A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Five essential theology books

    Michael Westmoreland-White, riffing on this Christian Century article, asks folks to list “five essential theological works” from the past 25 years. (Actually, I think there was a meme on a similar topic circulating the theo-blogosphere a few years back.)

    Anyway, not being a theologian, or professional churchly type of any sort, I’m not really qualified to judge the “best,” or “most influential” works of theology. So instead I’ll list five theological works published in the last 25 years that have had a significant influence on me (in no particular order).

    – Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theology This was my first in-depth exposure to feminist theology. Depending on who you ask, Johnson is either a dangerous radical who wants to overturn Christian tradition or a timid reformist who can’t face up to the inherently patriarchal nature of Christianity. I think she’s written a convincing book about how gender shapes theological language that at the same time breaks open new space for seeing God in ways that are less beholden to dead metaphors.

    – Clark Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel: Post-Holocaust Church Theology As I wrote in my summary post about this book, it forced me to look closely at the issue of anti-Judaism in Christian theology. Supercessionist thinking is still embedded in much Christian theology and practice, left, right, and center. This book convinced me that becoming aware of it and rooting it out remains a hugely important task for the Christian community. Just as importantly, though, in articulated an understanding of the gospel that is rooted in the Christian tradition without being exclusivist.

    – Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology Regular readers won’t be surprised to see a book from Linzey on this list. This is his most sustained engagement with the theological tradition, one in which he tries to show that an orthodox, trinitarian conception of God not only permits, but requires us to re-think our views of non-human animals, but to radically change our practice.

    – Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the GospelThis one’s kind of a cheat because the book was originally published in 1982. But the edition I read was the one reissued by Wipf & Stock in 2002, so there. Anyway, Jenson’s work was my first exposure to a sustained critique of the influence that Greek metaphysics and its attendant assumptions about time, eternity, and power had on the Christian doctrine of God. I don’t share all his conclusions (or his social conservatism), but the idea that God shares in–and even defines the divine identity through–the history of God’s creatures, rather than standing aloof and unmoved, is one that has stayed with me. Plus, it seemed like I should have at least one Lutheran on here (even if it’s an idiosyncratic one like Jenson).

    – Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning I don’t consider myself a “Girardian,” but I think once you’ve been exposed to Girard’s way of looking at the world–at violence, sacrifice, and the sacred–you see things differently. Girard sometimes seems to be offering an overly simplistic, mono-causal account of religion. Nevertheless, particularly in this work, he shows how the gospel can convey the power to overcome the violence that simmers just beneath the surface of human society. I’m not even sure this book counts as theology properly speaking, but if nothing else we can point to the ways that the brilliant James Alison has applied Girard’s insights to theology.

    I also feel like there should be something about the historical Jesus on this list, but I don’t know that there’s one book I would single out (Luke Timothy Johnson, Marcus Borg, and Dale Allison have all been influences here, despite–or maybe because of–their disagreements). I would also want to cite something in the religion and science dialogue (probably Ian Barbour’s book).

  • Stendahl on glossolalia

    Krister Stendahl has a really interesting essay in Paul among Jews and Gentiles called “Glossolalia—The New Testament Evidence.” He argues that what we usually call “speaking in tongues” was a widespread part of early Christian expeience that was later damped down by the institutional church. He maintains that glossolalia as discussed in Paul’s letters were an “ecstatic” form of religious experience that is proper to Christianity.

    It seems to me that the witness of the New Testament texts as to the phenomenon called glossolalia is quite clear and quite simple–and quite up to date. The various texts carry with them a certain critique of the situation today. The history of our main traditions is one of fragmentation and impoverishment within the Christian community. As I read Paul it seems to me crystal clear that if the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, and all the “proper” Christians, including the Catholics, did not consciously or unconsciously suppress such phenomena as glossolalia, and if other denominations did not especially encourage them, then the gifts of the Spirit–including glossolalia–would belong to the common register of Christian experience. (p. 121)

    He also says that it’s a mistake to separate charismatic experience from Christian witness against injustice because the one time the NT promises that the Spirit will provide Christians with words to speak is when testifying to the faith before the authorities.

    There are those who identify the public impact of the Spirit with spectacular religious exhibitions on TV and maximum publicity for evangelistic campaigns, while casting suspicion over those who challenge the authorities by their courageous witness to Christ’s justice in the courts. It seems that the biblical model is the opposite one. In the courts is the confrontation that has the promise of the Spirit. (pp. 120-121)

    Stendahl–a Lutheran–is no charismatic, but he says that the church needs them because “light-bulb wattage” faith isn’t sufficient to meet the difficulties that the world faces. He also thinks, however, that charismatics would benefit from incorporation into the broader church so that they can be nurtured into a more mature faith that doesn’t rely exclusively on “peak experiences.”

    I take it that this essay must’ve been written prior to the inroads made by the charismatic movement into the mainline denominations. Still, I think it has relevance since it would be a stretch, to say the least, to maintain that most mainline churches honor charismatic experience as something normal and desirable. I’m about the least “charismatic” guy around (in the theological sense!), but even I resonate with Stendahl’s point that we mainlainers are extremely wary of the more ecstatic forms of religious experience. He makes the intriguing suggestion at the end of the piece that charismatic phenomena like glossolalia belong to the same spectrum of experience as mysticism–both are forms of living religious experience that a religious tradition should want to nurture.

  • A note on Christ and culture

    Derek has a convincing piece at Episcopal Cafe arguing that it’s simplistic to see “liberals” (specifically, those who support things like women’s ordination and same-sex marriage) as simply going with the cultural flow while “conservatives” are upholding timeless standards of biblical morality. Using H. R. Niebuhr’s typology from his classic Christ and Culture, he points out that both liberals and conservatives are frequently beholden to culture in various ways. Moreover, he urges “liberals” to genuinely ground their convictions in the soil of the gospel.

    While I largely agree with this, I also think Christians should honestly admit that “the culture” is sometimes up ahead of us in various respects. In other words, it’s not necessarily a question of our bringing “Christ” to bear on “culture,” since we can’t claim to have a monopoly on truth and churches have their own cultures that are often shaped by things other than the gospel. The church always remains under the judgment of the gospel (hence the Reformation slogan that the church should be “always reforming”–semper reformanda).

    Plus, if, as Christians believe, Christ is a living reality, he eludes any attempt by the church to grasp or “own” him. And because Christ is Lord of the whole world, his Spirit can manifest itself in people and movements outside the formal confines of the Christian community. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, that churches would’ve made what progress they have in equality for women and LGBTQ folks if they hadn’t been prodded by largely secular movements.

    Obviously Christians need to use discernment and the resources of their own tradition to sift the wheat from the chaff. But this is just to say that different approaches (as described by Niebuhr’s typology) will be appropriate under different circumstances. Sometimes the church will be called upon to take a rejectionist “Christ against culture” stance, sometimes it will be more accomodating, sometimes it will exist in a paradoxical tension, and sometimes it will seek creative transformation.

  • Judgment and weakness

    Judgment is the time when God finally brings in the verdict. The question, then, is not how one balances off mercy and judgment, but for whom is judgment mercy and for whom is it threatening doom. For God’s people God’s judgment is salvation. But who are God’s people? Is it not consistently true in the Bible that the only time that language about “God’s people” really functions, the only time it is allowed to stand up without the lambasting critique of the prophets, is when it stands for the little ones, the oppressed, the suppressed, the repressed? Is it not true that all language about a chosen people becomes wrong when applied outside the situation of weakness?

    In other contexts, this was also Paul’s great lesson to the triumphalist and self-assured Christians of his time, to the super-apostles who in his judgment, were overconfident. To them Paul said that for him the Lord’s grace was sufficient: “…for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9-10). Such an exploding of the concept and image of strength is perhaps the simplest and most overarching message of the life and death of Jesus.

    –Krister Stendahl, “Judgment and Mercy,” Paul among Jews and Gentiles, p. 102.

  • Stendahl’s rules

    Krister Stendahl was a Swedish Lutheran theologian, New Testament scholar, and ultimately a bishop of the Church of Sweden. He’s probably best known for arguing that St. Paul’s letters were responding to a specific context–namely the relationship between Jews and Gentiles and his mission to the latter. According to Stendahl, much Western theology (Lutheran in particular) has misunderstood Paul by projecting onto him later conflicts, such as Luther’s with the Catholic Church, resulting in an overly “psychological” understanding of Paul’s teaching on faith and justification (the “introspective conscience of the West” as he puts it). Stendahl’s argument was an important impetus for the so-called new perspective on Paul. His book Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, which coincidentally I just started reading, collects some of his best known essays on this general topic.

    But I didn’t know–until Christopher noted it in a comment–that Stendahl is also known for three “rules” for interreligious dialogue:

    (1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.

    (2) Don’t compare your best to their worst.

    (3) Leave room for “holy envy.” (By this, Stendahl seems to have meant that we should be open to finidng attractive or truthful elements in other religions that aren’t necessarily present in our own.)

    According to Wikipedia, Stendahl articulated these rules during a press conference in which he was responding to opponents of building a Mormon temple in Stockholm. Stendahl’s rules call for just the kind of approach to other religions that I was commending here.

  • Jews, Christians, and a “two-poled” eschatology

    I’ve read more than one work of theology that attempted to explain the rejection of Jesus’ messiah-hood by the majority of Jews like this: Jews expectated the messiah to be a nationalist–even military–leader who would liberate them from Roman oppression, but Jesus was a different kind of messiah, a “spiritual” one who came to liberate us from our guilt and sin.* One problem with this account is that it reinforces stereotypes about “carnal” Jews and “spiritual” Christians. In the chapter on eschatology in his Way of Blessing, Way of Life, Clark Williamson proposes that it’s more illumaniting to see Jewish rejection of Jesus in a different light: it was because Jesus’ ministry clearly didn’t usher in the “days of the messiah,” the age where oppression, injustice, war, and hunger (for everyone, not just Jews) would be things of the past. By this reckoning, Jews were well-justified in not accepting the claims made on Jesus’ behalf!

    Williamson says that the early Christians maintained the same kind of messianic expectation, at least for a while, with the teaching that Jesus would return soon to usher in the messianic age. But as that hope of an imminent return faded, the church pushed its eschatological hope off into the afterlife and/or identified the “kingdom of God” that Jesus proclaimed with the spread of the church. Thus it became possible for Christians to see Jews as stubbornly refusing to accept what should’ve been obvious to them–that the Messiah had come. Along the way, Christians lost their sense of the eschatological tension between what had already been accomplished in Jesus and what was yet to be accomplished.

    As Christian eschatology has become increasingly otherworldly and privatized, we need, Williamson argues, to recover a more “Jewish” emphasis on this-worldly liberation as one pole of our eschatological hope. God wants the world to display relations of justice and peace. On the other hand, even the most just society would contain suffering, disease, sin, oppression, and death. These are constituent elements of our present condition that can’t be done away with by any program of this-worldly liberation. Moreover, if we restrict our hope to establishing a just society in this world, what about all the people who have died, many of them under conditions of terrible oppression and injustice? That’s why the other pole of our eschatology must remain our ultimate hope in God’s promise to save us, even beyond the horizon of death.
    —————————————-
    *I recognize that it’s far from certain that Jesus, in fact, claimed to be the Jewish messiah in any straightforward way.

  • A God of life

    The God of the Bible creates, re-creates, and ultimately redeems life. This God, whatever the other so-called “gods” might be like, loves life, rejoices in it, is concerned about it, not only creates it for the purpose of blessing it, but saves it, and in between discloses to God’s covenanted people the way of life that they are to follow as an alternative to the death-dealing ways so prevalent in the world. (Clark Williamson, Way of Blessing, Way of Life, p. 99)

    For Williamson, too much traditional theology has painted a picture of God that is at odds with this central biblical affirmation. He criticizes the view that God is “impassible”–unaffected by anything that happens in the world. While he affirms God’s “necessity” in two senses–God exists necessarily, and God necessarily has a particular character–he also predicates “contingency” of God. That is, God is affected by what happens in the world, by how the life that God has created fares. God is genuinely related to us.

    Following process thought, Williamson proposes that in place of a static, substance-attribute metaphysics, we’re better off using our experience as living selves to model the nature of God. For example, we shouldn’t think of God as fundamentally a-temporal (unrelated to time and change) but as eternally faithful through time. “If we develop a model of God from this basic awareness of the self, then God would be genuinely social and temporal, affected by others as well as effecting (creating) them…” (p. 105). Just as human selves are relational and social through and through, God is intimately related to all existing things.

    Williamson departs from some versions of process theology by affirming creation ex nihilo. “God’s creativity is not simply a once-upon-a-time creation, but an ongoing creativity that calls every moment of the life of the world into being” (p. 107). Further, God “created the world in order to share with it the blessing of God’s fullness of all possible good and beauty, to bring the world to well-being that the world might thereby glorify God” (p. 110). God wants to be in relation to creatures, a desire that manifests itself in God’s history of covenant-making.

    However, it’s precisely because of the relational nature of all existence that God cannot be said to be omnipotent, if by that we mean that God unilaterally determines the outcome of events. If reality is relational through and through, then power is essentially shared power. “What guarantees that evil will not finally triumph is God’s covenantal faithfulness and the faithfulness of God’s covenant partners in the task of actualizing God’s purposes in the world” (p. 128). We cannot, Williamson argues, divorce God’s power from God’s love; God’s power is at work in the world is through love. God’s will opposes the evil that exists in the world, but that doesn’t mean God can simply destroy evil through coercive power. The cross of Jesus is the clearest picture of how God’s love is manifested in the world. God’s love is the power whereby God blesses, redeems, and reconciles all life.

    This view has two main implications for ethics: (1) what we do matters to God (because God is affected by everything that happens) and (2) since God is not one finite agent among others, we are responsible for doing the sorts of things that it is appropriate for finite agents to do (things like concretely meeting the needs of our neighbors). A life-centered ethic is the proper response to the blessing of life we receive from God.

  • A story of blessing

    Clark Williamson’s systematic theology Way of Blessing, Way of Life is less focused on Jewish-Christian relations than his earlier work A Guest in the House of Israel (which I blogged about previously), but the project of re-connecting Christianity to its Jewish roots is still a major concern. One point Williamson makes is that the way Christians frequently tell their story tends to leave out the history of Israel. The arc of “creation-fall-redemption” that forms the backbone of much Christian theology, preaching, liturgy, and spirituality all too readily allows us to jump from the first three chapters of Genesis to the New Testament.

    By contrast, Williamson argues, we need to attend more to the “Old” Testament (he recommends we just refer to “the Scriptures”) to discern the identity of God and God’s purpose for humanity and the rest of creation:

    No story is more pivotal to Judaism than that of Exodus and Sinai. Nor should any book be more crucial to how Christians understand themselves. Exodus, says David Tracy, “provides a proper context for understanding the great Christian paradigm of the life-ministry-death-and-resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Christianity misunderstands itself whenever it wallows in a privatized, depoliticized, and de-historicized faith. Exodus requires “a resolutely this-worldly spirituality as it demands a historical and political, not a private or individualist, understanding of Christian salvation-as-total-liberation.” (p. 74)

    Williamson thinks that the Exodus story can help correct the Christian tendency to think of salvation in a narrowly individualistic way that emphasizes an otherworldly heaven. Following Methodist theologian R. Kendall Soulen, Williamson suggests that, more basic and inclusive than the creation-fall-redemption story is one of “an economy of consummation based on the Lord’s blessing”:

    God promises well-being that includes all of life (peace, economic sufficiency, health, safety, fertility, God’s loving presence) and makes for the fullness of human life. The fullness of human life is a gift from the fullness of God’s life. (p. 84)

    Becuase God’s blessings are freely shared with us, we should freely share those blessings with the other, those who are different. This “blessing-in-difference” characterizes God’s blessing of creation, human beings’ mutual self-giving, and Israel’s mission to be a blessing to “the nations.” Clearly, God’s purpose of blessing all creation has not yet been realized in its fullness, but awaits God’s eschatological consummation. And part of that ultimate consummation is our learning to share more widely the blessings we have received with each other and the rest of God’s creation.

  • Clark Williamson on revelation

    God is the proper subject of revelation, God’s self in God’s being and works. In revelation, God reveals God’s self and we are dependent on God’s revelation of God’s self for our knowledge of God. All human efforts to gain knowledge of God by independent inquiry are fruitless (1 Cor. 1:21: “The world did not know God through wisdom”); such pretend knowledge of God is to God’s own self-disclosure as chaff to the wheat (Jer. 23:28). God is not an object accessible to our observation in the world. God is not an in-the-world being, who exists alongside other beings and is perceptibly distinguishable from them as they are from one another. God is the One in whom the world has its being, the One from whom all things come and to whom all things return, the Alpha and the Omega. The knowledge of God must be granted us by God.

    – Clark Williamson, Way of Blessing, Way of Life: A Christian Theology, pp. 46-47

    Revelation, according to Williamson, is always particular, not revelation “in general”; it occurs by means of particular media (e.g., historical events) through which God’s identity is disclosed. The content of revelation is primarily personal–God’s nature, will, and purpose–rather than a set of propositions or doctrines to be believed. Thus, the proper faith-response is primarily trust–trust in God’s promise and God’s command–rather than assent to a set of statements. Revelation is better thought of on the model of personal disclosure than the revelation of propositional truths. Revelation has both an “objective” and a “subjective” pole–the revelatory event and the human reception (and interpretation) of it. There is no revelation without interpretation. For an event to be a purported case of revelation is for it already to have undergone interpretation. (This also opens the door to an ongoing revisiting and refinement of our understanding of revleation.)

    Further, Williamson doesn’t deny that revelation occurs outside the boundaries of Christianity. “God reveals God’s self freely and to whom God pleases” (p. 46), and other religions can be media of revelation. But that doesn’t mean that Christians can never criticize other traditions (even as they should enter into conversation with and learn from them). Ultimately, the criteria of revelation, for Christians, is “the love of God freely offered to God’s people and the command of God that they in turn love God and one another” (p. 60). This provides a guide for interacting with people of other faiths (or no faith): because revelation is fundamentally about love, it does not impose itself on others. “Definitive revelation does not impose itself in an authoritarian, oppressive way on anyone” (p. 67).

  • CotC on Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood

    Elliot at Claw of the Conciliator seems poised to return to at least semi-regular blogging (or so we can hope!). The other day he had a good post on Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood, the second book in what I believe is supposed to be a projected trilogy about a world of bioengineering and environmental degradation have run amok. I recently read both YOTF and its predecessor Oryx and Crake and enjoyed them both immensely. As Elliot points out, Atwood deals with some very interesting religious and philoosphical issues in these books, including putting the story of a sect of radical eco-Christians at the center of the second book.