Category: Theology

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Theology

C.S. Lewis Answers Richard Dawkins

I read this very brief but lovely essay by C.S. Lewis this evening: “On Obstinacy in Belief.” (I found it in a collection of Lewis’ essays which includes “The World’s Last Night”). In about fifteen pages, Lewis answers the same questions Dawkins keeps asking today about Christian belief. What people like Dawkins miss is that faith is relational, not merely rational, and that it is a particular relationship with this God, not with “god” as a concept. A snippet from the conclusion:

Our opponents, then, have a perfect right to dispute with us about the grounds of our original assent [to the Christian faith]. But they must not accuse us of sheer insanity if, after the assent has been given, our adherence to it is no longer proportioned to every fluctuation of the apparent evidence. They cannot of course be expected to know on what our assurance feeds, and how it revives and is always rising from its ashes. They cannot be expected to see how the quality of the object which we think we are beginning to know by acquaintance drives us to the view that if this were a delusion then we should have to say that the universe had produced no real thing of comparable value and that all explanations of the delusion seemed somehow less important than the thing explained. That is knowledge we cannot comunicate. But they can see how the assent, of necessity, moves us from the logic of speculative thought into what might perhaps be called the logic of personal relations. What would, up till then, have been variations simple of opinion become variations of conduct by a person to a Person. Credere Deum esse turns into Credre in Deum. And Deum here is this God, the increasingly knowable Lord.

Categories
Law and Policy Theology

A Young Evangelical Who Doesn't Get It

In the February First Things, Jordan Hylden, a self-identified young evangelical, responds to Tony Campolo’s recent book, “Letters to a Young Evangelical”. In the correspondence section of the current First Things, Campolo responds and Hylden adds a sur-reply.

Hylden is right about one thing: Campolo’s book is frustrating because it suggests that the moral substance of some social issues, such as abortion, is fuzzy, when it is not. What Campolo should say is that there is not necessarily one “evangelical” political approach to such moral questions (and even then, Campolo should better represent why there is perhaps justifiably a relatively broad consensus within evanglicalism on the general politics of some of these big moral questions).

But overall, Hylden’s criticism is unfair. This is even more evident in his correspondence with Campolo in the current issue of FT, in which Hylden lamely bashes not only Campolo, but also all things emergent — even to the tiresome point of dropping Brian McLaren’s name as a scare token.

I sent this in to FT’s correspondence section — let’s see if it gets published:

Jordan Hylden’s zeal to bash the emerging church movement, Tony Campolo, and all else that fails his sniff test, is a shame. When Hylden suggests Campolo and the emerging church movement “have had the courage to emerge from worn-out things like Christian doctrine,” he apparently is oblivious to the work of theologians such as the Stan Grenz, John Franke, Scott McKnight, Leslie Newbiggin, James K.A. Smith, and others, who identify with or whose work informs much “emergent” thinking.

I wonder whether Hylden has any idea, for example, about the potential connections that James K.A. Smith has identified between the robust theological movement of Radical Orthodoxy and emergent sensibilities? And does Hylden have any notion of how John Franke, an Origen scholar, is reaching back into the Patristic tradition to find fresh ways of revitalizing evangelical hermeneutics and theology? Can Hylden trace Newbiggin’s missiology to the emerging church’s missional posture towards contemporary postmodern culture? Apparently not. Hylden is instead content merely to whisper the scary words “Brian McLaren” into the inquisitor’s ear.

Hylden seems equally oblivious to the devastating impact a generation of political and theological crankery has had on American evangelicalism. Hylden self-identifies as a young evangelical, but he seems not to care that the angry, spitting rhetoric of some of evangelicalism’s so-called leaders has made many young believers — as well as, sadly, most young unbelievers — wonder what all of this has to do with the Jesus who sacrificed himself for the world in love on the cross.

Tony Campolo and the emerging church can indeed be frustratingly obtuse sometimes. It would be wonderful if Campolo, McLaren and other emergent leaders would “speak the truth in love” about clear “traditional” social-moral issues such as homosexual practice and abortion. But I, for one, am thankful that someone is willing to expose how far contemporary Western evangelicalism, for all of its goods and blessings, seems to stray sometimes from the central “good news” of the gospel. And I’m not even so young anymore.

Categories
Spirituality Theology

The Jesus Way

Thank God for Eugene Peterson. In the middle of our overprogrammed, sometimes canned Western Christianity comes an honest, gentle breeze. Peterson’s latest, The Jesus Way, is vintage, refreshing Eugene. Herewith just a few quotes:

the Christian way cannot be programmed, cannot be guaranteed: faith means that we put our trust in God — and we don’t know how he will work out our salvation, only that it is our salvation that he is working out. Which frees us of anything.

The fatal thing is to reduce faith to an explanation. It is not an explanation, it is a passion. To tell the story of Abraham is to enter a narrative that throws self-help, self-certification, self-discipline — all our paltry self-hyphenations — into a junkyard of rusted-out definitions.

Faith has to do with marrying Invisible and Visible. When we engage in an act of faith we give up control, we give up sensory (sight, hearing, etc.) confirmation of reality; we give up insisting on head-knowledge as our primary means of orientation in life…. we choose no longer to operate strictly on the basis of hard-earned knowledge, glorious as it is, but over a lifetime to embrace the mystery that ‘must dazzle gradually / Or every man go blind'”.

The way of Jesus is not a sequence of exceptions to the ordinary, but a way of living deeply and fully with the people here and now, in the place we find ourselves.

But the temptation is to reduce people, ourselves and others, to self-defined needs or culture-defined needs, which always, in the long run, end up being sin-defined needs — and use Jesus to do it. . . . The devil wants us to use Jesus . . . to run our families, our neighborhoods, our schools, our governments as efficiently and properly as we can, but with no love or forgiveness. Every man and woman reduced to a function.

Categories
Historical Theology Spirituality Theology

A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future

I guess I’ve been living under a rock or something, but I hadn’t seen the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future before today. All I can say is, wow — this captures so much of how my thinking has developed over the past few years — indeed, of how my thinking has developed ever since I was exposed to ideas like this at Gordon College more than 20 (gulp) years ago.

Here are some excerpts:

On “The Primacy of Biblical Narrative”:

We call for a return to the priority of the divinely authorized canonical story of the triune God. This story—Creation, Incarnation, and re-creation—was effected by Christ’s recapitulation of human history and summarized by the early church in its rules of faith. The gospel-formed content of these rules served as the key to the interpretation of Scripture and its critique of contemporary culture, and thus shaped the church’s pastoral ministry. Today, we call evangelicals to turn away from modern theological methods that reduce the gospel to mere propositions, and from contemporary pastoral ministries so compatible with culture that they camouflage God’s story or empty it of its cosmic and redemptive meaning. In a world of competing stories, we call evangelicals to recover the truth of God’s Word as the story of the world, and to make it the centerpiece of evangelical life.

On the Church:

We call evangelicals to take seriously the visible character of the church. We call for a commitment to its mission in the world in fidelity to God’s mission (Missio Dei), and for an exploration of the ecumenical implications this has for the unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church. Thus, we call evangelicals to turn away from an individualism that makes the church a mere addendum to God’s redemptive plan.

Individualistic evangelicalism has contributed to the current problems of churchless Christianity, redefinitions of the church according to business models, separatist ecclesiologies, and judgmental attitudes toward the church. Therefore, we call evangelicals to recover their place in the community of the Church catholic.

On Theological Reflection:

We call for the church’s reflection to remain anchored in the Scriptures in continuity with the theological interpretation learned from the early fathers. Thus, we call evangelicals to turn away from methods that separate theological reflection from the common traditions of the church. These modern methods compartmentalize God’s story by analyzing its separate parts, while ignoring God’s entire redemptive work as recapitulated in Christ. Anti-historical attitudes also disregard the common biblical and theological legacy of the ancient church.

Amen, amen, and amen!

Categories
Academic Books and Film Science & Technology Spirituality Theology

Incarnational Humanism and "The Passionate Intellect" — Book Review

The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education

By Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman
Baker Academic (2006)
ISBN 0-8010-2734-9

This book is explores the themes of whether, and how, Christians can develop a rich and passionate life of the mind. Although it is written for Christian students bound for university, it is useful for any Christian who is serious about the intellectual life.

One of the authors’ goals is to defuse the “warfare” mentality concerning faith and “secular” learning that some Christians, particularly those who are not very mature in the faith, often seem to develop. They propose to do this through the model of “Incarnational Humanism.”

“Incarnational Humanism” takes the incarnation of Christ as a starting point for a Christian approach to learning. “In Christ,” the authors state, “all fragmentation ends and a new humanity begins, a new creation in which all knowledge is united (or taken captive, as Paul puts it) under the lordship of Christ because in him the divine and the human are firmly joined forever.” The pattern of the incarnation suggests that we should expect to find that truth is not “an abstract, timeless concept,” but rather is mediated through human language, culture, and tradition. Therefore, Christians should not be afraid of truth located outside the hermetically sealed world of our particular religious subcultures.

In short, the authors place a Kuyperian notion of “common grace,” as mediated for generations of Christian college students by Arthur Holmes’ famous dictum that “All Truth is God’s Truth,” into the postmodern context. While the authors thus acknowledge the postmodern turn, they firmly deny the destructive Nietzschean postmodernism, evident in figures such as Michael Foucault, that rejects any notion of classical humanism in favor of a heuristic of power relationships.

The answer the authors suggest to Nietzsche and Foucault, however, is not a resurgent Christian rationalism dusted off from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Rather, they hearken back to the sort of humanism that is evident in many of the Church’s great minds, such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, prior to the Enlightenment. In this classical Christian humanism, truth is more than power – indeed, truth in many ways is the antithesis of power – because the divine Truth became man and gave himself for us.

There are many riches in this book. The phrase “Incarnational Humanism” is a beautiful one that deserves broad attention, and it is high time that “All Truth is God’s Truth” be given a postmodern reading. There is also, however, a glaring weakness in the authors’ arguments: they do not deal adequately with the effects of sin. A model of truth that hearkens back to Augustine, but that glides over any reading of Augustine’s thoughts on sin, will not present a thoroughly Christian humanism.

I wish the authors had acknowledged the tension between the incarnation and human sinfulness, and had contextualized it, as scripture and the Christian humanist tradition do, within the “already / not yet” of the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, this is a valuable addition to the literature on the intellectual life as a Christian vocation. Let us hope that a holistic, incarnational understanding of faith and learning once again infuses the Church, rather than the rationalist, atomistic, confrontational approaches that so often seem to dominate our thinking.

Categories
Justice Law and Policy Theology

The Ontology of Peace

In the past, I’ve referenced my interest in Radical Orthodoxy, which developed after I attended an RO-heavy conference at Baylor last fall. I’m working up a proposal for a presentation at next year’s Baylor conference, with the vague thought of how the “ontology of peace” can apply to information law and policy. I stumbled across this nice summary of the Augustine-Aquinas-Milbank trajectory through the “ontology of peace” in a delightful little essay by Joel Garver about “Kenny” from “South Park” as a Christ figure:

An Ontology of Primordial and Final Peace

Let’s begin sketching an alternative by examining some of the suggestions and presuppositions of two Christian philosophers and saints–Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Then we will consider some considerations of a contemporary Christian philosopher–John Milbank.

Augustine

The fundamental presupposition of Augustine is that the material world is a result of free creation by God–as opposed to violence. Since, for Augustine, God is a Trinity of persons in a relation of love, freely shared, God is free to create a reality that may enter into that love. Futhermore, human beings who are in the image of God possess free will by which they do wrong–as opposed to find evil’s source in mere ignorance. Moreover, evil has no ontological purchase on Augustine’s view. It is defined negatively as the choosing of lesser goods over greater goods and so evil is seen as a privation–as opposed to an ontological reality.

In his Confessions Augustine presents the history of his person, lived before the face of God and offered up to God, redeeming his painful memories of the past. Thus, Augustine can be credited with the first deep theorization of psychology and personality as we know it–as opposed to the ultimate impersonalism of the Greeks.

Finally, in his City of God Augustine proposed an alternative city, a re-telling of the pagan myths which unmasks their inherent violence. Moreover, it is the proposal of a new narrative that is plausible by out-narrating the alternatives.

Let us turn then to Thomas.

Thomas Aquinas

For Thomas the fundamental nature of the world is to be understood by means of the analogy of being (analogia entis) in which the relations and reality of creation find an analogy in the very life of God. Thus being and difference must be seen in the final context of relation and love within the Trinity. God is who he is–both in the unity of the Godhead and in the differences between the Persons–only in virtue of his internal relations of love.

By the analogy of being we can then also see that the ultimate nature of things is love. Difference within the creation is established in love. Moreover, being unveils itself to me and so knowledge is a gift of love, but since love is fundamental to knowledge reason and faith are not extrinsically and externally related to one another and to knowledge, but are mutually and intrinsically related. This ontology and epistemology provides an alternative to empirical-positivist model of science by invoking formal and final causality, intrinsic relationality, and gift–as opposed to a privileging of control, atomism, and force.

John Milbank

Augustine and Thomas show us, then, that it is possible to narrate reality in a way that does not presuppose and perpetuate violence either as a primordial condition of ontology or as a sustaining event within the world and human practices and discourse. There is an alternative within the Christian message.

For Milbank, the Christian message is not to out-argue the ontology of violence by an appeal to some supposedly neutral and universal discourse of rationality. Rather, Christian belief claims to out-narrate and out-practice any alternatives. Part of that narrative is the example of Jesus who embodies the ultimate rejection of violence by refusing to play the game and answering conflict with transforming love. In him, the church is to be the space in which the alternative world is manifest with its alternative narrative and counter-history. Thus the ontology of violence is to overcome with a lived narrative and ontology of peace.

Categories
Epistemology Theology

Bloesch on Truth

This is a continuation of my posts about Donald Bloesch’s Holy Scripture.

Bloesch’s chapter “Truth in Biblical & Philosophical Perspective” is excellent. Bloesch notes that both the correspondence and coherence views of truth are Biblically flawed. “To understand truth bascially in terms of correspondence between the mind and the exterior world,” Bloesch notes, “reflects a dualistic view of reality, presupposing a bifurcation between mind and matter, spirit and nature.” This is a helpful corrective to the strong emphasis in some corners of evangelicalism on the correspondence view (to the point, in the writings of folks like Doug Groothuis, of holding that the correspondence view is the only proper view for a Christian to hold).

The coherence view, Bloesch holds, is equally flawed, because it is rooted in an idealistic monism, in which everything is capable of hanging together perfectly in human speech and thought, and in which nothing is unique or outside a systematizable perspective. Yet Bloesch is similarly critical of mysticism, in which truth is a sort of “overarching unity that dissolves particularity and individuality” and pragmatism, in which “the criterion for truth is workability and utility.”

Against all these views, Bloesch suggests that “truth” in scripture usually means “genuineness, veracity, faithfulness and steadfastness.” “In the deepest sense,” he says, “truth is identified with God himself, and the stamp of truth therefore characterizes both his words and his works. Truth is not so much an ideas as a person, not so much a formulation as an act.”

This does not to suggest to Bloesch that correspondence and coherence are irrelevant. However, while

[t]he Christian certainly shares with the unbeliever the idea of truth as a correct description of the world, . . . the correspondence theory becomes questionable when the discussion turns to ultimate or final truth. Truth in the ultimate sense is not a conforming of the mind to objective reality but the refocusing of the mind by the Spirit of God, who breaks into our reality from the beyond. Truth is being brought into accord with the transcendent meaning of the gospel, the very Word of God. It is not simply an agreement between our ideas and the gospel but a conforming of our totla life orientation to the demands of the gospel. Truth in biblical perspective is not so much the factual of the eventful. It is not the mere perception of facts but transformation by the transcendent reality that the biblical facts point to and attest.

Similarly, the coherence theory eventually breaks down because “[r]evelation cannot be assimilated into a comprehensive, rational system of truth….” However, revelation “can throw light on all human systems that purport to give meaning and purpose to life.” Pragmatism also is misplaced because “the fundamental need of human beings is not satisfaction or integration but deliverance from sin and communion with God.” And mysticism loses contact with Biblical truth because “[f]aith is not a mystical unknowing but a steadfast and certain knowledge concerning things beyond the compass of human reason and imagination (Calvin).”
Bloesch ties all this together in an assessment of evangelical controversies about scripture. He notes, correctly I think, that

The crux of the problem in contemporary evangelicalism concerning the inerrancy of the Bible revolves around different understandings of truth. The conflict is not so much theological as philosophical. Because a large segment of conservative Protestantism has unwittingly accepted the Enlightenment reduction of truth to the rationally empirical or evidential, the possibility of forging some concensus on this question is made all the more difficult. What is clear is that the cultural or dictionary understanding of truth has eclipsed the biblical understanding among many earnest Christians.

Bloesch argues for an understanding of inerrancy that is not freighted with this cultural baggage. “Biblical Christians,” he says, “can affirm the inerrancy of Scripture so long as it is not confused with total factual and scientific accuracy. . . . Inerrancy in biblical understanding means that the Bible in its unity with the Spirit guides us into all truth.”
This does not mean that the essentially historical character of Biblical revelation can be discarded.

The paramount question is not whether the Bible is true in the sense of being fully accurate in everything it reports, but whether the Bible leads us into truth, whether the Bible brings us truth. But the Bible could not lead us into truth unless its central claims were true, unless its overall witness were reliable and dependable. . . . To affirm that the Bible teaches ‘religious truth’ but not ‘historical truth’ is to overlook the Bible’s central claim that paradoxically God became historical, myth became fact.

Ultimately, Bloesch states, “[t]he texts of Scripture are steppingstones to the spiritual reality to which these texts refer, a reality inaccessible to historical research and investigation. God’s Word is truly known only when God himself speaks, an occurrence that is always unpredictable and mind-altering.”

There is so much that I think is helpful and right in this balanced, reformed understanding of truth, which nods to Barth without accepting Barth uncritically.

Categories
Epistemology Science & Technology Theology

Intelligent Design and Positivism

I participate in an email list concerning intelligent design, on which there’s been an interesting discussion about whether ID presupposes a positivist epistemology. I think that it often does.

By “positivism” I mean a philosophical / epistemological position according to which knowledge is authentic only if it is measurable and empirically verifiable — i.e., only if it is derived from the scientific method. See a Wiki here. It seems to me that ID often accepts this assumption by proposing, at least implicitly, that the doctrine of creation is in some sense measurable and emprically verifiable. The presense of specified complex information, for example, is supposed to be a filter through which we can empirically verify the activity of a creator. If not for some concession to positivism, however, why would we even need such an empirical filter?

The Bible says “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19), which I take to mean that all of creation reflects God’s glory. God is revealed in all of creation, apart from any specific scientific test we might propose for deducing his activity in some aspect of creation. Indeed, the pursuit of such a particular scientific test is misguided. The test is simply everything that exists.

I think this is different than the question of evidential apologetics. I would disagree with many opponents of ID who suggest that the creation we observe is as compatible with atheism as it is with theism. I think this stance is correct only if we’re back to presupposing a postivitist epistemology. If we presuppose positivism, then I think its correct that the existence of God can’t be “proven” one way or the other. But if the sense of wonder, longing and awe we feel when we reflect on the creation around us is more than some kind of reductionist biological / evolutionary impulse — if, as C.S. Lewis might put it, our experience of the numinous points to a reality outside our ordinary perception — then the positivistic atheist is merely dulling his senses when he denies the creator. As Romans 1 puts it, “their thinking [becomes] futile and their foolish hearts [are] darkened” concerning the knowledge of God.

Therefore, to a mind not entirely bound by a presupposition against the knowledge of God, the “ordinary” processes of creation seem reducible to physical laws and chance. It is only as grace begins to melt that futility and darkness that the evidences we can provide in support of the faith start to make sense. (Unlike very strict Calvinist presuppositionalists, I believe common grace plays an important role here and that glimpses of the numinous aren’t limited to the elect.) But it seems to me that the sorts of evidences we can provide are not taken from the positivist’s toolbox in the form of particular mathematical filters and proofs. They are rather the witness of all of creation, seen through the spectacles of faith. (For a good essay exploring some of these themes, see Michael Hanby, Reclaiming Creation in a Darwinian World, Theology Today 62(2006): 476-83).

Categories
Looking Glass Theology

Through the Looking Glass: The Greek Bible

Here is an awesome resource for understanding the New Testament in the original Greek: Zhubert.com. It will produce the Greek of any passage, along with a hyperlinked lexicon. Very cool.

Categories
Theology

The Apocalypse

ἀποκάλυψις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ

“The apocalypse of Jesus Christ” . . . so begins the book of Revelation. I grew up in dipensational premillennial churches that focused heavily on Revelation. The view they took of Revelation is that it is a detailed description of future events, most of which concern a seven-year period of judgement after the Church is removed or “raptured” from the earth.

I never was terribly comfortable with this view, but only in the past year or so have I begun to study more deeply what Revelation is all about. My study began with The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views, a good overview of the broad contours of eschatology. Now I’ve begun studying Revelation itself in detail, using Craig Keener’s NIV Application Commentary and Beale’s New International Greek Testament Commentary.

It’s refreshing and exciting to realize that Revelation doesn’t really fit so easily into the dispensational premillennial box. Beale’s background discussion is fascinating, and highlights that the various judgments are usually best understood as recapitulations of a broad theme rather than as successive events that will happen over a short time period. Beale summarizes the broad theme of Revelation as follows: “the sovereignty of God and Christ in redeeming and judging brings them glory, which is intended to motivate saints to worship God and reflect his glorious attributes through obedience to his word.” (Beale at .p 174.) Excellent.