Tag Archive - theology

Theology as a Way of Life?

March 14, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

I hate to get too predictable, but you can imagine how I responded when I saw the following in a recent advert from Paternoster Press:

James McClendon is right to assert that Theology is ‘not merely a reading strategy by which the church can understand Scripture; it is a way—for us, it is the way—of Christian existence itself’.

Disclaimers: (1) I do not know where James McClendon says this, therefore I do not have a larger context for interpreting what “theology” means here. (2) I do not know who this “us” is of whom he speaks.

Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Let me also say, first and foremost, that there are some ways that I can see myself affirming this sentence. If by “theology” you mean, “Jesus, the crucified Messiah, is resurrected Lord,” then I agree that this mini-narrative of Christian theology provides both the hermeneutical lens for making sense of scripture and provides us with the way of Christian existence itself.

If this is the life of Christ, after all, then we who are dubbed “little Christs” are called to renarrate this life in our own.

But of course, my concern is that this is not what the phrase means at all.

My concern is that it has taken a typical Evangelical mistake (relying on the Bible as though the Bible is THE thing, rather than Christ being THE thing) and pushed it back one further level from the appropriate target, landing on Christian theological articulations as THE things that determine faithful Christian faith and practice.

“The way,” of course, is Jesus.

The Bible testifies to Jesus as the way God has provided for the life of God’s creatures. It is one step removed from the person and his narrative, but is the access we have and the God-given interpretation of the saving story.

Theology in the traditional sense is a second step removed, as it reflects on what the Bible has said about Jesus who is the way and the God who provided Him.

If I’m reading the paragraph fairly, the claim that theology is the way of Christian existence is a door to a world in which theology forms the hermeneutic, identity, and praxis of a community. In such a world, articulating the correct theology becomes its own good–the very faithful practice God hopes for from Christians.

If theology is the way of Christian life itself, then mental constructions and statements of right belief become the markers of Christian life. And in so doing, following Christ along the way of the cross, being ambassadors of the message of reconciliation, feeding the hungry, caring for the parentless, embracing the outsider–all of these become second-order responses, and lie far from the center of faithful Christian practice.

But perhaps we can just agree (hard as it is for my inner 8 to say such a thing):

The theology by which we understand scripture is that Jesus is God’s messiah, given up on the cross and then raised and enthroned at God’s right hand.

This theology of the Christ is our way of life, because it means that all of our life should be a giving up of ourselves in order that all creation might live under the freedom of the risen Christ’s lordship.

Now that’s a “theology as the way of Christian existence” I can get behind–a theology in which theology itself is eclipsed by the Christ of whom it speaks.

Deconstructing Paul

December 22, 2011 in Book Reviews, Jesus Have I Loved with 1 Comment

When you think of Paul, what, or who, do you think of?

Some thoughts on various Pauls that need deconstructing, and what might go in the place:

Get the full story here!

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.

Laughing at Karl

September 25, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Quotes with 4 Comments

Here’s a quote I’ve seen in several places (HT: Chris Tilling). I thought that you might enjoy it–especially if you wonder why on earth I’m reading Karl Barth.

“The angels laugh at old Karl. They laugh at him because he tries to grasp the truth about God in a book of Dogmatics. They laugh at the fact that volume follows volume, and each is thicker than the previous ones. As they laugh, they say to one another, ‘Look! Here he comes now with his little pushcart full of volumes of the Dogmatics!’—and they laugh about the persons who write so much about Karl Barth instead of writing about the things he is trying to write about. Truly, the angels laugh.” -Karl Barth

The best part about it is his little jab at people who write about him rather than writing about the God who is his subject matter. How often has theology gone wrong because we’ve been so interested in what people have said that we talk about what they have said rather than the God about whom they are speaking?

“When I Say God…”

August 29, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 14 Comments

“When I say God, what I mean is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

This statement of Geoffrey Wainwright was a favorite among the Divinity Students at Duke when I was there–it invariably showed up in each of their sermons prepared for Trinity Sunday.

The Christian God has an identity. That identity is Father, Son, and Spirit. This is our starting point. This is who (and what) our God is.

So what happens when we turn to the Bible and read the word “God”?

When Paul said God, he meant the Father only.

Similarly, when we read Mark, for example, God is the sender, the power, the authority giver, the father.

The burden of my various threads of thought over the past couple of weeks (and months and years!) on the blog has been to clear out space to answer this question: “What does it mean to say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ before Christians were proclaiming, ‘Jesus is God’?”

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.

Salvation and the Rule of Faith

August 8, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Church with 20 Comments

Over on my Google+ world a little conversation is unfolding around a question I asked regarding the Rule of Faith, and I thought I’d bring it over here as well.

In his landmark work, The Creeds of Christendom, Philip Schaff says the Ecumenical creeds contain articles of Christian faith “necessary and sufficient for salvation.”

Do they contain what’s necessary?

Are they sufficient?

I incline toward “neither.”

Did Christians without Matthew attain salvation without a virgin birth or is that not really necessary to believe in order to follow Jesus?

If a Jesus follower today believed that Jesus was raised from the dead, that he was the exalted Lord over all things, and devoted himself to serving Jesus, loving his destitute neighbors, and the like, but didn’t believe in a virginal conception and birth, would that person be excluded from the kingdom of heaven at the final judgment because he failed to believe this necessary point of the creed?

If we believe all these things but act like nincompoops our whole lives, is that sufficient for salvation or will Jesus say, “Depart from me, I never knew you, you workers of lawlessness,” thereby showing “belief” in these creeds to be insufficient?

I worry that the whole paradigm of points of doctrine that need to be believed for salvation is misguided. What do you think?

Tribalism Old and New?

July 25, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 17 Comments

A few days back Andrew Perriman’s blog drew my attention to James K. A. Smith’s complaints about the state of theology nowadays.

Here’s the heart of his assessment:

It just seems to me that we have increasing “balkanization,” with everyone carving themselves up into smaller and smaller tribish enclaves, and then proceeding to both rail against straw men and preach to their own little choirs. In some ways, I think this is an effect of the loss of confessional and denominational identity. Instead of training to be Reformed theologians or Roman Catholic theologians or Lutheran theologians we have a generation who are training to become “ecclesiocentric” theologians or “apocalyptic” theologians or “radically orthodox” theologians, etc.

I cannot help but think that Smith’s assessment boils down to this: “People aren’t playing by the rules of the game that I learned when I learned theology, therefore their game is wrong.”

I find more than a little irony in the idea that a Protestant theologian wants people to get out of their “tribish enclaves” and return to their denominations.

News flash! Denominations are tribish enclaves!

Worse, denominations are ghettos. They are places where people become socialized to a certain way of thinking, a certain way of viewing the world, a certain way of articulating their theology, a certain way of paying their dues so as to ascend to positions of influence and power.

One of the ironies of Smith’s post is that he is writing in response to a graduate student who is upset about the ways that theological labels prevent conversation: if you like person x or don’t like person y, you are automatically celebrated or, as often, persona non grata.

News flash! This is exactly what happens in ecclesial worlds defined by a strong denominational identity. That “thick” theology, as Smith calls is, is nothing less than a thick door that enables us to keep out people who disagree with us. All you have to do is say, “Luther” or “Calvin” or “Barth” or whomever, and we know, without ever having touched the book, that they are to be celebrated or, as often, he is persona non grata.

Deep commitment to denominational identity and being a “churchman” does not produce better theology. It produces a more controllable tribe–one that can be policed by church bureaucracies, one that can be guarded by limiting ordination or snubbing theologians for academic posts should they associate too closely with those “others.”

I do understand the pull and strength of denominational identity. I’ve been there.

But the reason there are so many new tribes is at least threefold, it seems to me: (1) a new generation is recognizing that those old fault lines are bad ways of splitting up the church; (2) we recognize that people with whom we differ on “traditional” points of doctrine are nonetheless people with whom we share greater affinity about things that are much more important to the life of the church than what we think about church government or predestination; and (3) we see the less-than-Christian dynamics that control the power politics of our denominations and we’re over it.

There is nothing lost, and an infinite amount to be gained by the erosion of denominational identity. What the power brokers and gatekeepers will continue to see as a fracturing and weakening of the church will continue, for new generations, to prove itself as the only strong and viable way forward.

My own field, biblical studies, is so strong in part because we do not divide and discuss based on theological identities that bind the hands of our exegesis and blind the eyes of our hermeneutics.

Allow the old tribes and their hundreds-of-years-old divisions to die.

Then come, open up your Bible and read with me. And take the bread with me. And sing to God with me. And theologize with me while we serve our One Lord together.

Ed. Note: I know that at this point you probably think JRDK has nothing good to say about denominations and that nobody should be in one. Tomorrow we will revisit the issue and work through why denominations have value for the church and even, at times, for the Kingdom of God.

What Threatens the Chuch?

July 23, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 24 Comments

In the wake of the Rob Bell controversy, his editor at HarperOne, Mickey Maudlin, wrote a reflection on what transpired.

Bell wrote a book many disagreed with, and the disagreement immediately was charged with words like “Heresy,” and was roundly condemned in many circles.

Maudlin points out how blithely the notion of heresy was invoked:

Why would leaders attack as a threat and an enemy someone who shares their views of Scripture, Jesus, and the Trinity? What prevented leaders from saying, “Thanks, Rob, interesting views, but here is where we disagree”?

What list of theological beliefs must be fully checked off before someone can be embraced as brother or sister even if we disagree about other important issues?

Maudlin sees in this reaction itself the true threat to evangelicalism. The threat to the evangelical church’s life is not creeping liberalism. The true threat is tribalism.

But now I think the biggest threat is Christian tribalism, where God’s interests are reduced to and measured by those sharing your history, tradition, and beliefs, and where one needs an “enemy” in order for you to feel “right with God.” Such is the challenge facing the church today and what the reaction to Love Wins reveals.

Or, in the words of Paul, “If you bit and devour one another, take care or you might just consume one another.”

I think Maudlin is on to something. At some basic level we have gotten our story wrong. We have begun to act as though the way that we know we’re faithful to Jesus is if we condemn anyone who seems to be tearing down the walls of the theological circle that inscribes the faithful.

But there is no such wall.

Falling within a theological border is not, has never been, can can never be, the means by which the faithful followers of Jesus are demarcated.

The first-century church had to painfully wrestle through the reality that Jesus came to break down the dividing wall of hostility that was Israel’s Law. It seems that we must come to terms with a Jesus who breaks down the dividing wall of hostility that is Christian Theology.

If we don’t, we may find ourselves in the very position of Paul’s opponents in Galatia, compelling others to become like us if they would be marked as part of the people of God–and thus as agents of nothing less than anti-gospel.

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