Rich Mouw gave a great welcome address to Fuller’s incoming students. It outlines well where Fuller came from, what “evangelical” might mean as a label for non-fundamentalist, even non-conservative Christians.
New Students Convocation: President’s Message from Fuller Theological Seminary on Vimeo.
Once upon a time, I had a blog called Sibboleth (may it rest in peace). I was quite proud of the cleverness of this title (ok, am proud of that moment of inspiration that brought the title to mind). But in addition to being clever, it also signaled something about my theological place and posture. I had been, for many years, incapable of saying things “just so,” and thus found myself on theological outs with my denomination, Presbytery, church, and even some friends.
So I proudly took the label of “mis-pronouncer” of theology, began my blogging career with an extended review of why N. T. Wright should be beloved by people who had walked the Reformed theological trajectory, and created a soap-box to give myself voice in the controversial issues of the day.
When my blogging life was raised from the dead this past January, I wanted to strike a different note. Rather than defining myself as reacting against what others see as the crucial shibboleths, I wanted to engage in a more constructive, and possibly even, at times, winsome project of engaging a host of issues from the perspective of what I’ve been calling narrative theology.
I often fall short of this ideal, but I pray, and have hope, that I am growing into it.
Enter Rich Mouw.
Rich is the president of Fuller Seminary (full disclosure: that makes him my boss, and the boss of my bosses), and a person whose life and speech reflect the sort of winsome engagement with those who agree and disagree alike that most of us could only aspire to attain in this life. And his 
book, Uncommon Decency extends the invitation for us all to strive after a convicted civility in our conversation with one another.
Mouw recognizes that people tend to fall off the horse in one of two directions: those with deep convictions have a propensity toward belligerence or triumphalism in their articulation, propagation, and embodying of their beliefs while those who are civil tend to be people of little definite conviction, pluralists in the sense of affirming that anything goes.
In Uncommon Decency Mouw makes a case for Christians to pursue and hold to robust convictions while at the same time cultivating a civility in our conversation with other people. As he does so, he 
engages thorny issues of interfaith dialogue, conversation about sexuality, how to embrace conviction and civility in the church, Hell, and even the mundane issues of parking spaces and rental car disagreements.
The book engages in both the theological, Christian underpinnings of our need to be convicted and civil and how this looks in practice.
This is a book that most of us need to read ourselves–as much as most of us know a person or two to whom we’d like to give a copy!
It was interesting to me to read this book immediately after having read through David Sehat’s The Myth of American Religious Freedom. I think that in theory Mouw and I are on much the same page in terms of being cautious about imposing Christian values on the culture from without, and the idea that it’s good for Christianity to pursue a religiously pluralistic environment so that we, too, can continue to thrive.
If there’s one thing I would have liked to see more of in the book, it would have been a more central place for the death (and resurrection) of Jesus in laying out the theology and articulating the approach to modern issues. The cross came up in one important place, to balance out the sometimes-triumphalist Abraham Kuyper, but I would have liked to see more. That’s what happens when a Paul scholar reads a work by a philosopher, I guess!
In all, this is a book well worth reading–it’s updated and expanded from an earlier version and as timely now as it was then.
Rich Mouw has a blog post on atonement, touching both on the question of N. T. Wright’s atonement theology in particular and the need for substitution more generally. Here’s the opening salvo:
I am no expert on N. T. Wright’s theology, but I know enough to reject those charges of his critics that he is weak on “the substitutionary atonement.” Here is the clincher for me, from one of his meditations in The Crown and the Fire: “Jesus, the innocent one, was drawing on to himself the holy wrath of God against human sin in general, so that human sinners like you and me can find, as we look at the cross, that the load of sin and guilt we have been carrying is taken away from us.”
(Note to self: I love Fuller.)
The article goes on to talk about the importance of substitution–not as the end-all, be-all of atonement theory, but as one important part of what happened on the cross.
One question I continue to wrestle with is the extent to which “Jesus died for me” entails substitution in general and penal substitution in particular. When working through the New Testament texts in class, I often step back and ask: does this passage really say that Jesus took the penalty, or are we bringing that with us? And if Jesus is in some sense substitute, what sense is that, exactly?
There are lots of good questions being asked, and lots of proposals being made. In part, I think that coming out with a robust biblical and theological answer will depend on keeping in view a full-orbed vision of both sin and redemption. We cannot allow the reality of sin as guilt be entirely eclipsed by sin as power. We cannot discount a narrative in which God hopes to use the discipline and punishment of exile to recreate a new and faithful people. We cannot discount stories of Jesus in which he forgives sin without sacrifice.
Somehow we have to be able to hold all of these things and myriad others at the same time. We have to be able to say Jesus lived for me. It was necessary for Jesus to live for me. Jesus died for me. It was necessary for Jesus to die for me. Jesus was raised for me. It was necessary for Jesus to be raised for me.
If we can pin that together with “He comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found,” I think we’ll be well on our way.
