Tag Archive - Ethics

Two Down, or…

December 15, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 2 Comments

Karl Barth, The Man-Crush Resumes.

Dogmatics, Two Down

In the final section of Doctrine of the Word of God, Barth touches on two dynamics of his work that make my heart sing, and clarifies one of the recurring challenges I’ve had (including from part one of this section).

First, Barth here talks about the dogmatic method as deriving from the word of God. In other words, there can be no systematization based on a prior idea of what is most basic or foundational. No “law of God,” no theory of the atonement, no primacy of creation.

Yes, law, atonement, and creation are all important! But they are important as pokes radiating out from the center which is the Word of God itself: Christ the word, witnessed to in scripture.

This means that the “analytic” approach to theology that had its heyday in the 18th century and following, needs to take a back seat to a reconceptualization in which various elements sit alongside one another, informing one another, correcting one another, and all mutually subject to Christ the Word.

Second, and relatedly, I think Barth said in a more respectful and sophisticated way what I was striving to say in my somewhat iconoclastic rant about the Trinity a week or two ago. Yes, he has a Trinitarian statement about God, and even about the various doctrines he will cover. However, this Trinitarian statement is not the source of that structure but coordinately derived from the word of God.

The Trinity is crucial, but it does not displace the word of God as the structuring element in Dogmatics; it does not displace the foundational place of the Word of God. Or, “No foundation can be laid other than the one which has already been laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

Finally, in Barth’s very brief outline of what is to come, he leaves me anticipating that ethics will suffuse his understanding of that the church is supposed to teach.

I have been wary thus far that Barth puts too much on the teaching office itself. I see the entire Evangelical project in danger of becoming the teaching church that never faithfully embodies its calling to be the doing church. I have good hopes that Barth will offer something better. We will have to see how that develops over the remaining 6ish years of our time in the Dogmatics.

This brings Year 1 of the Barth Together reading group to a close! Yay!

If you didn’t keep up this year, you won’t feel any more disoriented than the rest of us should you choose to jump in with volume 2 in January. I hope many of you will pick up again and keep reading in 2012. Stay tuned for a reading schedule to go up in the next couple weeks.

Peace of Christ Be With You

December 5, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

Yesterday I had more opportunity to reflect on “peace” within the context of the Christian story. Where I kept getting pushed was how “Being children of God,” as peacemakers, reflects the breadth of God’s redeeming love.

In short, peacemaking as Christians is our turning toward one another, and the larger world, with what we have received from God.

“God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” More directly to the point, “Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ… and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”

The hope that Christians celebrated on advent week 1, is actually the product of the peace that we celebrated in week 2. It is the reconciling, redeeming, justifying work of God that gives us peace with Him.

Why is it that being “children of God” is tied to being a “peacemaker”? Because to be a child of someone is to bear that person’s image and likeness. God’s children are peacemakers because God is the Peacemaker.

God has given us life and peace with himself in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

So, being agents of peace in the world is a matter of living out in our own lives and in our communities the story of Christ crucified. We embody the peace-making mission of God.

But this peace is made in the cross.

This tells us that the means by which we will make peace will never be the sword.

It also means that we are going to have to step back and reconsider what “peace” means as we search for it in our lives. It will be a peace that is present in the midst of suffering and trial–not necessarily one that delivers us from it here and now.

Yesterday’s service included some reflections on Phil 4: “…make your requests known to God, and the peace of God which surpasses all comprehension will guard your hearts and mind in Christ Jesus.” Paul shortly goes into his means of peace and contentment: being able to get by in plenty and want, in any and every circumstance: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Peace is about living out of, and living into, the reality of the gospel of Christ crucified. It is a self-giving so that others my live. It is a trust in the provision of God, even as we walk the way of the Christ. It is an extension of the peace-making presence of God through the church which is the continuation of Christ’s presence here on earth.

Ethics and Dogmatics

November 4, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 6 Comments

Ok, so I knew this would happen: rag Barth for saying that the church’s highest calling is dogmatics, bemoan how this enables evangelicals’ lack of engagement in substantive issues of praxis and… lo! the next section talks about the inseparability of dogmatics and ethics.

Here, Barth is (perhaps too singularly) focused on the problem of dividing out ethics from theology, folks who strive to construct ethics as a separate enterprise from theology altogether. The idea that makes Barth so uncomfortable is that we might know enough in and of ourselves to construct ideas of ethics on “universal norms” or even natural law rather than the revealed word of God.

So Barth contends that all Dogmatics is received and spoken and enacted, that all church dogmatics is inherently ethical; it is not only a matter of thinking and speaking, but of doing.

Why is Dogmatics inherently ethical?

A reality which is conceived and presented in such a way that it does not affect or claim men or awaken them to responsibility or redeem them, i.e., a theoretical reality, cannot possibly be the reality of the Word of God, no matter how great may be the richness of its content or the profundity of its conception. Dogmatics has no option: it has to be ethics as well.

The refusal to allow us to merely speak is laudable. But I’m not entirely sure I buy the notion that dogmatics is sufficiently broad, that “Word of God” is even sufficiently broad, to encompass practice as well.

Speaking & the Church’s Calling

November 2, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 10 Comments

What is the mission of the church? The church must preach the word of God. It must enact its message in the administration of the sacraments.

It must speak correctly the things of God for its time and place.

Barth--He Can Talk

From this, Karl Barth concludes that the church “cannot, then, escape the conclusion that it must regard and treat the work of dogmatics as its most essential task” (§22.2).

Throughout his discussion of doctrine, dogmatics, and preaching, Barth advances two crucial components to the church’s faithful practice of articulating its doctrine.

First, the calling to speak correctly about God both demands that we labor with all our resources to speak correctly and, in the end, that the grace of God superintend the speech so that it communicates faithfully and truly. There is no pure doctrine without the grace of God, but this is not an excuse for idleness.

Second, the task of speaking correctly will engage the traditions and creeds of the church, but cannot be assured simply by repeating the same words. The church’s task is always to say what needs to be said for its own time and place if it is to speak a truly faithful dogmatics.

But I now wish to circle back around to the claim that dogmatics is the church’s most essential task. And here I have to protest.

For all that Barth’s means and frameworks for doing Dogmatics is important–and an improvement on what often happens in the church–the church misses the heart of its calling if it thinks that its most important task is to speak correctly about God. Full stop.

The speaking correctly about the revelation of God in Christ is important for the purpose of directing the life of the church as a continuing embodiment of that revelation.

Perhaps Barth here falls victim to his own Logo-centrism, where Jesus is revelation of the Father as Word of God, which Word is revealed also in scripture and preaching. But Jesus not only speaks and embodies divine words, Jesus also acts.

The living Word of God feeds hungry people–and thereby reveals God.

The living Word of God embraces the outcasts and the dregs–and thereby reveals God.

The living Word of God heals the sick–and thereby reveals God.

The most important task of the church is to re-present the living Word of God in the deeds of that very Word’s body on earth, the church. If we attend so strictly to the dogmatic task that we fail to act, or so prize it that we fail to equally, let alone more abundantly, prize the self-giving love to which we are called, then we have failed in our Kingdom calling to love our neighbor as ourselves.

King Jesus Gospel

September 17, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 10 Comments

Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel is the most recent in a stream of books designed to get evangelicals to recognize that the Christian faith is an inherently active affair. It is not merely a personal message of salvation to be believed in my heart, it is about a grand story that we must continue to tell, and live out, if we are to be the faithful people of God.

I have much affinity with Scot’s overall project. Like my own work in Jesus Have I Loved, But Paul?, The King Jesus Gospel is concerned to articulate a gospel that both Jesus and Paul proclaimed, to articulate this gospel as deeply enmeshed in the story of Israel, and to insist that the gospel is not merely about personal salvation but about a more pervasive, cosmic transformation.

More than this, Scot is working with a similar paradigm to the one I’ve been developing here and elsewhere over the past several years: there is an inherent connection between the gospel message, what defines us as Christians, our identity, and our ethics.

The sharp end of his argument is this: the way that we have “shared the gospel” has been so much about personal salvation that it fails to carry with it an inherent call to a particular way of living. And, when the message of salvation is so truncated, it begins to close its claim to bear the label “gospel” at all: it is “soterian” (about salvation) without being entirely “evangelical” (about the gospel).

McKnight spends the first couple chapters laying out the need to move from a “salvation culture” to a “gospel culture.”

The book then turns to develop an articulation of what the gospel is. It moves from Paul’s summary statement in 1 Cor 15 through the Creeds before returning to Jesus in the Gospels and Acts.

The focus of these chapters is this: the death and resurrection of Jesus are the consummation of the story of Israel.

One the most important contributions of this, the meat of the book, is that Jesus proclaimed and demonstrated himself to be the king of the kingdom, the special agent in whom the story of Israel is coming to its consummation. Far too much credence has been given to the notion that Jesus proclaimed God rather than himself. Jesus places himself right in the middle of God’s plans for the cosmos.

Here are a few places I’d want to push back on the book and maybe generate a bit more conversation:

  • Is the Creed really a faithful summary of the Paul’s 1 Cor 15 gospel? The most important reason I say no is that it removes all of the important interpretive glosses that enable us to say that why the death and resurrection are “gospel”: “according to the scriptures” and “for our sins.” McKnight is insisting that the gospel is the consummation of the story of Israel–yes! But if there is one area where the creed is deficient it is precisely here. There is no “according to the scriptures,” there is no OT, there is no Israel. The creator God has a son whom he sent.
  • Is the creed a faithful summary of Paul’s gospel? No, for reason number two: Paul’s declaration is that Jesus is “the” Lord, the Creed says “our” Lord. In other words, the Creed is the beginning of the soterian gospel that McKnight has written the book to counter. There are other reasons why the Creed is quite different from 1 Cor 15 as well, but hey–this is my hobby horse. You know that I am wary of the creeds as lenses for reading scripture, or as the most accurate summaries of the Story.
  • I’m concerned that using 1 Cor 15 has curtailed the power of the Gospels to contribute to McKnight’s argument. I agree that there is much to the idea that the gospels are passion narratives with lengthy introductions. However, there is a Mark 1-8 in addition to a Mark 8-16. I think that it is precisely in figuring out how Mark 1-8 are gospel, not in hurrying to the crucifixion, that the “gospel culture” McKnight hopes to propagate is going to be established. It might be that our evangelical obsession with the cross is, itself, a significant part of the paradigm that needs to be broken up. I thought that Embracing Grace pushed some of these issues a bit better.

The book is replete with powerful, important statements such as these:

“The question is not about whether Jesus preached justification; the question is about whether he preached the Story of Israel coming to its completion in the story of himself as a saving story.” (106)

“From this point on, Jesus claims, everyone’s moral life is to be measured by whether they live according to his moral vision.” (107)

“… the book of Acts reveals that gospeling was not driven by the salvation story or the atonement story. It was driven by the Story of Israel, and in fact makes most sense in that story.” (134, emphasis original)

The book is sure to generate significant conversations, especially in the more traditional, conservative evangelical world toward which the argument is largely directed. It is written so as to be accessible to everyone, and would be a great conversation starter for many small groups and pastoral staffs.

Authority, Scripture, Creed

September 16, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 4 Comments

Blogsphere confessional: I realize that I am often not at my best when I am trying to work out the relationships among bible, theology, and church authority. I do too much “not this but that” rather than “this and also that.” The whole project of reading through the Church Dogmatics was meant, in part, to keep me wrestling with and appreciating good theology.

In §20, Barth is wrestling with the very issues that have been driving me insane for the past decade or so: where does church authority come from? What does it mean and look like to have scripture as ultimate authority? What does this mean for our confessions about the canon as it stands? And what does it mean for the creeds that speak to us of what the church has said defines it and its beliefs?

This section is beautiful, because Barth the dogmatician (i.e., the one who seeks to say within the church what the church is truly saying about God) demands that we not surrender for one minute the Reformation principle that the Bible as the word of God is the church’s authority. This means that the authority will not be shared or usurped by church or creed.

And, it is only within the church that we meet this Bible as a Bible, as holy scripture; and before we could even say anything good or ill about a creed it must come to us as the church’s proclamation that this is what it believes.

Barth manages to advocate a hermeneutical spiral that deals with the reality of the church as the primary locus of God’s speech and as the primary mediators of the word, that deals with the reality of the Bible as something that is only the book it is because of the church, while demanding that we never lose our evangelical and Protestant moorings by allowing the church to have either a final word over the scriptures, or even a co-equal word alongside it.

Let me try that again: the canon (!), church, and creeds are important, but are always subject to correction and stand under the authority of scripture as the word of God.

But this authority of scripture is a derivative authority. It is only because Jesus is Lord that the Christian Bible has authority (§20.1). For there even to be a church is not to have a bunch of people sitting around reading the Bible. The Society of Biblical Literature is not the church. Where the church really is the church it is a people living in obedient relationship to Jesus Christ.

One reason I trust Barth is that he keeps demanding that people be actively responding to the story of Jesus if they are going to claim for themselves the prerogative of bearing the name of the church. Where the more recent conservative move has been to say that we have the word in the Bible itself, and therefore as the possessors and readers and expositors of the word we are the emissaries of God, Barth suggests the reverse.

To be the people of God is not to posses and master the Word, but to be possessed and mastered by it.

To be in the presence of scripture is not to have laid hold of what is pristine and to derive one’s validity from that possession. It is to be in the presence of something human in every sense that the word “human” conveys in a fallen world: limited, fragile, sinful. And yet, it is also be in the presence of something that, though very human, is the instrument that God in God’s grace chooses in order to speak and draw and otherwise mediate the authority of the resurrected Lord Jesus.

Christ sits enthroned above all, and God speaks this Word through the word that is scripture. The word has authority because of this dynamic use to which God puts it, to which we believe he puts it, as God calls us to obey. And the church’s own authority rests under both of these: the written word which mediates and the God who speaks through it.

More needs to be said about how this relates to church authority and creeds in particular. But the focus on word, and obeying the word, rather than believing a creed or submitting to a church, enables Barth to cultivate a vision for what the church is, what Christianity is, that has an inherent ethic.

This has the power to overcome the failure that has beset the church in general and Protestantism in particular for most of its history.

“The existence of the church of Jesus Christ stands or falls with the fact that it obeys as the apostles and prophets obeyed their Lord. It stands or falls with the known and actual antithesis of man and revelation, which cannot be reversed, in which man receives, learns, submits, and is controlled, in which he has a Lord and belongs to Him wholly and utterly.”

Yes. That.

Now, how do we define Church and Christian such that this kind of obedience lies at the core of its identity?

Theology is Important

August 26, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 13 Comments

For all of my moaning about certain ways of doing theology or thinking of Christian identity in particular theologized ways, I have something even more important to say, and I hope it’s not lost amid the cries and protests.

Theology is important.

I do worry about certain ways of doing theology, and want to push for a reconeptualization of Christian theology away from systematic theology and confessional theology and creedal theology to something that more inherently embodies the narrative character of scripture, God, the church, and (I believe) the cosmos.

But to call for a new way of doing things is not the same as rejecting theological enterprise out of hand. I am a theologian. I am a theological reader of scripture.

And, in my better moments, I even realize that the theologizing done by the councils of the church was a faithful enactment of their own calling to say for their time and place what needed to be said then and there.

Moreover, I believe we should, as is so often advocated, learn from history so that we do not repeat its mistakes. It’s just that I happen to see in that history a series of mistakes by the “winners” that should be avoided rather than a series of heresies by the “losers” that are ever in danger of reproduction.

Both, of course, can be dangers, but given the thousands year history of judging salvation by statements of doctrine, I think that the pendulum swing to assessing salvation by faithful or unfaithful practice is a salutary one.

For this time. For this place.

But then, how will we know what we’re supposed to do? There’s a lot of theology that goes into that: faith in a theological narrative that says that the Suffering One is not a victim or a mistake, but the very means for God’s salvation of the world.

Colloquium on Theological Interpretation, Day 1

August 19, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 2 Comments

I am currently in Auckland, NZ, attending the Colloquium on Theological Interpretation at Laidlaw College.

The environment at the conference is excellent, as have been almost all of the papers.

I won’t bore you with an extended recap of the 8ish papers I heard today, but there have been some common threads that ran through several of the things I heard–common concerns that I take as very good signs for the practice of theological interpretation.

Two of the papers today from OT scholars touched on issues of theodicy–and anti-theodicy. One was focusing on Lamentations and exploring the polyphonic nature of the text–there is dire complaint, there is defending of God, there is a repentant man a complaining woman, a narrator.

The questions the paper was exploring pertained to the ramifications of allowing each voice to stand, without resolving any one perspective into the perspective of another. The paper was pressing the question of what it might mean for communal praxis to embody the type of point, counterpoint; theodicy, anti-theodicy that we find in Lamentations. Similarly, a second OT paper wrestled with the viability of OT theodicy from another angle.

Then, three of the papers that focused on the NT were exploring some aspect of the crucified Christ and/or love as a driving force in our readings of scripture. I was angling for the story of Christ crucified as the controlling identity marker, hermeneutic, and ethic; another presenter used the category of love from John 14 as the essential component to the hermeneutic that leads us into all truth; and a third presenter discussed the Spirit in Galatians as the Spirit of the crucified Christ who, as this Christ-Spirit, leads Jesus’ followers into the life of new creation.

The common thread in all this is that the papers demonstrated a common drive toward a praxis that is both theologically and exegetically viable.

Much of what I’ve heard today represents, to me, the best of what theological interpretation can be. It is not a strong-arming of difficult texts so that they fit preconceived ideas of Christian theology. That caricature of Christian readings of scripture was nowhere to be found today.

Instead, it was a series of demonstrations that what these ancient texts say can be, and should be, life-giving for the communities that receive them as scripture. Faithful exegesis, even when it is somewhat destabilizing of our preconceptions about “how things are” or how they should be, perhaps especially when destabilizing, has the power to draw us to not merely saying the right things about God but acting more faithfully as the people of God.

Bounded or Centered? (Pt. 1)

August 17, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 18 Comments

As I have been in my grudge match to the death with the Rule of Faith as a “rule,” one critique I regularly find myself bringing is that it creates a bounded set. My instinct has been that so conceptualizing the Christian faith is not only a category mistake but ethically disastrous.

In short, once we have defined Christianity as a set of beliefs that must be maintained in order to be faithful Christians, then Christian ethics boils down to maintaining “the faith” that is so delineated.

What should Christians do? Defend the borders.

I have recently stumbled upon the work of Paul Hiebert. Here is what he says about bounded sets:

  1. The category is created by listing essential characteristics something must posses in order to belong to the set
  2. The category is defined by a clear boundary
  3. The objects form a homogeneous group
  4. “Bounded sets are essentially static sets”
  5. Within Western conceptual categories, bounded sets tend to be ontological sets, reflecting an absolute, unchanging nature of reality.

Two things strike me here: the quote, point 4, is the one that I most often rail against here. Christian theology is not a static set, but something dynamically in process in the ongoing story of the church. See yesterday’s post: The church has to grow up to the fact that things are not simply givens, so we cannot take an 1800 year old statement as the defining marker of who we are and what we should do.

But here’s the other problem, as Hiebert lays it out. On point 2, the category is formed by a clear boundary.

What does this mean in practice? He says:

Most of the effort in defining the category is spent defining and maintaining the boundary. Not only must we say what an apple is, we must also clearly differentiate it from oranges, pears, and similar objects that belong to the same domain but are not apples. The central question, therefore, is whether an object is inside or outside the category.

The ethic entailed in a bounded-set system is defining and maintaining the boundary.

When we envision Christianity as a bounded-set, we are consigning ourselves to a lifetime of boundary guarding. Absent from all this, of course, are other measures of Christian fidelity–such as embodying the self-giving love of Christ or even walking in accordance with the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount.

Christianity bounded the “Rule of Faith” becomes, throughout Church History, a self-referential religion, concerned with keeping itself together, and keeping out the heterodox.

This is not to say, of course, that it is without biblical precedent.There were, after all, the disciples who bravely fended off the would-be intruders upon their bounded world: “Lord, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, but he was not with us, so we forbid him!”

So what is a centered set? Stay tuned…

Storied Exhortation

August 14, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

At The Table, we have been reorienting toward our story by reading together The Story of God the Story of Us.

Today was Torah day. Or, as Sean Gladding put it: Community. The community God charters at Sinai.

Gladding draws our attention to the historical prologue: the recounting of what the great king has done for the people that underscores for them why the king is worthy of their loyalty.

I am YHWH your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Jekuthiel Sofer Decalogue, Public Domain

The reason the Decalogue must be obeyed? This God has rescued this people and then given them these commands. Israel’s eternal summons to obey Torah is reestablished as it says year after year, in the Passover celebration, “We were slaves in the Land of Egypt, but God brought us out…” (Deut 6).

Not “they.”

“We.”

And, therefore, YHWH gets to command us to obey (Deut 6).

And, therefore, when our story is defined by a different moment, our entire ethic is transformed.

We are not the Exodus people. We are the Christ people.

Our story is that when we were enslaved, the Son of Man gave his life as a ransom for all; God did not spare God’s own son but delivered him up for us all.

Therefore, to love the Lord our God with all our heart means to receive and submit to the King whom God has enthroned.

Therefore, to love our neighbor as ourselves means to walk in the way of the greatest love: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

To be the Exodus people meant to obey the Decalogue as a summary and promise of adherence to all 613 commands.

To be the Jesus people means that we walk in the way of the cross, following Jesus and thereby honoring God.

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