it can be found among some of the early church fathers and Reformers. I sense an inclusivist attitude in Athanasius and Karl Barth, who offer the contemporary church an ancient-future voice. For them, the key verse in understanding election is 2 Corinthians 5:14: “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died” (emphasis added). All human beings are included in the death of Christ, not just potentially but actually. When someone comes to the Christian faith, it’s not a transition from being an outsider to an insider.
We’re all insiders—whether we realize it or not. Christians are simply awake to the reality of being already accepted in Jesus Christ. Barth rejects the false alternative between “all are saved” (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa) and “not all are saved” (Augustine, Calvin). All are saved insofar as the Christ event is efficacious for humanity, but how that gets worked out among individuals is entrusted to the perfect mercy and justice of God. Barth leaves the question about human destiny open in hope, a position that George Hunsinger calls “reverent agnosticism.”
[Barth] defines the existence of hell as a self-chosen place of separation from God. He also navigates a middle way between the exclusivist tendency to focus singularly on God’s righteousness and the universalist tendency to focus singularly on God’s mercy. Christ is at the center of Barth’s attention, descending into hell when we deserve to be there. His descent doesn’t empty hell of its occupants, all of whom lock the door from the inside, but it does show—without equivocation—that the Cross achieves plenitude of being and eternal peace for each one of us.
Tragically and unfathomably, individuals will elect against their own election in Christ, choosing poverty of being and eternal torment instead. Even though God has put us to rights, some don’t want to be “disentangled from the birdlime of concupiscence,” as Augustine puts it in Confesssions. We’re all invalids by the pool of Betheseda, but some will answer the perennial question of Jesus in the negative, “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6). No living person has undergone the descent of Christ into hell, and therefore we must never count who is there. What makes the hell-counters of Westboro Baptist Church so odious is that they feign the Cross’ knowledge without undergoing the Cross’ torture.
****
We might even say the exclusivist is a Cassandra whose fire and brimstone vision overwhelms the wideness of God’s mercy, and the universalist is a Pangloss whose cheerfulness about humanity underestimates the exactitude of God’s justice. If the former preaches “Wrath Wins,” the latter declares “Love Wins.” Neither sermon gets it quite right, and that’s why we need to hear the inclusivist’s message of “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God,” which preserves the dialectical tension in the Gospel: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).We cannot know the fate of every person who ever lived. For those impossible and ignorant souls, we’re better off adopting a posture of “reverent agnosticism” about their outcome rather than assign them to a circle of hell; otherwise we shall incur condemnation for usurping the seat of judgment from its rightful occupant.
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Milbank for Christian Lawyers
Here’s a short piece I wrote for The Christian Lawyer magazine. This issue will include introductions to various theologians by Christian law professors.
John Milbank for Christian Lawyers
The role of positive law in a pluralistic democracy presents a significant theological problem for anyone who takes Christian theology seriously. That this is so might not seem immediately evident to many Christian lawyers in America.
If you are reading The Christian Lawyer, there is a more than fair chance that you have been influenced by the American culture wars. Whether you consider yourself “progressive,” “conservative,” or something in between, if your conception of positive law has been shaped by the culture wars, you probably think the task of the “Christian lawyer” in the public square is to explain in neutral terms, accessible to everyone, why certain legal rules or policies comport with intrinsic, self-evident, common-sense notions of what is good for society.
Theologically, this approach is tied to views of “natural law” or “common grace” that assume most people in most times and places basically know what is really good and bad. The longstanding theological problem of the relation between nature and grace is essentially passed over by assuming that the inherent imago Dei, or grace, or some vague combination of both, provides common ground for public reason.
Curiously, for many culture warriors, nature and/or grace usually seem to deliver reasons that look much like the platforms of one or the other of the major political parties. If you have a sneaking suspicion that this is too optimistic, too easy, too closely wedded to the preoccupations of American power politics and the selfish logic of the market, too attached to modern notions of “neutral” human reason divorced from the historic commitments of Christian faith, you might want to explore the work of John Milbank.
In his influential and difficult book Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Blackwell, 2d ed., 2006), Milbank seeks to re-infuse Christian theology with the priority of metaphysics and ontology. He excavates the Christian philosophical tradition in an effort to recover the pre-modern idea that Christian theology is a scientia that comprises the true explanation of what reality really is like. At times, Milbank sounds like the contemporary neo-Thomists and neo-Calvinists who tend to dominate the law and religion discourse in America. He notes, for example, that “more importance must be given to propositions, and so to ontology,” than is permitted by the post-liberal cultural-linguistic theory of doctrine that in recent years has provided the most clear path between fundamentalism and liberalism (TST, at p. 384).
But Milbank takes seriously the postmodern critique of foundationalism. He mercilessly deconstructs all social theories, whether secular or presumptively Christian, based on any supposed foundation other than the reality narrated in the Christian story and incarnated in the Christian community. Any account of reality in which there is any such thing as “secular reason,” for Milbank, represents pagan or atheistic philosophy. Christian theology need not “answer” to secular reason. Rather, the reality of the Christian God revealed in Jesus Christ is the only ground for any sort of account of “reason.”
Many readers will disagree with some of the implications for political theology that Milbank draws from this return to ontology, not least his version of “Christian socialism.” Yet some of those same readers might be surprised to note the affinities between Milbank and, say, Abraham Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty as developed by his student Herman Dooyeweerd. In any event, anyone who makes the effort to read through Theology and Social Theory will be rewarded with a renewed commitment to the priority of a thoroughly theological account of the good in relation to any truly “Christian” theory of positive law.
An excellent column in First Things from David Bentley Hart. The volume and quality of many of the comments following it is also astounding.
The best and most thorough review of Love Wins that I’ve read is from Steven Holmes at St. Andrews. Here are the mulitple and ever-growing parts of Holmes’ review: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9. Holmes is an evangelical and a Calvinist.
If you are like me — you find the questions Bell raises legitimate and troubling, but you are concerned that the conversation requires much more nuance and weight theologically (and you cannot consider yourself a universalist) — read Holmes’ blogs. Even if you are not a staunch Calvinist like Holmes (I’m not), you’ll find them refreshing.
Holmes is quite critical of various aspects of Bell’s arguments. But for me some of the most important of Holmes’ observations are in Parts 2 and 5 of his review. In Part 2, Holmes recites this quote from Bell:
“A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better … This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message (p. viii)”
Holmes analyzes the quote as follows:
This is a full-frontal attack on historic orthodoxy, isn’t it? Bell must be opposed, denounced, corrected, and bid farewell, because he has ceased to believe the gospel found in Scripture and taught by the church down the ages, and this paragraph is sufficient proof of that, surely? This proves that Bell is a heretic, right?
Wrong.
This is going to be a long discussion, because some historical detail is necessary. So let me state a conclusion as briefly and bluntly as I can: in saying this, Bell is saying nothing that has not been held by the vast majority of Christian theologians down the ages, taught explicitly by many of them, and repeatedly defended as Biblical by the most conservative scholars.
What is Bell actually saying, first? If we read the passage carefully, the core claim is about proportion: the offence is in the ‘select few’ who are saved – not the nature of heaven, nor the nature of hell, but in their relative populations. The message of God’s love demands that we hold that God saves many, or most, or all – that the gift of grace is not given parsimoniously. And this is not about the nature of hell, but about who God is – the claim of the book is that love wins.
The question of the relative populations of heaven and hell come the eschaton was asked quite frequently in the Reformed tradition. B.B. Warfield published an essay under the title ‘Are they few that be Saved?’ His argument was exegetical; his answer a resounding negative. In closing, he paused to point to others who held that the number of the saved would far outnumber the lost: R.L. Dabney; Charles Hodge; W.G.T. Shedd. I could add A.A. Hodge and Jonathan Edwards.
This is not a catalogue of woolly-minded liberals.
This was the united witness of Old Princeton, a position taken by at least two of the writers of The Fundamentals. These names are the very definition of Calvinist orthodoxy. These are the people whose respect for Scripture was such that they developed and defined the doctrine of inerrancy. These are the people with whom Bell is agreeing.
And when you burrow in to what they actually said, the point becomes more striking still. Charles Hodge calls the number of the lost ‘very inconsiderable’ on the last page of his Systematic Theology. Shedd actually suggests that the error of believing that only a few are saved is equal and opposite to the error of universalism. That’s Shedd, the Calvinist’s Calvinist, asserting that the point Bell writes to oppose is a grave heresy – albeit one that seems presently to be being vigorously defended by all manner of men (they do all seem to be men…) whose zeal, unfortunately, apparently far outweighs their knowledge.
(Warfield does point to one Reformed writer who holds that the number of the saved will be few, Johann Heidegger….)
Holmes returns to this discussion in Part 5:
Remember Johann Heidegger from a couple of posts back? He was the Reformed writer who held that the number of the saved would indeed be small. Shedd and Warfield condemn him for being far too conservative in his theology. Heidegger wrote about precisely this question, and said this:
“No one except those who sin unto death ought to or can determine anything certain before the end of life, concerning the eternal reprobation of himself or of others. Of others indeed we must have good hopes by the judgement of love, 1. Cor.13:7 (beareth, believeth, hopeth, endureth all things)… (q. ET from Heppe, p. 188, with error silently corrected).”
Let’s do a kind of scale of theological conservatism here, shall we? Shedd and Warfield are conservative – I believe that will be generally granted. They reprove Heidegger for being far too conservative. That makes him, what? Ultra-conservative? Heidegger then rejects as far too conservative the position that we can know for certain that any other human being is damned. We’re somewhere off the scale now, in the company of those who think the Taliban are dangerously liberal. I have thought hard about anyone in the Christian tradition who held to this position, that we can know for certain that a particular person is in hell. There were, to be fair, some Landmarkian Baptists. And Dante, I suppose, although he might claim his allegory was not meant to be taken like that. Certainly, there are not many.
And yet when Bell doesn’t even say that this is wrong, but merely questions whether it is right, we are told that he has committed an error so grave that he must be publicly castigated.
I can’t quite decide whether this is simply brilliant debating work from Bell, enticing his opponents to defend a position so extreme that no one in their right mind would touch it, or whether his opponents really, genuinely, don’t realise just how far behind they have left anything resembling historic orthodoxy.
This is not mere theological hair-splitting. This point is pastorally vital. Bell’s other example concerns an atheist teenager, killed in a car crash. ‘There’s no hope, then,’ comes the comment, reflecting this ridiculously extreme position. All of us who are Christian pastors have performed funeral services for those with no visible faith, and have been offered care and counsel to those, actively Christian or not, who have lost an apparently-unbelieving family member or friend. The first rule of such pastoral engagement has always been not to speculate about the fate of the dead person. One speaks with confidence the promises of Jesus, proclaims the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead, announces with utter conviction the defeat of death and sin and hell in the cross, and invites, implicitly or explicitly, the hearers to place their own faith and trust in these realities. The one who has died is in God’s hands, and it is not for us to judge. The gospel of Jesus is never, ever, ‘there’s no hope, then.’
This point is utterly vital, and Bell is simply right.