Theology Reader

"Michael J. Vlach, Ph.D.
Introduction
Dispensationalists and non-dispensationalists disagree sharply on the issue of Israel. Dispensationalists maintain that the nation Israel will be saved and restored to a place of service to the nations. Non-dispensationalists, on the other hand, argue that the nation Israel will never again have a role as a nation in the plan of God. Important to this non-dispensational understanding of Israel is Christ’s role as “true Israel.” In sum, the non-dispensational argument goes like this: “Jesus is the complete fulfillment of Israel and, thus, is the ‘true Israel.’ As a result, all those who are ‘in Christ,’ whether Jew or Gentile, are now part of Israel. Thus, there is no future significance for the nation Israel.” Our purpose here is to show that this non-dispensational understanding of Christ as “true Israel” is not supported by Scripture. On the contrary, we will argue that Christ’s identity as the true Israel is the basis for national Israel’s restoration. So instead of leading to the end of national Israel’s significance in the plan of God, Christ’s identity as true Israel guarantees the nation Israel’s significance."

GLifeLine: Adrian Bird, M.M. Thomas - Theological sign posts for the Emergence of Dalit theology

2010-10-03T17:12:00.000-07:00

GLifeLine: Adrian Bird, M.M. Thomas - Theological sign posts for the Emergence of Dalit theology

Shroro: The Syriac Orthodox Christian Digest

2010-09-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

METHODOLOGICAL iSSUES

Shroro: The Syriac Orthodox Christian Digest

Anan taught that each individual could use simple rules of reason to derive the Law directly from the text of the Torah. Anan's movement (called Ananism) brought various subsects together and eventually was supplanted by Karaism, which differed from Anan's teachings in many respects but still held him in high regard.

Anan ben David - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2010-09-25T16:40:00.000-07:00

Anan ben David - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Abu Hanifah was accustomed in certain cases to take the words of the Qur'an not in their literal, but in a symbolical sense (Ta'awil); see also Qur'an#Levels of meaning and inward aspects of the Qur'an. Anan adopted a similar method with the Hebrew text of the Bible. Illustrations of this method are not infrequently, indeed, afforded by the Talmud itself. Thus he interpreted the prohibition of plowing on Sabbath (Ex. xxxiv. 21) as applying to marital intercourse; the word 'brothers' (aḥim, Deut. xxv. 5) in connection with the levirate marriage he interpreted as 'relatives,' etc. Anan's method of interpretation, however, was distinct from its Muslim counterpart in that he primarily built upon analogy of expressions, words (the rabbinical gezerah shawah), and single letters.
The earliest sources tell also of another doctrine borrowed by Anan from the Muslims; namely, the belief in the transmigration of the soul (metempsychosis). This doctrine, represented in Greek antiquity especially by Empedocles and the Pythagoreans, had always been widespread in India, and was encountered there by a Muslim etc. called the Rawendites, adopted by them, and in the middle of the eighth century was carried to Babylonia (Iraq). It is also found in Kabbalah. Anan is said to have written a special work in its defense"

2010-09-08 Dr. Raimon Panikkar Obituary Manmorama Sept 8, 2010 Harikrishna

2010-09-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

BBC News - Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe

2010-09-02T17:17:00.000-07:00

BBC News - Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe

Nine Ways Not to Talk about God, by Raimon Panikkar

2010-09-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

Nine Ways Not to Talk about God, by Raimon Panikkar

Sex allegations shock Kerala Church| Cathnews India

2010-09-02T06:29:00.000-07:00

Sex allegations shock Kerala Church Cathnews India

Theologian Raimon Panikkar is no more| Cathnews India

2010-09-02T06:21:00.000-07:00

Theologian Raimon Panikkar is no more Cathnews India

Obituary Malayalam papers 1

Manorama September 8 by Harikrishnan

Sanhedrin 106a says about Jesus' mother

2010-08-31T23:26:00.000-07:00

http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/Sanhedrin on Mary
Just Genesis
Was Freud an agnostic Jew who believed in the Virgin May? This is likely, and further evidence of the complexity of Freud’s personality. He appears to have accepted at least on the level of myth the idea of Mary as the Bearer of God. Perhaps this Christian view of Mary became embedded through his early exposure to the veneration of the Virgin by the Catholic population of Freiburg, his hometown. Exploration of Freud’s obsession with Anne and the Virgin Mary suggests that he put more stock in the Christian view of Mary than in the Talmudic view which circulated through the synagogues of Europe. Sanhedrin 106a says Jesus' mother was a whore: “She who was the descendant of princes and governors played the harlot with carpenters.” I wonder what Freud would uncover through psychoanalysis of the rabbi who first wrote that? Posted by Alice C. Linsley

Identity Politics and Deconstruction of Theological Methodology

2010-08-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

Identity Politics and Deconstruction of Theological Methodology
T. Jacob Thomas

Introduction
In the postmodernist world view there are no fixed or absolute universal foundations for knowledge. Knowledge exists in particular cultural and linguistic communities and is validated by the communities themselves. Reality then is viewed as existing in the interconnectedness of existence and thus deprived of its essentialist status. No essence, only inter-relations. Truth claims are validated within the parameters of particular religions or communities. A common centre of truth outside the community is rejected. Truth can exist at the interface of communities. This provides space to communities in their quest for identity. In India Dalits, tribals, feminists or environmentalists find identity and meaning in their struggles for space. Their identity politics have no common base or common goal unlike the mainstream politics. They create their meaning symbols and particular goals which have no perennial or essentialist claims. What they hold is that our knowledge systems are not doing justice to their particular aspirations and threaten them with the hegemonic claims of dominant knowledge systems and their politics. Todays theological challenge is to bring God into the political struggles of people for identity, freedom and life. Dominant theological schools with their essentialist foundational approaches cannot do justice to these particular politics. A deconstructed theological methodology can only address the challenges of identity politics.
How are traditional theologies constructed?
Early Greek philosophers like Protagoras, held that one’s opinion can be no more correct than another’s, though it did not find acceptance in major schools of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, which viewed the world in terms of “unchanging and invisible forms,” or ideas. For the classical philosophers sought ways to authenticate one’s knowledge and they searched a reason to justify our reasonings. This search for a foundation for their thinking led them to the idea of intuition, which could not be put to criticism. For them a knowledge system can be built only on the basis of what was already known which later Kant described as a priori categories. Sankarite school of advaita in india also based knowledge on something given earlier, either smrti or shruti. Aristotle called the basic forms of knowledge scientia, first principles.
In formulating Christian theology, St. Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle and regarded perception as the starting point and logic as the intellectual procedure for arriving at reliable knowledge of nature. He posited the articles of faith as the first principles, on the basis of the authority of the church. However, the Enlightenment philosophers, armed with the spirit of reformation, attacked such outside authority. Des Cartes made the certainty of the self as the foundation of all knowledge and considered the existence of God as a corollary. His assertion, cogito ergo sum, I cannot doubt that I who doubts exist, made mind as the source of knowledge and not empirical evidence as Aristotelians argued.4F.LeRonShults, The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmaans, 1999), 34.
Schleiermacher, the enlightenment theologian built his theology not on the authority of the Church or the mind but on the self-consciousness of every human being, the “feeling of absolute dependence,” as the foundation for sure knowledge of God. According to the skeptical epistemology of David Hume ( 1711-1776) we can trust only the knowledge that we acquire from our perceptions, either ideas or impressions. That makes knowledge dependent not on intuition, or on any authority outside oneself, nor even on something a priori or given. Hume held that it is impossible for us to think of anything, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses. It has been said that ever since the time of Hume knowledge found it difficult to establish itself on any sure foundations. Our knowledge is limited to our reasoning.
The classical philosophical schools agreed that a knowledge is valid if it is universally true. This has been the position of the major philosophical schools of India also. Immanuel Kant while accepting the authority of reason has found room for faith in the limits of reason. He held that there is possibility for pure practical reason to postulate freedom, God and immortality, and that was the realm of faith. Thus faith is not against reason but exists at the limits of reason. Since Kant theology found itself in dialogue with reason which gave it some kind of scientific basis and universality. Theology was considered as science.
The Linguistic Turn and the Death of Foundationalism
Hans-Georg Gadamer ( 1900-2002) was critical of modern approaches to humanities that modeled themselves on the natural sciences and scientific methods and argued that a “historically effected consciousness” is embedded in the text which itself was the product of particular history and culture. Interpreting a text involves a “fusion of horizons” where the meaning emerges in dialogue with the text's history with the interpreter’s own background. The final outcome of all these developments was coming to the realization that no absolute knowledge is possible as the enlightenment conceived. The linguistic turn refers to the demise of the long reign of the philosophy of Cartesian monological subject and the recognition of the centrality of language in the constitution of knowledge5 It was Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) Philosophical Investigations7 that marked the shift in philosophical method. His linguistic analysis perceived reality in terms of language games. No truth is possible outside the language. Languages are shaped by cultural systems and traditions into which we are born. Language is inextricably woven into the fabric of life. Language determines our knowledge. To understand something is no more to form mental “representations” of it as modernism insisted, rather, understanding has become a matter of actively interpreting our world experience—by means of language. The enlightenment belief that reason is neutral and would lead to truth irrespective of context, tradition, or language was found shaky. Schleiermacher had already liberated the hermeneutical theory from the Enlightenment “objectivity” to the consciousness of the feeling subject, paving the way for liberal humanism. Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger rejected the concept of knowing subject by the “lived experience” of the involved subject which would discover itself. All this led to the conviction that philosophy is no longer a search of truth or absolute knowledge, but linguistic analysis or interpretation. Knowledge exists in interpretation. Modern philosophy has become an art of interpretation through its avatars of structuralism, post-structuralism. Their approach to knowledge has been viewed as postmodernist, since they reject the enlightenment foundations knowledge.

Poststructuralism

Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics contended that language is a system of relations and the meaning is processed within that structure. The text has no given meaning and the author disappears behind the structure. The problem with Saussure’s structuralism has been that it rejects not only the Cartesian knowing self but also its subjectivity and subverts the identity consciousness of the marginalized and oppressed groups. The resurgence of identity politics among the submerged or subaltern groups challenged the unitary notions of human kind as false universalism that blocks substantive differences such as race, gender, or ethnicity. This gave rise to Poststructuralism and the strategy of deconstruction. Jacques Derrida’s notion of decentred universe challenged all fixed or absolute notions of centre and periphery and has conceived universe as a free play. There is no authoritative centre, which makes validation of knowledge necessary. Derrida has gone beyond Saussure’s notion that words derive their meaning in their difference with other words and pointed out that since the text has no foundational meaning any number of meaning can be formed by deferring the meaning of a word. This endless passive and active interplay of meaning is termed by Derrida as “differance.” Differance happens not in the difference of words as in structuralism but when something is known only from its absence. 8 The poststructuralist strategy of deconstruction devised by Derrida categorically asserts the absolute impossibility of attributing to any text one single ultimate meaning.9 In deconstruction "objective truth is to be replaced by hermeneutic truth.”10

Politics behind the construction of meaning.

Sacred texts, such as the Bible, do not have a single ultimate meaning nor are such texts necessarily authoritative. All sacred texts are compilations and various socio-cultural political interests played their part in their production. Deconstructing these texts helps us to see how texts are produced and meanings are created. Meanings are created by the social forces to suit their interests. Deconstruction is a rebellion against any absolute meanings or truth claims. It contest the given knowledge absolutized through hierarchical dualities which Derrida calls binary oppositions, creating superiority and inferiority structures of thought and social practices. Deconstruction disrupts and displaces the hierarchy and dismantles its authority and creates space for the “marginals” to present themselves as social agents. The web of relations outside the text may determine both the meaning of the text and the nature of its authority.

The linguistic turn led to the demise of the foundationalist tenet that for truth to exist there must be some sort of “extralinguistic” reality. Instead the legitimacy of a plurality of stand points and interpretations over an absolute or a contextual conception of knowledge or truth was affirmed. The linguistic turn has led to the postmodern argument that there are no truths, but only rival interpretations. This does not mean that language is everything, but that we know everything by means of language. There is no need of any foundation, either by way of intuition or by experience.
Deconstruction of Knowledge

Human experience, insights and the perspective, shape new ways of achieving and producing knowledge. The new view on knowledge does not assume reason to remain the same at all times and in all places. Rather it is now assumed that the subject of knowledge constitutes itself through a large number of social factors in its cultural context, like gender, wealth, class, and tradition.
Knowledge has now become a communicative function, an interplay between competence and performance, a “social construction of reality.” It is no longer result of any inherent human characteristic. Circumstances in society affect the subject’s knowing and knowledge. The question of the nature of knowledge is now replaced with the question of knowledge’s social connection and of rationality in communicative social course of events.
The nonfoundationalists defend an aesthetic relation to self; one should affirm “one’s liberty” by devising a personal style in opposition to all ruling norms. They attempt to immunize particular interpretations from critique by appealing only to the intra communal factors; they disengage themselves from any inter communal or extra communal factors. From a static and monist outlook on human kind, these newer attempts emphasize that the knowledge is produced in the interaction between subject and context. This means that the earlier anthropological essentialism was discarded in favour of a relational view of the human person.
Emergence of Postmodern theologies

The Liberation theology as well as the consequent third World theologies, though aimed at “a radical break” from the Euro-centric epistemologies could not escape the project of modernity, the dialectical progress of history and the Marxist “metanarrative”11 of class struggle. These contextual theologies could not accommodate epistemological and anthropological pluralism because of their basic foundationalistic world-view. Several contemporary scholars responded to the challenge raised by the nonfoundationalist theory of knowledge in a variety of ways. These nonfoundationalist theologies are postmodern as they reject the modern project of metanarratives but in that attempt find themselves in the awkward position of emitting ultraliberal as well as ultra conservative responses.12

The nonfoundational or antifoundational character of theology goes back to Karl Barth or even to Aquinas. Barth held that there could be no “foundation, support, or justification” for theology in any philosophy, theory or epistemology”20 Karl Barth affirmed the self-authenticating Word of God as the foundation of theology. The truth of this Word is self evident to the believer. It may not make any sense to those who do not share the faith. This Barthian approach to Bible has influenced the postliberalist thinking that other religions or schools of thought can have their own valid set of foundations with no need of authentication from any outside authority. George Lindbeck, a postliberal Lutheran theologian, is open about his indebtedness to Aquinas who wrote that the Christian language about God is true, but we do not know how it is true. We know God loves us, but we do not know what love would be like for God. We cannot go beyond our experience; we can only work within the rules the community provided to talk about God.21 As the title of another postliberal theologian William Placher’s book suggests, Christians need not "apologize" for their theology not conforming to non-Christian standards of rationality. Such is true about other religions or knowledge systems too its own way. One system need not conform with another, yet it can be true on its own way. In the classical methodology truth has to conform with other truth claims in order to be true.

Interpreting Hans Frei, the postliberalists argue that the Christian story for them can shape the Christian communal identity.23 It has the assimilative power to absorb the world. Postliberal theology emphasizes the importance of an intratextual use of scripture, relying on “the distinctive internal logic of Christian beliefs and practices.24 Identity politics does not go along with pluralism which says that different methods or religions are saying the same thing. Here the differences among religions, rather than their commonalities, are important. Identities refer to differences. Different identities are free to follow their own systems, meanings. Postliberal theology “emphasizes the scriptural stories or narratives by which Christians identify God and the Christian community and come to understand their own lives.”22 Kathryn Tanner “refuses to locate divine acts in some larger narrative of what is happening in creation, but insists on the primacy of God’s activity, but she sees such an account as ‘empowerment’ of quests for social justice rather than ‘tyranny.’25 Postliberalists attempt for the “creative fusion of hermeneutics and epistemology.”26
Dalit theology

Dalit theology emerged as an academic discipline in the 1980s. It emerged as a quest for a “contested epistemology; it offered a “methodological challenge to the grand narratives of ‘prefix-less’ theology and Indian Christian theology.”35 Arvind P. Nirmal(1936-1995)36 rejected the Brahminic tradition in Indian Christian theology37 He observed that even though a third world theology was emerged in the 1970s under the influence of the Latin American Liberation theology it “failed to see in the struggle of Indian dalits for liberation a subject matter appropriate for doing theology in India.”38 Liberation theology or the third world contextual theologies could not offer a proper method for analyzing and interpreting the story of the Dalits. Dalit theology needed “a methodological shift in this postmodern context.”39 In his search for a suitable critical and constructive method Nirmal digged out the neglected Indian protest tradition of Lokayata or Carvaka school of Indian philosophy which rejects the Brahminic notion of esoteric knowledge. Vinaya Raj introduces a nonfoundationalist poststructuralist method of deconstruction, suitable for Dalit theology. He writes: “Deconstruction-- the poststructural method, as it believes in the fluidity and nonfixity of the meaning/subjectivity helps us to produce new meanings through discursive readings.”40 The nonfoundationalist poststructuralist strategies offer alternate ways of looking at theories of self and social formations, and transform existing caste practices and institutions in order to construct a sense for Dalits as active social agents.

Conclusion

Colin Gunton is of the opinion that we should not give up our search for foundations. For him non-foundationalism is a reflex to foundationalism. He argues, “that the basis and criteria of rationality are intrinsic to particular human intellectual enterprises, which should not have imposed upon them in a procrustean way the methodologies which are appropriate for other forms of intellectual life.”41 Yet Gunton rejects non-foundationalism as it constructs a barrier to outside critique. The nonfoundationalists “run the risk of the rank subjectivism… they evade the intellectual challenge involved in the use of the word ‘God’.”42 Basing on the theology of Cappadocians Gunton writes that since God is a communion of persons and each person is distinct but inseparable from the others, God’s being consists in relationship with one another. He writes,

…[the] three persons are for and from each other in their otherness. They thus confer particularity upon and receive it from one another. That giving of particularity is very important: it is a matter of space to be. Father, Son and Spirit through the shape – the taxis – of their inseparable relatedness confer particularity and freedom on each other. That is their personal being.43

For Barth the doctrine of the imago Dei means that God created human beings for fellowship.44 Humans are naturally fellowshiping beings, with other beings and with God. It also means only in relationship with God that we can be fully human. There is no objectively existing datum that can be called religion, no “true religion” as such. Neither are we able to discover truth. We only become real only in relation between objectivity and subjectivity. Hendrick Kraemer called this Barthian approach “Biblical realism.” Since we cannot understand ourselves or others wholly we must focus on what we are made for—relationship. So the encounter with other religions must focus on the relational aspects of the encounter. The relational character of being human existence, the network of existence need to be the common ground between people, defined by way of religions, ethnicity, race, language or gender. Postliberlaism failed to note this relational aspect of Barthian theology, instead they used him mainly to insulate themselves from any outside scrutiny. Postliberal suggestion that Christian community exists alongside other communities with each having its own rules of discourse and linguistic conventions, each becoming a system unto itself, without any cross-cultural, universal values, is not satisfactory. The problem the postliberalists want to solve is not solved as there still looms the danger of the most dominant group exerting its values upon others. Colin Gunton criticizes postmodernity as “an imperious for truth which abolishes all other truth by a form of homogenization. It is, despite appearances, a form of universalism” 45 Postliberlaism deprives itself any theological warrant to establish mutual relationship as the rules of each community remain separate.
The challenge to Christian theology in India is to demonstrate that Christian faith, at its very heart, and not only in its moral preaching, promotes the dignity and honor of human personhood. Christians have to acknowledge the criticisms raised by contemporary discourses on casteism, racism and, sexism. In order to accept the other, to accept difference, theology should change its universal, fixed, absolute categories of knowledge and values and reorient its theoretical basis to accept the validity of multi-foundational faith, values and practices. If we redefine our worldviews it is possible to see that as stars in relation to galaxies, or galaxies in relation to the universe or universe in relation to multiverse are not necessarily centred on any particular point; the world organism, even the atoms and the subparticles exist only in relationship, one keep the other in its place with their simple presence, mutually influencing and shaping other’s identity. If that relationship is broken the entire universe will collapse. Hence our theologies need to be relational with respect to individuals, communities, genders, races, and all creation, resisting all efforts to subsume the difference or drift away from one another.
Select Bibliography
Ford, David F., ed. The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian theology in the twentieth century. Second edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997. Gellner Ernest. Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London: Routledge, 1992.Danish Yearbook of Philosophy vol 35, 2000. University of Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum press, 2001. Healy, Paul. Rationality, Hermeneutics, and Dialogue: Toward a Viable Postfoundationalist Account of Rationality. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Healy, Paul. Rationality Judgment, and Critical Inquiry,” The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 1:3, 1993. Kamitsuka, David G. Theology and Contemporary Culture: Liberation, Postliberal and Revisionary Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lindbeck, Goeorge A. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and theology in a postliberal age. Philadelphia: John Knox Press, 1984. Nirmal, Arvind P. Heuristic Explorations. Madras: CLS, 1990. Nirmal, Arvind P.ed. A Reader in Dalit Theology, Madras: Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute, 1991. Raj, Vinaya, Y. T. “Poststructructuralist theory of language, discourse, power and resistance and its implications for the re-working of Dalit theological methodology,” M.Th. Thesis submitted to the Senate of Serampore College, 2006. Rorty, Richard. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method .Chicago: University of Chicago press[1967], 1992. Schrag, Calvin. The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge. Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1992. Schwarz, Hans,.Theology in A Global Context: The Last Two Hundred Years Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005. Shults, LeRon, F. The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmaans, 1999. Toulmin, Stephen. The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
1This article is a tribute to the memory of Dr. Prasanna Kumari, who always dared to go beyond rules. “The rules are there to be broken,” I heard her saying in one of our encounters. No rule is final. Rules have to be redefined to suit the new situations. Rules must be formed to facilitate growth of the persons and communities, to build realations, to live together. Nonfoundationalist theories challenge us to question our knowledge foundations and open ourselves to create space for differing view points to exist.

2J.Wentzel van Huyssteen, the James I. McCord Professor of Theology and Science at Princeton Theological Seminary, is a major proponent of postfoundationalist theology. He writes: “For theology today, an all-important focus of its dialogue with contemporary culture is not only the challenge of moving beyond the insular comfort of theological foundationalism but also and precisely its uneasy relationship with the sciences. In fact, as theologians, we are now confronted with a double challenge. First, we have to deal with the postmodern trilemma of trying to keep together, in a meaningful whole, a sense of continuity and tradition, a respect for and celebration of pluralism, and a resistance to any form of authoritarian (also epistemological) domination. This challenge does not call for a benign balancing act but rather for a serious engagement that may entail a radical revisioning of the way we theorize about our most basic Christian commitments.” J.Wentzel van Huyssteen, “Is the Postmodernist Always a Postfoundationalist?” Theology Today, vol.50,No.3 (October, 1993), 373.
3Paul Healy, Rationality, Hermeneutics, and Dialogue: Toward a Viable Postfoundationalist Account of Rationality (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 1.
4F.LeRonShults, The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmaans, 1999), 34.
5Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago press [1967],1992), 9. According to Rorty it was Gustav Bergmann, of the logical positivist school of the Vienna circle, who coined the term, “linguistic turn;” see, Rorty, The Linguistic Turn, p.9. He describes linguistic turn as, “a ‘tedious roundabout,’ because it forces us to attend to word alone, instead of concepts or universals which words signify.”
6Different methodological turns can be identified since the emergence of modernity. Classical foundationalism can be described as turn to the subject. David J kamitsuka is of the opinion that the contemporary revisionary theology represented by David Tracy and Thomas F. Torrance was shaped by the modernity's "turn to the subject, with its view that the person is homo religiousus and its insistence that theology is critical reflection on Christian witness. David G. Kamitsuka, Theology and Contemporary Culture: Liberation, Postliberal and Revisionary Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1999), 3., Liberation theology has made a methodological shift from the "subject" to the "subjugated". Another is a sociological turn where metaphysical objectivity is replaced by sociological subjectivity The turn to sociological subjectivity leads to the rejection of human autonomy. This shift led to the rise liberation theology and varieties of socio-political theologies .The subject, that is, the person, is always part of a larger sociological matrix which includes history, culture, economics, religion, politics, and philosophical worldview. Theology does not "fall from the skies" but is constructed within a complex socio-cultural matrix." Socio-political theologies such as liberation theology from Latin America and minjung theology from Korea, homeland theology from Taiwan, and the theology of struggle from the Philippines, are challenging the official histories of the past and their accompanying theologies. Hegel introduced the category of history and the other in the process of knowing. Husserl and Heidegger established that the nature of reality is not to be found in objective truth but in the phenomenological linguistic event. It was Karl Marx who turned the Hegelian notion of epistemology as a dialectical process of consciousness and history to a product of material relations dialectics between free subject and the structure of society .
7Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. by G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Prentice Hall, 1999). The first edtion was posthumously published in 1953.
8Non-cognition or anupalabdhi of Indian philosophy comes somewhat close to what is meant here. The Upanishadic neti, neti (not this, not this) mainly refer to non-perception of God in Indian epistemology. The Nastika (atheistic) school of Indian philosophy, the Carvakas, accept only perception as valid source of knowledge. R. D. Ranada, A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philisophy (Bombay:Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan,1968), cited by K. P. Aleaz, The Role of Pramanas in Hindu-Christian Epistemology (Calcutta:Punthi-Pusthak, 1991), 96. Aleaz identifies six Indian pramanas (valid sources of knowledge) that can contribute to an appropriate method of doing theology in the Indian context. They are: pratyaksa (perception), anumana (inference), sabda (verbal testimony), upamana (comparison), arthapatti (postulation) and anupalabdhi (non-cognition);.see p. 120. Aleaz writes: …Indian Philosophy through non-cognition recommends apophatic Indian Christian Theology. There are four kinds of non-existence which can be known through the theological method of non-cognition. They are Pragabhava or the absence of the effect (jar) in its material cause (clay) previous to its coming into existence e.g., the absence of Creation in God previous to its coming into existence; dhvasmsabhava is non-existence as represented by destruction e.g., non-existence of jar in broken parts; non-existence of the image of God the broken humanity due to alienation from God; atyantabhava is the absolute non-existence of an object in a locus, e.g., absolute non-existence of evil in God; and anyonabhava is a difference or separateness owing to which we judge ‘A’ is not ‘B’ e.g., the third world is not the first world and vice versa” (pp 128-129).
9 Ze'ev Levy, "On Deconstruction -- Can There Be Any Ultimate Meaning of a Text?" Philosophy and Social Criticism 14, no. 1 (1988): 18
10 Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), 35.
11 Lyotard says,” I define post-modern as incredulity towards metanarratives.” Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: U. Minnesota, 1984) First published in French in 1979.
12 William A. Beardslee, David Ray Griffin Joe Holland, Varieties of Postmodern Theology (Albany:SUNY Press, 1989).
13 Graham Ward, ‘Postmodern Theology” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian theology in the twentieth century, second edition, edited by David F. Ford ( Cambridge, Mass. :Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997) 585-601, 588.
14Graham Ward, “Postmodern Theology” in The Modern Theologians, 589. For Mark C. Taylor, who coined the term “a/theology,” it is a post ecclesiastical theology, where theology and anthropology merge and “religious studies become a subset of cultural studies, even aesthetics, and transcendence issues only within immanence” Ibid., 590.
15 George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine : Religion and theology in a postliberal age (Philadelphia: John Knox Press, 1984).
16 Graham Ward, ‘Postmodern Theology” in The Modern Theologians, 589. 993
17John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1993).
18See William C. Placher, “Postliberal Theology in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian theology in the twentieth century, second edition, edited by David F. Ford ( Cambridge, Mass. : Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997), 343-356.
19Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated promise (Notre Dame, IN, 1985). 158; cited by William C. Placher, “Postliberal Theology" in The Modern Theologians, 344.
20Karl Barth, CD I/1: The Doctrine of the Word of God, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Clark, 1986), xiii.
21George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine : Religion and theology in a postliberal age (Philadelphia: Westminster, John Knox Press, 1984); also see William C. Placher, “Postliberal Theology,” in David F. Ford, ed., The Modern Theologians, 343 –356.
22 William C. Placher, “Postliberal Theology,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian theology in the twentieth century, second edition, edited by David F. Ford ( Cambridge, Mass. : Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997), 344-5.
23Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative (New Haven, 1974), 99; cited in William C. Placher, “Postliberal Theology in The Modern Theologians, 344-5.
24 David G. Kamitsuka, Theology and Contemporary ulture: Liberation, Postliberal and Revisionary Perspectives ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3.
25 William C. Placher, “Postliberal Theology,” in The Modern Theologians, 353; Kathryn Tanner, God and the Doctrine of Creation (New York: Blackwell, 1990).
26 Shults, The Postfoundationalist, 78.
27 Ibid., 80-81.
28 The Mark Bevir, “Postfoundationalism and Social Democracy” Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, vol. 35, 2000 ( University of Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum press, 2001), 8.
29Shults, The Postfoundationalist, .65.
30 Mark Bevir, “Postfoundationalism and Social Democracy,” Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, vol , 2000 ( University of Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2001), 9.
31 Tom Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol.1. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992, 560..
32F. Le Ron Shults, The Postfoundationalistic Task of theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality (Grand Rapid, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 46, 79.
33Calvin Schrag, The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) 166; Shults, The Postfoundationalist, 65.
34 Shults, The Postfoundationalist, 64.
35 Y. T. Vinaya Raj, “Poststructructuralist theory of language, discourse, power and resistance and its implications for the re-working of Dalit theological methodology,” M.Th. Thesis submitted to the Senate of Serampore College, 2006, p.53, 64. Vinaya Rraj, a Dalit scholar, observes that Dalit theology followed “the salient features of the liberal humanism and the theoretical framework of the project of modernity .”
36Arvind P. Nirmal, Heuristic Explorations (Madras: CLS, 1990) 106. Nirmal made pioneering contributions to the academic discussions on Dalit theology while he was the head of the Department of Dalit Theology in Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute, Chennai.
37Hans Schwarz, Theology in A Global Context: The Last Two Hundred Years (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans 2005), 529.
38Arvind P. Nirmal, “Towards a Christian Dalit Theology,” in A Reader in Dalit Theology, ed. Arvind P. Nirmal (Madras: Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute, 1991), 54.
39Vinaya Raj observes: Caste “as an episteme was a product of Brahmanic-Hindu epistemology.” “Brahminism upheld its hegemonic social position, by constructing certain knowledges and disciplinary practices.” “It is paradoxical that though Dalit theology criticizes the Euro-centric worldview, it shows an ambivalent relation to the European Enlightenment project.” Y. T. Vinaya Raj, “Poststructructuralist theory of language, p.53.
40 Y. T. Vinayraj, “Poststructructuralist theory of language, 74.
41 Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 133.
42 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 134.
43 Colin Gunton, “Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of the Imago Dei,” Persons, divine and Human. King's College Essays in Theological Anthropology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark,1992), 56.
44 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), 347ff.
45Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 131.

The Bible and Psychology

2010-07-01T17:59:00.000-07:00

The Bible and Psychology

The first is the fear-anxiety-apprehension syndrome. The world is caught up in this to a great degree because it says, "There is no help for mankind---this is a meaningless universe." The world cares nothing for the individual who is only a number, and though each individual is a unique person there is really no help for that person. Each individual is just one of billions of other people. We live in an amoral world that is hostile to the individual. Therefore, because of this we have fears, anxieties, and apprehensions, as to what is coming.

The second set of emotions that bothers us is the anger-hostility-hated syndrome, since basically we are afraid. This is a cover up, and thus we exhibit our fears which come out through anger, hostility, and hatred. And hostility is the direct action to powerlessness in one's life because of what he fears. This bothers the Christian as well as the non-Christian.

The third set of emotions that we are plagued with is that of the depression-guilt-psychic pain syndrome. It is interesting to note that the majority of people that occupy hospital beds are there not because of physical illness, but because of emotional, mental and psychological problems. If as human beings we could be rid of these, there would be plenty of beds in all hospitals today. It is an abiding sorrow that bothers every individual. For the non-Christian, it is an unconsciousness sense of guilt, though that person may not acknowledge or recognize it. For the Christian it may be unconfessed sin which therefore leads to depression and guilt feelings.

The fourth set of emotions that bothers us is what may be termed as destructive egotism. This is another form of fear; "I am myself, I have an ego, and I have desire to have it built up to a certain degree. And yet in my desires to have my ego built up, there is also a certain amount of fear, and so I am trying to balance my fears with my ego as an individual," and that gives everyone problems.

Over against these four sets of adverse emotions needs to be fulfilled, else these destructive tendencies will overcome us as human beings. This is where the principles of God's Word are highly focused in the book of Philippians. In brief, they can be pointed out as follows:

The first emotional need that we have to be fulfilled is that of affection---to love and to be loved. Every baby born into the world desires this. Sometime ago, an experiment was made in Colorado, in which a doctor took a group of unwanted babies who had been abandoned. He found that within a year the majority of them died. Yes, they were well cared for and they were fed, and the nurses looked after them; but they died because they lacked affection and love, because every human being needs this. This is why God gave to us mothers, to breast-feed babies, not only for the benefit of the mother's milk that the baby receives, but for that sense of security that the baby gets as it is held in it's mother's arms. That is something that no bottle will ever accomplish, and every human being needs this affection not only as babies, but for the rest of one's life.

The second emotion that needs to be fulfilled is that of acceptance---of who one is, and each individual's unique character. We need to feel accepted by other people. This is part of our community of being together.

The third emotion is that of appreciation---to have a favorable critical estimate made of one's self: A certain kind of approbation, a slap on the back for a good job well done. We give medals, letters of commendation, watches, appreciation banquets---we pass out awards and rewards, and various sorts of things. Why? Because we all need it. We need to be appreciated.

The fourth emotion that all need is that of achievement---not only a sense of satisfaction or accomplishment, but also that which is praiseworthy, so when we achieve a certain goal there comes a certain amount of appreciation for that achievement, and it makes us feel good, so we desire it.

The Old Testament and the Sanctity of Life | CBHD.org

2010-06-30T03:58:00.000-07:00

The Old Testament and the Sanctity of Life | CBHD.org
One of the most important contributions of the Old Testament creation theology is its implicit universality. Those familiar with the Bible tend to take this universality for granted, but it is an enormously important dimension of Old Testament creation theology and must not be overlooked. Consider the fact that all references to humanity in the early Genesis narratives are references to all humanity. God says, “Let us make humankind in our image.” This explicitly includes “male and female” (Gen. 1:26-27), and implicitly includes every male and female. The shedding of anyone’s blood is banned in Genesis 9:5-6 on the basis of everyone’s status as the image of God. Delegation of dominion is extended to all humans—William Brown describes this as the “democratization of royalty in the creation account”—such that we are all kings.1 Psalm 8 reflects on the “glory and honor” with which humanity as such is “crowned.” There is no hierarchy offered here between subcategories of human beings: Jew or non-Jew, male or female, young or old, slave or free, sick or well, friend or enemy (cf. Galatians 3, where Paul can be taken to argue that this original human egalitarianism has been renewed in Christ). The fact that such distinctions dominate much of human history and even creep into biblical law and narrative represents a weakening of this implicitly egalitarian and universalizing theology of creation.2 There is but one God who makes one humanity. This is a non-negotiable element of biblical creation theology.

The oneness of humanity in part results from our common origin not just in one Creator God but in one shared ancestor. The creation narrative found in Genesis 2 tells a story in which God begins to create humanity by creating one person first. Here the older, less gender-sensitive English style actually helps us: God creates “man[kind]” by creating “a man.” The first woman is then formed out of the first man. From them come absolutely everyone else. Paul put it this way at Mars Hill: “From one he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26). Paul actually offers a wordplay here—from enos (one) to ethnos (nations/peoples). However unlike each other the different ethnoi may seem, we came from the same place. From one person, came all people. One might say that Genesis 1 teaches the universality of the imago Dei, and Genesis 2 teaches a primal human unity by narrating a story in which all human beings come from one common ancestor. In our origins, we are one race—the human race.

Doctrine of Man in the Old Testament

2010-06-30T03:45:00.000-07:00

Doctrine of Man in the Old Testament
Throughout the OT the relationship of man to nature is everywhere stressed. As man shares with nature share with man in the actualities of his living. Thus, while nature was made to serve man, so man on his part is required to tend nature (Gen. 2:15). Nature is therefore not a sort of neutral entity in relation to man's life. For between the two, nature and man, there exists a mysterious bond so that when man sinned the natural order was itself deeply afflicted (Gen. 3:17 - 18; cf. Rom. 8:19 - 23). Since, however, nature suffered as a result of man's sin, so does it rejoice with him in his redemption (Ps. 96:10 - 13; Isa. 35, etc.), for in man's redemption it too will share (Isa. 11:6 - 9).

But however deeply related man is to the natural order, he is presented nonetheless as something different and distinctive. Having first called the earth into existence with its various requisites for human life, God then declared for the making of man. The impression that the Genesis account gives is that man was the special focus of God's creative purpose. It is not so much that man was the crown of God's creative acts, or the climax of the process, for although last in the ascending scale, he is first in the divine intention. All the previous acts of God are presented more in the nature of a continuous series by the recurring use of the conjunction "and" (Gen. 1:3, 6, 9, 14, 20, 24). "Then God said, 'Let us make man.'" "Then", when? When the cosmic order was finished, when the earth was ready to sustain man. Thus, while man stands before God in a relationship of created dependence, he has also the status of a unique and special personhood in relation to God.

Man's constituents
The three most significant words in the OT to describe man in relation to God and nature are "soul" (nepes, 754 times), "spirit" (ruah, 378 times), and "flesh" (basar, 266 times). The term "flesh" has sometimes a physical and sometimes a figuratively ethical sense. In its latter use it has its context in contrast with God to emphasize man's nature as contingent and dependent (Isa. 31:3; 40:6; Pss. 61:5; 78:39; Job 10:4). Both nepes and ruah denote in general the life principle of the human person, the former stressing more particularly his individuality, or life, and the latter focusing on the idea of a supernatural power above or within the individual.
Of the eighty parts of the body mentioned in the OT the terms for "heart" (leb), "liver" (kabed), "kidney" (kelayot), and "bowels" (me'im) are the most frequent. To each of these some emotional impulse or feeling is attributed either factually or metaphorically. The term "heart" has the widest reference. It is brought into relation with man's total phychical nature as the seal or instrument of his emotional, volitional, and intellectual manifestations. In the latter context it acquires a force we should call "mind" (Deut. 15:9; Judg. 5:15 - 16) or "intellect" (Job 8:10; 12:3; 34:10), and is frequently employed by metonymy to denote one's thought or wish with the idea of purpose or resolve. For one's thought or wish is what is "in the heart," or, as would be said today, "in the mind."

These several words do not, however, characterize man as a compound of separate and distinct elements. Hebrew psychology does not divide up man's nature into mutually exclusive parts. Behind these usages of words the thought conveyed by the Genesis account, that man's nature is twofold, remains. Yet even there man is not presented as a loose union of two disparate entities. There is no sense of a metaphysical dichotomy, while even that of an ethical dualism of soul and body is quite foreign to Hebrew thought. By God's inbreathing the man he formed from the dust became a living soul, a unified being in the interrelation of the terrestrial and the transcendental

The Old Testament View of Human Nature

2010-06-29T23:57:00.000-07:00

The Old Testament View of Human Nature

No age knows so much and so many things about human nature as does ours, yet no age knows less about what man really is. Having lost their awareness of God, many people today are concerned primarily with their present existence. The loss of awareness of God makes many people uncertain about the meaning of life, because it is only in reference to God and His revelation that the nature and destiny of human life can be truly understood.

The question of human nature has been a consistent concern in the history of Western thought. In chapter 1 we noted that, historically, most Christians have defined human nature dualistically, that it consists of a material, mortal body and an immaterial, immortal soul which survives the body at death. Beginning with the Enlightenment (a philosophic movement of the 18th century), attempts have been made to define man as a machine that is part of a giant cosmic machine. Human beings hopelessly are trapped within a deterministic universe and their behavior is determined by such impersonal and involuntary forces as genetic factors, chemical secretions, education, upbringing, and societal conditioning. People do not have an immaterial, immortal soul, only a mortal, material body that is conditioned by the determinism of the cosmic machine.

This depressing materialistic view that reduces human beings to the status of a machine or an animal negates the Biblical view of man created in the image of God. Instead of being "like God," human beings are reduced to being "like an animal." Perhaps as a response to this pessimistic view, various modern pseudo-pagan cults and ideologies (like the New Age) deify human beings. Man is neither "like an animal" or "like God," he is god. He has inner divine power and resources that await to be unleashed. This new humanistic gospel is popular today because it challenges people to seek salvation within themselves by tapping into and releasing the powers and resources that slumber within.

What we are experiencing today is a violent swing of the pendulum from an extreme materialistic view of human nature to an extreme mystic, deification view. In this context, people are confronted with two choices: Either human beings are nothing but preprogrammed machines, or they are divine with unlimited potential. The Christian response to this challenge is to be sought in the Holy Scriptures which provide the basis for defining our beliefs and practices. Our study shows that Scripture teaches we are neither preprogrammed machines nor divine beings with unlimited potential. We are creatures created in the image of God, and dependent upon Him for our existence in this world and in the world to come.

New Book on Moltmann:Exodus Church and Civil Society

2009-02-02T16:12:00.000-08:00

Exodus Church and Civil Society
http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Thinking-Religion-Theology-Biblical/dp/0754662012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233616178&sr=8-1

This book investigates the intersection of theology and social theory in the work of Jurgen Moltmann. In particular, it examines the way in which his concept of the 'Exodus Church' can illuminate the importance of the idea of civil society for a Christian public theology. The concept of civil society can aid in moving from the narrower category of 'political theology,' a term used frequently by Moltmann to emphasize the church's public commitment, to a broader understanding of theology's public task, which takes into account the plurality of ends and institutions within society. The idea of the Exodus Church enables deeper understanding of Christian ethical participation within a complex modern society.

About the Author
Scott R. Paeth is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University, USA.
Product Details
Hardcover: 250 pages
Publisher: Ashgate (October 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0754662012
ISBN-13: 978-0754662013

Roger Haight Ordered by Vatican to stop teaching, publishing

2009-01-28T21:42:00.000-08:00

Rome orders Roger Haight to stop teaching, publishing

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR., NCR Staff

Published:

Jan. 5, 2009

Roger HaightAmerican Jesuit theologian Fr. Roger Haight, whose writing on Christ and non-Christian religions was censured by the Vatican in 2005 for causing “grave harm to the faithful,” has been ordered by Rome to stop teaching and publishing on theological subjects.

Sources told NCR that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal agency, communicated the restrictions to the Jesuits in spring 2008. They apparently came amid back-and-forth discussions involving the Vatican, the Jesuit leadership in Rome, and the order’s New York province. Among other steps, Jesuit officials in America reportedly had consulted the late Jesuit Cardinal Avery Dulles in an effort to resolve the concerns. Read it all

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY, S.J. comments :

I am sure you know about the case against his Jesus Symbol of God and the Notification several years back. Since then Fr Haight, moved from teaching at the (then) Weston Jesuit School of Theology, has continued his writing, and also taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, a Protestant seminary. But now, he is barred from further theological writing and from teaching, even at Union. The reason, it seems, is that he is not willing to recant and disown what he wrote in Jesus Symbol of God.
Now, as I have just said, it is von Balthasar I love to read, and he is the one I find inspiring to me in my interreligious, comparative theology. While I admire the solidity and clarity of Fr Haight’s writing,Jesus Symbol of God but also his other works too, it is not the kind of theology that helps me very much in the work I do. I also recall that when Fr Haight’s book came out, it quickly became a hot topic in theology, and the early reviews of it were quite varied, some positive, and some quite critical of this or that aspect of the book. I recall hearing Fr Haight speak about reactions to the book at the Catholic Theological Society annual meeting one year. Even at that point, there were some 25 or 30 reviews of it (the author in me dies of envy), and many of them engaged in the academic delight and duty of giving Fr Haight a hard time. I have taught the chapter of it on world religions in my classes, first at Boston College, and now at Harvard, and while there are things I admire greatly in the chapter, both my students and I found cause to quarrel with the book and the way in which Fr Haight explains the relation of Christ, Christianity, and the world religions. Read it all here

Gutiérrez speaks of the theocentric nature of liberation theology

2009-01-27T18:57:00.000-08:00

Liberation theologian says hope takes work

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Published: October 30, 2008

Dominican Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez speaking at DePaul Univeristy Oct. 30 (Photo by David V. Kamba)
Conference marks 40 years of 'preferential option for the poor'

Chicago

Hope isn’t synonymous with just sitting around waiting for something good to happen, the widely acknowledged father of Latin American liberation theology said this morning. Instead, it implies concrete effort in daily life to generate reasons for that hope.

“Hope is a gift, but you don’t receive that gift if you’re not creating resources for it,” Dominican Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez said this morning in Chicago. “Reasons for hope don’t just drop from the sky. They come from below, from what people are doing or not doing.”

Gutiérrez, a Peruvian, spoke this morning at a conference titled “Transformed by Hope: Building a Catholic Social Theology for the Americas,” sponsored by the Catholic Theological Union and DePaul University.

The conference marks the 40th anniversary of the famous meeting of the Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, which gave rise to the Catholic church’s “preferential option for the poor” -- a social commitment recently reaffirmed during the 2007 conference of the Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil. Coincidentally, 2008 also marks 35 years since the first translation of Gutiérrez’s famous book, A Theology of Liberation, into English. More

Gustavo Gutiérrez - Biography

2009-01-22T13:07:00.000-08:00

Encyclopedia of World Biography on Gustavo Gutiérrez

The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez (born 1928) was known as the father of liberation theology.

Gustavo Gutiérrez was born in the Monserrat barrio of Lima, Peru, on June 8, 1928. He was a mestizo, part Hispanic and part Quechuan Indian. He had polio as a boy and spent most of his teenage years in bed. This experience motivated him to begin training for a career in medicine, but along the way he decided instead to become a Roman Catholic priest. Because of his outstanding work in theology, the church sent him to do graduate work in Europe, at Louvain (Belgium), Lyons (France), and the Gregorian (Italy).

On his return to Lima to begin work as a priest and teacher, he discovered that the "classical" formation he had received in Europe had not equipped him to deal with the needs of the poor and oppressed in Latin America. Three discoveries in particular were important. First, instead of seeing poverty as a "virtue," or at least something to be accepted by Christians, he came to see poverty as something destructive that must always be opposed. Second, instead of seeing poverty as the result of laziness or bad luck, he came to see it not as accidental but structural, something that society conspires to ensure, so that there will always be enough poor people to keep wages down. Third, instead of accepting poverty as inevitable, he came to see that the poor were a social class and could organize to bring about change.

Re-reading the Bible in the course of making these discoveries, he realized that the God of the Bible makes "a preferential option for the poor," rather than (as the institutional church so often implied) for the rich. God loves all persons, but has a special concern for the victims, and sides with them in their struggle for justice. The true concern of both the Bible and the Christian tradition, Gutiérrez came to feel, is the promise of liberation, a three-fold liberation from unjust social structures, from a sense of fate, and from personal sin and guilt.

These concerns received his powerful expression in what became the most influential theological work in the 1970s and 1980s, A Theology of Liberation (1971; reissued with a new introduction in 1988). The prominence of this book led many to describe Gutiérrez as "the father of liberation theology," a description he disavowed because, as he insisted, a theology of liberation is not the work of the experts but of "the people," meaning the poor people for whom he was simply the one to write a book about what he had learned from them.

The main themes of liberation theology are congruent with the themes of the Christian tradition, save that they are always seen "from the underside of history," namely, from the perspective of the poor and oppressed. There has been "an irruption of the poor" challenging the unjust structures of society and the church when either becomes a defender of the status quo rather than the champion of its victims. God is the God of the poor, Jesus Christ is "God become poor" in a Galilean carpenter, and the Holy Spirit is the power of God on the side of transformation. All this is particularly evident in the "base communities," small groups within the church who combine Bible study with involvement for change. Over a hundred thousand base communities sprang up in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.

Because liberation theology means, among other things, a challenge to the authorities, there was heavy opposition from those same authorities. Those holding power killed thousands of priests and lay people for siding with the poor and seeking to improve their lives. Gutiérrez himself was attacked from within the church by those who did not want the church to be on the side of change. A familiar charge in the 1970s was that he and liberation theologians like him were Marxist, seeking to transform Christianity into nothing but left-wing politics. The charge was unpersuasive to any who had actually read his writings or examined his life, and by 1990 this criticism was receding from the scene.

Gutiérrez was essentially a parish priest in Rimac, a slum area of Lima near where he grew up. But his writings made him a world figure, and he occasionally visited the United States and Europe to speak and teach. The fullness of the faith he thus communicated was further evident in such later works as We Drink From Our Own Wells (1984), in which he described a "spirituality of liberation" and argued that the two terms could not be understood apart from each other. His book On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (1987) distinguishes two types of "God-talk," prophetic language about God that stressed the need for justice in human affairs, and mystical or contemplative language addressed to God, a language of praise and relationship. He contended that the two forms of speech were essentially one.

While his later writings were less overtly "political" than his earlier ones, they nevertheless served to make the basis for political involvement increasingly firm. They mined the resources of scripture and tradition for fuller understanding of the God of the Hebrew prophets and of Jesus Christ, a God who, rather than being remote and uninvolved, is found "in the midst" of the world and the suffering of God's people. Thus, Gutiérrez affirmed that human effort for social justice contributes to laying of the groundwork for the Kingdom of God, which is ultimately God's gift rather than a human achievement.

Gutiérrez spent 20 years writing Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ, the story of the early Spanish missionary Bartolome de Las Casas, which was released in the mid-1990s. During this time he also alienated some Peruvian feminists by saying that feminism was alien to Latin America. Critics argued that this showed he was losing touch and dividing communities. link

Viewing The Bible Through The Eyes And Ears of Subalterns In India

2009-01-13T03:07:00.000-08:00

by Sathianathan Clarke

................
In this paper, the term Subalterns refers to the last two groups, namely, the Dalits and the Adivasis. But before I proceed further, a brief word on the background of the term ‘subaltern" may be in order. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist writing to counter Fascism in 1920s and 1930s, popularized the term. He substituted it for the commonly accepted term "proletarian class." In India, this term has been brought to the center of critical scholarship by the Subaltern Studies Collective writing since 1982 on South Asian history and society from a "subaltern perspective." In the Preface to Subaltern Studies, Volume I, Ranajit Guha proposes the following definition: "The word ‘subaltern’. . . stands for the meaning as given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, that is, ‘of inferior rank.’ It will be used . . . as a name for the general attitude of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way."11 In a clarificatory note, at the end of this same Preface, he further opines, "The terms ‘people’ and ‘subaltern classes’ have been used synonymous throughout this note. The social groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the elite."12 While I have no objections to this general trend to rewrite history and write about society from a people’s viewpoint, my own use of the term is confined to the Dalit and Adivasi communities in India. In the most general of ways they can be taken to be the labouring people who are not the elite of India. They stiffer multiple disadvantages. In the words of the World Development Report 2000/2001, "Evidence from India shows that scheduled castes [Dalits] and scheduled tribes [Adivasis] face a higher risk of poverty. These are among the structural poor who not only lack economic resources but whose poverty is strongly linked to social identity, as determined mostly by caste."13 Thus, the term Subalterns is utilized to allude to those communities, which were outside the Hindu-based caste system (Dalits and Adivasis or Tribals). Dalits number about one hundred and eighty to two hundred million and Adivasis number about eighty-five to ninety million in the population that has touched the one billion mark. In this paper, I have consciously avoided talking of the Subaltern, as if it is one phenomenon. Rather, in order to integrate the awareness that this tern connotes multiple realities, having many context-specific variations, I employ the plural, that is, Subalterns. And yet I opt for the one common term mainly to reflect the history of solidarity that is emerging between Dalit and Adivasi communities. In the end, Subalterns’ scholarship finds strategic rather than essential reasons to project a common identity for the differing strands of Dalit and Adivasi communities in India.

II. Subalterns’ Viewing of the Bible Accentuates the Domestic, the Local, and the Particular

Subalternity is characterized by the primary interplay of domestic, local and particular mechanisms of colonialism. Despite all the caveats that are built into the postcolonial biblical discourse, I find that "postcolonial" is somewhat of a modern marker, which takes its multiple birthings from a common master narrative. Thus, postcolonialism tends to deal with the diverse variants of a grand narrative: East-West, North-South, European-Asian, and Empire-Native subjects.

Of course, there is a struggle to break free of this Orientalist trapping. And yet one cannot get away from the fact that there is a divide between the local or national context and an international or global context. Thus knowledge about the local and the particular is framed, and being framed, within the overall dynamics of this international/transnational world. In the domain of Asian biblical studies let me cite the example of R.S. Sugirtharajah. From one angle, his description of postcolonialism relocates its interrogatory activity well beyond the domestic and the local. Thus he suggests, "The current postcolonial criticism takes the critique of Eurocentricism as its central task . . . negatively put, postcolonialism is not about historical stages or periodization. Neither is it about lowering the flags of the Empire and wrapping oneself with new national flags. Positively, it signifies three things -- representation, identity, and a reading posture, emerging among the former victims of colonialism."14 This line of argument is further picked tip in another article, which functions as a sort of Preface for The Post-colonial Bible. Here Sugirtharajah attempts to allow representatives from various former colonies to boldly and engagingly talk back to their Eurocentric colonizers. He reiterates the west/north/colonial -- east/south/colonized feature of the bilateral dialogue pointed to earlier: "What postcolonialism does is to enable us to question the totalizing tendencies of European reading practices and interpret the texts on their own terms and read them from our specific locations. 15 Interestingly, much of the "us" and the "our" doing this reading is projected in nation-state terms. Read it all from Religion on line

Richard John Neuhaus Lutheran turned Catholic intellectual passed away on 08 Jan 2009 at the age of 72

2009-01-10T07:21:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK (AP) — Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a leading intellectual of the Christian right who helped build a new coalition of conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics and informally advised President George W. Bush, died Thursday. He was 72.

Neuhaus died from the side effects of cancer treatment, said Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, a journal of religion and public policy that Neuhaus founded.

A one-time Lutheran minister, Neuhaus led a predominantly African-American congregation in New York in the 1960s, advocating for civil rights and protesting the Vietnam War. With Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, the Catholic peace activist, Neuhaus led the anti-war group Clergy Concerned About Vietnam.

He later broke with the left, partly over the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling legalizing abortion. He converted to Catholicism in 1990, and a year later was ordained a priest.

He then worked to break down the historic mistrust between evangelicals and Catholics over their theological differences, helping build the coalition of churchgoers across faith traditions who became key to Republican electoral victories in recent years. source

Neuhaus has been Columbia's intellectual superstar you've never heard of. You've never written a paper for him, you've never checked his CULPA reviews, and you've certainly never shown up late to one of his classes. This is because Neuhaus's lectures are delivered not from a Hamilton Hall lectern, but from the pulpit in St. Paul's Chapel. Every Sunday for the past four spring semesters, Father Neuhaus has made his way uptown from his parish on 14^th Street to say the 5 PM Mass at Columbia.

"Lecture" is a loose way of describing what Neuhaus does — but not that loose. The Catholic priest is an orator of Roman proportions — with a stentorian voice, perfect sense of timing, and a knack for rhetorical flourish. The sermons themselves are peppered through with references to great works of theology, philosophy, and literature—classic and contemporary. All are variations on a theme: "the attractiveness of the high adventure of Catholic faithfulness," as he puts it. They are recorded and archived on the Columbia Catholic Ministry's web site for the greater listening public.

Neuhaus's relationship with Columbia is also a variation on a theme: his status as a maverick intellectual. When New York Magazine named the top five intellectual movers and shakers in Manhattan, they grouped Father Neuhaus with Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia physics professor Brian Greene, NYU law professor Noah Feldman, and CUNY philosopher Saul Kripke; Neuhaus is the only one who does not teach at a university. Neuhaus is famous not only as speaker, but as the Editor-in-Chief of First Things, which is — as the New York Times put it, and First Things re-put it on their subscription cards — "the spiritual nerve center of the new conservatism." The monthly magazine of religion, politics, and culture is indeed the place to find top-notch conservative thought presented for a general reading audience. This is the work of impresario-Neuhaus. Once a far left-wing Lutheran minister, he re-emerged in the 1990s as a conservative Catholic priest and founder of First Things. more

Dr Paul Nimmo gets the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise 2009

2009-01-10T07:05:00.000-08:00

Edinburgh University lecturer is top young theologian

09 January 2009

A CITY lecturer has been named as one of the most promising young theologians in the world.

Dr Paul Nimmo, who works at Edinburgh University, has been awarded a 2009 John Templeton Award for Theological Promise for his work on the ethics of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth.

Dr Nimmo will receive a prize of $10,000 plus additional funds of up to $10,000 to pay for public lectures at universities around the world.

He will receive the prize at a ceremony at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in May.

Established in 2005, the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise is given annually to twelve young scholars in any area of religious studies, for the best doctoral thesis or best first book related to the topic of God and spirituality.

Dr Nimmo's award was in recognition of his recent book Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth's Ethical Vision, which arose out of his doctoral research carried out at Edinburgh. source

A Time for Confessing

2008-12-16T17:44:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-12T20:34:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-10T18:03:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-24T03:12:00.000-08:00

Alvin Planitnga on line methodology papers

Packer and Bloesch compared

2008-11-13T17:10:00.000-08:00

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
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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

2008-11-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

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).

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.

2008-11-03T06:59:00.001-08:00

Paul F. Knitter bibliography

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

2008-10-31T16:19:00.000-07:00

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.

read it all

More books from Rowan Williams

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

2008-10-31T15:48:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-26T22:44:00.000-07:00

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).

read it all

How to read Karl Barth: George Hunsinger

2008-10-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

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.

read it all

Book Review: Public Theology in Cultural Engagement

2008-10-26T22:32:00.000-07:00

« Website for McDonald Centre | Main

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)

2008-10-26T02:05:00.000-07:00

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.

[hide]

[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

One can imagine a being than which none greater can be conceived.
We know that existence in reality is greater than existence in the mind alone.
If the being we imagine exists only in our mind, then it is not a "being than which none greater can be conceived".
A being than which none greater can be conceived must also exist in reality.
Failure to exist in reality would be failure to be a being than which none greater can be conceived.
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 18^th 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

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Godless Theology by Jurgen Moltmann

2008-10-24T22:46:00.000-07:00

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.
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The Revelation of God in Eastern and Western theology

2008-10-17T21:06:00.000-07:00

The crucial difference

Queer Theology

2008-10-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western body
Gerard Loughlin, editor

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

2008-10-15T18:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-13T20:26:00.000-07:00

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

Bonhoeffer's Christology

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

2008-10-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

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

M. M. Thomas and Raymon Panikkar

2008-09-22T00:05:00.000-07:00

M M Thomas and Panikkar

Ecumenical Hermeneutics by Rudolf von Sinner

2008-09-21T23:36:00.001-07:00

ecumenical hermeneutics is meant to serve the "specific task of focusing on how texts, symbols and practices in the various churches may be interpreted, communicated and mutually received as the churches engage in dialogue. In this sense it is a hermeneutics for the unity of the Church." (ibid.)7 It is ecumenical because of the space in which it is being applied, that is, where churches are in dialogue about the interpretation, communication and reception of texts, symbols and practices. At the same time, it alms at the unity of the Church, a unity which, however, is not being defined more precisely.

On the basis of this definition, the study paper expounds in three points what such an ecumenical hermeneutics should be able to produce. (1) It should "aim at greater coherence in the interpretation of the faith and in the community of all believers as their voices unite in common praise of God". (2) It should "make possible a mutually recognizable (re)appropriation of the sources of the Christian faith". (3) Finally, it should "prepare ways of common confession and prayer in spirit and truth" (para. 6). Therefore, it aims at being a hermeneutics of coherence. As the (One) Church is, in itself, a hermeneutical community, in which the churches are in dialogue with one another, each church has, at least, to suppose that the Spirit can also speak in the other church and, through her, speak to oneself. Thus, the study also mentions a hermeneutics of confidence, a term new to the published study text compared to its earlier versions, which presumes in the other a "right intention of faith" (para. 30). It is made clear, at the same time, that the study paper does not refer to a romantic notion of understanding and agreement without any criticism. It also implies a hermeneutics of suspicion "which perceives how self-interest, power, national or ethnic or class or gender perspectives can affect the reading of texts and the understanding of symbols and practices" (para. 28). I shall return to this threefold hermeneutics -- of coherence, confidence, suspicion -- in the concluding chapter of this article. ...> More

Raymon Panikkar by GERARD HALL

2008-09-21T23:29:00.000-07:00

Australian Association for the Study of Religions

Annual Conference 4th - 6th July 2003

Multi-Faith Centre, Griffith University

Multi-Faith Dialogue in Conversation with Raimon Panikkar

GERARD HALL sm

Abstract

Raimon Panikkar (1918- ) has deliberated on principles and practices of multi-faith dialogue for over half a century. The presentation will focus on Panikkar’s experience of Christian-Hindu, Christian-Buddhist and Christian-Secularist dialogue. It will outline his “rules of the game” for interreligious dialogue and intercultural encounter. Attention will be drawn to his distinct levels of religious discourse identified as mythos, logos and symbol. Panikkar’s more adventurous proposal for the meeting of the world’s religious and cultural traditions will be introduced through elucidation of his “cosmotheandric vision” of reality—what he now calls “the radical trinity” of cosmic matter, human consciousness and divine freedom. The conversation will conclude with an overall assessment of Panikkar’s contribution to contemporary thinking on multi-faith dialogue and religious pluralism.

The Primacy of Experience: Introducing Panikkar

Born in Barcelona (1918) to a Catalan Catholic mother and an Indian Hindu father, Raimon Panikkar has dedicated his life to interfaith and intercultural dialogue. His approach is also interdisciplinary attested to by his three doctorates in philosophy, science (Madrid University) and theology (Lateran University). In the late forties, Panikkar was ordained a Catholic priest and in the early fifties first left for India where he undertook studies in Indian philosophy and religion (University of Mysore and Varanasi). For the next fifty years Panikkar's academic posts oscillated between professorships in European, Indian and North American universities. Panikkar is currently Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but lives in Tavertet, outside Barcelona, where he continues to study, pray and write. He has also married (at seventy), continues to minister as a Catholic priest, but conceives of himself as a monk.

Panikkar has published some forty books and four hundred academic articles in a variety of fields and languages. Among these, his works on The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, The Trinity and Religious Experience, Worship and Secular Man, The Vedic Experience, Myth Faith and Hermeneutics, The Intra-religious Dialogue and The Cosmotheandric Experience mark him out as a significant religious scholar. Anthologies of important essays include The Invisible Harmony and A Dwelling Place for Wisdom. What he calls his final word, The Rhythm of Being, based on his 1989 Gifford Lectures, is still in process. ......> More

Thomas Forsyth Torrance: Self-Revealing God

2008-09-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

Knowledge of the Self-Revealing God in the Thought of Thomas Forsyth Torrance
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 1999 by Flett, Eric G

Knowledge of the Self-Revealing God in the Thought of Thomas Forsyth Torrance. By John Douglas Morrison. Issues in Systematic Theology Vol. 2. New York: Peter Lang, 1997, 386 pp., n.p.

Titles are getting cumbersome of late, but don't let this one put you off. Morrison's work is a well-organized and clear exposition of Professor Torrance's theological epistemology.

Morrison's fundamental concern is that Torrance's efforts to eliminate dualist thought from his own theological project have fallen prey to an internal inconsistency. Torrance has his theological mentors (Kierkegaard and Barth) to blame for a transcendentalism which "has forced a schism within his theological thinking so that a gulf is found finally to exist between divine and human at the point of space-time relation in the world" (p. 319). As a result the only meeting point where divine and human knowing may coincide is through an "existential Word-event." This Wordevent is a timeless encounter where "the knowing subject's historical existence and very humanity [are] finally lost or reduced as one is lifted up to the Word transcendentally beyond the historical domain of the existing self" (p. 317). Kierkegaard, Barth and Torrance's conception of "the way, the place, the mode, and the nature of the Word of God in our history" (p. 317) is in need of re-thinking. Their conception carries with it an implicit imperative that God can only be known directly and personally via a supra-historical event-encounter with God.

Morrison finds this to be inconsistent with Torrance's stated objective to offer a unitary and realist theological paradigm and offers a corrective of his own, drawing on the thought of John Calvin and, to a lesser extent, Hans Frei.

Taking an important cue from the research of Ray S. Anderson, conducted twentythree years ago under Torrance's supervision, he draws in the idea of "historical transcendence" and ties it to Calvin's understanding of Scripture. Scripture is the 'inspired' interaction, response, witness and interpretation" of the eternal Word's incarnate reality (p. 330) and as such participates onotologically, through the ministry of the Spirit, in the movement of divine disclosure. Contra Torrance, whose position forces him to understand Scripture as a "disposable conduit," Morrison wants to expand the Barthian understanding of revelation as Being-Act and Act-Being to incorporate Scripture. The result would be Being-Act-Interpretation (Scripture). This upholds the transcendence of God while still providing a concrete point in human history for the divine-human relation. Like the Word made flesh, Scripture should be understood analogically and functionally as "kenotic" (p. 332). Torrance's tendency to downplay Scripture as the conduit of revelation is then drawn alongside Hans Frei's concern to pay close attention to the actual textuality of Scripture as a revelatory structure.

Morrison is fundamentally concerned that Torrance "arbitrarily limits the historical Word to the incarnation" (p. 337). This "limitation" is not as arbitrary as it might seem, if attention were turned to the theological personalism that underlies all of Torrance's thought (as well as Barth's) as opposed to the realist/objectivist category that is often employed. This would nudge interpreters of Torrance to look to his anthropological, ecclesiological and sacramental thought for the "historical transcendence" that Morrison grounds in Scripture. A consideration of what Torrance means when he comments that the church is "the earthly-historical form of [Christ's] presence" as well as being Christ's body would be especially helpful. These things cannot be said of Scripture (even though Scripture plays a vital role in the self-understanding of the Church) for reasons that substantiate Torrance's personalism and hence his thought regarding Scripture. The Church, not Scripture, is truly "kenotic," for without the Church Scripture would also have no historical context or contemporaniety.

Morrison's work does point out an important concern that needs attention, and his proposal here seeks to address it: the mediation of the Word in human history. Colin Gunton has taken up this theme as well in his book A Brief Theology of Revelation (T & T Clark, 1995), proposing that a "deficient pneumatology" is to blame for proposals that do not take historical mediation seriously. Much work needs to be done in this area and Morrison furthers the conversation by drawing the thought of Torrance into constructive use. Morrison's exposition of Torrance's thought is clear and cogent, and he has mastered a great deal of material from diverse fields of inquiry. This is a valuable gift to those who continue to draw upon the thought of Professor Torrance for their own theological work. Morrison has also pointed out a weakness in Torrance's epistemology that needs to be taken seriously, but it does not justify the claim that a restoration of the role of Scripture as a historical embodiment of God's eternal Word will heal the dualism he has pointed out.

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Theosblog: Engaging Deconstructive Theology: a review

2008-09-05T06:26:00.000-07:00

Theosblog: <i>Engaging Deconstructive Theology</i>: a review

2008-09-05T06:24:00.000-07:00

Theology Society

Theosblog: Engaging Deconstructive Theology: a review

2008-09-05T05:48:00.000-07:00

Theosblog: <i>Engaging Deconstructive Theology</i>: a review

A Marxist critique of Postmodernism

2008-09-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

Pomo; what the hell is it?
This is not an easy question to answer, a quick look at the Wikipedia article on postmodernism will show a graphic stating that the article is in need of an expert to come clean it up, and the article itself is of little help. Its not unreasonable that no one in Wikipedia’s volunteer community is a postmodernism expert, arguably there are few pomo ‘experts’ in existence. Even the well known linguist Noam Chomsky, a man who the New York Times has referred to as “One of the greatest intellectuals of our time” seems to have trouble getting his head around it; “There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things

Myfavoriteblogs: Historical Theology Resources. Links to several theology journals

2008-08-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

Myfavoriteblogs: Historical Theology Resources. Links to several theology journals

Medieval Theology Resources

2008-08-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

Curricula: Christology

Christology outline

Christology Chalcedon to Anselm
Medieval Christology Overview Aquinas to DunsScotus
Ockham's Christology

Medieval Christology as Natural Theology

Calvin's Christology Trinity Journal Fall 2006

Medieval Theology Resources: intute arts and humanities

Theology Website

The Labyrinth: Resources for medieval studies

Journal of Medieval Philosophy and Theology

The hall of Church History: Medieval Churchmen

Scholastic Lutheran Christology

Vatican Says "Yahweh" Not to Be Pronounced

2008-08-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

Calls on Practice Used by 1st Christians

WASHINGTON, D.C., AUG. 19, 2008 (Zenit.org).- A note from the Vatican has reiterated a directive that the name of God revealed in the tetragrammaton YHWH is not to be pronounced in Catholic liturgy.

Commonly used songs with phrases such as "Yahweh, I know you are near," will need to be modified.

The June 29 Vatican message, from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, clarified that the name of God revealed in YHWH was not pronounced by the first Christians, following the tradition already in use.

It explained: "The venerable biblical tradition of sacred Scripture, known as the Old Testament, displays a series of divine appellations, among which is the sacred name of God revealed in a tetragrammaton YHWH -- hwhw. As an expression of the infinite greatness and majesty of God, it was held to be unpronounceable and hence was replaced during the reading of sacred Scripture by means of the use of an alternate name: 'Adonai,' which means 'Lord.'

"The Greek translation of the Old Testament, the so called Septuagint, dating back to the last centuries prior to the Christian era, had regularly rendered the Hebrew tetragrammaton with the Greek word Kyrios, which means 'Lord.' Since the text of the Septuagint constituted the Bible of the first generation of Greek speaking Christians, in which language all the books of the New Testament were also written, these Christians, too, from the beginning never pronounced the divine tetragrammaton."

"The attribution of this title to the risen Christ corresponds exactly to the proclamation of his divinity," it continued. "The title in fact becomes interchangeable between the God of Israel and the Messiah of the Christian faith, even though it is not in fact one of the titles used for the Messiah of Israel."

Read it all here

Johann Baptist Metz

2008-08-17T03:07:00.000-07:00

Johann Baptist Metz (b. 1928). Metz is German, from Bavaria more specifically, and like other Germans of his time — Dorothee Sölle and Jürgen Moltmann, his scandal was theodicy. Other than the Holocaust, he also experienced his own brush with death. Conscripted into the Nazi war machine at sixteen, he was sent to deliver a message. He left his company, of more than a hundred boys of similar age, only to return and find them all slaughtered:

Read it all here.

Inter cultural Theology

2008-08-11T23:50:00.001-07:00

Walter J. Hollenweger: Intercultural Theology

One of the most striking examples of the value of intercultural theology for Western theologians is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The decisive insight for Bonhoeffer was his discovery that the church transcends the boundaries of class, race, and nation. He came to this insight through his negative experience in a nationalist German church (which in his view was a contradiction in terms) and through the positive experience of his ecumenical contacts, among them his discovery of the black churches in New York City. Bonhoeffer was the first-and, for at least forty years, the only-theologian who saw the political and theological relevance of the spirituality of these black churches.

Read it here

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Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions was introduced as a new discipline at the Faculty of Catholic Theology in the latest curriculum. Being defined as fundamentally interdisciplinary in teaching and research, it is more than just a new segment of theology. It refers to a changed socio-political context, which is to be apprehended not only through a dissociated description of phenomena, but by seeking out the places where people are struggling for recognition, dignity and respect. These signs of our times call for our commitment:
(1) to a theological opening up to the challenge of the cultural and religious other,
(2) to making the cultural and religious differences a valued innovation for one’s own discourse, and
(3) to take up a problem-oriented focus.

The intercultural and interreligious discourse pertains to the plurality of cultures within and beyond Christianity on the one hand, and to the plurality of religions on the other hand.

Read it here

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Mission Studies as Intercultural Theology and its Relationship to Religious Studies

In the second half of the 20th century, transculturality became a central theme of Mission Studies. Addressing this issue theologically has become known as “Intercultural Theology”. In its current approach, the subject – from a wide theological perspective - focuses on the encounters and disputes between Christianity and non-Christian religions, as well as on theological reflections about the non-western cultural dialects of Christianity in close connection with the general question of ecumenism. Additionally, there is the explicit and conscious acceptance of Religious Studies as a definite point of reference for mission research. The result is that Mission Studies has developed into a diversified, empirically substantiated Christian theology of cultures and religions. Against this background, Intercultural Theology/Mission Studies has to be seen as a theological discipline that reflects on: 1.) the relationship between Christianity and non-Christian religions and worldviews and 2.) the relationship between western Christianity and its non-western cultural variations.

Read it here

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George Newlands, The Transformative Imagination: Rethinking Intercultural Theology (2004)

The question of the relation between faith and culture is at the centre of theological studies today. A major advance in human understanding in recent decades has been the discovery of the manifold ways in which human thought takes place within an almost invisible element which are the shared systems of representation and meaning denoted by the concept of ‘culture’. Testing questions have been posed regarding the nature of Church within a social representation of the human which understands culture to be a fragmentary and piecemeal milieu of meaning in which focus and stability are as quickly constructed as they are destroyed by the centrifugal energies of discourse, representation, negotiation and exchange.

Read it here

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Annette Meuthrath : Interculturality

If contextuality is/should be one facet of theology, then interculturality is/should be the other. In answering the question “Which task do you think should be given priority in theology at the beginning of the 21st century?”⁵ Felix Wilfred wrote: “One of the tasks ahead is to forge greater dialogue among the various contextual and regional theologies.”⁶

Every Christian theology is influenced by certain contexts, but at the same time, it is an expression of a universal whole, a universal religion.⁷ In so far as each Christian theology is part of a whole, contextuality means not to be isolated from this whole but rather to be an integrative part of the universal unity. This plurality in unity can only function if there is a dialogue between people, between theologians of different cultural contexts. Such a dialogue across the cultural boundaries, such an intercultural dialogue prevents misunderstandings, isolation and one-sidedness.

Read it all here

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Rosemary Radford Ruether :Re-Contextualizing Theology

In his essay on "Black Theology in American Religion," James Cone speaks of the "warring ideals" that have divided African identity and American identity. These same warring ideals continue today for black theologians in the debate between African and Christian identities. For Cone, black theology is distinctly Christian, but contextualized in black American experience with its roots in African culture.I

The re-contextualization of theology arises in a somewhat different way for women. Unlike subordinated races who have preserved some remnants of an alternative culture from a period prior to their enslavement, the subordination of women takes place at the heart of every culture and thus deprives women of an alternative culture with which to express their identity over against the patriarchal culture of family and society. Some cultures give women distinct religious rituals and cults and quasi-autonomous social and economic groupings, providing some basis for a women's culture or "sub-culture." But even these female groupings remain largely invisible to the public culture, defined as male

Read it all here

Church in the World: How Churches Might Face the Coming Crises

2008-08-11T07:41:00.000-07:00

Church in the World: How Churches Might Face the Coming Crises

Gmail - Braaten/Jenson CHRISTIAN DOGMATICS - jacobthanni@gmail.com

2008-08-01T07:18:00.000-07:00

Gmail - Braaten/Jenson CHRISTIAN DOGMATICS - jacobthanni@gmail.com

Vince
to Confessing-Chr.

show details 10:44 PM (11 hours ago)

Reply

It was a real labor of love fort Carl - Braaten - - he so believed that we needed to center our theology again - he was not a 'dogmatic' person, a brilliant thinker, passionate about the Gospel and about the mission of the Church (and his The Flaming Center on mission is a good read, I highly recommend, a church body not centered in mission is like a fire without a flame - it can't exist, mission is the flame).

Its been a long time since I read it - and I never knew Jensen, I knew his usual partner, Gritsch, but I never met Jensen.

Carl was a bit used to be revered as kind of a out in front theologian in Lutheran (and, of course Christian) circles and he was, he was very cutting edge (as well as being very grounded, hence a two volume dogmatics, which is why we loved him) - except on one thing... I don;t think anyone will forget the senior seminar he was leading in 1977 when he made the comment that no human being is fully human unless they are married. Now granted Carl loved his wife and what a passionate love match that was but that making the particular into the universal led to quite an explosion in the seminar which he did not expect, especially the passion with which many of his students had when they exploded. Not sure Carl ever did get it. He was really befuddled by the firestorm.

But other than that - I look at what I just wrote and everything I have written has using fire-y metaphors and that is how it should be with him because the Church and its mission burned deep within him - so it is not a two-volume set of dull academic dogmatics by someone who thinks we have not intellectualized the Church enough, it was written to be foundational so that all of our mission (the Church) would be centered in Christ and would be that light in the world rather than some dull institution preserving privilege.

And to anyone who ever talked to Carl in the refectory knew, any conversation with him would be alive and it would be theologically grounded, no sloppiness allowed. I thank God he was my teacher - I really do thank God for that - he was such a force fr the Gospel.

Gum, Geckos, and God: An Interview with Jim Spiegel

2008-08-01T06:45:00.000-07:00

Gmail - Christians in Context: from orthodoxy to orthopraxy. - jacobthanni@gmail.com

Christians in Context: from orthodoxy to orthopraxy.
Link to Christians in Context: from orthodoxy to orthopraxy.

Gum, Geckos, and God: An Interview with Jim Spiegel

Posted: 30 Jul 2008 11:01 PM CDT
Below are a few questions from our interview with Jim Spiegel, regarding his new book, "Gum, Geckos, and God: A Family's Adventure in Space, Time, and Faith"(Zondervan, 2008). For some additional description of the book itself, check out our post from yesterday; and remember, Dr. Spiegel will be available today to answer additional questions from our readers that post in the comments thread- enjoy!

1. Norm: "I love the concept of this book! I think its original amidst the barrage of books available to teach children about God. What would you say to those who, despite the readability and accessibility of this book, are reticent to take on the challenge of answering their children's questions themselves? Perhaps they would like to punt those questions to their pastor or Sunday school teacher; do you see additional value in answers coming directly from the parent?"

Dr. Spiegel: "It is common for parents to be apprehensive about addressing the really hard questions of faith and doctrine with their children. And while this is understandable, since most parents are not theologians, we need to remember that sometimes the most impactful aspect of our discussions with our kids is not the content of our answers as much as the manner in which we answer. I have found that my kids appreciate it when my answer to their question is "I don't know, but that's a great question." This simple admission of ignorance affirms their thinking ability and invites them to probe further regarding God's truth-hopefully about issues regarding which the answers are more obvious! The point is that teaching a child to inquire into theology is one of the main objectives in spiritually nurturing them. Whether we have solid answers to their questions or are completely stumped by them, we can model this humble quest for understanding in a way that builds our kids' faith as well as our relationships with them."

2. Norm: "Beyond providing a tool for parents to use as they prepare for the inevitable questions that will come from kids about God, what are some additional situations where you think this book will prove to be a valuable resource?"

Dr. Spiegel: "My primary audience in writing Gum, Geckos, and God was not parents specifically, but Christians who desire a dynamic primer on basic doctrine. The book will work as a text for small groups and Sunday school classes where teachers want to reinforce core Christian beliefs. (Readers can download the free book discussion guide at my website: www.jimspiegel.com .) Also, since the book explores the good reasons for these core beliefs, it is also a useful resource for anyone interested in basic Christian apologetics. Incidentally, just a few days ago I was interviewed for the www.apologetics.com radio program. Your readers can listen to the podcast of that interview at their website or read a condensed transcript of the interview at my blog: www.wisdomandfollyblog.com ."

3. Norm: "It seems pretty clear that your family experiences inspired you to write this book; what else was it that inspired you to take on this project? Was it an observation about the typical Christian family, or perhaps an observation about how these questions are handled in the church? What made it clear to you that there was an opportunity to meet a need?"

Dr. Spiegel: "It seems to me that there is a significant need in the church for a book that teaches Christian doctrine in a way that is both substantive and entertaining. (Though I admit, as an academic, it is hard for me to use that "E" word!) There is also a need for a book that tackles the hard questions of the faith (e.g. Where did God come from? Why does God allow suffering? How can Jesus be both God and man?) and gives answers that anyone can understand, though without oversimplification. Gum, Geckos, and God is my attempt to fill this void. The semi-narrative style of the book, featuring conversations with my kids, just happened to be a format which gave me the best shot at actually pulling this off. Fortunately, my children provided me with plenty of fodder for the task!"

Gmail - [CB] The Apocrypha -- Missing in Action in the Lutheran Church - jacobthanni@gmail.com

2008-07-27T18:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a helpful article from Paul T. McCain to Cyberbrethren

Gmail - [CB] The Apocrypha -- Missing in Action in the Lutheran Church - jacobthanni@gmail.com

July 27, 2008

Greetings Cyberbrethren:

In the past several decades, there has been a resurgence of interest
in the so-called "missing books" of the Bible. The work of persons
such as Elaine Pagels has made a career of trying to popularize the
Gnostic Gospels and other Gnostic literature. The most dramatic
discovery of Gnostic texts occurred in the upper Egyptian city of Nag
Hammadi. The Gospel of Thomas was found as a complete text. These
Gnostic texts are often referred to in populist works and the major
media as the "missing books of the Bible." Actually, nothing could be
further from the truth. They were never regarded as being part of
Christian Scripture. Gnosticism, in its variety of forms, was a
mixture of pagan philosophy and Christian stories.

A whole cottage industry has developed around these "missing books,"
pumping out volumes of misleading books and information, leading
people to believe that somehow there has been a grand conspiracy to
cover up and hide the "real facts" about Christ and Christianity. All
one has to do to quickly demonstrate the difference between canonical
Scripture and these false Gnostic Gospels is read them. Frankly, the
Gnostic Gospels sound like something produced by a person writing
under the influence of LSD or other such hallucinogens. So, set the
Gnostic literature aside and let's talk about some books that have
always been in our Bibles, until the Lutheran Church moved into the
English language.

There are, in fact, "missing books" of Scripture: the Apocrypha. For
too many years Lutherans, like Protestant denominations everywhere,
have thought that these books are only part of the "Roman Catholic
Bible." Let's sort out the facts here, and conclude these brief
remarks with an excellent introduction to the Apocryphal books by
Pastor Richard Sawyer, which I'll provide below.

But let's first talk about how, when and why the Apocryphal books
became relatively unknown to English speaking Lutherans. When the
first complete edition of the Bible by the Wittenberg Reformers was
published, in 1534, Luther and his colleagues included the Apocryphal
books, though distinguished from the more universally accepted books,
by setting them apart in their own appendix to the Old Testament.
Luther's Bible was the first major edition to have a separate section
called Apocrypha. Books and portions of books not found in the Hebrew
Old Testament were moved out of the body of the Old Testament to this
section. The books of 1 and 2 Esdras were omitted entirely. Luther
placed these books between the. For this reason, these works are
sometimes known as inter-testamental books. The point is that
Apocryphal books were never rejected by orthodox Lutherans, but always
included in every edition of the Luther Bible and in many German
editions of the Bible as well, for instance all German Bibles
published by Concordia Publishing House as long as German bibles were
publishedl. The Roman Catholic, at the Council of Trent, did something
never before done in the history of the church: it put the Apocryphal
books on the same level of authority as the rest of the books of the
Bible. Why? Because it is in the Apocryphal books that Rome claims to
find justification for several of its false doctrines: chiefly, the
doctrine of purgatory. But this fact never dissuaded Lutheran
Christians from using these books or including them in their Bibles.

In the early years of the 20th century, as Lutherans in the USA began
replacing German with English in their churches, and in their Bible
translations, the Apocryphal books simply went missing, indeed
"missing in action" is pretty much what happened to them. In recent
years, interest is increasing in these books, as Lutherans look to
reclaim more of their heritage. There is no reason to allow Rome to
claim these books as their own, for indeed, they are not the sole
possession of Rome, or Eastern Orthodoxy. It will take a lot of
careful pastoral instruction to help the members of English speaking
Lutheran congregations distinguish the Apocryphal books from the
Gnostic non-Biblical books, and to help explain what the Apocryphal
books are, and what their traditional place in the Bible has always
been in the Lutheran Church. For that matter, the Apocryphal books are
featured throughout Western European culture. Perhaps the best way to
help Lutherans who are unfamiliar with these books understand their
place in the Lutheran Church's own culture and hymnody is to point
them to a well-known hymn from the age of Lutheran Orthodoxy: Now
Thank We All Our God, written by Martin Rinkart circa 1636 when the
devastating Thirty Years War was nearing its end. It depends very much
on Luther's translation of the Apocryphal book of Sirach, Chapter 50.

My own personal experience with the Apocryphal books is typical of
most other Lutherans in English speaking churches. I was raised to
understand that the Roman Catholics had their own Bible, and that
their Bible had more books than "our" Bible. I learned that the
doctrine of purgatory was drawn chiefly from one of the Apocryphal
books, and therefore those books were bad. But then I as I learned
more about the historic teachers of the Lutheran Church, I began to
see that the Apocryphal books were freely cited and used by them,
never on the same level of authority as the other books of the Old
Testament or the New Testament, but nonetheless, there was no
hesitancy to use these books by Martin Luther, Martin Chemnitz, Johann
Gerhard and others. Perhaps the most amusing and enlightening example
of the extent to which there is little awareness of the Apocrypha in
our Lutheran Church's history, even in The LCMS's history, was when we
produced a book of Walther's devotions, based on his sermons. There
are several references in C.F.W. Walther's sermons to Apocryphal
books, but not realizing that, our editors cited the Song of Songs,
when in fact the reference was to the Wisdom of Solomon. And in the
case of the Concordia Edition of the Book of Concord, we found a
series of woodcut illustrations of the Small Catechism, published
toward the end of Luther's lifetime in Leipzig. And what do you know,
the illustration provided for the 8th Commandment, "You shall not bear
false witness" is from the Apocrypha: the story of Susanna. The same
image was used in the first illustrated edition of the Small
Catechism, already in 1531.

It was interesting simply to include it in the Book of Concord and
watch to see how many people noticed it. There were quite a few
questions about it, leading to some good opportunities to explain the
Apocrypha. Simply put, the Apocrypha is every bit as much "Lutheran"
than it is "Roman Catholic." It is the common possession of the
Christian Church. I'm encouraged by this growing, and renewed,
interest in the Apocrypha and am pleased to note that next year Oxford
University Press will be releasing an edition of the English Standard
Version of the Bible that contains the Apocrypha.

We wrestled with the question of whether or not to include the
Apocryphal books in The Lutheran Study Bible. For three reasons, we
finally decided not to. First, the Apocypha is so little known among
Lutherans today that simply to include it in TLSB would have caused a
ruckus and consternation among most of our fellow English speaking
Lutherans who know nothing at all about the Apocrypha. We felt we
would be putting something in front of people who have had little, to
no, opportunity to learn and understand what these books are, from
their pastors. It woudl cause potentially very serious offense and
confusion, at this point in time. Second, there was no published
translation of the Apocrypha available in English, in the ESV
translation when we had to make a decision about this. Unfortunately,
the Oxford edition comes too late for our Bible. Third, there are next
to no resource materials available on the Apocryphal books from which
we can draw notes and commentary. Simply put, English speaking
Lutheran pastors, professors and theologians have not done any work on
these books. So, for these three reasons they will not be in TLSB. But
perhaps a future edition will be able to include them.

Here is Pastor Sawyer's article:

The Apocrypha is a collection of books, generally dated before the
first advent of Christ, and included in the bibles of many Christians.
They are not included in the Hebrew collection of Old Testament
Scripture, but they are included in the Greek translation of the Old
Testament Bible, called the Septuagint. It is uncertain exactly when
the Apocryphal books were included in the Septuagint, but since the
Septuagint is clearly the translation from which many of the New
Testament's quotations of the Old Testament are taken, we can consider
the Septuagint the Bible used by the Holy Evangelists and Apostles.
It's not unlike saying that the King James Version was the translation
prevalently used by Christians until only recently. If you read an old
book or watch an old movie, chances are, if Holy Scripture is quoted,
you'll find the citation taken from the King James Version. Well, read
the New Testament, and chances are, you'll find that when the Old
Testament is quoted, the translation used is the Septuagint. That
makes the Septuagint's inclusion of the Apocrypha a fairly compelling
argument for seriously considering these books. It is true that they
are not found among the Hebrew texts. That was a distinction not
missed by St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. It was also
a distinction noted by Martin Luther when he made his translation of
the Bible into German. In fact, it's simply historical fact that the
Church has noted that there are certain books that were universally
recognized as belonging to the canon of Holy Scripture, and then there
were others that lacked that universal recognition. While some books
lacked universal acceptance, they were still often read - even within
the services of the Church - and while not as sure a basis for forming
doctrine as the Canonical Scriptures, they were considered pious,
laudable writings, useful for encouraging and training Christians in
their walk of Faith. Luther certainly held that opinion regarding the
Apocrypha. He wasn't the first to distinguish them from those books
universally accepted as the Word of God, but in doing so, neither was
he alone in recognizing their benefit and recommending their usage by
Christians. Luther not only translated the books of the Apocrypha into
German, he also included them in his German Bible. He included them in
an appendix so that they were distinguished from those books
universally attested as the Word of God but not removed from the piety
and faith of Christians. Luther has very favorable things to say about
the Apocrypha. The fact that German Christians in his day could open
their Bible and read the Apocrypha is testimony to that. The Lutheran
Confessions cite the Apocrypha, as do Luther, Melancthon, Chemnitz,
Gerhard, and other fathers in our Lutheran tradition.

Many Christians in America will be surprised to hear that the King
James Version, that most beloved of English translations, also
included the Apocrypha. As Luther had, the King James Version
distinguished the Apocrypha from the universally attested canonical
texts by including it in an appendix. Over time, especially after
copyright restrictions were broken by the American Revolution,
publishers ceased to include the Apocrypha in editions of the KJV.
Still, like the Septuagint, the first translation of the Bible into
Greek, and Jerome's Latin Vulgate, and Luther's German Bible, the
Apocrypha was included in the original King James Version.

The Apocrypha is a collection of sacred texts for Christians to
rediscover. How much better that Christians - who regularly make use
of devotional material, visit Christian bookstores, listen to
Christian music, watch movies with Christian themes - how much better
that Christians today familiarize themselves with the devout and pious
writings which are part of our heritage, which Luther and so many
others recommend for our edification! It is safe to say that
Christians - up until the past few hundred years - have been quite
familiar with the Apocrypha. The Apocryphal texts have influenced
religious art and music, hymnody and even names. The name Judy derives
from the name of a Hebrew heroine in the Apocryphal book, Judith. Toby
derives from the Apocryphal book, Tobit. Susan is derived from the
Apocryphal book, Susanna.

It is said that the account of 2 Esdras 6:42 gave Columbus the
necessary "evidence" that the waters of the Atlantic were not so wide
that the East Indies couldn't be reached by sailing west. If it
weren't for the Apocrypha, would Columbus have made his voyage? Wisdom
18:14-15 provide the testimony on which Christians understood Christ's
birth to have occurred when night was "half-spent," thus giving us the
carol, "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear."

Lutherans are familiar with the hymn, "Now, Thank We All Our God,"
which is based on Luther's translation of Sirach 50:22-24. And any
Lutheran who has attended the Easter Vigil and sung the Benedicte,
Omnia Opera, that is, "All You Works of the Lord" (LSB # 931; LW #
9;TLH p. 120) will note that it is the Song of the Three Young Men
(Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) who were thrown into the fiery
furnace and kept safe by the pre-incarnate Christ. However, that song
is not in the Hebrew text of Daniel, and so is not known to most
Christians, since their English translations are taken from the
Hebrew. It is, however, included in the Apocryphal additions that have
come to us through the Septuagint. Thus, this beautiful and laudable
song of praise has graced the lips of many Lutherans, without their
realizing that they are singing a Biblical canticle from the Apocrypha.

Cordially in Christ,
Paul

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Gmail - Braaten/Jenson CHRISTIAN DOGMATICS - jacobthanni@gmail.com

Gum, Geckos, and God: An Interview with Jim Spiegel

Gmail - [CB] The Apocrypha -- Missing in Action in the Lutheran Church - jacobthanni@gmail.com