A Time for Confessing

by Robert W. Bertram Eerdmans, 240 pp., $30.00 paperback reviewed by Frederick Niedner

Academic circles sometimes include a giant who publishes relatively little despite the pleading of students and colleagues. Such a figure was Robert Bertram, whom longtime colleague Edward Schroeder calls, in his grateful foreword, "the most unpublished Lutheran theologian of the twentieth century."

Bertram taught theology for 50 years in Lutheran institutions, including Valparaiso University, Concordia Seminary (St. Louis), Christ Seminary-Seminex and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He published dozens of articles and prepared even more public lectures. However, when he died in 2003, Bertram left only one "book," a dissertation that engaged Karl Barth's critique of Luther, and a handful of larger projects with which he never quit tinkering.

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Throughout these theses, one detects the foundational assumptions and methods that derive from Bertram's intense engagement with Luther and the Lutheran confessional writings. God's communicating through law and gospel, the crucified Christ as the Word of God, honoring Christ's death and the comfort of penitent hearts as the signs of genuine gospel—all these permeate and enliven the sequence of theses that address the current theological scene.

Dialogue between Barth and Luther also emerges as crucial. Barth criticized Luther for fixing theology on God's relationship to humankind, as though God cannot be understood apart from involvement with and even vulnerability to creatures. Alternatively, Barth worked to understand God "in himself," without regard to flesh-and-blood entanglements. To Barth, therefore, Christ functions as a revelation of God's eternal election, and his death becomes less a saving event than a sign that humans have always been saved but simply did not know it. This "revelationist half-truth," Bertram suggests, permeates a goodly share of current theology.

For Bertram as for Luther, God is deeply involved in both judging and romancing the world and humankind. Drawing strongly on Romans and the reconciliation imagery of 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Bertram probes the gospel of Christ's entry into the plight and place of those whom God has abandoned to their sins and perversions, paying little mind to the strongholds of the righteous who need no physician, so that the former, when they come to the end of their rope and breathe their last in utter abandonment, find themselves, to the surprise of everyone, in the company of the crucified Word of God. In this company there is hope—and plenty of work to do.  more

Avery Dulles passes away

Cardinal Avery Dulles, Theologian, Is Dead at 90

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Published: December 12, 2008

Cardinal Avery Dulles, a scion of diplomats and Presbyterians who converted to Roman Catholicism, rose to pre-eminence in Catholic theology and became the only American theologian ever appointed to the College of Cardinals, died today died Friday morning at Fordham University in the Bronx. He was 90. His death, at the Jesuit infirmary at the university, was confirmed by the New York Province of the Society of Jesus in Manhattan.

Enlarge This Image

Jerome Delay/Associated Press

Cardinal Avery Dulles, center, with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in 2001.

Cardinal Dulles, a professor of religion at Fordham University for the last 20 years, was a prolific author and lecturer and an elder statesman of Catholic theology in America. He was also the son of John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the nephew of Allen Dulles, who guided European espionage during World War II and later directed the Central Intelligence Agency.

A conservative theologian in an era of liturgical reforms and rising secularism, Cardinal Dulles wrote 27 books and 800 articles, mostly on theology; advised the Vatican and America’s bishops, and staunchly defended the pope and his church against demands for change on abortion, artificial birth control, priestly celibacy, the ordination of women and other issues.

His task as a theologian, the Cardinal often said, was to honor diversity and dissent but ultimately to articulate the traditions of the church and to preserve Catholic unity.  more

Remembering Barth and Merton

The nadir, of course, was 1968 with the assassinations of King and Kennedy. But two deaths, in December of that year, also caused great grief. Karl Barth and Thomas Merton died on this day, worlds apart physically, but sharing much spiritual kinship.

To my mind, on December 10th 1968, they appeared symbolically as spokesmen for God’s transcendent mystery, in a culture that was fast trivializing that sense. They also spoke realistically about the human plight when such talk seemed to run counter to a facile celebration of human potential.  read it all 

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Thomas Merton, 40 years on...

Wednesday December 10, 2008

Categories: Bishops, Catholic, Church , History, Pop Culture

1968 was a true annus horribilis, as the Queen (upending Dryden) might have said, with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the social upheavals surrounding the Vietnam War ramping up. Then, on Dec. 10, 1968, came the bizarre death ofThomas Merton, the Catholic convert, Trappist monk and enormously influential spiritual writer who was accidentally electrocuted when he touched a poorly-grounded fan as he stepped out of his bath while he was on a trip to Thailand. (merton is pictured here with a young Dalai Lama.)   more

William C. Placher dies at 60

CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind. — Wabash College professor William C. Placher died unexpectedly  on  Dec 4, 2008, at 6:14 PM leaving the college community mourning the loss of one of its most influential teachers and scholars.

Placher, the LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, was 60. He died of natural causes, according to Wabash spokesman Jim Amidon.

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In 2002, the American Academy of Religion named him the best teacher in the country, honoring him with the Excellence in Teaching Award. He received the McLain-McTurnan Award for Excellence in Teaching at Wabash in 1980. In 2006, the Indiana Humanities Council honored him with the Indiana Humanities Award for his teaching, scholarship, and collegiality.

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He was the author of 13 books, including A History of Christian Theology, Unapologetic Theology, Narratives of a Vulnerable God, The Domestication of Transcendence, Jesus the Savior, and the Triune God. He also edited the textbook, Essentials of Christian Theology, which was honored by both Christian Century and Christianity Today. He gave more than 40 invited lectures and was the author of literally dozens of essays, articles, and reviews.

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Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Planitnga on line methodology papers

Packer and Bloesch compared

gdemetrion@msn.com to confessing-chr.
https://mail.google.com/mail/?zx=wjaku8irwsto&shva=1

No doubt Packer relied heavily on Scriptures and holds to a very high view. No doubt, too, in Packer's interpretation a static orthodoxy that is not attuned the promptings of the Spirit is worse than useless. What he does say is that encapsulated in ther Bible is the most profound repository of God's revelation to humankind in which the red thread of the Holy Spirit is what connects the original writers and readers of any era. Packer's pre-eminent challenge is to aspire toward the revelatory truths embeddecd in the Scripture as experienced from writer to reader notwithstanding the flawed instrumentality of human reason and experienced flawed even more by the indubitable reality of sin. This leaves room even in Packer for much new light to break forth and his pietism ultimately overrides his rationalism when push comes to shove, though he would be very dubious about any new light that in some substantial way congtradicted Scripture in its canonical fulness revealed in the fullest sense in Christ crucified and resurrected. Donald Bloesch is similarly skeptical even as he is much more attuned to the neo-orthodox impetus especially of barth and R. Niebuhr.

The following comparison may be of some value.

Best,

George Demetrion
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Bloesch and Packer in Quest of Common Ground

Our shift in focus from what might be viewed, and with considerable qualification, as the rational evangelicalism of J.I. Packer to the “fideistic revelationism” (Grenz, 1999) of Donald Bloesch represents a theological sea change in the American evangelical imagination even as Packer and Bloesch are much closer on core essentials that a careful reading of their work and an examination of their historical influence might disclose. As Bloesch (1994) notes, Packer, too, “seeks to distance himself from an evangelical ‘self-reliant rationalism’ that minimizes or downplays the role of the Holy Spirit in biblical interpretation.” A difference is that Bloesch “would probably be more open to historical-critical study as an aid in biblical exegesis” (p. 335), although, as indicated in the pervious chapter, Packer is not averse, but is more wary than Bloesh of the intrusion of liberal and neo-orthodox scholarship invariably diluting the disclosive word of God revealed both in and through the Scriptures. Bloesch is also cautious in his qualified, yet highly empathetic appropriation of Barth, particularly in wanting to avoid any sense of “actualism,” that the Bible is a primary source of revelation that comes to life only when internalized within the existential experience of the believer. This is a criticism that Bloesch’s heavy emphasis on the mediating role of the Holy Spirit does not totally escape. By way of contrast, Packer seeks to respond to the obscurantist charge through a fuller development of evangelical scholarship on its own terms with a deep reach into the Puritan theological vision. Bloesch is more attuned to the apologetic challenges of drawing in with some equivocation the many fruits of neo-orthodoxy and is also more inclined to discuss outright liberal biblical exegesis and theology for the evangelical purposes that he has identified, though in his critique of this latter strand Bloesch is as stinging as Packer.

Given this far from unimportant difference, both theologians construct a theology of Scripture based on a dynamic interaction between the Word and the Spirit even as Packer gravitates more freely toward the inscripturated Word. Still, for Packer as well as Bloesch, the centrality of the Holy Spirit as a primary source of illumination without which the text itself can only exist as a dead letter remains a core thesis. In response, moreover, to the trajectory of 20th century Protestant theology, both privilege the Word in the Bible-culture relationship. Bloesch, however, builds, at least in part, on the neo-orthodox vision of Karl Barth while Packer draws on the Princeton theology of Charles Hodge, Benjamin Warfield, and J. Greshem Machem in support of his nuanced concept of biblical inerrancy which both Packer and Bloesch, describe as trustworthiness. As Bloesch (1994) puts it, “we must never say that the Bible teaches theological or historical error, but we need to recognize that not everything in the Bible may be in exact correspondence with historical and scientific fact as we know it today” (pp. 36-37). These differences, Bloesch’s partial Barthian move and Packer’s qualified support of a rationalistic interpretation of the Bible, represent an important shift in theological consciousness even as both theologians have sought to confront modernity with what they take as the unequivocal biblical truth, in which they both acknowledge that we can only know in part.

Given the fundamentalist-modernist divide in contemporary U.S. Protestantism there is much more reception for Bloesch than Packer in mainline circles even as Packer has sought to exorcize the fundamentalist demon through a highly articulate evangelical theology. This makes their similarities even more striking, particularly in the consideration of their overarching themes and mediating roles in bringing into greater concord substantial sectors of evangelical discourse. In the very process of seeking broad ecumenical influence within their respective evangelical spheres both invariably engender criticism from the theological left and right. In bringing out something of his distinctive contribution there will be aspects in this chapter discussing Bloesch’s work, highlighting, even if only implicitly so, more of the differences between these two important theologians, particularly Bloesch’s more extensive encounter with neo-orthodoxy and Protestant liberalism. It is, nonetheless, worthwhile to keep in mind the profound similarities within the differences underlying their divergent but complementary efforts of working out the relationship between the Word and the Spirit within the broad stream of issues facing 20th century Protestant theology.

At the core, is their mutually mediating efforts in constructing a Reformed-centered catholic evangelical theology, a vision by definition that, while beckoning, is one in which the reach perpetually extends beyond the grasp. It is toward such an effort that this project aspires through an irenic reading of the five theologians and biblical scholars discussed in this book. In the process I attempt to probe into critical divergences as part of the effort itself of teasing out areas for potential breakthroughs toward a mediating ecumenical evangelical theology of Scripture, while staying attuned to persisting tensions and conflict. The quest for broad evangelical ecumenism in which “scripture reorients the world” rather than “absorbs the world” (Husinger, 2003, p. ix) can obtain at best as a regulative ideal. Nonetheless, it is an enduring hope that fresh light on seemingly intractable problems can be shed, in and through the very process of exploring some of the underlying issues confronting 20th century American Protestant theology and biblical exegesis and exposition. source

Evolution of Fundamentalists

Evolution and Fundamentalism

Thursday October 23, 2008

Categories: Science and Faith

Pastor (Park Street Church Boston) Daniel Harrell's new book, Nature's Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith (Living Theology), is the book we need. Here is someone who can translate science into theology and theology into science, and do so in engaging, fun, and clear prose.

Here's an opener: "What if, instead of getting all threatened and frightened by scientific advances, we viewed scientific advancement as new vistas for theological consideration, new mountains to explore?" (10) He concludes: "This may sound like a compromised theology. But it's not. It is an adjusted theology, that's nothing new" (132). And: "God is the God of both evolution and the Bible" (134). 

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Thursday, November 06, 2008

Emergent Church Promotes "Christian Evolution"

Writing out of a pastoral concern for those struggling to negotiate faith and evolution, Daniel Harrell argues in his new book Nature's Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith (Abingdon Press/Living Theology) that being reliable witnesses to creation helps people of faith be reliable witnesses to its creator. Whether you are a pastor wondering how to talk about these issues with your church, or a student asking whether your biology class makes your faith irrelevant, Harrell's book winsomely leads you on a journey of exploration in which a robust biblical faith can be held along with affirmation of the scientific data for evolution.  more

John MacArthur on “Doing Church”

Source: Crosswalk.com - "The Paul Edwards Program," WLQV Detroit

Paul Edwards, host of "The Paul Edwards Program" on WLQV in Detroit, interviewed pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church John MacArthur about the emerging church movement in America. Paul begins the interview by asking Pastor John to respond to a radio interview with prominent emerging church leader Doug Pagitt. In the clip from October 22, 2007, Pagitt denied that there is a place of eternal conscious torment for persons who die apart from faith in Jesus Christ.

Paul Edwards: Help me with this—the emerging church prides itself on conversation, having a conversation, so let's have a conversation. How can you have a conversation with someone, when you're not even speaking the same language?

John MacArthur: Let me just cut to the chase on this one: [Doug] Pagitt is a Universalist. What he was saying is real simple. He was saying when you die your spirit goes to God and judgment means that whatever was not right about you, whatever was bad about you, whatever was substantially lacking about you, gets all resolved. It doesn't matter whether you're a Buddhist, a Hindu or a Muslim—doesn't matter whether you're a Christian really; we're all going to end up in this wonderful, warm and fuzzy relationship with God. That's just classic universalism.  

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Paul F. Knitter bibliography

Rowan Williams: DOSTOEVSKY, reviewed by A. N. Wilson

Rowan Williams
DOSTOEVSKY
Language, faith and fiction,
268pp. Continuum, 2008

As we read Williams’s discussion, and become absorbed not only in his enjoyment of Dostoevsky’s novels, but also in his own wide reading in the patristic literature and immersion in the Eastern traditions of Christianity, we begin to realize that ambiguities and downright contradictions which seem so startlingly “modern” in Dostoevsky’s pages are often matters that have always been inherent in theology. The book thereby combines a rereading of Dostoevsky with an attempt to confront, not merely the storm clouds of the nineteenth century, as Ruskin called the theological crisis of faith, but also our contemporary phenomenon of Darwinian revivalism which believes itself to have answered, or repeated, the destruction of theology’s claims to plausibility.

The book therefore begins where, one suspects, Dostoevsky himself would want a book published in 2008 to begin – if he were still with us and observing contemporary life. The author starts, not with the great Russian literature that is his theme, but with “the current rash of books hostile to religious faith”. “They treat religious belief almost as a solitary aberration in a field of human rationality; a set of groundless beliefs about matters resting on – at best – faulty and weak argumentation”. In contrast to these writers, whose work, it could be said (though the author does not quite say it), was all anticipated in the writings of the later Dostoevsky, Williams spells out the way in which religion actually operates in individual human lives. This was central to Dostoevsky’s work as a novelist. Williams’s book is a work of literary criticism, but it begins, therefore, as if it were one of theological apologetics.

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Commentators on Dr Williams’s record as a church leader have sometimes observed his apparent capacity simultaneously to hold two totally incompatible beliefs. This debate need not concern us here, unless we find it irresistible in passing to reflect that Dostoevsky’s own views on female – let alone gay – bishops would be all too easily imaginable. Whether or not there is an advantage in doublethink when performing an Archbishop’s agonizing role of reconciling the ill-thought-out positions of American liberals and African conservatives, the capacity to hold opposite viewpoints on religious matters is precisely what Dostoevsky’s characters demonstrate again and again. Williams acknowledges from the outset his indebtedness to the great Russian critic-philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, whose Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics has been essential reading since it was first published in 1929, and which has had such an immense effect on literary theory.
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Perhaps one of the deepest mysteries of our own times is not that Darwinian atheists, whom Dr Williams takes to task in his opening pages, have emerged from the milk-and-water post-Enlightenment religious traditions of England to mock simple-minded American-style Evangelicalism. It is that the Russian Orthodox faith, which Dostoevsky was right to see as something different in kind from the religion of other nations, has survived nearly a century of Marxist atheism, with civil war, massacre, starvation and a relentless attempt to eradicate it from the Russian soul by persecution and by programmes of materialist education. Whether a Western intellectual believes in it, or feels at home in it, is an irrelevance. No sooner had the Soviet Union imploded than there reappeared, in full view, the Church of Fr Zosima and Bishop Tikhon, seemingly strengthened by its torments – just as in Dostoevsky’s novels murders and drunkenness, child-molestations, suicides and blasphemies actually quicken the faith of indelibly drawn, mired but redeemed characters.


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More books from Rowan Williams

Robert W. Jensen, Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology, Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1992

Reviewd by by John A. Saliba
Theological Studies, Sept, 1993


One of the issues confronting the ecumenical movement is whether the dialogue between the various Christian churches has made much headway over the last few decades. Jenson articulates a not uncommon view that ecumenism is at a standstill and that the many dialogues have been largely futile and frustrating efforts that fail to deal with the real differences that divide Christianity.


J.'s view is that dialogical exchanges between representatives of different churches have not contributed to Christian unity. The argument advanced in support of this thesis runs as follows: those engaged in dialogue have taken up traditional areas of theological dispute and have sought to narrow the distance between the respective ideologies. Dialogue, however, while identifying some areas of convergence, has repeatedly led to further debates and apparently unreconcilable differences and impasses. J. proceeds to show how this applies to several topics that have been the focus of many inter-church exchanges. He divides these topics into two broad areas: (1) the "Early Ecumenical Convergences," that include the themes of justification, the Real Presence, and the eucharistic sacrifice; and (2) the "Convergences about the Church," that consider church office, the episcopacy, the papacy, and the Church's mediation. Finally, he attempts to show that theological debates about apostolic succession, Christology, and the Trinity portray a basic flaw shared by all parties in dialogue: a misunderstanding of the fundamental concepts of temporality, the presence of Christ, and the nature of God.

J.'s book certainly provides several insights into the nature of the differences between the various Christian churches. One wonders, however, whether he underrates the achievement of the ecumenical movement and whether his own theological solutions would lead to the same problems he so ardently wishes to avoid.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Theological Studies, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning



source

The Fundamentalist Turn?

Amos Yong on Carl Raschke's GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn.

GloboChrist: Chapters 3 and 4

Below is Amos Yong's engagement with chapters 3 & 4 of Carl Raschke's GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn. Chapter 3 is entitled "Utter Holiness or Wholly Otherness: Finding Fidelity among the Infidels" and chapter 4 is entitled "A Closer Look through the 10/40 Window." For those of us who are unfamiliar with the term "10/40 window," Raschke helpfully defines this term thus:

The expression 10/40 Window has been often used by evangelical Christians, and even more frequently by evangelical missionaries, to refer to the sprawling region running east to west across the African and Asian continents that lies between the tenth and fortieth parallels. The area contains the largest population of non-Christians in the world. It reaches from ten degrees to forty degrees north of the equator and spans the globe all the way from North Africa across to China. But from the faith perspective, it is best known as an entrenched "window of resistance" to Christian missions and evangelism. In contrast to what Jenkins and others term the "Christian South," it is barren ground for church planters. It is a trackless desert of counter-Christianity (p. 94).


Chapters 3 and 4 of GloboChrist almost read like two different proposals for engaging “the infidels.” The former presents Raschke’s suggestions for the Christian mission in a pluralistic world. The key moves he makes here are summarized by the notion of incarnational mission wherein Christian faithfulness takes on as many vernacular forms as need be in order to “indigenize the gospel” (the first section title of ch. 3). Thus in a pluralistic society, Christian faith and Christian mission take the “postmodern turn” (in the subtitle of GloboChrist) precisely through their (potentially infinite) malleability and translatability into the many local “icons, values, and cultural practices” of our times, just as the first century followers of the GloboChrist themselves also absorbed the mystery religions of their world into the Christian framework.

In chapter 4, however, such an incarnational strategy seems to retreat to the background when confronted by “globo-Islam” inside the 10/40 Window. In this context, Raschke repeatedly emphasizes instead – all against the liberal penchant for dialogue in quest for a common denominator – the “clash of revelations, “collision of eschatologies,” and “irreconcilability of differences” separates Islam from Christianity. There appears to be only opposition instead of the call to incarnational mission vis-à-vis Muslims. What has happened? Why emphasize the “monumental differences” (p. 143) between these two global faiths but approach Buddhism dialogically (pp. 83-84)?

Peeking ahead to the last three chapters does not quite resolve this apparent discrepancy. Perhaps we can interpret Raschke as saying that only a relational and rhizomic form of Christian faith will be suitable for engaging Islam. So, if the goal of the “increasingly radicalized Muslim umma” is the “emancipation for the Muslim world [that] is equivalent to Islamization” (p. 113), then might a relational-rhizomic approach in the 10/40 Window be more successful in our postmodern times? More concretely, however, if political (and I use the word broadly here) Islamization is the goal for Muslims, what does incarnational mission look like in a Muslim context? If the indigenization of Christianity involves taking on the values and cultural practices of the “other,” how is this possible with regard to a politically constituted and expressed Islamic faith? Does not Christian incarnationalism and indigenization, relationalism and rhizomism, in this case involve – even require – some form of alternative “politics” which absorbs the thrust of Islamic political philosophy, economy, and theology?

I suspect that Raschke would be very nervous about any such “politicizing” of Christian faith. After all Christian relationalism and radicality includes a transcendental dimension that is neither “right” nor “left” as measured by contemporary “Christian” options. Instead, the church is a communion of radical disciples or saints, loving one another, and living out the dynamic power of the risen Christ to one another. Raschke’s radicalism is thus a fundamental retrieval of the early forms of Christian community that, paradoxically, both absorbed the world while standing out apart from it, imbibing and transforming some of the world’s icons, values, and practices, while sharing with one another so that none had any need. In the end, then, maybe different “infidels” require different responses so that our evangelism of Buddhists is or should be different from our mission in the 10/40 Window; maybe this is simply Raschke’s way of responding to our postmodern situation: to propose that the pomo-appeal of the GloboChrist in the power of the Spirit will be manifest pluralistically and received differently depending on the context.

On the other hand, maybe Raschke has given up too quickly on his incarnational principle. Might it not be possible that a thoroughly relational-rhizomic Christian approach to Islam will produce a form of “Muslim Christianity” (or even “Christian Islam”) even as a messianic form of Judaism has arisen over the centuries? If this is the case, then the blurring of the lines between Christian and non-Christian that Raschke observes in a missional context (p. 65) may also happen vis-à-vis Islam such that the incommensurability – theological, eschatological, or otherwise – that now appears insurmountable will be overcome. If so, then perhaps the clash of revelations is diffused not via louder and more convinced proclamation, but, as GloboChrist suggests, performatively, through a thoroughgoing vernacularization of Christian faith in Muslim garb. Along these lines may lie the reconciliation of the proposals sketched in chapters 3 and 4 toward a more coherent understanding of GloboChrist and the Great Commission after the postmodern turn.

Amos Yong
Professor of Systematic Theology
Regent University School of Divinity, Virginia Beach, Virginia




SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

GloboChrist: Chapter 7

Don't miss Carl Raschke's response to Jamie Gates' engagement which can be found below. Then, please turn your attention to the final engagement with Carl Raschke's GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn. Deirdre Brower-Latz, a Nazarene pastor in Manchester, UK, has engaged the seventh and final chapter entitled "A Concluding Unacademic Postscript."

Over this summer in the community I serve as pastor we had reason to ask several questions about how our relationships as Christ’s disciples shape and form our real-life, day-to-day relationships with our neighbours. I suppose that this falls into the ‘performative’ understanding of faith. In a multi-faith, multiracial community we want our lives alongside our Muslim neighbours (and those of a range of other faiths and none) to have more meaning than simply whether or not we serve halal meat at the fairs we host for the community. So, my interest was piqued by the title ‘GloboChrist’ and the strap line, “the Great Commission Takes a Postmodern turn.” As an urban practitioner, at points I confess the undistilled ideas of postmodernism and the discussions that often surround it can seem like a retelling of the emperor’s new clothes, yet I find myself gripped by the equation of postmodernity and globalisation, and recognising Raschke’s world of ‘heterogeneity and social pluralism’ as one I share. Having been asked to focus on Chapter Seven (fittingly for my situation, the ‘concluding unacademic postscript’) I found much that resonated with the reality we face.

The first part of the chapter, from my UK perspective, struck me as a particularly internal, almost sectarian, North American argument (something Raschke seems to deplore when other people do it, see p. 159). And I read it as an eavesdropper might listen to an interesting conversation across the room at a party – interested, but not sure that I’m as caught up in the debates between fundamentalism and the threats they see in postmodernity as I would be if I were in the thick of the debate. Nevertheless, I sensed the balances being articulately redressed and said a hearty ‘hear, hear’ to the statements that “In Christian thought, and historically, in evangelical thought, salvation has ultimately been about the heart, not the mind” and “...we need to open our hearts and minds into an authentic relationship with the Lord.” (158) Recognising, of course, that in a book of this sort all the caveats that might accompany such statements have already been made by the sustained arguments themselves. Though what an ‘authentic relationship with the Lord’ might mean still raises the questions of ‘who decides?’ and ‘what is authentic?’

In the second section I succumbed to what probably would put me in the Brian McLaren camp– I was initially struck and frustrated by the statement that ‘we know fundamentalist Islam is much worse [than Christian fundamentalism]’. Pausing there to allow the internal debate to rage was hazardous to my mental health, for I wanted to read more awareness that Christian fundamentalism has its own logs-in-eyes (state-sanctioned violence, capital punishment, support for unjust wars and so on). I was reassured then, by Raschke’s willingness to recognise just that in the following paragraphs, and struck by the persistent challenge to resist “betray[ing] the gospel by confusing ideology with faith”. Of course, I later realised that I was also falling into the category of type that Raschke calls ‘bobopomo’, by my very engagement with the discussion on the terms of anti-fundamentalist stances.

The broad point that a “hypertolerant and indiscriminate acceptance of everything happening in our culture” (159) and the suggestion that we face up to the inherent tension between inclusivity and meaningful calls to discipleship is a pertinent ‘on the ground’ discussion in our setting. What does it mean to hear a call to Christ, and respond, and become like Christ? How do we grapple with the type of tolerance and openness that misses the mark, and ignores Jesus’ demands of discipleship (163)? How does true discipleship manifest itself in the community called to be the community of saints? Certainly, the intellectual and moral courage needed to think through the labyrinthine theological issues is not for the faint of heart. The tension between being Christ-centred and not causing offense, or being willing to have the intellectual rigour and courage to allow the ‘Other’/ meaningful-and-true-difference to exist is challenging for someone in my/ our setting. I would be amongst those who saw in Amos’ critique something I too want to ask – what about person to person engagement? What about a politics (small p) of Christianity-rhizomically encountering Islam? I too would be amongst those who would want Raschke to further explore the relative flaws or merits in indigenising forms of faith - the possibilities, for instance, of Easter Mosques. I would be keen to hear more about the way of being Christ.

I am not sure that Raschke does justice either to McLaren, or to the development of the creeds; however, the point of his section ‘Burger King Christianity’ seems to hint strongly at the need to reconsider the essence of the call to discipleship. It surely is true to say that we need “To be incarnational in the most radical and eschatological sense” ... but I was left asking questions about what that means. I recognised the parody of the ‘boboists’ (as I said earlier, I probably am one) but wanted to ask more about the distancing of the areas Raschke sets to one side as ‘leftist politics.’ Is there no sense that redressing of issues of justice and poverty is vitally important in the light of globalisation and postmodernity? I agree that the ‘something/ one’ that distinguishes us, that calls us to be the church must be more than ‘a Western countercultural guise’ - I agree too that the global body of Christ, incarnationally knowing no cultural boundaries, is vital – but I am left wondering just what that means for people inhabiting the Western world of the ‘posts’? What does it mean to ‘be Christs to one another’ in a meaningful and authentic way?

The apparently romanticised view of the southern shifting of Global Christianity (166-167) and the statement that this is ‘the real postmodern moment...the global postmodern moment’ demands some scrutiny. Ironically, the global face of Christianity as it is developing seems often fundamentalist and non-rhizomic, and some of the hopes of relationality, or incarnational Christianity are still being worked out. Perhaps this is where the need to engage one another, and learn of each other would be fruitful for the hope of GloboChrist to be most fully realised.

Certainly I heartily agree with Raschke’s statement that the moment the church is focus group based, or ‘demographic constituency developed’ (168) it loses something that is essential to the GloboChrist we claim to follow – and I was positive that there was/is a tacit understanding of the inherent messiness of communities that seek to be inclusive.

For me, the book was challenging, interesting, and compelling. Like the other reviewers I will read it again (and again) to try to grapple further with some of the nuances of the arguments. I’ve already given it to colleagues and friends so that we can chew over it together. I wish that the new material introduced in this last chapter had been given an airing earlier, and that the ‘unacademic postscript’ had been, well, more unacademic. It was all well and good to take on McLaren, the emergents, the fundies/modern evangelicals, and remind us of weak Christianity, church-in-bed-with-consumption, globalisation and postmodernity, I was thankful for it all, but I confess, I also wanted to be given more of a sense of the ‘what then now... for relational and rhizomic Christianity’.

Posted by Eric Lee in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
SEPTEMBER 08, 2008


GloboChrist: Chapters 1 and 2

It is really a thrill for me to start off this series for The Church and Postmodern Culture blog by writing some thoughts on the first two chapters of Carl Raschke’s new book called Globochrist: The Great Commission Take a Postmodern Turn.

I was with Carl a few months ago in Amsterdam and we chatted about some of the themes of the book, in particular the idea of the rhizome as a metaphor for the internet - something both Carl and I have been using for some time to suggest a better way forward for church planting movements and understanding the impact on new churches from the organizational structures of the internet. Or perhaps the other way around, assuming we are also creating the internet structures based on how we think. Chicken or egg??

Even more to the point, I have recently returned from a missions conference for Baptist missionaries in Western Europe. All of them Americans. GloboChrist was the one book I recommended to buy and read. Those who have read the book will quickly see why I thought it so relevant but I only have time for a short post on two chapters so let me do that now without further ado.

Chapter One. "Globopomo: The Planetary Postmodern Moment"

Carl’s contribution here is to equate being postmodern with being global. Whatever postmodernism was, or however it has been received, over the last few decades, it is about “globalization” in this 21st century in which we live and more and have our being and, unlike a mere philosophical theory, we cannot avoid it. This fact brings postmodernism back into play for those of us that thought we could move on.

I have said before that Americans have a habit of coming late to dinner and then leaving before dessert. This certainly happened in the American church world that equated postmodernism with a 60’s style philosophical relativism and saw it prematurely ejected (yes, i said EJECTED) from church vocabulary. But now, Carl, having served up a fascinating menu of postmodern food for thought over the last twenty years, tops it off by bringing out the mousse (I almost said ‘Mauss’, the French ethnologist) and once again proves that the postmodern conversation did not go the way of disco but in fact is alive and well and in fact overshadows our lives.

Carl's second contribution, as I see it, is to bring Gilles Deleuze on stage early in the play rather than Derrida. Now I am not a philosopher but these things DO interest me and from my perspective, I see at least three distinct structural threads going back to Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 20th Century, and that is not counting Lacan.

One is the post-modern literary thread, the usual suspect, that starts with Saussure’s structuralism (or from what he was incoherently hinting at) and winds its way through Russian formalism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism of course, and it is here that a somewhat clichéd Derrida appears to tie the threads together and into the world in which he lived.

Another less travelled road is the cultural thread that starts with Sausurre’s “signifier and signified” and runs through the mythology of Barthes, the cultural anthroplogy of Claude Levi-Strauss, to find its voice in current missiology and cultural wars of the emerging/inherited church.

A related thread is the semiotic, starting with Saussure’s ideas of syntagm and paradigm, morphing into binary logic, Barthes and Baudrillard, media theory (McLuhan) and more recently, new media theory (Manovich) It is this semiotic string that Raschke plucks and we hear the note of Gilles Deleuze sound strong. I raise my glass at this because, as I said, I have been pointing to Deleuze for some time, having once given a lecture on being an entrepreneur in web based mission movements entitled “Like a Rhizome Cowboy”. What I was hinting at 5 years ago, Carl deals with far more thoroughly and proves that my early hunch was correct. And to be fair to Dr. Raschke, I was just scratching the surface of something that he went far deeper into than I ever did. And to be fair to Derrida, he is also a player in this thread as well.

Gotta love this book!

Thirdly, Raschke highlights the new wave of Islamism that is sweeping the USA and Europe. This is something that we have to get our head around and not many people have tackled it. Really! Nuff said.

Having defined the challenges of our new post-modern post-western world, we are challenged to recognize Raschke’s three essential characteristics of global postmodern Christianity:
decentralization, de-institutionalism, and indigenization.

That last one ties us in to the cultural and semiotic ideas of Deleuze and again the idea of the rhizome which, although has many underground roots, remains a single organism that seeks to give itself away. Which of course is very different from the tree metaphor that spurns off independent trees and reinforces our theologies of separatism and denominationalism. Hmmmm. Me talking here, not Carl.

Chapter Two: "De-Signs of the Time”

Having dealt in a recent book with our need to find roots in the historical Protestant Reformation before launching out too far in this New Reformation, Raschke now brings a challenge for the church to engage the current culture, to “contextualize” itself inside this new world, to become “missional”. This is the heart of the second chapter of GloboChrist.

Raschke calls for an incarnational Christianity that “translates” who God is into a new culture. Quoting from Andrew Walls is very appropriate here but the thought going through my head is that “translating” may not be enough. Rather, if the internet and the dynamics of new media are influencing the culture and minds of a new generation, then an appropriate “transcoding” (Lev Manovich) into native new media forms might be the step beyond a mere translating of old forms into a new world when we should be going native and creating new forms online and offline, forms that “recapitulate” and not just “represent” (Douglas Rushkof). Just a thought. Must talk to Carl next time we meet.

But I am nitpicking here. Its a fabulous chapter which drops us back into the world of semiotics and the importance of reading the signs of the times or ‘de-signs’ if you like. This is another reason why I recommended this book for the missionaries who are tasked with the challenge of reading the culture in which they have been sent. Following Christ’s example, we “dwell” or “tabernacle” with others “in their unique situation, their perceptual habits, just as God was in Christ, and dwells and continues to dwell and will always dwell with us as Emmanuel, God with us.”

I have to mention, before finishing off this long post, [apologies] that in his book, Carl Raschke is at best critical and at worst, SNARKY towards the “emerging church” which he sees as a bunch of bo-bo psuedo-intellectuals who are parochial, Eurocentric and not radical enough. He claims the movement is too similar to American and European culture and has ignored the poor, downtrodden and lost.

Although I do not disagree with his response to what he has seen, and have seen for myself some examples of what he writes about, I think the movement is much bigger than he has seen and the term “emerging church” is losing its usefulness. It is probably time to leave the term behind. The word “missional”, although also suffering at the hands of the misinformed, gets a better deal in GloboChrist and it may be that word that brings us all together. However, his critique of the emerging church is welcomed, as is his positive references of Hirsch and Frost on the subject of being incarnational in our ministry.

Shoot! What a fantastic book. I am still shaking my head how an intellectual from USA can write a book that is so pertinently relevant to missionaries working in Europe. But he did, dammitt, and I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever for recommending it.

I should get royalties!

Posted by Andrew Jones in Books | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
AUGUST 28, 2008

GloboChrist: Introduction

[Previously I had mentioned that posting would begin Monday of this week, but we need to push back the schedule by just one week.]

This coming Monday marks the first engagement of Carl Raschke's new book entitled GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn. Andrew Jones will be posting an engagement with chapters 1 and 2 called "Globopomo: The Planetery Postmodern Movement" and "De-Signs of the Time," respectively.

In the meantime I wanted to post a very brief introduction to the series of engagements. In Raschke's introduction (which can be read in its entirety on the Baker Academic website here), he states that the new post-Cold War setting has inspired those like Francis Fukuyama (i.e. the "end of history" thesis following Hegel and Kojève) and Thomas Friedman (see: The World is Flat) to proclaim that finally, the "rest of the world" will now be able to have its Englightment, and with it, its own Romantic forms of self-expression. Coupled with this, Raschke follows Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis but modifies this slightly that what we are really experiencing is a "clash of revelations" (p. 17). That is, the rest of the world, which is very religious, seems to be clashing with the West insofar as the West is predominantly a secular culture. Enter postmodernism which simultaneously "signals the arrival of a post-Western era" (p. 18). It is not so much that the West is fading--as it is very much left its mark around the entire world--but that, "Just as the eclipse of ancient Rome was followed by the rise of a new Roman civilization that was predominantly Germanic but subsequently came to be called European, so the decline of the West will likely lead to a new world that remains Western in character, though no longer in name" (ibid). Moving beyond the "personal relationship with Christ" of much of evangelical parlance, Raschke instead focuses on the "power of relationship, or the power of establishing, sustaining, and purposefully pursuing relationships His is a power in this sense, not just an impersonal force. The GloboChrist is a theological term we have coined to show how this power is manifesting itself amid the growing anxieties over what is happening under the impact of the force we call globalization and the politcal, cultural, and religious upheavels that arise in its wake" (p. 19).

If you haven't already been reading the book, please read along with us and read along with us in the forthcoming posts beginning Monday to see how Andrew Jones, Amos Yong, Jamie Gates, and Deirdre Brower-Latz engage with and interact with Raschke's newest offering.

"The postmodern moment is far more momentous than the cultural spleen and political partisanship that has defined much of Western discourse for nearly half a century" (p. 20).

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How to read Karl Barth: George Hunsinger

How to read Karl Barth: George Hunsinger's foreword to the German Edition

The first is rather simple but well worth knowing. Every “paragraph” in the Church Dogmatics is written around a single main point. Even when the Absatz may run on for more than one page, as sometimes happens, the rule holds. What this means is that it becomes possible for the reader to reconstruct Barth’s overall outline. Reconstructing the outline is not only a very good discipline, but also a way of not getting lost. By looking for the outline, one keeps one’s head above water. Every page of Barth’s dogmatics is literally teeming with ideas. It is all too easy to get diverted by an arresting point or by mistaking the part for the whole. I find that by digging for the main point of each Absatz and writing it down, I can help my students follow Barth’s argument much more readily than would otherwise be the case. Then, of course, it also helps to look for the sub-points within the Absatz, of which there are usually quite a few. All this may seem rather pedestrian, and indeed it is. Nevertheless, I have found it to be a most valuable procedure in reading the Church Dogmatics.

Another deceptively simple point for the beginning reader is to keep an eye out for the antecedent to Barth’s pronouns. Almost everyone has had the experience of reading Barth, feeling that one is following the train of thought, and then suddenly getting to the bottom of the page and finding that one is hopelessly lost. At this point it is easy to give up with the sense that Barth is just too hard to understand. Very often, however, all that has happened is that the reader has lost track of the antecedent to Barth’s many pronouns. (I can’t imagine what it would have been like to try to follow this material, which began as classroom lectures, by ear.) In any case the pronouns are like the bread crumbs in “Hansel and Grettel”. One only needs to trace them back in order to get out of the forest. For an especially vexing passage, I sometimes underline the antecedent twice, once I have retrieved it, while then underlining the subsequent pronouns once. The passage is then much easier to follow if I need to revisit it for purposes of further study or instruction.

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Book Review: Public Theology in Cultural Engagement

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October 16, 2008

Book Review: Public Theology in Cultural Engagement
Stephen Holmes (ed.), Public Theology in Cultural Engagement (Paternoster, 2008), 196pp

This is a set of previously unpublished essays engaging theologically with culture. The papers have emerged from a recent project between the Bible Society and the Research Institute in Systematic Theology at King's College London. With essays from Colin Gunton, Robert Jenson, Colin Greene, Brian Horne, Luke Bretherton and Stephen Holmes this is an excellent book which addresses important concerns. Unlike other works engaging theology and culture, this book seeks to be 'theological rather than sociological.'

The book begins with Holmes asking whether theology can engage with culture; followed by essays dealing with the same question 'through the lens of particular biblical, theological, or historical data', and then a second part which puts the theory into practice - on issues of drugs, art and nationalism.

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Anselm (1033-1109)

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ANSELM'S PROSLOGIUM

OR DISCOURSE ON THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Proslogion, (also spelled Proslogium; English translation of title - Discourse on the Existence of God), written in 1077-1078, was an attempt by the medieval cleric Anselm to prove beyond contention the existence of God.

Contents  [hide] 1 Faith seeking understanding 2 Excerpts 3 References 4 External links

[edit]Faith seeking understanding

Anselm wrote this discourse, not from the perspective of an attempt to convince non-Christians of the truth of Christianity, but rather from the perspective of a Christian believer seeking a rationale for his/her faith. His original title for the discourse, in fact, was Faith Seeking Understanding. The Proslogium is the source for Anselm's famous and highly controversial ontological argument for the existence of God--that is, the argument in favor of God's existence by definition. While opinions concerning the ontological argument vary widely (and have from the moment the Proslogium was written), it is generally agreed that the argument is most convincing to Anselm's intended audience: that is, Christian believers seeking a rational basis for their belief in God.

The Argument - Dr. Scott H. Moore

1. One can imagine a being than which none greater can be conceived.
2. We know that existence in reality is greater than existence in the mind alone.
3. If the being we imagine exists only in our mind, then it is not a "being than which none greater can be conceived".
4. A being than which none greater can be conceived must also exist in reality.
5. Failure to exist in reality would be failure to be a being than which none greater can be conceived.
6. Thus a being than which none greater can be conceived must exist, and we call this being God.

[edit]Excerpts

CHAPTER I: Encouraging the Mind to Contemplate God
Come on now little man, get away from your worldly occupations for a while, escape from your tumultuous thoughts. Lay aside your burdensome cares and put off your laborious exertions. Give yourself over to God for a little while, and rest for a while in Him. Enter into the cell of your mind, shut out everything except God and whatever helps you to seek Him once the door is shut. Speak now, my heart, and say to God, "I seek your face; your face, Lord, I seek." Source: Medieval Sourcebook

CHAPTER II: That God Truly Exists

CHAPTER III: That God Cannot be Thought Not to Exist

CHAPTER IV: How the Fool Managed to Say in His Heart That Which Cannot be Thought

CHAPTER V: God is the only self-existent being

Chapter VI: God is sensible but not a body

Chapter VII: God is omnipotent

Chapter VIII: God is compassionate and passionless

Introducing the philosophy of religion The third in Roy Jackson's series looking at some of the classic problems in the philosophy of religion. No. 3 God - A Necessary Being? In the the second chapter of the Proslogion (Discourse, 1077), St Anselm, a well-regarded philosopher and theologian, presented the original statement of what in the 18th century became known as the ontological argument for the existence of God. However, Anselm himself never referred to it by that title and, it might be suggested, was not really attempting to present a coherent argument in the first place. Unlike the other arguments we have looked at - so called a posteriori arguments - this one is a priori.A posteriori knowledge is the most common form of knowledge we possess. As an example, my knowledge that Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, or my knowledge that sunflowers have yellow petals. This form of knowledge can be verified (or, indeed, falsified) by experience (that is, through observation, looking up the information in a reliable reference book, past experience, etc.). However, it may be argued that not all of our knowledge comes from experience alone. For example, the fact that 2+2=4. Such mathematical formulations seem to be objective, universal facts and, some would argue, can be determined prior to experience. Anselm's Argument   more