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



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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!

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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

Godless Theology by Jurgen Moltmann

Religion on line


All who believe and think about what they believe are theologians. The theology of all believers is the foundation for every academic theology. But does that mean that Christian theology can be nothing other than a self-related "doctrine of faith," to echo the title Schleiermacher gave his modern theology? Does it mean that only people who are "believers" or "born again" can study and understand theology, and that they understand it because they are already in agreement with it from the outset?

Now, faith is of the essence for Christian theology, because theology does not purpose to be a theory about the Absolute, devoid of any determining subject, and the rebirth to a living hope is the subjective opening up of God’s new future for the world. But that still does not have to mean that theology is only there for believers. God is not just a God of believers. He is the Creator of heaven and earth, and so he is not particularist, in the way that human belief in him is particularist; he is as universal as the sun which rises on the evil and the good, and the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust, and gives life to everything created (Matt. 5:45).

A theology solely for believers would be the ideology of a Christian religious society, or an esoteric mystery doctrine for the initiated. It would be in utter contradiction to the universal God-ness of God, and his public revelation as the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ. It is not theology that has an absolute claim. What does have that claim is the one God, about whom theology talks in human terms. Neither the tolerance required of human beings, nor the situation of the multifaith society in which Christians exist today, can narrow down the universal offer of the gospel, and the eschatological invitation to the new creation of all things through God.
more

The Revelation of God in Eastern and Western theology

The crucial difference

Queer Theology

Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western body
Gerard Loughlin, editor

Jeremiah Gibbs and Jason Byassee in Christian Century: Making belief intelligible

Christain Century September 23, 2008

Explain yourself
by Jeremiah Gibbs and Jason Byassee
Karl Barth famously attacked apologetics—the attempt to offer a persuasive account of Christian belief on mutually agreed-upon grounds of reason—as a misguided task, part of the failure of theological liberalism. When you focus on making sense to those outside the faith, Barth warned, you end up adopting their worldview. When you lean way over to speak to the secular world, you end up falling into it.
If Barth’s analysis doesn’t make you shy away from apologetics, the crude way that apologetics is often practiced may do so. Books like Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict or Lee Strobel’s The Case for Faith overstate the rational basis for faith. Even C. S. Lewis had his bad days operating in this field. His famous remark that Jesus was either who he said he was or a liar or lunatic appears to present a logical choice, one that directs the reader toward faith. But are there really only three options? Such syllogisms produce few believers and even fewer lovers of God.
Apologetics has largely lost its place in mainline seminary curricula. But the task of apologetics—making Christian belief intelligible—remains inescapable. If it isn’t done well, it will be done badly.
The postmodern claim that all truth is relative to a context or tradition has created a new situation for apologetics. All that postmodern apologists need to do is show that their opponents also stand in a particular tradition that has its own unverifiable presuppositions. Science, for example, rests on presuppositions like this one: “The world is governed by natural forces and everything can be explained if we understand these natural forces.” This is a philosophical presupposition that is not falsifiable and therefore not subject to scientific inquiry.
Postmodern apologists can be divided into two schools, the humble and the bold. The humble apologists simply want to argue that the Christian way of life is the most desirable way of life, on the basis of the kinds of people that the belief system fosters. If a belief system creates a cantankerous neighbor or a militaristic extremist, then few people would want to embrace that individual’s belief system. As Origen argued in an earlier age, Christianity must be true because it creates the best people. Justin Martyr pointed out that Christians promoted peace in the empire and paid their taxes, didn’t commit adultery or kill or abandon their children. Humble apologetics is often an argument about ethics, with lots of examples.
The bold apologists aim to show that their account of the world makes better sense of it than all other accounts and that non-Christian belief systems collapse from inner contradiction. The bold apologists might look at the Darwinist concept of survival of the fittest and argue that Darwinism cannot account for the phenomenon of love. Why are so many people willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of someone else and not just for their own survival? Darwinism, the argument goes, cannot account fully for the way we experience the world. By contrast, the Christian story of creation by a good God and of humanity’s fall into sin is able to make sense of why people are capable of both love and evil. And it can answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” with “Because God created the heavens and the earth.”

Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and author of The Language of God, is something of a hybrid apologist. He doesn’t try to show that science is inadequate, only that it isn’t adequate by itself. He aims to show that both science and faith are necessary to explain the world. For Collins, science answers questions about the natural world and faith answers questions about the spiritual world; the tools for exploring one world are not appropriate for exploring the other.
This clear separation of realms has been called into question by many postmodernists, who see more fluidity between science and religion. So in one sense Collins fails to question modernist assumptions. Nevertheless, he attacks the views of scientists such as Richard Dawkins who think that science leaves no room for faith and that science has shown belief in God to be a delusion. One of the world’s leading scientists, Collins insists that faith is not incompatible with science. The two are simply answering different questions. Science cannot explain the existence of the moral law within every person, which is the most convincing evidence for faith. Only faith can explain why people universally have a sense of right and wrong.
Compared to Collins, Dinesh D’Souza is definitely a bold apologist. Responding to the recent atheist manifestos by Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, D’Souza writes: “This is not a time for Christians to turn the other cheek. Rather it is a time to drive the money-changers out of the temple.” In What’s So Great About Christianity D’Souza seeks to equip comrades for battle, though at times the reader may wonder why D’Souza’s help is needed, since according to him “God is the future, and atheism is on its way out.”
If God is the future, that is no thanks to liberal Christianity, according to D’Souza. Liberal theologians are “the world’s missionaries to the church,” clamoring in behalf of women’s rights and gay marriage. D’Souza dispatches liberals with H. Richard Niebuhr’s famous summary of the tenets of liberal Christianity: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” It’s a great line, but D’Souza doesn’t seem to realize that Niebuhr himself is the patron saint of generations of theological liberals. D’Souza is also a bit hazy on some basic facts. (Apparently intending to describe divisions in the Episcopal Church, he notes that “traditional Christians” from mainline denominations have aligned themselves with new structures in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Surely he means Uganda and Rwanda.)
In D’Souza’s world, only Christians care about combating famine or resisting genocide: “Most people in other cultures are unconcerned.” He also asserts that “modern science is an invention of medieval Christianity, and the greatest breakthroughs in scientific reason have largely been the work of Christians.” Never mind that Muslims carried the load of Western science for a millennium and that Jews have won more than their share of Nobel prizes. Even more troubling are such theological excurses as this: Jewish monotheism was “generally unthreatening to Roman paganism.” (D’Souza apparently has not heard of the Jewish revolts of AD 70 and 135.)
For D’Souza, Christianity’s genius was distilled into Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and John Locke’s politics. Christianity brought to the world moral norms that can be made universal, he says. He also contends that church teachings helped bring about Western laws seeking to prevent ill-advised concentrations of power. D’Souza’s book makes no mention of the Trinity or the incarnation, which one might think fairly important to orthodox Christianity. His tool kit for faith is little more than a set of talking points for debating Hitchens.
Better works of apologetics are being written. One of them is Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God. Keller is founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America. Though the church has many young professionals among its members, it is startlingly traditional. Keller assumes that young urbanites are up for serious conversations about faith. At one point in his ministry he would stick around after worship for an hour to take questions.
A striking contrast to D’Souza (who opens his book with an epigraph from Star Wars’ Darth Vader: “I find your lack of faith disturbing”), Keller readily grants that there are obstacles to faith, and he can be unsparing in his critique of Christians. He admits that religion may fuel violence and that churchgoers may be weak people who need a crutch. He says the answer to religious and irreligious fanatics is a different kind of fanaticism: the world needs people who are “fanatically humble, sensitive, loving, empathetic, forgiving, understanding—as Christ was.” Keller thinks that what makes Redeemer Presbyterian different is its love of “irony, charity, and humility.”
Keller’s version of traditional Reformed faith seems to be effective in Manhattan. John Calvin’s insistence on the saving efficacy of Christ alone, apart from any human work, touches the souls of young achievers trying to climb the career ladder. One can imagine them paying attention when Keller proclaims, “Your career can’t die for your sins.” And he can grant Christians’ failings precisely because, for him, Christians don’t claim to be the best people: we claim to have the greatest Forgiver.
The book is not without its problems. Keller lets Christians off the hook a little too quickly for their sins. For some reason he blames the Crusades on Anglo-Saxon paganism, and he insists that the cross can’t be used to support violence (of course, it often has been used that way). Like other apologists, he seems unwilling to grant that someone really can be an atheist deep down. In his chapter on proofs for God’s existence, he argues that the reader already believes in God, even if she doesn’t know it. He repeatedly claims—wrongly—that the critique of religious people as narrow and arrogant is inevitably no less narrow and arrogant itself.
But Keller is on target when he argues that those who oppose “absolute truth” often do so from their own position that at least implicitly claims absolute truth. And he often skillfully deploys theological moves that liberals may not have encountered—as when he says that believing in a God of judgment is actually a hedge against violence, since revenge can be left in God’s hands, not human ones.

Lying somewhere between D’Souza’s boldness and Keller’s and Collins’s humility is N. T. Wright and his book Simply Christian. The New Testament scholar draws on his scholarly resources to address apologetic questions. For example, he argues that Christianity can explain people’s universal desire for spirituality, community and beauty. Wright commends Christianity for offering a true vision of justice that overcomes the clamoring for vengeance. He argues that people’s quest for spirituality and community cannot be fulfilled by mere material and psychological means, because we were created for relationship with God and one another. At key points in the book, Wright shows that much of the way people understand the world stems from the presuppositions of modern and postmodern worldviews. Christianity provides a vision of the world as it is and where it is going that calls these presuppositions into question. By revealing the presuppositions of other worldviews, he is able to present a uniquely Christian vision of the world that is also persuasive.
Wright’s title suggests that his book is an attempt to update C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and the Anglican bishop of Durham does have something of Lewis’s knack for producing an unforgettable image or phrase. He says those who make arguments for God’s existence are like people who point a flashlight at the sun and run the risk of ending up like the women who went to Jesus’ tomb—with a living God on their hands rather than a dead one. Wright also shows that Christianity need not be wed to conservative politics or doctrinal narrowness: on the cross the living God took on massive injustice, yet did not “lash out with threats or curses.” For Wright, the bodily resurrection of Jesus serves God’s work of “putting the world to rights.” Caesars and pharisees of the religious right should shiver in their shoes at news of a living, embodied savior (while Gnostics of all types concentrate on some world other than this one). This is vintage Wright—clear, compelling, zeroing in on the problems in the church and world.
Yet compared to Lewis’s work, the book feels all too churchy. When Wright compares praying without a structure to mountaineering without shoes (it can be done, but by very few), it’s a striking and helpful analogy—if one is already worried about how to pray. Wright reworks for popular consumption his scholarly investigations of the resurrection and the meaning of messiah in Jesus’ day, but again these concerns are more relevant to Christians than to outsiders. The marvel of Lewis’s book is that it can be handed to someone outside Christianity in the confidence that it will prompt a fresh look at the faith. Wright’s writing is simply pitched a little too high.

Conservative apologists of old (and their current imitators, like Strobel) operated on the basis of evidentialism—the idea that we can and should believe only what can be supported by empirical evidence. Many conservative apologists today recognize that postmodernity has altered the terms of discussion. No longer is it obvious what constitutes evidence. A sign of this trend is InterVarsity Press’s New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, which has entries on many theologians and philosophers as well as on topics ranging from abortion to worldviews.
All the book’s articles take the concerns of postmodernity and pluralism seriously, and the first 50 pages address the contemporary challenges of doing apologetics. The writers agree that apologetics in a post-Christian culture involves articulating basic theological tenets. Apologetics must contend for the uniqueness of Christianity, not simply the existence of a generic God or Designer. Rather than arguing for a Creator in general, Christian apologetics will argue for the trinitarian God revealed in Jesus Christ. And it will emphasize the importance of arguments that point to the uniquely Christian way of life.
The unique Christian vision must be judged according to the extent to which it accounts for the world. Judging between competing visions of the world is not the same as proving the truth of one or the other. Judgment requires knowing the issues intimately and making a well-informed decision. A courtroom judge must know the factual evidence of a case, the relevant laws and previous court decisions, and be able to discern the character of the persons involved. Likewise, apologists and their interlocutors must be wise in judging between competing accounts of the world.
Christians have always had to engage in apologetics—to give an account of the faith to those who inquire. In doing so, Christians inevitably reframe the faith for themselves. Done as it should be, apologetics renews the church as it reveals the plausibility and even the beauty of faith. Done poorly, it can turn off believers and unbelievers alike.
The postmodern insight is that there are always competing versions of what counts as rationality. Arguments about faith do not float free of cultural context or individual experience. Nor do the arguments considered here float free of individual stories: Collins, D’Souza, Keller and Wright are very different people who operate in different disciplines and social roles. Character precedes argument—something that Origen and the other patristic writers recognized. If Christianity is true, it creates faithful and generous-hearted people. If it isn’t doing that, all arguments fail. source

Bonhoeffer's Christology

http://flyingfarther.wordpress.com/category/dietrich-bonhoeffer/

Bonhoeffer's Christology

Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, by Rosemary Radford Ruether.

In 1974, New Seabury Press published Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, by Rosemary Radford Ruether. In this book, Ruether offered a thoroughgoing critique of the New Testament and of the writings of the early church fathers that offered a distorted and inaccurate view of Judaism and Jews to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian church. Ruether noted a troubling aspect of Christian writings: the most powerful expressions of Christ’s divinity and redeeming power were often accompanied by ugly denunciations of Jews. Christianity’s assertions of Christ’s divinity, status as the messiah, and expectations of redemption were so deeply interwoven with enmity toward the Jews that Ruether asked:

Is it possible to purge Christianity of anti-Judaism without at the same time pulling up Christian faith? Is it possible to say “Jesus is Messiah” without, implicitly or explicitly, saying at the same time “and the Jews be damned”? more