The Fire and the Rose

The Top 50 Albums of 2011

2011-12-31T09:34:00.001-05:00

The year 2011 did not set any new standards in music. It wasnot 2010. The top 3 albums from last year are easily better than anything fromthis year. But in many ways it was a year of new beginnings, as many newtalented artists released surprising debuts (James Blake, Katy B, Youth Lagoon,Cults, Washed Out) and seasoned artists pushed their music in new directions (M83,Beirut, Radiohead, Mates of State, Destroyer, Danielson).

This was the Year of Electronic Music. The seeds that weresown in 2010 bore fruit in 2011. James Blake is perhaps most symbolic of this trajectory,but the influence of electronic music can be seen everywhere. The rise ofdubstep as a legitimate and serious mode of pop music is perhaps the mostexciting development.

My pick for the most surprising album goes to Mates of Statefor Mountaintops. I’ve long been ahuge fan of their music, but the last few albums have been lackluster comparedto their earlier work. The new album does not retread old ground, but it bringsback a lot of the old magic. It is one of their best albums ever. My pick forthe biggest disappointment is an easy one: TV on the Radio, Nine Types of Light. After the stunningachievement of Dear Science, Iexpected something truly magnificent and groundbreaking for their follow-upeffort. Unfortunately, it is their least engaging and most uninspired product. Nodoubt the loss of bassist Gerard Smith on April 20 due to lung cancer was ahuge blow to the band. I can only hope that they are able to recover soon and fulfillthe promise of their earlier albums.

What follows are my top 50 albums of the year. Only the top 25are ordered in a way that I feel more or less confident about; the bottom halfare open to (nearly daily) revision.

1. M83, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

Each year seems to have at least one album that expands thedefinition of “epic.” In 2011, that album was the stunning two-disc work byAnthony Gonzalez.

2. Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Overrated? Hardly. But even if it is, it’s for good reason.Justin Vernon’s sophomore album does much more than merely assuage those worriedthat his debut might have been a lucky accident born out of an unrepeatablerevelatory experience in the Wisconsin woods. And if I hear one more complaintabout the cheesiness of the last song, I might lose it.

3. The Antlers, Burst Apart

The Antlers had a tough act to follow after their beloved Hospice, but this is, I think, thesuperior album. It might be the album I listened to most in 2011, and it willprobably be the one that has the longest listening life.

4. James Blake, James Blake

Blake came on the scene in a big way with three magnificentEPs in 2010. His self-titled debut brought his singular (post-)dubstep visioninto full focus. Of all the albums from this year, this one still strikes me asthe most artistically impressive.

5. Katy B, On a Mission

Katy B was for 2011 what Robyn was for 2010: a supremelytalented female artist producing club-ready music without the mainstreamrecognition that each deserve. Kathleen Brien was indeed on a mission this year,and it paid off beautifully.

6. Handsome Furs, Sound Kapital

The husband-and-wife duo of Dan Boeckner (of Wolf Paradefame) and Alexei Perry fulfilled their promise with their third album, Sound Kapital. This album did for mewhat Sleigh Bells did last year: it gave me total sonic bliss. It was as if someonehad extracted the magical kernel within Apologiesto the Queen Mary and dressed it within the garb of electronic indie pop.It was love at first listen.

7. Youth Lagoon, The Year of Hibernation

The debut album by Youth Lagoon, the stage name of TrevorPowers, was perhaps the biggest and most pleasant surprise of the year. His catchy,atmospheric, dreamy, shoegazy sonic concoction delivers some of the year’sbiggest musical thrills.

8. The Field, Looping State of Mind

Swedish minimalist techno artist, Axel Willner, doing whathe does best. His third album is his best yet.

9. Dominik Eulberg, Diorama

I want to live inside the landscapes of this album. It’s nosurprise that the German musical artist occasionally works as a park ranger. IfI had to pick a soundtrack for the year, it would be Diorama.

10. Cults, Cults

The Cults debut album—self-released in June—is just aboutthe perfect summer pop album. Its effortless blend of post-punk, power pop, andshoegaze makes me happy every time.

11. Beirut, The RipTide

12. Washed Out, Withinand Without

13. SBTRKT, SBTRKT

14. Arrange, Plantation

15. Cut Copy, Zonoscope

16. Lykke Li, WoundedRhymes

17. Fleet Foxes, HelplessnessBlues

18. Radiohead, King ofLimbs

19. Mates of State, Mountaintops

20. Gang Gang Dance, EyeContact

21. Destroyer, Kaputt

22. Girls, Father,Son, Holy Ghost

23. Thundercat, TheGolden Age of Apocalypse

24. Tim Hecker, Ravedeath,1972

25. Wild Beasts, Smother

26. Danielson, TheBest of Gloucester Country

27. The Horrors, Skying

28. Marissa Nadler, MarissaNadler

29. Richard Buckner, OurBlood

30. WU LYF, Go TellFire to the Mountain

31. AraabMuzik, ElectronicDream

32. John Maus,We Must Become the Pitiless Censors ofOurselves

33. Neon Indian, EraExtraña

34. Moonface, OrganMusic Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped

35. Nguzunguzu, ThePerfect Lullaby & Timesup EP

36. The War on Drugs, SlaveAmbient

37. Wilco, The WholeLove

38. Panda Bear, Tomboy

39. Real Estate, Days

40. Apparat, TheDevil’s Walk

41. Los Campesinos!, HelloSadness

42. Drake, Take Care

43. Beastie Boys, HotSauce Committee, Pt. 2

44. tUne-yArDs, WhoKill

45. Boom Bip, Zig Zaj

46. Iron & Wine, KissEach Other Clean

47. Shabazz Palaces, BlackUp

48. The Decemberists, TheKing Is Dead

49. Com Truise, GalacticMelt

50. Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck

Rudolf Bultmann: theologian of Advent

2011-12-24T12:13:00.000-05:00

As most who read this blog know, my dissertation is technically on Barth and Bultmann, but my primary interest is in reinterpreting Bultmann and reviving him for a new generation of theology. One of the many benefits of this project has been the chance to read Bultmann’s sermons, especially those that were published posthumously in 1984 in the collection, Das verkündigte Wort. Nine of the pieces in this work were written for Advent. They confirm in a striking and profound way the fact that Bultmann is the theologian of Advent par excellence. His key verse is John 1.14: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us...” For Bultmann, all theology is christology, and christology is about the paradoxical identity of divinity and humanity in this concrete historical event.

One of the sermons, “Der Sinn des Weihnachtsfestes,” was delivered in Marburg on December 17, 1926. I have translated a section from the end of the sermon that I have found immensely helpful in understanding Bultmann. As with all his Christmas writings, it is an example of his theological mind operating at the highest level and on a topic of profound concern to him. (Please forgive the woodenness of the translation.)

The message of Christmas is: there is a second beginning; that event, “the Word became flesh,” is this beginning, in which love became an actuality. How can love be a possibility for us, become an actuality for us, if we come from hate? One way only: by the fact that we are loved. How can we become new, start a new beginning, get away from ourselves? One way only: through love that forgives. ...

We are confronted by the choice whether this beginning will be our beginning. It is not an event that has created objective world-historical values which are bestowed on us without our choosing, that is, without faith. It is not an event that has led to a world-historical occurrence, in whose so-called blessings we all readily participate. But instead it is an event that, as a beginning, is always ever a beginning; it was not once a beginning that has now long since been built over, indeed, rendered obsolete by means of a developmental process. In the pagan idea that God is always born anew, in the childish thought that the Christ-child is always a child, lies a meaningful clue. ... Precisely this is the reason that we celebrate his birth, the Christ-child; because it brings to expression the fact that we do not fancy him according to human standards of what is great and impressive, but rather that we hold in earnest to the claim: “The Word made flesh.” Of course, when we say, “always beginning,” we are not talking about an eternal becoming-human of the divine in humanity, but instead we speak of that one event that has divided history, of that human being in whom God’s love appeared as an actuality. When we say, “always beginning,” we thus mean: this event always demands our decision. We have to choose whether it will be a beginning for us.

In truth, this event, which always wants to be the beginning for us, is in fact always the beginning for us, whether we want it to be or not. We choose always only in which sense it will be the beginning for us. For ever since this event took place, all history has been marked by it. The one who chooses it has chosen life, and the one who spurns it has spurned nothing less than life itself; that person has chosen death. Each person has chosen. One cannot ignore this beginning, and even to ignore it is to take a position; the one who spurns love remains in hate.

And finally, once again: “The Word became flesh,” God became a human being. It’s not about the miraculous transformation of some cosmic substance, but rather the fact that through the birth of a human being history has been decisively determined. It’s also not about the fact that we have sensed God’s grace in special matters and special experiences as something extra, but rather the fact that in the person of Jesus Christ God’s grace and actuality have appeared and marked our history. As flesh, as human beings, we belong to the history whose beginning he is. If we believe in him, this means that we believe that these occurrences of everyday life, these doings and sufferings, these givings and receivings, in which we stand as human beings, can and should be stamped with the mark of love. In view of that beginning, this life should be guided by faith in the love that surrounds us with forgiveness—in the love whose word, if only that one great word is heard, can become everything. But, of course, that is only if we ourselves become such a word of love, that is, if we love. Since one can only love as one who is loved, to whom love has been given, so one can also only receive love if one accepts it as the power to love in obedience.

“In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the reconciliation for our sins. Beloved, since God therefore loved us, we also should love one another.”

Rudolf Bultmann, Das verkündigte Wort: Predigten, Andachten, Ansprachen 1906-1941, ed. Erich Grässer and Martin Evang (Tübingen: Mohr, 1984), 237-38.

Actualistic ontology: a word of clarification

2011-12-23T19:06:00.002-05:00

I am blessed to be surrounded by people interested in carrying on vigorous and intelligent conversation regarding the intricacies of contemporary theology. For this, I am truly grateful. But as part of this ongoing conversation, I occasionally encounter misunderstandings of certain theological positions. One of the most misunderstood, even by those who are largely sympathetic, is the current post-Barthian conception of “actualistic ontology” (hereafter AO). I will not here advance my own arguments regarding the validity of this position as an interpretation of Barth. I only wish to clear up a bit of confusion that has cropped up among those who reject ontology tout court as theologically illegitimate. Those who hold such views are one of two camps that believe all ontology to be metaphysics; the other group being those who think theology needs to embrace metaphysics. They are two sides of the same “ontology = metaphysics” coin, and both sides are wrong—but I won’t get into all that now. The criticism is simply that AO, by virtue of speaking about a theological ontology, is an instance of trying to give human beings a kind of epistemological control over God, that is, to secure God as something stable and graspable. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I will keep my clarification of AO very simple. AO does not give unwarranted ontological security; on the contrary, it de-secures our ontology. AO locates the fragility and instability of our knowledge of God—what dialectical theology rightly emphasizes over against orthodox and liberal attempts to make such knowledge secure through some kind of general foundationalism—in the very reality and identity of God. Or, rather, it affirms, in an act of Nachdenken, that God has located such fragility within Godself. AO thus says something quite remarkable and radical: the vulnerability of our epistemic relation to God is not merely a feature of our finitude and sinfulness; it is, in fact, a vulnerability in which God has eternally willed to participate—a vulnerability, in fact, that God has willed to make constitutive of God’s very being. The weakness and riskiness that marks our human situation is one that God has chosen to mark the divine situation. There is no control or stability here. On the contrary, AO radicalizes the instability and maximizes our lack of control by grounding these in the being of God.

There is an Advent sermon embedded in these thoughts, but I’ll let others develop it. I have a dissertation to write.

The Evangelical Hypothesis

2011-11-20T14:06:00.001-05:00

The Evangelical Hypothesis: Recovering the Counterimperial Promise of Evangelicalism

A lecture given on November 17, 2011 in the course, “Introduction to Systematic Theology,” at Princeton Theological Seminary. The lecture is a version of the blog essay, “The Evangelical Hypothesis,” published online at Two Friars and a Fool on August 16.

I begin with a fact: there is no consensus about what the word “evangelical” means today. The word comes of course from the Greek New Testament word euangelion, meaning “good message.” In Germany, the word evangelisch simply means “Protestant.” As German theologian Oswald Bayer notes, “evangelical” was “mainly a concept in imperial law,” referring to the body of Protestant churches within the Holy Roman Empire—the corpus evangelicorum. In the North American context, the word has a very complicated and diverse history. The Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, established by historians Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch, distinguishes between three senses of the word “evangelical.” First, there is a doctrinal or thematic definition, most often associated with the fourfold definition provided by David Bebbington. In this sense, evangelical refers to a commitment to: (a) conversionism, the notion that lives have to be changed; (b) activism, the expression of the gospel in practical action; (c) biblicism, a high regard for scripture; and (d) crucicentrism, the emphasis on the cross of Christ as the doctrinal center of faith. This definition has more recently been revised by the Canadian evangelical theologian, John Stackhouse, who changes activism to the broader conception of mission and adds the fifth category of “transdenominationalism.” I’ll return to this later. The second sense of evangelical is a kind of style, rather than a set of beliefs. Here the emphasis is on an individual piety that is not restricted to any one denomination or community. So this could include everyone from Catholic charismatics to the Dutch Reformed. The third understanding of evangelical refers more specifically to the coalition of religious groups that formed after the Second World War in response to the fundamentalist-modernist controversies, which includes the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Seminary, and the publication Christianity Today.

The lesson to take away from these different meanings of the word “evangelical” is that the attempt to provide a universal definition of the word is impossible and runs contrary to evangelicalism’s own diverse history. In the time remaining, I want to articulate what I call the “evangelical hypothesis.” I take the language of hypothesis from Alain Badiou’s book, The Communist Hypothesis. Just as he refers to the “idea of communism,” so I will refer to the “idea of evangelicalism.” By this, I do not mean to give a definition that encompasses any empirical group of self-described “evangelicals.” My goal is rather to articulate what I take to be one idea or truth that comes to expression in evangelicalism. My claim is that this idea or truth is radically counterimperial, and it is because of this idea that I think evangelicalism, despite its near-total capitulation to empire, remains the best hope for a subversive theopolitical praxis in a post-Christian world.

Before I state what the evangelical hypothesis is, let me give you some of my family history. I am a direct descendent of Jonathan Blanchard, the founder of Wheaton College, one of the flagship schools in American evangelicalism. Blanchard was a pupil of Charles Finney, a leader in the Second Great Awakening and the second president of Oberlin College. Finney is, to put it mildly, a radical figure in American Christianity. He lived from 1792 to 1875, during which time the United States experienced major religious and political transformations. The Second Great Awakening is the origin of most of contemporary evangelical or nonconformist religious trends. Many of these we find problematic, if not repulsive, today, such as the end-times fervor that arose with the dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby (1800-1882). Others are intriguing or amusing for one reason or another, such as the rise of Seventh-Day Adventism or the creation of the Mormon faith. In the midst of these developments, a group of Calvinists came to reject many of the Reformed doctrines with which they were raised in light of what they saw to be a new situation for the church. The old doctrine of predestination was unable, in their view, to either (a) account for the kinds of personal changes and conversions they experienced in this period of revival or (b) fund the kind of social and political activism they believed was essential to becoming a Christian. Charles Finney was the most outspoken member of this group, and his publication in 1835, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, sparked a national debate over these issues. Finney proclaimed himself a proponent of what he called “the new measures,” referring to new church practices guided by this new cultural situation. In these lectures, he made what was then a shocking statement: “The proper end of all doctrine is practice. Any thing brought forward as doctrine, which cannot be made use of as practical, is not preaching the gospel” (184). He not only got rid of predestination on this ground, but he reconceived conversion itself to mean that one “becom[es] as ‘useful’ as possible in the world” (Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, 18).

(A fifty-page “review” of this work was written in the journal Biblical Repertory and Theological Review—the precursor to the Princeton Theological Review—by Albert Dod, a professor of mathematics at what is now Princeton University and professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. You can find the piece in its entirety in the seminary library’s digital collections online, as well as its counterpart from the previous issue of the journal, another fifty-page piece on a collection of Finney’s sermons.)

How did Finney’s ideas translate into everyday life? Here I will have to be brief. In his Lectures on Revivals, Finney argues that “revivals are hindered when ministers and churches take wrong ground in regard to any question involving human rights” (Lectures, 265). By understanding the gospel in terms of the universal involvement in sin and the universal offer of grace, Finney drew the logical conclusion that all people are understood to be equal before God. As a result, restrictions on who can participate in the work of the church are nullified, and hierarchical divisions are no longer viewed as theologically legitimate. Long before feminism ever became accepted in American society, much less in the mainline denominations, these revivalist evangelicals were openly egalitarian. Not only that, but Finney was one of the country’s most vocal abolitionists. Prior to his involvement, the abolitionist movement viewed its work as a slow, gradual process. But Finney and his disciples preached “immediate emancipation,” and he worked toward this by having new converts walk from the altar call to the back of the church where they would sign up for the abolitionist movement or some other reformist group. Finney refused communion to slaveholders and openly preached against it as a social sin. Finney’s most well-known convert was Theodore Weld, who became one of the major leaders in the abolitionist movement. His tracts on the issue were the catalyst for many of the later political developments. When Finney was offered a job as professor (and later as president) of Oberlin, he made it a condition of his arrival that the school would be open to both women and African-Americans—making it the first such school of its kind in the country. Blanchard founded Wheaton on this same principle.

Finney is, of course, only one person, and he is by no means uniformly worthy of praise, as Ted Smith brilliantly explores. I bring him up as an illustration of what I see as a red thread running through the entire history of evangelicalism, in both its European and North American manifestations. We can track this thread from its origins in the Anabaptist opposition to the magisterial Reformation’s tacit (and often explicit) affirmation of Christendom all the way to contemporary nonconformist efforts, such as New Monasticism. Ecclesial developments as varied as the emphasis on parachurch organizations, the formation of the so-called “emerging church,” and the move of Christianity to the global South are all indicative of this evangelical idea—despite the many problems associated with these developments. What is this thread, this single idea? Here I want to return to Stackhouse’s two notions of mission and transdenominationalism. By mission, he means a socioeconomic and political engagement that is basic to the gospel itself; by transdenominationalism, he means a conception of the church’s work that transcends institutional structures and fosters ecumenical partnerships. I think we can and should radicalize Stackhouse’s vision of evangelicalism.

The evangelical hypothesis that I wish to put forward is what I call “mission without churches,” which is a play on the phrase often used by Badiou to define his version of communism, viz. “politics without parties.” By “mission without churches” I mean that evangelical faith brings to expression, however obliquely and indirectly, the truth that the mission of God is subtracted from the logic of religion. Christian faith is absolutely independent of any and every religious structure (or “church”) that would attempt to legitimize it. Evangelicalism, properly understood, is an anarchic mode of Christian existence. Just because I speak of religious institutions does not mean that I restrict the word “church” to denominations and other self-identified religious groups. In the same way that Luther declared “god” to be whatever one worships, so too whatever provides the ideological support or social matrix for one’s identity is “church.” For many self-described evangelicals today, for example, the “church” takes the form of the Republican party and the American empire. But these evangelicals betray the radical insights that come to expression in the actual history of evangelicalism—a history marked by a refusal to let tradition control the exigencies of the moment, a refusal to let abstract doctrine control practice, a refusal to let secular and religious authorities control the movement of the Spirit within the margins of society.

In short, a mission without churches means a mode of worldly praxis that neither undergirds nor can be assimilated into any given power structure. The evangelical hypothesis is, I argue, a counterimperial form of Christian existence.

For Further Reading

Bebbington, D. W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Benson, Bruce Ellis and Peter Heltzel, eds. Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2008.
Dayton, Donald W. Discovering an Evangelical Heritage. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
Dayton, Donald W. and Robert K. Johnston, eds. The Variety of American Evangelicalism. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991.
Finney, Charles G. Lectures on Revivals of Religion. 2nd ed. New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1835.
Heltzel, Peter. Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Loveland, Anne C. “Evangelicalism and ‘Immediate Emancipation’ in American Antislavery Thought.” The Journal of Southern History 32, no. 2 (1966): 172-88.
Marsden, George M. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991.
Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
———. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995.
Olson, Roger E. How to Be Evangelical without Being Conservative. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008.
Pally, Marcia. America’s New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011.
Smith, Ted A. The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Stackhouse, John G., Jr. “Defining ‘Evangelical.’” Church and Faith Trends: A Publication of The Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism 1, no. 1 (2007): 1-5.
Webber, Robert. The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2002.

Survey on Faith and Art

2011-10-05T20:19:00.000-04:00

My friend and fellow PhD colleague at Princeton Seminary, Katie Douglass, is conducting a survey on the role of faith and art in young adults as part of her dissertation project. She is looking for people between the ages of 18 and 30 to fill it out. You do not need to be either Christian or artistic. The survey consists of four parts divided into sixty questions: Demographic Information, Faith Practices, Art Practices, and Your Opinions on various issues on the arts and religion. It will take approximately 15-20 minutes to fill out.

As a bonus for taking the survey, you will have a chance to win a $100 gift card to Amazon.com.

Impossible Possibilities: On Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible

2011-09-08T09:54:00.004-04:00

The most talked-about book of 2011 among evangelicals ought not to be Rob Bell’s Love Wins, but rather Christian Smith’s provocative and insightful attack on biblicism, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. I have a more formal, academic response to this book that I hope to write and publish in the near future. In the meantime, I want to take this opportunity to respond to Robert Gundry’s review in Books and Culture, and through that lens, to address some of the pros and cons of Smith’s book.

First, a few brief words about Smith’s thesis. The book is divided into two main parts: the first is his diagnosis, the second is the prescription. Smith argues that the position of biblicism is an impossible reading of scripture. By “biblicism,” he means “a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability” (viii). He elsewhere identifies a “constellation” of ten assumptions or beliefs that constitute biblicism (4-5):

Divine Writing: the Bible is inerrantly identical with God’s own words;
Total Representation: the Bible communicates the totality of what God has to say;
Complete Coverage: all issues are contained in the Bible;
Democratic Perspicuity: any rational person can correctly understand the text;
Commonsense Hermeneutics: the meaning is available through a plain, literal, face-value reading;
Solo Scriptura (vs. sola scriptura): theology can be built directly out of the biblical text with no extrabiblical texts or frameworks;
Internal Harmony: each texts is internally consistent with every other text;
Universal Applicability: the teachings contained in the Bible are universally valid;
Inductive Method: all Christian teachings can be learned by deriving them directly from the text taken in isolation; and
Handbook Model: the Bible functions as a handbook for every aspect of Christian life.

Smith’s central claim is that this biblicist program is impossible to fulfill, and he demonstrates it through what he calls “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” The argument goes something like this:

biblicism requires that the Bible’s teachings constitute a unified, coherent worldview for the entirety of Christian faith and practice (#2, 3, 7, 8, 10);
biblicism further requires that these teachings are accessible to any rational person, apart from faith and apart from any religious tradition, who reads the text with care (#4, 5, 9);
ergo, biblicism states that everyone ought to be in agreement about what the Bible teaches.

While (3) is obviously false, Smith piles on the examples of pervasive pluralism ad nauseam. He supplements his case with numerous additional problems, including the arbitrary ways biblicists relativize certain passages, the ineluctable need for extrabiblical concepts, and the way biblicist practice deviates from biblicist theory. The conclusion is clear: biblicism, as defined by Smith, is theological nonsense. It has no ground in scripture itself and is thoroughly self-defeating.

In the second part of the book, Smith presents his response to the problem. He doesn’t give a solution—though it occasionally reads like one—so much as present possible aspects of or avenues toward a more responsible evangelical hermeneutic. The primary suggestion is to adopt Barth’s christocentric hermeneutic, that is, to make the gospel kerygma of our reconciliation in Christ the lens by which we understand God’s word for us. Smith even affirms the need for a “canon within the canon” (116), to which I can only say: yes and amen! He even has a section titled: “Learning from Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics” (121-26). Other suggestions include, for example, accepting ambiguities in scripture, refusing the temptation to harmonize, distinguishing dogma from doctrine from opinion, rejecting epistemological foundationalism, embracing elements of speech-act theory, and broadening the notion of biblical authority. All of these are good suggestions, though they fall short, in my opinion, of the kind of robust theological hermeneutic that evangelicals need.

Before turning to my own critiques, let’s take a look at Robert Gundry’s huffy response in Books and Culture, published under the title, “Smithereens!” To call this a review is being a bit generous. It has no intentions of being an honest analysis of Smith’s argument. Gundry opens by saying the book will “sizzle before it fizzles,” and then he goes on to talk about why it should fizzle. The reader of this review who hasn’t actually read the book might be misled into thinking that Gundry actually surveys Smith’s argument fairly, but this is false impression. Gundry spends all of three paragraphs describing Smith’s diagnosis of the biblicist dilemma, while spending the next 15+ paragraphs criticizing his “solution” to the problem. That’s not to say a three-paragraph summary isn’t potentially valid; Smith’s criticism of biblicism is indeed very simple. But it gives the impression that the point of the book is to give a systematic answer to biblicism, when this is most definitely not the case, as the book states explicitly. As Smith put it in his response to Peter Leithart, “In short, the first half of my book needs to be addressed and answered directly for its main critical argument. The second, constructive half of the book might be temporarily ignored, as far as I’m concerned.” Gundry asks: “How then does Smith propose to solve the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism?” But this completely overlooks Smith’s qualification at the start of the second half: “The ideas in the following pages do not offer a fixed package of solutions to the problems raised in previous chapters” (97). Suffice it to say that Gundry’s piece is an untrustworthy guide to the book purportedly under review. It is a very smug essay, full of the self-congratulatory “gotcha” moments that one finds in the writings of reasonably intelligent people who dismiss works critical of their views by distracting their readers from a book’s forceful and valid insights. Readers are advised to judge Smith’s work for themselves.

Where Gundry is wrong, he is dead wrong. He seems to endorse deriving universal ethical laws from the Bible. He finds it suspicious that “Smith repeatedly cites the fate of the unevangelized as an open question and refers again and again to the gospel of God’s reconciling the world to himself through Christ but says nary a word about divine judgment and the lostness of unbelievers despite the apostle Paul's declaring that for their salvation people have to believe in Christ.” Why do conservatives persist in making mercy and judgment antitheses in God, as if God is bound to the kind of antinomies that govern creaturely life? Not surprisingly, he is appalled to hear Smith question the dogmatic status of the “penal satisfaction” theory of atonement: “Sorry, but victory without the penal is pyrrhic.” But this only confirms Smith’s point, that evangelicals have illegitimately elevated what are doctrines at best into infallible dogmas. Gundry is also wrong to side with Van Til against Barth, but that goes without saying.

One of the snarkier moments occurs when Gundry claims to show how Smith employs in his own book the very Scottish commonsense realism and Baconian inductivism that the latter criticizes. “Welcome to Scottish commonsense realism and Baconian inductivism redux,” Gundry writes. “Thanks to Smith they've made a comeback.” This is one of the worst “gotcha” moments in the review, since it is both factually wrong and misses the point. First, to demonstrate that Smith is employing these very methods, Gundry would have to show that his approach actually claims to achieve a purely objective (non-subjective) truth about the world. But Smith nowhere claims such a thing. Gundry equates these methods with an extremely broad scientific method of examining data. If Gundry were correct, then every scientific study would have to be committed to a Baconian philosophical framework, which is of course ridiculous. Not only is Gundry’s attempt at a comeback factually wrong, it is also useless. Simply showing how these methods might be found in the book says nothing about the validity or invalidity of these methods for biblical interpretation. Gundry admits as much when he adds, “To say so is neither to deny nor to affirm his thesis.” Okay, so what’s the point? There is only one point: to distract from the real argument of the book with a banal observation meant to impress the Books and Culture reader (Gundry must assume such readers are not very intelligent), so that he or she forgets Smith was trying to make a serious observation.

But even broken clocks are right twice a day. Some of Gundry’s blows actually hit their mark, and it would be unfair not to point out where he’s right. But let’s be clear: Gundry provides nothing to undermine Smith’s critique of biblicism in the first half of the book. The review’s criticisms all pertain to the “solution” that Gundry thinks Smith is trying to propose. On that, Gundry is quite right to question whether a “christocentric hermeneutic” would really curtail pervasive interpretive pluralism. “You also have to ask whether a christological reading doesn't produce its own such pluralism,” he says. Gundry essentially makes this one point again and again in different ways. The ancient creeds “haven’t put a stop to pluralism outside biblicist circles any more than inside them. Nor has a strong teaching office. Not even pronouncements of the Roman Catholic Magisterium have stopped it among theologians, clergy, and lay people of that communion, not to detail disagreements among Roman Catholics on the Magisterium itself.” And later, he responds to Smith’s point about Christ being present outside of scripture by asking, “are these extrabiblical presences of Christ any less subject to pervasive interpretive pluralism than is biblicism?” All of this is quite true, and I’ll come back to it later.

Gundry is also entirely correct to question Smith’s claim that his recently becoming Roman Catholic is “only partly related to the issues raised here” (xiii). While it is true that the critique and the constructive suggestions are both valid for evangelical Protestants, it is certainly suspect when a book like this appears the same year that Smith publishes another book with the title, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in 95 Difficult Steps (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011). It’s hard to read The Bible Made Impossible and not feel like it is a covert argument for why evangelicals should become Catholic. For instance, at one point Smith says that American evangelicals need to “spend the time needed to think matters through carefully, creatively, and in interaction with the larger, longer Christian tradition. . . . The last thing American evangelicalism needs is more autonomously impulsive reformist action and more organizational and identity fragmentation” (96)! Combine this with his concluding remark about the need for “a stronger hermeneutical lens and ecclesial teaching office” (177; emphasis added), and you have the basic building blocks for a conversion to “evangelical Catholicism.”

As true as these criticisms are, they are not by any means the most important points to raise in objection to Smith’s book. First, Smith’s diagnosis, while generally on target, fails to zero in on the real source of the biblicist dilemma. He admits that not everything on the long list of biblicist characteristics falls under his critique. And he often appears to confuse issues that need to be differentiated more sharply, giving the impression that kitschy books like Gardening with Biblical Plants can be placed alongside the “Three/Four/Five Views on X” that Smith rightly sees as more problematic for biblicism. Second, the constructive suggestions that he provides, while helpful, do not nearly go far enough. He acknowledges this, but that’s not sufficient. We need something more robust. But it’s more serious than that. Not only do they stop short; they also go in the wrong direction. Let me explain.

Both Smith and Gundry, if I’ve understand them correctly, are opposed to pervasive interpretive pluralism (hereafter PIP). Though I must admit that it’s not entirely clear for either one. Certainly Gundry thinks that Smith is against PIP, and he seems to share Smith’s concern about this problem. But is Smith opposed to it himself? Throughout the book he refers to PIP as a problem for biblicism. To use analytic terminology, PIP is a defeater for biblicism. The question is whether PIP is a problem as such for Smith. I agree with Gundry that this is the general impression from the book, and it seems to be confirmed by the conclusion, where Smith says that “biblicism collapse[s] under the weight of the pervasive interpretive pluralism that biblicism itself generates” (173; emphasis added). This is one of the many slips in the book. It is a factually erroneous statement. If biblicism generates PIP, then it would have to be as early as the biblical text itself—more than that, as early as human civilization! If anything, biblicism is a (failed) response to PIP, not its cause. Gundry goes so far as to suggest that PIP might be caused by too much nonbiblicism in the past—as if everyone would agree with his paleofundamentalism if only ancient Christians had been more biblicist!—but that’s equally as erroneous.

The real issue is the assumption by both that PIP is a problem at all that needs to be “fixed” or curtailed. What is perplexing about Smith’s book is that he fails to draw the logical conclusion that PIP itself needs, in some sense, to be embraced. For surely this is what the book leads the reader to expect at numerous points. For instance, he rightly affirms, over against the pursuit of pure objectivity, the active role of the reading subject in the interpretation of scripture: “How else could humans possibly know truth, other than to involve themselves as personal subjects in the discerning and understanding of it?” (114). He seems to acknowledge in these pages the fact that subjective involvement is a universal feature of interpretation. But if that’s the case, then PIP is simply the natural consequence of allowing everyone to read and interpret scripture—which it is. Consequently, on Smith’s own terms, the only way to combat PIP is to fully submit one’s subjectivity to the normative authority of an ecclesial magisterium, or to keep Bibles out of the hands of the laity. Put simply, if Smith really thinks we must overcome PIP, then his argument necessarily requires that one “become Catholic (as I have done) or Eastern Orthodox.” However, if he’s only concerned about moving past biblicism—and thus embracing PIP within a postfoundationalist christocentric hermeneutic—then many of these problems disappear, including the basis for most of Gundry’s criticisms.

Pervasive interpretive pluralism is not a problem to be fixed; it is a fact to be accepted, even a blessing to be embraced. Smith comes so close to making this very point, but he holds back. He has an entire chapter on the need to accept the Bible as it is, with all its ambiguities and complexities and contradictions. He writes about the need to embrace the subjective nature of all interpretation. It ought to follow that PIP is itself something to affirm as part of the creaturely relation to God. This is what Smith should have argued in his book. Not only that PIP is a defeater for biblicism, but that we need a hermeneutic which embraces the radical multiplicity and heterogeneity of our interpretations.

As helpful and insightful as Smith’s book is, it falls short of what the book could and should have argued. Throughout the book he criticizes the “handbook” attempt to derive universally-applicable ideals and principles from the biblical text that will govern every aspect of our life. And yet there is no corresponding suggestion that our understanding of scripture ought to embrace the plurality of historical contexts in which scripture is read and interpreted. Opposing biblicism is one thing; affirming a radically open hermeneutic that gives a positive place to “pervasive pluralism” is something quite different. The pieces are in place for making this move within Smith’s book. A christocentric “canon with the canon” is indeed the correct starting-point. One only needs to recognize that that which remains “outside” this inner canon are the multiplicity of cultural-historical contexts and conceptual forms. If christocentricity constitutes the “inner” canon, then a kind of pneumatocentricity must constitute the “outer” canon. Put differently, the kerygma of Jesus Christ establishes the unity, while the cross-cultural movement of the Spirit establishes the diversity. Together, we have the theological basis for a hermeneutic that embraces pervasive pluralism without resulting in a vicious relativism.

Announcement: Analytic Theology Fellowships & Grants for 2012-2013

2011-08-24T10:03:00.001-04:00

The Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, with support from the Templeton Foundation, announces the following fellowships and grants available for the 2012-2013 academic year:

Analytic Theology Cluster Grants

These grants fund interdisciplinary seminars or reading groups. Each funded seminar or group has two leaders – one theologian and one philosopher – and up to eight additional participants. The leaders must be faculty members. We will award up to five Grants with a maximum $15,000 budget per grant. For details visit the Analytic Theology Project website. To apply to be a leader send a 500 word letter of intent and budget to analytictheology.project-at-gmail-dot-com by February 15, 2012. Full proposals will be invited on a competitive basis. (Prospective participants apply to leaders after funding is secured.)

Analytic Theology Summer Stipends

These stipends provide $5,000 to fund summer research in analytic theology. Successful applicants in year one or two will automatically receive an award in year two or three if they meet the following two conditions: (a) they intend to research a project in analytic theology during the second summer, and (b) their previously funded project has been swiftly accepted for publication at a peer-reviewed journal. For further details visit the website. All materials must be received by February 1, 2012.

Analytic Theology Course Awards

These awards provide funding for the development and implementation of courses, or course segments, in analytic theology at divinity schools and departments of theology and religious studies. The project expects to award five applicants with $15,000 each: $5,000 for the applying faculty member, and $10,000 for the host institution. See the website for more information on the course award program. Applications are due March 15, 2012.

Analytic Theology Post-Doctoral Fellowships

These are one-year fellowships for the 2012-2013 academic year. They provide a funded leave of absence to be spent in residence at a center for research on philosophy of religion or philosophical theology. These fellowships are open to faculty who teach in theology, religion, or divinity programs. Applicants must outline a research program that leads to scholarly publications in analytic theology or to new programs of study. Fellows receive a $60,000 stipend plus $15,000 for expenses. For details, including sample topics and application requirements, see the theology fellowships overview on the website. All materials must be received by January 15, 2012.

The real impasse in the debate over Rob Bell

2011-07-17T23:07:00.000-04:00

Mark Galli’s book, God Wins—a response, obviously, to Love Wins—was the topic of discussion last week. The book has been available on Kindle for a few weeks, though it doesn’t appear in print until August 1. In it, Galli explains why he thinks “love wins” is an insufficient understanding of the gospel, because it bypasses the question of God’s judgment and wrath. Hence, “God wins.” One almost wants to ask Galli whether he’s forgotten 1 John 4:8. But that’s a cheap shot. Since I haven’t read the book yet—and since I’ve already written a few thousand words on Galli in my series responding to his deeply misguided and misinformed review in Christianity Today—I defer to the recent blog posts by Roger Olson, a man I highly respect and deeply admire.

Olson, a friend of Galli, wrote about God Wins on July 7. There he made a number of ambiguous remarks that were clearly an attempt to praise the qualities of the man while criticizing the claims of the book. He begins by stating that “Mark is a serious evangelical scholar with an irenic approach to controversial material.” He then goes on to say, “I get the sense that Mark felt things that I did not feel and that I felt things Mark (and others) did not feel.” And later: “I think that may be because Mark is a member of a denomination struggling with rampant liberalism in which conservatives (by which here I mean people who value traditional, orthodox, biblical Christianity) feel embattled. I, on the other hand, have been beset by fundamentalists and aggressive neo-fundamentalist heresy-hunters.” The rest of the review is just filler: Mark is a great guy, but he’s approaching this book from a perspective I do not share. Translation: his criticisms of Love Wins are not really about Bell; they are instead about Galli’s own issues within his ecclesial context.

Olson followed up that review of God Wins with another post on “Why I defend Rob Bell’s Love Wins (and other controversial books).” In this fascinating post, Olson puts forward the claim that what is really driving a book like God Wins is the whole Calvinism-Arminianism debate. He then states:

I think SOME evangelical Calvinists are so allergic to both Arminianism and liberalism that they tend to lump them together and not see their differences. There’s something in American evangelical Calvinisms’ DNA that makes it see a trajectory from Arminianism (or anything like it) to liberalism. I deny that trajectory and, in fact, tend to think it is the other way around (if anything): Calvinism leads to liberalism.

Olson compares Love Wins to the books related to the open theism controversy. He observes that the attacks made against both by Calvinists are the very same arguments used by Calvinists against Arminianism. What happens in these debates is that the particularities of open theism and Bell’s “open eschatology” (if I may put it thus) are lost amidst polemics about divine sovereignty and human free will. In Olson’s words, “the crux of the debate has to do with two different interpretations of 1 Timothy 2:4,” and “the deep, inner logic of the attacks on Love Wins” are rooted in “Reformed assumptions about God rather than out of Arminian assumptions about God.” Olson then makes a very interesting comment that warrants further reflection:

Simply to respond that God Wins is to raise some questions from the Arminian side. In what sense does God win? Does God get everything he wanted? Does God want hell–antecedently as well as consequently? If you say no, then why does hell exist? It has to be because of free will and that has to be because of God’s loving self-limitation. If you say yes, then that raises a host of questions about God’s goodness. There don’t seem to be alternatives. Either God wanted hell antecedently, in which case God is a monster, or God only wants hell consequently (to the fall) and that means God doesn’t exactly “win” in every sense, right? But love can still win IN THE SENSE that love wants free response and not coerced or programmed response.

There is much here worth examining in detail, but in the interests of brevity, I will summarize my thoughts with the following points. These are not meant to be exhaustive. They only hit on some of the key issues for the sake of further discussion.

1. The Calvinist-Arminian debate is an old one, but it seems blissfully unaware that there are serious alternatives to this rather stale binary opposition. It might seem a bit obvious, since it’s been suggested many times before, but a really compelling alternative is that of Karl Barth. Why? Well, it all comes down to understanding what we mean by freedom. The problem with both Calvinism and Arminianism is that freedom—whether the freedom of God or the freedom of the human being, respectively—has been defined in the abstract. The Calvinist freedom of God (i.e., the absolute sovereignty to determine the elect and the reprobate) and the Arminian freedom of humanity (i.e., the free will to determine one’s eternal identity in response to the gospel message) are both known prior to and apart from how God has actually exercised freedom in the person of Jesus. In other words, both are metaphysical conceptions of freedom. They are abstract notions not determined by the concrete particularity of God’s self-revelation. Now it may be that both sides simply don’t care; they like their metaphysics and cling to it tightly. That could very well be the case. But it’s important to point out just what is being assumed on both sides. In both cases, Christ is not definitive for what divine and human freedom means theologically.

2. Of course, to lift up Barth as a possible solution to the debate is not new, nor is it very persuasive to hard-core adherents of both positions. I suspect Calvinists and Arminians want their abstract conceptions of freedom, not because they care about the debates over metaphysics but because they are both deeply afraid of what it mean to go a different route. To put it directly, both Calvinists and Arminians are afraid of universalism. Calvinists need an abstract divine freedom (that is, an abstract decision of predestination) because their commitment to irresistible grace and the efficacy of God’s election means that a divine freedom determined by Christ’s reconciling promeity would result in the salvation of all people. Arminians need an abstract human freedom because their commitment to God’s universal desire for all to be saved (see Olson’s reference to 1 Tim. 2:4 above) would mean, again, that all humans would be saved were it not for our ability to thwart God’s will. But maybe—just maybe!—the problem is the presupposition by both sides that the salvation of all people is absolutely prohibited as a possible option in theology. Maybe our abstract commitments to a non-universalist eschatology and to certain notions of what freedom means for God and for human beings are at the root of the problem. Maybe we should let the reconciling mission of Christ determine what we can say about freedom and eschatological consummation.

3. In other words, the following claim by Olson is a false binary: “Either God wanted hell antecedently, in which case God is a monster, or God only wants hell consequently (to the fall) and that means God doesn’t exactly ‘win’ in every sense, right?” The answer is no and no. I agree with Olson that God would be a monster for willing hell in advance. The old doctrine of double predestination is indeed a diabolic position to hold. But the Arminian alternative fares no better. Is a God who sends people to hell really much worse than a God who is impotent in the end to save those who reject the gospel (or never hear it in the first place)? The former is a God who is sovereign but cruel; the latter is a God who is weak but loving. The former is protologically monstrous, while the latter is eschatologically monstrous. But it’s unacceptable either way. If all are not finally saved, then God cannot be said to have “won.” And a God who does not “win”—who does not fully and finally accomplish God’s own perfect will—is simply not the God attested in scripture.

4. We can put the problem another way: for both Calvinists and Arminians, love and justice have been defined in the abstract, i.e., apart from God’s concrete self-communication in Christ. Thus both pit love and justice in a competitive relationship. Calvinism grounds the competition in God’s eternal predestination—so that God determines where love will “win” and where justice will “win.” Arminianism grounds the competition in the conflict between a loving God and a sinful humanity: God loves everyone, but this loving divine will is overpowered by a human refusal of this love that, according to the rules of the game, forces God to exact justice. If we begin with Christ, however, it turns out that love and justice are non-competitively related, since it is precisely the love of God for all that God’s cruciform justice serves to accomplish. Justice is simply the form that God’s love takes in the event of the cross. The notions of love and justice are not theologically meaningful independent of and prior to the actualization of God’s just love in the concrete reality of Jesus Christ. The attempt to define them in advance and then figure out how they relate theologically results in this intractable debate.

5. This whole debate also seems to take for granted the notion that eschatology refers to something “beyond death,” that is, beyond each person’s individual perishing. Maybe that’s something we need to reconsider as well.

Some rather unanalytic thoughts on analytic theology: reflections on Logos 2011

2011-06-06T15:49:00.000-04:00

I returned on Sunday from Logos 2011, a superb three-day conference at the University of Notre Dame, sponsored by the Center for Philosophy of Religion and under the specific auspices of the Analytic Theology Project. Let me begin by thanking Michael Rea and the other organizers of the conference for inviting me to participate in the conversation. It was an honor to be there and I greatly enjoyed my time at Notre Dame.

After writing a number of tweets (#logos2011) about it, I’ve naturally been asked to comment at length about the experience. I will do so now, though my assessment here is merely provisional in nature. Larger issues raised at the conference will have to be addressed at another time. This year’s topic on divine revelation, scripture, canon, and biblical authority is a central interest of my work, and for that reason, many of the most interesting theological insights from the conference will have to wait for a future occasion. Here I only want to raise some concerns that I have about the project of analytic theology more broadly, in light of the conversations I had at the conference.

But first, let me gush about the fantastic people I was so privileged to meet. I very much enjoyed conversing with Evan Fales (Iowa), whose paper was a favorite of mine at the conference, and whose use of Leach, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss to interpret scripture is immensely interesting to me. Getting to know Tamsin Jones (Harvard) was a highlight of my time. I was also happy to meet and interact with Andrew Dole (Amherst). It was a pleasure to interact with Oliver Crisp (formerly of Bristol, now at Fuller) and Michael Rea (Notre Dame); both graciously answered my questions and Crisp especially is a lot of fun at a bar. After years of reading his work, I finally met Kevin Vanhoozer (Wheaton) for the first time, as well as his family. More recently, I have taken a great interest in Kenton Sparks (Eastern), whose book God’s Word in Human Words is perhaps the best evangelical treatment of modern biblical scholarship—a work I cannot recommend too highly. Sadly, however, I had to miss the opening session with Peter Enns, a man I highly respect and admire. The reason for this is a little long, but suffice it to say, my luggage was lost during a layover at O’Hare airport. I received it the next day around noon at our hotel, but the last shuttle for the morning session left at 11 am. I also did not have a chance to talk personally with William Abraham (SMU), who provided what was for me the highlight of the trip (see below).

Second, let me also state the obvious: for a conference organized under the auspices of analytic theology, there were very few actually analytic theology or philosophy papers. Unlike previous Logos conferences (from what I’ve heard), this conference broadened the scope of participants considerably. They also chose scholars known for their work on this particular doctrinal topic, as opposed to picking analytic scholars to speak about the topic. The result was an excellent discussion about scripture, though perhaps not as satisfying on a philosophical level for those working in analytic philosophy of religion. Since I’m not interested in analytic theology myself, I found the papers very interesting and worthwhile. Some of the papers were even critical of analytic theology, whether implicitly (Paul Nimmo) or explicitly (Vanhoozer, Abraham).

In the rest of this post, I want to raise some concerns I have about the whole project of analytic theology. I raise these as part of a good faith effort to understand what the project is trying to do. If I have misconstrued anything, I do hope those in the analytic theology circles will correct me. I view myself as a friendly critic, an outsider interested in helping those “inside” do their work better.

My general critique is a classically “continental” one: viz. that I am concerned with the apparently ahistorical and non-social conception of reason with which the analytic people appear to be working. That is to say, there seems to be a sense that theological claims and concepts can be evaluated in abstraction from the historical, cultural, and political contexts within which such claims and concepts originate and develop. So we can evaluate someone like Schleiermacher or Barth by distilling a set of propositions and deciding whether the conclusions rationally follow from the premises. While this appears quite objective, it does not properly take into account both the inherently contextual nature of these theological texts but also the intrinsically social nature of reason itself. The former comes from the fact that these and other theologians are writing within a particular tradition, responding to developments within that tradition, and seeking to speak for this tradition within a new historical situation. The latter is a larger claim that goes back at least to Hegel (see Pinkard’s The Sociality of Reason), with whom I agree. But I cannot defend that tradition of thought here. That’s not to say analytic philosophy cannot take up this Hegelian line of thinking. People like Robert Brandom and John McDowell have done just that, within an analytic pragmatism or a particular reading of Wittgenstein that socializes our thinking, speaking, and doing in the world. (One could justifiably say that the analytic tradition is divided between two different readings of Wittgenstein. By and large, those I met at Logos don’t read him the way I do.)

I bring up this “continental” argument, because I think it illuminates a lot of the disagreements and misunderstandings that I overheard at the conference. I don’t just mean the dismissal of Barth I encountered, or the statements about Schleiermacher having a God who cannot act in the world and does not love humanity. These were certainly very bad and did not inspire confidence about the future, but these are not views unique to analytic theologians; many people hold such notions out of a general lack of knowledge of these theologians and an unwillingness to charitably engage them on their own terms. The problems I am referring to are things like the incredulous stares of some at the notion that I or another person are happy to get rid of inerrancy. While it wasn’t made entirely clear, I gathered that this is because the doctrine of inerrancy is a key premise in a syllogism regarding the authority of scripture. If one dispenses with this doctrine, one dispenses with the logical argument for scripture’s authority and meaningfulness. It became clear to me that many of these analytic grad students are simply ignorant of the entire theological tradition regarding this doctrine. They’ve never read the Protestant scholastics on verbal-plenary inspiration, never studied the writings of Hodge and Warfield in their historical context, never examined the arguments Barth gives for rejecting these doctrines or assessed the cultural and historical reasons for his claims. What these philosophers of religion want to know is: is this doctrine rational or irrational? is scripture authoritative or not? The idea that inerrancy could be a culturally-loaded term, with a complex web of historical relations that have to be entangled before it can be rightly evaluated, is viewed as either irrelevant or foreign or both.

This is why I think people like Enns and Sparks—both of whom, like Barth, make a very sharp distinction between the “humanity” of the text and the “divinity” of God’s word—provoked looks of puzzled astonishment, as if they’ve heard a new language for the very first time. The analytic crowd seemed to insist that unless we could directly predicate inspiration, revelation, and authority of the biblical text (qua text, i.e. words on the page), the whole Christian game would be up. The Barthian/actualistic position—that revelation is directly identified with the person of Christ himself, and that the word of God is a christic-pneumatic event in the encounter between text and reader—got no hearing at all at the conference. I’m not sure anyone in the analytic crowd knows what to do with it. An event resists any logical proposition. It is an existential disruption, not a syllogistic conclusion. Every analytic evaluation of Barth that I’ve read ends up greatly misunderstanding Barth’s christocentrism. They seem to forget that what distinguishes Barth from someone like Charles Hodge is not the various doctrinal propositions with which each agrees; it is rather the entire nature of what theology is as a discipline: its origin, ground, and telos. Between the systematic arrangement of discrete timeless, universal, propositional facts and the contextual-historical reflection on the faith and proclamation of a particular community—between scripture as the revelation of universal truths about God and Christ as the contingent actualization of God’s being that demands ever-new interpretation within new contingent situations—yawns a great chasm.

Returning to Enns for a moment: I think at the end of the day much of this conflict comes down to a christological disagreement regarding the very nature of incarnation. Enns and Sparks could both use some greater sophistication in their use of christological categories, but their essential insight is quite sound: scripture is a fundamentally and thoroughly human document, bearing all the marks of our finitude and fallenness. But precisely as a human document, God speaks in and through it in a way that remains truthful and normative. The incarnational analogy that Enns uses helps to illuminate this very point. Jesus is not God “in spite of” his human form, but precisely “as” a human, including everything that being human implies and demands (insofar as what is not assumed is not redeemed).

However, this is where we run into problems, because we have to clarify just what we mean by incarnation. The classical Chalcedonian tradition is both helpful and dangerous in this regard, because people like Cyril of Alexandria were quite willing to instrumentalize the human nature. The divine Logos was understood to be the sole active agent in the incarnation, while the flesh functioned passively like a garment worn by God in the world. So the incarnational analogy can easily support a very instrumentalist doctrine of inerrancy, even a full-blown theory of dictation (which a couple people at the conference came very close to accepting outright, and are at least sympathetic with). A better incarnational analogy requires a better christology, one that affirms the full human agency of Jesus. The way to do so, in my view, is through Barth, Jüngel, and McCormack—where Jesus is God precisely in his historical existence, where the “human nature” is not something appended onto the “divine nature” because the human existence is precisely where divinity is ontologically located (which to the analytics appears like a collapse of the natures).

I say all this because I think the lack of comprehension regarding incarnation and inerrancy is really indicative of a larger disagreement regarding the very nature of theological reasoning. This became clear at the after-dinner talk given by Billy Abraham (title: “Turning Philosophical Water into Theological Wine”!), in which he made it very clear that all Christian theology is a “spiritual enterprise,” which has spiritual formation as its rightful telos. Theology cannot escape things like diversity of tradition, historical and intellectual diversity, and the diversity of audiences. In short, the very idea of a universal rational discourse is, at least for theology, an illusion. He didn’t put it quite this way, but his point was that theology is about Christian discipleship, and discipleship involves concrete human beings within concrete historical contexts. It speaks from and for a particular group of believers, seeking to upbuild them in the faith and orient them toward love of God and neighbor. I do think most everyone in the room was on board with this, but there were some clear misgivings by some of the analytic types. The most telling moment occurred when one young man asked, “I really don’t understand why theology has to be concerned with spiritual formation at all. Why can’t it be just about logic and reason?” Abraham’s response was to the point: “Go do philosophy.” In other words, don’t call yourself a theologian, because you’re not doing theology. This particular man wasn’t the only person to raise this concern, and I suspect many people in the audience agreed with him.

So let me step back and assess what I take to be the general issue here. Is there such a thing as universal truth? Does theology trade in universally-valid propositions? Do we have access to timeless facts whose validity is universal in scope because not historically-conditioned? These are the kinds of questions that really divide the camps. I don’t want to get into how I would answer those questions here, since that would make this post even longer than it already is. For now, I’ll just say that even if there is universal truth, it’s not universal in the sense of being accessible to all—it is only truth for faith, i.e., within the context of the community of believers. The universality of truth is thus inseparable from the contingency and particularity of history.

My position thus stands in stark contrast to those in the analytic theology school, and I think there is a fairly obvious reason for this. Analytic theology is a subset of analytic philosophy of religion. According to proponents of analytic theology, this field is simply the systematic extension of the analytic philosophy of religion to every doctrinal locus. The aims of analytic theology are not fundamentally different from the aims of the philosophy of religion; there is a quantitative, rather than qualitative, difference between the two. Now the academic discipline of analytic philosophy understands its task to be the logical analysis of propositional arguments about various topics. Those who have not swallowed the Wittgensteinian, much less the Hegelian, pill—who still operate within the sphere of so-called universals—see themselves as capable of abstracting concepts from the historical contexts within which they are used; they can be analyzed apart from their concrete uses in particular situations for particular ends. A logically-justified claim has universal significance. Contrary to the “postmodern” continental tradition, everything is not hermeneutics.

For me, on the contrary, everything is hermeneutics. Every concept is culturally situated, every claim is determined by its location within history. There is no universally-valid ontology, no metaphysic that is not conditioned by a particular sociopolitical context. Now I think there are many ways of reaching this “continental” conclusion, but my reason is purely theological: Jesus Christ is the historicization of God, thus the historicization of theology. Speech about God is not speech about a universal concept of deity; it is contextual speech about the concrete reality of God in the world. This means that the very being of God is the ground for the hermeneutical nature of all theological discourse. There is no speech about God that is not essentially a matter of hermeneutical understanding. All talk of God is interpretation.

Is this an absolute divide? Are these two approaches to theology mutually exclusive? I’d like to think they aren’t, because I do want to engage these analytic theologians in constructive conversation that will be to our mutual benefit. But I am deeply skeptical. I am concerned that we have such radically different views of God, Christ, scripture, and revelation that we will never be able to move past prolegomena to actually do joint work in doctrinal reflection. I hope I am proved wrong and that my suspicions and worries are misguided. Based on the conference, however, I am left with decidedly mixed feelings.

Personally, I do not believe you can start with philosophy of religion and ever reach Christian theology. I am with Barth on this one. Or as Bultmann put it, “There is no alternative; [philosophy] must be either maid or mistress.” With Barth and Bultmann, I want the former (philosophy as maid). There are many at the conference that would probably agree with this, making theology the queen of the sciences. But exactly what they mean by this is often unclear. It seems that, in practice, philosophy is in fact the mistress—or, rather, they see no qualitative distinction between philosophy and theology, and whenever such a view is held, philosophy is inevitably the one in control.

I must reiterate again my deep gratitude for the invitation to attend Logos 2011. It was a pleasure to be there. I had some of the best conversations of the year (including some of the best drinks!). I met many incredible people, whom I look forward to seeing again in the future. I hope my misgivings are themselves misguided. I eagerly await future opportunities to discuss these important topics in more depth. In the meantime, consider me a friendly but critical outsider wishing the analytic theologians the best. There is still time to turn the philosophical water into theological wine.

Logos 2011: Revelation, Authority, and Canon

2011-05-28T21:53:00.000-04:00

I leave on Wednesday for the University of Notre Dame as an invited participant in the 2011 Logos Workshop. This year’s theme is revelation and scripture, focusing on issues related to biblical inspiration, authority, and canon. The papers are by some of the leading scholars in the field, including Peter Enns, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Kenton Sparks. Other presenters include C. Stephen Evans, Eleonore Stump, and (to my great delight) Paul Nimmo. The papers I have read have been nothing short of excellent. I eagerly look forward to the conversation, and I’m honored to have been invited. I expect it to be a highlight of the year.

If you’ll be in the vicinity of South Bend next week and would like to meet up with me, send me an email. My evenings will be relatively free, and nothing is scheduled before 10:00 in the morning.

Christological Unity and Pneumatological Plurality: A Theological Reflection on the Church

2011-05-16T00:49:00.000-04:00

Rachel Held Evans recently held her Rally to Restore Unity, a noble and much-needed effort to establish some healthy, humorous, and charitable dialogue among Christians. Consider this my modest and belated effort to contribute to that conversation.

What is the theological basis for Christian unity? What defines unity for Christian faith? The epistle to the Ephesians provides the best answer: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. … In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord” (Eph. 2:13-14, 21). It is the person and work of Christ—the one crucified for us and our salvation—that forms the “ontological” ground for Christian unity. The unity of the church is located “in him.” Ecumenical peace only exists “in him.” The christology of Ephesians 2 is thus the basis for the more famous passage on unity in Ephesians 4. And we see this in other NT letters. Probably the most succinct and famous passage is Gal. 3:28, which states that all are now “one” in Christ.

But what kind of unity is this? In what sense is a theological-christological unity supposed to be evident on the level of phenomenology? It is in moving in this direction that I think most people tend to go astray. The assumption is that an ontological unity in Christ necessitates some kind of concrete, phenomenal unity on the level of corporate practice, if not also doctrinal formulation. In one sense, this is true enough; the fact that we are unified in Christ ought to translate into the actual practice of unity, as Halden and Ry have correctly argued. We need to do away with the notion that unity is something we do by finding universally-acceptable confessions and doctrinal statements, or through practicing a common liturgy of word and sacrament. Unity is not a task that we must realize. It is instead an indicative before an imperative; and there is only the latter because of the former.

All of this is a much-needed correction of a certain pragmatic ecumenical logic. And yet, I am still concerned about the very definition of “unity” that seems to be presupposed by all sides. What exactly does it mean to be unified? How does the gospel inform what unity looks like? Here is where I think the christological ontology of unity has to be supplemented by—or, rather, is actually ontologically inseparable from—a complex pneumatological repetition. In order to illustrate what I mean, I suggest we look at the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. We all know what happens. Jews in Jerusalem “from every nation under heaven” heard the apostles “speaking in the native language of each” (Acts 2:5-6). Biblical and theological scholars often point out that Pentecost is the Christian reversal of Babel, but this insight is worthy of further exploration.

First, whereas the Tower of Babel involved the loss of a unified language and so the loss of communication, Pentecost involves the restoration of communication in and through the diversity of human languages. Let’s reflect on this for a moment. Notice that the reversal of Babel is not a complete reversal; if it were, the Spirit would establish one common language in place of the many languages. But this is not what happens. God speaks a single message in a multiplicity of tongues: one kerygma, many contexts. What this means is that, in a certain sense, Pentecost actually blesses Babel, i.e., it sanctifies the very diversity that is the cause of our cultural fragmentation and miscommunication. Second, it strikes me that in the contrast between Babel and Pentecost, we have a perfect illustration of two kinds of ecumenical unities. Babel represents the pragmatic-anthropocentric unity forged through doctrinal agreement and liturgical participation. Pentecost represents the theological-christocentric unity established in the flesh of Jesus as the crucified one who destroyed the walls dividing one person from another, one nation from another, one denomination from another.

Third, it is particularly significant that this sanctified reversal of Babel occurs in association with the Spirit. If Christ concretizes the reality of God in a particular historical location, the Spirit universalizes this singular concretization through its infinite repetition. What’s especially important is that this pentecostal repetition is not the mere reproduction of the same. It is instead a creative repetition of the gospel in which the kerygmatic word of the cross is translated into an infinity of cultural contexts and historical situations. The repetition that God enacts, and that is consonant with the reconciling work of Christ, takes the form of a cultural diversification, a complex dissemination of the kerygma in a multiplicity of contexts. This repetition does not add anything to the singularity of Christ as the event of reconciliation; it rather bursts it open from within, enabling it to tear down dividing walls that no one—not even Jesus himself—could have known or anticipated. The Spirit turns Christ’s death and resurrection into an infinitely transposable truth-event capable of revolutionizing any situation, because in a certain ontological sense, Christ has already revolutionized every situation.

What is the practical payoff of this dense theological reflection? There are many aspects that could be developed, such as the claims that “mission makes the church” and that the gospel is intrinsically translatable. I want to focus on the nature of Christian unity. If it is indeed the case that our unity in Christ is inseparable from our being bound up in a pneumatic event of cultural translation, then this has rather dramatic implications for what it means to be part of the body of Christ. We are not dealing with a stable, static body whose limbs are all clearly identifiable as part of a single historical organism. We are instead dealing with a diasporic body whose limbs and parts are scattered and broken in every corner of the earth. It is the very confusion of Babel that is sanctified by the Spirit, because the infinitely translatable Christ is present and active in the midst of this confusion as the one who binds all the scattered remains together in his singular person—but not in a way that could be made phenomenally observable or dogmatically objectifiable. The post-pentecostal Christ cannot be definitively located; he cannot be tied down to any particular church or creed. His future cannot be directly identified with the future of any worldly institution or historical entity.

This brings us to the punch line: we correctly understand our unity to Christ only when it becomes clear that this unity is in fact irreducibly plural in nature; the unity is itself a multiplicity. We are united with those whom we do not know, and with whom we do not agree. Put more pointedly, it is precisely those who claim to be “orthodox” over against the “heterodox” who actually betray the unity that is characteristic of the Christian gospel. Those who cling tightly to their orthodoxy—whether a “sacred deposit,” a confession (such as Westminster), or a doctrine (such as inerrancy)—fail to bear witness to the pneumatological plurality that is distinctive of Christian faith in Jesus Christ. True unity is marked instead by cultural multiplicity and missionary translatability.

On the new universalism: a response to James K. A. Smith

2011-04-26T13:40:00.387-04:00

Thanks to the likes of Rachel Held Evans, Rob Bell, Gregory MacDonald/Robin Parry, and many others, the debate over universalism is all the rage today. In a recent blog post, Calvin professor James K. A. Smith has weighed in on this new development. He begins with the following promising description:

This ain't your Grandma's universalism (if your Grandma was, say, a Unitarian). The (relatively) old universalism was a liberal universalism of "many-roads-to-God-who-is-a-big-cuddly-Grandpa" (or, more recently, Grandma). Such a universalism was generally embarrassed by Christian particularity and any claims to the divinity of Christ. Instead, Jesus was a kindly teacher like so many others pointing us all to that great kumbaya-sing-along in the the "beyond."

In contrast, the "new" universalism is an evangelical universalism, a Christocentric universalism. If all will be saved, they will be saved in Christ, because of the work of Christ as the Incarnate God who has triumphed over the power of sin and death (the new universalist Christ is a victor, not a redeemer).

We can let the overly simplistic typology slide for the moment. The notion that there are two universalisms—a liberal Unitarian version and an evangelical christocentric version—is historically dubious at best. I’ve been reading the new special edition of John A. T. Robinson’s 1950 classic, In the End, God . . . , and I’ve been struck by how evangelical this text really is. Robinson is (in)famous for his provocatively liberal work from 1963, Honest to God (which has gotten a far worse reputation than it deserves, in my opinion), which questions the traditional realist conception of God. But his earlier work is badly in need of new readers. It is a perfect example of how the liberal-evangelical binary is entirely unhelpful. Robinson really breaks those stereotypes, and Trevor Hart’s new introduction very helpfully shows why T. F. Torrance’s rejection of Robinson’s universalism was mistaken on basically every point. Robinson is just as christocentric—and in some ways, even more so—than the new evangelical universalist. I recommend this work highly. Nevertheless, Smith’s basic point is valid: the new universalism is centered in Christ in a way that pluralistic forms of universalism (such as that of John Hicks) never were. The particularity of Christ’s claim to be the way, the truth, and the life is firmly upheld. That much Smith gets right, and it’s a crucial observation.

But problems emerge already at this point, for what could Smith possibly mean by the statement that “the new universalist Christ is a victor, not a redeemer”? Is there an either-or here? Does Christ-as-redeemer require rejecting universalism? How is the triumph over sin and death not an act of redemption? This is the first of many theological problems with Smith’s post. The ambiguities and assumptions continue to mount from here. See what Smith writes next:

The question, then, is just what compels one to be an evangelical universalist? Some resort to prooftexting, operating with a naive, selective reading of Scripture. I'm going to do the evangelical universalist a favor and ignore such a strategy, only because I think it can be so easily refuted. (Many of these evangelical universalists would pounce on such selective prooftexting in other contexts.)

No, the motivation for evangelical universalism is not really a close reading of the Bible's claims about eternity. Instead, it seems that the macro-motivation for evangelical universalism is less a text and more a hermeneutic, a kind of "sensibility" about the very nature of God as "love" (which includes its own implicit sensibility about the nature of love).

The problem with Smith’s emphasis on psychological motivation—and the implied notion that universalism is a pathological condition—has already been dissected by Halden. I want to raise the issue of Smith’s bifurcation between exegesis and hermeneutics. Notice that he says evangelical universalism is motivated by a “hermeneutic” rather than “a close reading” of biblical texts. This, of course, is naive at best. Every act of exegetical interpretation is itself already an exercise in hermeneutical understanding. The close reading of scripture is inseparable from a hermeneutic that guides this reading, even if it is never actually articulated or reflected upon by the exegete herself. What the evangelical universalists ought to “pounce on” is not the claim that they are proof-texting—which is frankly just silly and is not borne out by any of the representatives of the new universalism—but rather the even more egregious claim that their position is not grounded in the text at all but remains at a macro level of abstract analysis.

The truth is that the opponents of any kind of Christian universalism are more often than not the ones engaging in proof-texting. They tend to be the ones who point to Matthew 25 or (if they really aren’t paying attention) John 14:6 as if these are somehow knock-down arguments against all versions of universal reconciliation. The non-universalists are equally guilty, if not more so, of a “naive, selective reading of Scripture.” When you take into account works like The Inescapable Love of God and The Evangelical Universalist—as well as the collection, “All Shall Be Well,” to see that universalism has a long history in the church—it becomes plainly obvious that there is deep textual analysis going on, at a level that many of their opponents simply cannot match. So that whole charge is a moot point, and Smith should not have raised it in the first place. It’s a cheap shot that he then condescendingly leverages, by way of doing the universalist “a favor,” into rhetorical brownie points, in the form of an ironically supercilious ethical appeal (“I’m so magnanimous that I will overlook this flaw to make my opponent’s case appear stronger”).

In fact, not only are non-universalists often guilty of proof-texting passages about hell and eternal judgment—but Jamie Smith himself is guilty of such proof-texting a little later in his post. In the context of discussing why one’s personal hopes have to be governed by the authority of scripture, he relates a hypothetical situation regarding his hope for marriage in the afterlife. He then cites the following statement from Jesus, “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). Talk about proof-texting! Smith just quotes this passage and says that his hope has to be disciplined by the truth of scripture. But where’s the exegesis? Where is the careful analysis that contextualizes this passage? Where is the hermeneutical reflection to ground one’s interpretation? Answer: it’s non-existent. This is a perfect example of what I criticized Mark Galli for in his review of Rob Bell’s book in Christianity Today: shifting the goalposts. Like Galli, Smith seems to think that he is “above” such criticisms, that he can attack proof-texting when it leads to universalism (even though none of the universalists I know actually engage in such proof-texting), but he can freely do it himself because he is maintaining some “orthodox” position on salvation and damnation. This is a recurring problem among conservatives. They allow themselves more liberty because of what appears to be a misguided sense of moral and intellectual superiority, while those who propound “radical” views are placed within far stricter limits. (There’s an analogy here to various disparities within the American justice system, but that’s another topic for another time.) The delicious irony here is that many of the universalists already recognize these higher standards and freely place themselves within them in order to bolster their argument!

But we’re not done here. Look at how Smith uses the word “hermeneutic”: as a “sensibility.” This is a subtle instance of begging the question, in that he has loaded his description of the universalist position in such a way that his critique is already included within it. Where is the argument that the theological hermeneutic of the new universalists is merely a “sensibility” (which reads with an air of snobbish disdain) that God is by nature “love.” (Why the scare quotes on “love”? As if only sentimental, bleeding-heart liberal universalists make such silly statements, and not the author of 1 John?) Is there any proof that the new universalists do not have a robust theological hermeneutic? Is it really true that they do not have a consistent, clear way of understanding how competing passages ought to be interpreted? Is it really just a matter of personal feeling about who God is? If Smith’s outlandish claims are to be even remotely acceptable, he has to actually make some concrete arguments. Making abstract assertions about a general group of scholars and pastors, with no actual argumentation in sight, is irresponsible. One could more justifiably charge Smith with being guided by a “sensibility”—a sense that these universalists are just woolly-minded liberals with no real theological sophistication. It’s always a lot easier to attack inner feelings, motivations, and sensibilities than actual texts. With the former, there’s no way to disprove your statements. Of course, there’s no way to prove them either.

The rest of Smith’s post is full of more assertions about “imagination” and “hope” as the two strategies or sensibilities determining the new evangelical universalism. One says that “I can’t imagine” so-and-so being in hell, while the other says that “I hope” this is how things turn out. Halden has already deconstructed the first notion as a bogus charge, since the implied converse—“I can’t imagine so-and-so being in heaven”—is “no less anthropocentric and Feuerbachian than the (imagined) argument it is designed to counter.” It’s also worth pointing out the strange path that Smith has taken in this post. He began by saying the new evangelical universalism is not like the old liberal universalism because it is “christocentric.” And yet now he is leveling the charge of being “Feuerbachian” at the new universalists. You can’t get much more liberal than that!

This further reinforces the oddness of the whole piece. Smith begins and ends by stating that the new universalism is not the old one. Fine. But I challenge anyone to lop off the beginning and the end and read only the main content of the post. I doubt there is anyone with any knowledge of the subject-matter who would not summarize the thesis as: the new universalism is exactly like the old one. It appears to me, rather, that the qualifications at the start and end of the post are more examples of a rhetorical posturing on the part of Smith in the attempt to win a favorable hearing among readers. But the whole thing is a sham, because he does not actually provide any material support for this qualification in the body of the post. In fact, he seeks instead to undermine it at every turn. So he draws the reader in by making this distinction between old and new, only to subtly tear that distinction down with no actual argumentation or textual analysis to back it up.

For example, he states up front that the evangelical universalists are christocentric: all are saved in Christ. That is true. But if that’s the case, then why is there absolutely no reflection on christology and soteriology anywhere in the post? Why does he then claim that certain personal sensibilities are what drive the new universalists? Does he think that their christocentric claims are disingenuous on their part? Does he think that all universalist claims are inevitably based on psychological motivations, regardless of what they may say about Christ and scripture? Or does he simply find the reference to Christ meaningless in itself, such that Smith is simply unable to understand what christocentrism even means in this case? One has to wonder where the pathology really lies here.

The other charge, regarding hope, is even more befuddling. First, has no one told Smith that to hope for everyone’s salvation is not actually universalism? This would seem to be a rather elementary point. The very definition of universalism is the knowledge that all will be saved. To not know is to not be a universalist. Would Smith accuse Hans Urs von Balthasar of being a universalist simply because he affirmed that we can indeed hope (but no more) for the salvation of all?

But the real error of Smith—what makes it clear that he has no grasp of what it means to be christocentric—is how he handles the nature of universalist hope. He writes:

I'm firmly committed to the particularity of Christ, the evangelical universalist will emphasize. I just hope that God's salvation is not so particular that he only saves some. And it is precisely God's love and mercy that make me hope in this way.

This betrays a fatal misunderstanding of the new evangelical universalism. Smith, putting words in the mouth of a universalist, sets up a completely erroneous competition between the particularity of Christ and the hope for universal salvation grounded in God’s love and mercy. It is precisely this kind of thinking—which places John 14:6 in conflict with Rom. 11:32—that the new universalism seeks to overturn. Only the old universalism could place hope for salvation in conflict with Christ’s particularity. The new universalism makes them coterminous: it is precisely Christ’s particularity that grounds our hope for all to be saved, because Jesus Christ himself, crucified and risen, is the love and mercy of God. He is the concrete actualization of God’s judgment against sin and God’s mercy and grace unto new life. In the same way that Christ does away with all competitive conceptions of love and justice—since the judgment of sin on the cross is the eternal love of God for the reconciliation of the world—so too does Christ abolish all competitive conceptions of particularity and universality. For the evangelical universalist, the universal hope that God is “making all things new” is posited not in spite of but rather only because of the particular claim that Jesus is the exclusive source of salvation. Jesus is the new reign of God irrupting into the world for the sake of its radical—and radically inclusive—transfiguration.

So when Smith says, “Let's stop making this just about passages that mention ‘hell;’ [sic] at issue here are all passages that discuss judgment,” I can only respond: Yes, let’s. It is the claim of Christian faith that all such judgment has to be understood in and through the particularity of Jesus as the once-for-all judgment of God for the reconciliation of the world. Jesus is himself the hermeneutical key for understanding the biblical texts about judgment and hell. To extract these texts from the larger canonical-messianic context is thus to engage in the kind of selective proof-texting that Smith rightly disparages. Understanding these texts christologically—i.e., christocentrically—is not to replace exegesis with a hermeneutic or sensibility; it is instead to read these texts rightly, that is, theologically, within the broader scriptural witness to God’s covenant action in Christ for the sake of the world. Because, to repeat my earlier point, there is no such thing as exegesis without a hermeneutic, no interpretation without a method (however implicit) for making sense of a text.

The question is not whether a person is submitting to the authority of scripture. That much, I think, we can all agree is essential. The question is rather: which hermeneutic is operative in one’s theological reflection and biblical interpretation? The evangelical universalists have a very clearly christocentric hermeneutic. It may be articulated in different (not always compatible) ways, and it may be employed for different (not always compatible) ends, but the basic hermeneutical conviction remains the same: Jesus Christ is the subject-matter of Christian faith, and we only know God’s love and God’s justice in him, in the particular event of his crucifixion and resurrection. Our knowledge of divine mercy and divine righteousness is grounded solely in the saving-event of Jesus Christ. All other sources for such knowledge have to be subordinated to this critical norm of our faith and mission. It is the reconciling self-disclosure of God in Christ that makes one a universalist—and that alone. No other reasons are finally determinative, and therefore no other reasons are worth addressing. Smith’s entire post is a distraction from the real conversation about universal salvation. He misses the point altogether, and the result is an abstract attack on “straw men” of his own fabrication.

Where is the meaty, substantial debate over atonement and the efficacy of Christ’s death? Where is the discussion of passages like Romans 5? Where is the historical-grammatical analysis of the Greek words for “hell” and “eternal”? Where is the hermeneutical debate over theological presuppositions? Where is the nuanced discussion of divine and human freedom? Where is conversation about the relation between christology and pneumatology? Where is the analysis of the logic of hell and damnation? Where is the theological reflection on the nature of God as attested in the canonical biblical witness and its relation to questions of eschatology? Where are any of the actual questions driving the dialogue about universal salvation today? When compared with the real issues in the debate, Smith’s post appears misinformed and superficial. It hovers in the realm of the hypothetical and fictional, and never actually touches the concrete conversation “on the ground.”

Here are suggestions for future critics of the new evangelical universalism:

Lay bare your hermeneutical presuppositions. When you confront the conflict between universalist and dualist texts in scripture, what drives your interpretive conclusions?
Explain the relation between Christ and salvation. Is there a difference between reconciliation, salvation, redemption, and other concepts? In what sense is Jesus our savior? What is the relation between past, present, and future? Is salvation finally realized in the cross and/or resurrection, in a pretemporal act of election, in the present-tense decision of faith, in some future eschatological act of God, or in some other way?
Get your terminology and distinctions correct. Christian universalism is different from pluralistic universalism, but evangelical universalism is not the only version of Christian universalism. There are various ways of articulating a Christian universal salvation, and the evangelical model is not the only “new universalism.” If this is news to you, then start to read up on the debate before you make pronouncements that might come back to hurt you.
Stop with the overly simplistic and superficial dichotomies—for example, exegesis vs. theology, text vs. hermeneutic, love vs. justice, particularity vs. universality, grace vs. judgment, etc. These are the theological equivalent of biblical proof-texting. They are a sign of, to borrow from Eberhard Jüngel, an “unwillingness to read and an inability to think.”
Recognize the distinction between the old and new universalisms—but don’t treat it as a meaningless distinction. Recognize that the differences are crucial, that the basis for the new universalist claims is not the same as before. But at the same time, open yourself to seeing ways in which even the older liberal universalists were a lot more biblically- and theologically-nuanced than perhaps you were led to believe. Not every liberal universalist is a Unitarian, in case that’s news to you.
Finally, for the love of God, please stop breaking out the old rusty hatchet that claims universalists are unwilling to be disciplined by scripture or that they do not recognize the authority of scripture. This is bogus and frankly offensive. It impugns the faith of brothers and sisters in Christ and shuts down any possibility of meaningful dialogue.

Living out of the future: a Lenten homily

2011-04-13T22:11:00.001-04:00

Mark 10:13-16:
13 People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 14 But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. 15 Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” 16 And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

Today’s passage is from the lectionary text for the Wednesday before Palm Sunday. It is a passage we all know very well. This is the Jesus captured in old Hollywood movies and low-quality watercolor paintings and heart-warming Hallmark cards. It’s the saccharine, sentimental Jesus of American religiosity, the anodyne Jesus that we love to embrace because he makes no demands of us. How ironic, then, that this pericope is located between two of the hardest, most challenging, passages in all of Mark’s Gospel. Directly above we read Jesus’ unequivocal rejection of divorce and remarriage, and directly below we read his challenge to the rich man, “Sell what you own, and give the money to the poor,” followed by: “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” In light of the fact that Jesus had just said that the kingdom belonged to children, it’s little wonder that the next verse reads: “the disciples were perplexed at these words.”

Not that our text for today lacks a challenge for us. It’s the well-known one: to receive the kingdom of God like a little child. What exactly does that mean for us? Again, we know the Hallmark version: we must have childlike trust in God, a humility and innocent naiveté when coming before God. That is at least the usual message. It’s not necessarily a bad one, but like many of Jesus’ sayings in the Gospels, it is either ignored out of a sense of its impossibility or forgotten because it has been sentimentalized.

I find an alternative possibility in the work of the German martyr and Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his habilitation thesis, one of his least read works, he reflects on what it means to be “in Christ.” He says there are two ways of being in Christ. One way is to always be concerned with trying to deal with the past. It is to be caught up in endless self-reflection. This is what Bonhoeffer calls the way of the conscience. In the pursuit of a “clear conscience” in the present, one is forever living in the past; the present thus eludes him or her. The other way is to be caught up, not by the past, but by the future, by what is “yet to come.” This is a life lived without endless self-reflection, without turning inward or backward. Bonhoeffer calls this the way of the child. “The child,” he says, “sees itself in the power of what ‘future things’ will bring, and for that reason alone, it can live in the present.” Those who are “mature,” he says, the adults “who desire to be defined by the present, fall subject to the past, to themselves, death and guilt. It is only out of the future that the present can be lived.”

So what exactly does this mean? What does it mean to say that the child lives from the future? I think we have a pretty good illustration of this in the notion of “fantasy” or “make believe.” Children are distinguished by their boundless imagination, their ability to envision an alternate reality and to live into this vision without restriction. They have none of the cynicism and “realism” to place a gap between themselves and their imaginations. They do not stand at a “healthy” (healthy only to adults) distance and consciously reflect on the way in which they are constructing this world of “make believe.” And remember: the categories of “true” and “false,” “real” and “fake,” are adult descriptions; they have no meaning in the world of the child. In the movie, The Little Princess, the main character is a girl who has apparently lost her father in the war. She and the other girls are stuck in an oppressive boarding school. Instead of getting lost in the past, they develop a community of imagination. Their social fantasy frees them from a present that is stuck in the past and allows them instead to live out of the future, and thus truly in the present.

By contrast, we all know the world of the adult, of the mature conscience. The adult is the one who is burdened by memories of past sins, past hurts, past achievements, past failures, past friends, past enemies—always the past. At the same time, the adult is always trying to live in the present. The adult tries to recompense for past wrongs, repay past debts, and restore old friendships. The adult tries to establish the future instead of living out of it. In this light, it is remarkably fitting that the story of Jesus and the children is bracketed by stories of marriage and money—for no other issues define us more as adults than these! In both examples, we are burdened by our past, struggling with the present, and desperately seeking to establish a better future. It is especially fitting that Monday is Tax Day. It symbolizes the adult reflection on the past (i.e., last year’s income) and the preparation for the future.

But Jesus says that we must come to him like little children. Only the child enters the kingdom of God, because only the child is free to enter into God’s imagination. The child is unencumbered by the past and unconcerned with trying to create a reasonable future. The child is uninterested in the adult separation between reality and fantasy. He or she simply lives from the freedom of the future that is entirely open to the new and unexpected.

We are called to be a church of little children. God asks us to freely live in God’s imagination, what Jesus calls the kingdom of God. This isn’t any message that Hollywood or Hallmark can provide. It is found only in the message of Easter that the future has come into our midst, that even death is part of the past from which God frees us.

Prince of Peace Lutheran Church

April 13, 2011

2011 Warfield Lecture 3: “Where God’s Sovereignty Is Definitively Expressed”

2011-04-05T20:30:00.001-04:00

In his third Warfield lecture, David Kelsey turned to the question of divine sovereignty. His entryway into this question is the doxology of the Lord’s Prayer: “For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.” He briefly discussed the history of this doxology and noted that it was originally situated in the context of catechesis. Even though it is a late addition to the prayer, it serves, according to Kelsey, as an ancient creedal formula. It is as much a confession about God as a prayer to God.

However, we immediately confront a problem regarding the language of “kingdom.” For starters, it does not seem to parallel the other two terms, power and glory, because it is not intrinsically relational in nature. A kingdom seems to be a static entity or location, not an active relation to creatures. Furthermore, the term has sexist and oppressive connotations. An earthly king is understood to be someone who exercises absolute power over his subjects, which leads to many problems if ascribed to God by analogy. To deal with these problems, Kelsey reorders the doxology as glory, kingdom, and power. By placing glory first, he intends to define the identity of the one who exercises sovereign power. God’s power is understood in light of God’s kingdom, and both are understood in light of God’s intrinsic glory.

Kelsey then turned to address “where sovereignty is definitively expressed”—in what he calls “eschatological consummation.” In order to understand this term, we have to recall the three kinds of canonical biblical narratives that Kelsey takes from Claus Westermann. The first type of narrative is “liberative promises,” which refers to episodic accounts in which God acts to liberate the people from an oppressive situation. The exodus is obviously the paradigmatic instance of this. The second type is “creative blessing,” which refers to a “steady-state” blessing and sustaining of creaturely existence in itself. This is rooted in the creation narratives: “And God saw that it was good.” The third type is “eschatological consummation” or “eschatological blessing,” which is an additional blessing in excess of creative blessing that brings about the flourishing of the creature.

Eschatological blessing is “coeval” with creative blessing (narratively expressed in the establishment of the Sabbath on the seventh day), but it is not the latter’s logical ground or telos. It’s important for Kelsey that we give creative blessing a kind of independent significance; it has no necessary connection to salvific liberation or eschatological consummation. When creative blessing only exists as a presupposition for eschatological consummation, then it implies that we are not fully creatures until consummation. There is, therefore, an asymmetrical order between creative blessing and eschatological consummation. The latter presupposes the former. Eschatological blessing is an excess, a gift, a blessing-upon-blessing.

Finally, Kelsey made some remarks about why we necessarily “stammer” about God. He provided three basic reasons. First, because divine agency is radically unlike any form of creaturely agency, such that no analogy exists to adequately articulate God’s sovereign rule. God is able to be both immeasurably distant and immeasurably near to us at the same time in a way that we can never truly grasp. Second, the three kinds of canonical narratives noted earlier cannot be synthesized into a systematic unity. Each has its own concretely singular logic. Third and finally, we stammer due to the mysterious simultaneity and distinctiveness of providential care (creative blessing) and eschatological rule (consummation). These two forms of divine agency do not logically necessitate each other, and yet they are both simultaneously grounded in the glorious power of God. Both are aspects of God’s sovereign self-determination. They are consistent expressions of God’s own intrinsic glory.

Finally, in the Q&A following the lecture, it was asked whether Kelsey is an infralapsarian. He responded that he is a kind of supralapsarian. Eschatological blessing is not made necessary because of human sinfulness. It precedes the fall within the creation narrative, and thus such consummation would have occurred even had we not sinned. The incarnation of Christ would, in such a speculative possibility, also have taken place as part of God’s consummation of the creature. But because of the sin problem, such consummation also addresses the need for redemption.

David Kelsey’s 2011 Warfield Lectures: “Glory, Kingdom, and Power”

2011-04-04T12:38:00.006-04:00

This year’s Warfield Lectures were given by David Kelsey, the emeritus Yale theologian known especially today for his magisterial two-volume work on theological anthropology, Eccentric Existence (2009). He gave the lectures under the title, “Glory, Kingdom, and Power: Stammering about God.” As Kelsey stated in the opening lecture, these papers are developing the doctrine of God that was implicit but never developed in Eccentric Existence.

Four PTS theo-bloggers—W. Travis McMaken, Nathan Maddox, Melissa Florer-Bixler, and I—have put together summaries of each of the six lectures. Nathan, in particular, is deserving of special appreciation for covering half of the lectures on his own, in addition to attending all six. I am providing a summary only of the third lecture. Below is the index of posts, with links to be supplied as the summaries are posted online.

Lecture I: “The God of Abraham Praise” (WTM)
Lecture II: “In Praise of the Uselessness of God” (NM)
Lecture III: “Where God’s Sovereignty Is Definitively Expressed” (DWC)
Lecture IV: “God’s Sovereignty in Two Registers” (MFB)
Lecture V: “Where God’s Power Is Definitively Expressed” (NM)
Lecture VI: “God’s Power in Two Registers” (NM)

Announcement: Analytic Theology Course Award Program

2011-04-01T10:22:00.000-04:00

The University of Notre Dame Center for Philosophy of Religion, in cooperation with the John Templeton Foundation, is providing funding for the development and implementation of courses (or course segments) in analytic theology at divinity schools and departments of theology and religious studies. The project expects to award five applicants with $15,000 each: $5,000 for the applying faculty member, and $10,000 for the host institution. For more information, you may also visit their website and click on the course programs link. Applications are due June 1, 2011.

Here is more info from the website:

The program will provide five annual awards to faculty members who would like to develop and teach a course of one of the following two types:

Revised Required Courses – A required graduate survey course that does not currently contain a segment on analytic theology, and which the applicant would like to revise so that it does.
New Courses in Analytic Theology – A course dedicated to analytic theology. To qualify, such courses must, if selected, be taught for credit within major degree programs at the institution. Courses must qualify for credit towards a graduate degree in theology or religion and be a full semester, trimester, or quarter in duration. In addition, applicants must provide evidence from the overseeing administrator insuring that the course can be taught at least twice during the four year span after the course award is made.

Five syllabi will be selected for awards, and evaluators will offer feedback on each winning syllabus, giving advice on readings, course structure, etc. Award winning faculty will be asked to provide a revised syllabus based on feedback before the financial award is made. Awards will consist of $5000 for the individual faculty member and $10,000 for the host institution. Host institutions will be required to set aside at least half of the institutional award for professional development or course enhancement opportunities for the award winning faculty member.

Beyond Binaries: A Response to Mark Galli - Series Index

2011-03-19T10:03:00.000-04:00

After over 13,000 words, I have finally finished my series responding to Mark Galli’s review of Love Wins by Rob Bell. The review raises a lot of very important issues that I hope evangelicals will continue to discuss and evaluate. These include the meaning of revelation and its relation to Scripture and doctrine, the interpretation of biblical texts regarding salvation and the eschatological hope of God’s reign, the saving event of Christ’s death and resurrection and its relation to human sin and freedom, and the tradition of evangelicalism and its relation to liberalism. On these and other points, I hope this series will be of some modest service for the ongoing task of speaking and thinking honestly and appropriately about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Universalism
Part 3: Atonement
Part 4: Evangelicalism, Liberalism, and Mission
Part 5: Conclusion

Beyond Binaries: A Response to Mark Galli, Part 5

2011-03-18T10:00:00.008-04:00

Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Having analyzed the details of Mark Galli’s review of Rob Bell, it’s time to step back and assess the big picture. First things first, it cannot be emphasized enough that Galli’s review is without question the best review I have yet seen. In fact, it is precisely because it is so good that I have felt compelled to respond to it. Most of the blogosphere has been dominated by superficial engagements that have already ruled out the possibility of a universal hope for salvation prior to any actual historical, exegetical, or theological inquiry. What distinguishes Galli’s review is the far greater knowledge that he brings to the table. Unfortunately, in the case of Bultmann, for example, it still remained on a fairly superficial level. This series of posts has been an attempt to probe the matters raised by Galli in a more thorough and critical manner. The goal has never been to criticize Galli himself; rather, my intention has been to engage in a critical conversation with his review for the purpose of facilitating an ongoing dialogue that needs to take place within evangelicalism today.

In this concluding post I want to review the ground that I have covered and pick up bits and pieces along the way that I either overlooked or held off discussing until now. I will treat these under the headings of the previous sections of this review: (1) universalism, (2) the cross and atonement, and (3) liberalism, evangelicalism, and orthodoxy.

I. Universalism: Love and Justice

Near the conclusion of his review, Galli writes the following:

Most Christians grasp that to demythologize one doctrine is to make the others less coherent. They recognize that a Christianity that teaches about "a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross" (H. Richard Niebuhr's classic summary of liberalism) does not reflect the thickness of biblical revelation nor lived reality. And they see that when all is said and done, there is no painful contradiction between the love and justice of God. That in the end, not only does love win, but justice, too.

First, to get on my academic soapbox for a moment, if Niebuhr’s famous quote is the definition of liberalism, then Bultmann is most definitely not a liberal. Neither is Schleiermacher for that matter. Demythologizing has nothing whatsoever to do with the neutering of the gospel and the watering down of the faith. These kinds of statements completely misconstrue the theologians of the past, effectively denying their significance for the future. For our sakes, they deserve better. (Soapbox over.)

What I am more interested in is the final statement about love and justice. He speaks of there being no “painful” contradiction between the two, such that both love and justice win in the end. This, unfortunately, does not go far enough. If liberalism is defined as love without justice, then (Galli’s) evangelicalism is love and justice. But neither of these are adequate. Theology properly recognizes that if God is love and if God is just, then Christian faith must speak of love as justice and justice as love. The problem with so much of the traditional literature about love and justice is that it treats these as reified objects that compete with each other. “Love wins” is taken to mean that “justice loses.” Galli wants to say that both win, but what does he mean by this? He says that there is no painful contradiction, but does he still not have some kind of contradiction? It’s not painful because love and justice are being applied to two sets of people—those who are saved, and those who are not. By splitting up humanity in this way—either through double predestination or through allowing human beings to decide for themselves—he allows love and justice to counter each other, but in a painless way.

The problem is that love and justice are not “things” that exist “out there.” To say that “love wins” or that “justice wins” are simply two ways of saying the same thing: God wins. But it’s precisely because love and justice are defined by God’s being and act that we cannot separate them. God’s gracious action in Jesus Christ is the event of love and justice. God is just precisely in submitting to death on a cross, and God is love precisely in carrying out this act of divine justice on behalf of all humanity. This is what Galli seems to have missed altogether. He seems to think that universal salvation requires a God who does not judge. But that is entirely untrue. It is the judgment carried out in Jesus Christ that makes universal salvation both possible and actual. If Jesus does indeed stand in our place, as Galli clearly wants to say, then there is absolutely no reason why the judgment of sin on the cross cannot be—and perhaps even should be—understood as being effective for all people. Love wins at the same time that justice wins, because love and justice—being two aspects of the same christological event—are finally identical.

II. The Cross: Substitution and Ontology

I want to return to the problem of substitution. I think there are some serious theological issues that are simply not on the radar for people like Galli. Perhaps the most crucial one is the question of ontology. In my discussion of substitutionary atonement, I briefly raised the question: what does substitution mean? Is it an ontological connection between Jesus and the rest of humanity? This is, I think, a question that needs to be addressed.

The “orthodox” position is based, by and large, on an ancient ontology. The ancient church of the early ecumenical councils presupposed a substance ontology in which divinity and humanity were essences that had certain properties and could be treated like substantial objects. In the case of God, the divine nature was ascribed certain properties presupposed by classical Greek philosophy (e.g., uncreated, immortal, impassible, etc.). In the case of humanity, the human nature was understood to be something in which all individuals participated. It had an opposite set of properties (e.g., created, mortal, passible, etc.). We have to remember that when the church was figuring out what to say about the two natures of Christ, they were presupposing this Greek ontology. Their understanding of salvation was a deification in which the human nature came to participate in certain properties of the divine nature (e.g., immortality and impassibility). The Chalcedonian Formula was constructed to ensure (a) that the two natures qua natures remained absolutely separate due to the metaphysical antithesis between divine impassibility and human passibility, and (b) that the two natures qua person were in unity, in order to preserve the eschatological possibility of a future deification in which humanity came to participate in divinity. These were the concerns of the church at that time, and they cannot be understood apart from the ontology that they presupposed.

Within such an ontology, the language of Christ as substitute makes a lot of sense. In the incarnation, the Son assumes a human nature or essence in which all other human beings necessarily participate. There is a common ontological essence that unites every particular person. By and large, it is this abstract philosophical essence that is presupposed when speaking of substitution. But the question is: are we obliged to adopt this ontology simply because it was so important to the church in the past? Is this ontology itself essential to the gospel? Can we think of Christ being “in our place” in a new way today? Can we think about Christ in a postmetaphysical manner that dispenses with substance ontology altogether? These are the kinds of questions that Galli entirely overlooks. By identifying substitution as the biblical position without giving any attention to ontology, he gives the impression that Greek metaphysics is itself the biblical position; conversely, he implies that to think differently about substitution (i.e., to rethink our relation to theological ontology) is intrinsically a liberal move that is no longer faithful to Scripture.

This is a crucial issue. I think evangelicals need to spend a great deal of time critically examining to what extent they have baptized and deified a past philosophical ontology. Unlike Roman Catholics who are quite explicit about their baptism of Greek philosophy, evangelicals have no such commitments. We need to strictly differentiate between the gospel and all philosophical conceptualities. While theology is necessarily always appropriating philosophical concepts for the sake of bearing witness to the gospel, those concepts are always dispensable. The subject-matter of Christian faith is infinitely translatable from one conceptuality to another. If we do not make this distinction, we run the risk of idolatrously deifying a philosophy as itself the gospel and so making the message of Jesus Christ a sacrificium intellectus.

III. Towards a Missionary Orthoheterodoxy

What is orthodoxy? What is heterodoxy? Are we really so sure that we know what these words mean? Evangelicals have traditionally avoided rigid doctrinal formulations out of a pietist concern for an authentic faith that responds obediently to the message of the gospel. For this reason, evangelical organizations have generally had very limited statements of faith. They tend to be limited to (1) the affirmation of the triune nature of God, (2) confidence in the authority of Scripture, and (3) belief in the divinity and saving significance of Christ. Beyond these fairly general statements, most evangelicals are unwilling to lay down a specific doctrinal law to which one must assent. This is an impulse that stems from the Reformers themselves.

It is for this reason that I am deeply concerned about the rush to define orthodoxy in a way that restricts the circle of evangelicalism. In many cases, this results in ironically having to exclude some of our evangelical ancestors in the faith from evangelicalism. But what really concerns me is the missiological problem that I raised in the previous post. The attempt to nail down what orthodoxy means according to specific doctrinal formulations inevitably requires that the mission of the church be one of mere diffusion. It identifies the gospel with a particular cultural form, i.e., with a particular conceptuality rooted in certain cultural, historical, political, and philosophical presuppositions. The gospel is then turned into a worldview, one that is universally valid in advance and in the abstract. I firmly believe that Christian faith must distinguish itself from every worldview in as strong a manner as possible. The result of confusing the gospel with a worldview is always some form of legalism. An ethical worldview results in an ethical legalism that makes conformity to a universal moral code the measure of faithful obedience to God. A doctrinal worldview results in a doctrinal legalism that makes intellectual conformity to a universal dogmatic code the measure of “right belief.” Either way, the gospel has been distorted. The good news of God’s love becomes the old news of a past culture or a static system of belief.

In the end, I want to propose an orthoheterodoxy. By this I mean we need to be able to “think differently” (hetero-doxy), but in the “right” way (ortho-doxy). Orthoheterodoxy captures what I referred to in my earlier post as the relation between indigenization and pilgrimization. The gospel must continually become indigenized within specific historical contexts. It is this ongoing process of indigenization that constitutes the diverse history of the church community. Despite the infinite variety of cultural forms—and here just think about the amazing array of contexts into which the gospel has been culturally and linguistically translated—there remains a singular message of divine judgment against sin and divine grace and mercy through Jesus Christ. This message, captured in the kerygma of the cross and resurrection, is what we must proclaim again and again, and in ever new ways. This gospel cannot be constrained to one particular form; it must not be frozen in one time and place. If we believe that the Word is living and active, and if we believe that Christ is truly present with us in the Spirit, then we must confess the freedom of the gospel to indigenize itself in new contexts and to radically transform them in light of a hope that is far greater and more glorious than anything we can imagine. To “think differently” means to think from one context to another, from past to present, from one situation to the next. But we must engage in this work of missionary translation responsibly, always allowing the kerygmatic message of God’s grace in Christ to be our critical norm. It is this norm that illuminates our reading of Scripture (clarifying which passages are to be privileged over others) and funds the infinite diversity of the Christian community. In holding rightly to this norm, we must also think freely and differently. That is the task of evangelical Christianity today.

Beyond Binaries: A Response to Mark Galli, Part 4

2011-03-17T11:00:00.005-04:00

Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

3. Liberalism vs. Evangelicalism. We arrive finally at the major section of the review, wherein Galli presents his strongest criticisms of Bell. The thesis of this section is that Bell stands within the tradition of Protestant liberalism. And even though “liberalism is a tradition that has enriched the church in many ways,” and even though “many liberal themes have found their way into evangelical life,” Galli’s conclusion is that Bell has gone too far. He has stepped beyond the bounds of evangelicalism. In contrast to Bell, Galli believes that “orthodoxy will show again that it has the truer and thicker grasp of the Bible and of life.” Bell, by implication, is thus heterodox, despite the fact that he raises many good questions that “we would be foolish to ignore.”

What I want to interrogate in this part of my review is the criteria by which Galli distinguishes between liberal and evangelical, and the way he then expounds on this distinction. He begins the section with the following paragraphs, which clearly and succinctly articulate the problem:

That Jesus is divine is crucial for Bell. And he does a wonderful job of challenging the skepticism of those who find the incarnation impossible to believe. And he has no intellectual concerns about the reality of Christ's bodily resurrection.

But it's here that we run up against Bell's hermeneutic, that is, the principle by which he decides if a biblical teaching is relevant. Why, for example, is blood atonement a time-bound explanation of the Cross, but the divinity of Christ is a deep mystery we shouldn't shun? Why are Paul's statements about the universality of salvation taken literally, but his teaching on substitutionary atonement as mere creative writing?

If there is a criterion driving these distinctions, it seems to be based on what Bell thinks contemporary people can swallow. I couldn't see any other criteria at play. Given the complete lack of quotes from any other writer or tradition, one is led to the unfortunate conclusion that what makes one extraordinary biblical claim a time-bound metaphor and another literal truth is that Bell says so.

This is a serious charge, and it may very well be true. But can we look at the question of relevance in a different way? Is there a way to provide a hermeneutic that will accomplish Bell’s purposes while remaining firmly evangelical? That is what I hope to argue in this part of my essay. To begin, I first want to point out an issue in Galli’s second paragraph above. He asks why blood atonement is time-bound while Christ’s divinity is not. There are at least two ways of answering this. The first is that the divinity of Christ was the first and most basic of all the church’s conciliar decisions; without some form of its affirmation, one can hardly call oneself a Christian at all. By contrast, there has been no dogma of the atonement, no position that the ecumenical church decided was the right position to hold.

The second reason brings us to the hermeneutical problem. There are many different ways in which the NT speaks about the cross-event: ransom, reconciliation, substitution, judgment, etc. The point is simply that the cross is saving in some sense; it is the event of our reconciliation with God, however that is to be conceived. Similarly, the NT uses many different expressions for Jesus: Son of God, Son of Man, Lord, Messiah, Lamb of God, Logos, etc. The point here is that this man Jesus is in some kind of intimate relationship with the one he calls “Father,” so intimate, in fact, that our relation to Jesus constitutes our relation to God. Are we obliged to make one of the titles used for Jesus the controlling one in our understanding of him? Moreover, these titles have their origin in a particular cultural-historical context. “Son of Man,” for example, has its origins in the apocalyptic texts of Second Temple Judaism, appearing in 1 Enoch and Daniel 7. The use of “Lord” and “Son of God” in the NT had political connotations—as many scholars, such as Richard Horsley, have pointed out—since they involved denying these titles of honor to Caesar and others. Other contexts for other titles could be mentioned as well.

I bring this up only to point out that the metaphors and ideas used in the Bible have a particular historical provenance. While it is important to know the context in which they arose, our use of them today does not depend upon replicating the original cultural conceptualities and presuppositions. We can speak of Jesus as God’s Son without having to adopt the notions of Second Temple Judaism. In order to capture the political overtones of the NT imagery, it may be appropriate to use different titles altogether, such as when Martin Niemöller said that “God is my Führer.” In that context, the word “Führer” carried the scandalous and subversive implications that “Lord” would have in the time of the early church. Can we not do something similar with the atonement imagery in the Bible? Are we required to speak and think as if we are first-century Jewish-Christians? Is the task of understanding the message of the NT simply a matter of replicating an ancient historical context? Is it merely what Mark Alan Bowald calls “hermeneutical archaeology”? When it comes to the cross, are we finished with the task of interpretation when we’ve uncovered the cultural context and cultic logic of the biblical writers? Or—to take a far worse approach—are we simply supposed to repeat the words of the Bible without any critical historical and theological reflection? Does our evangelical identity depend upon the avoidance of hermeneutics? Are we supposed to assume that every biblical text coheres with every other because of some divine superintention of the Bible to say exactly what it says? Is this what an evangelical has to mean by the word “revelation”?

I raise these questions because Galli’s review seems to present us with two options: either one is an evangelical who simply repeats what is generally viewed as orthodox or what we read on the surface of the text, or one is a liberal who engages in a hermeneutical dialogue with the text in order to critically assess how to communicate the message of Scripture in a new time and place. I’m not saying that these are the two options Galli intends to present us with, only that his review gives the impression that we have to make such a decision. If that is the case, then I want to argue that the most evangelical decision is to become a liberal—at least in the sense that to be a faithful evangelical ought to mean the freedom to think hermeneutically and theologically about the gospel of Jesus Christ. I will assess Galli’s discussion in this section in three parts: (1) first, I will analyze his presentation of certain Protestant “liberal” thinkers and the definition he provides of liberalism, then (2) I will examine his main definition of liberalism as making Christianity relevant for today and how an evangelical hermeneutic might offer a better way forward than Galli’s alternative, and finally (3) I will conclude by analyzing the problem of the particularity and exotic nature of Jesus Christ.

A. The Problem of Liberalism. Galli says that Bell “correctly notes in the preface that many have taught what he teaches or hints at in the book.” Now, I’m guessing Bell was referring to people like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, since his book is dealing with questions associated with universal salvation and the scope of God’s saving love. But Galli makes a rather interesting (and, arguably, uncharitable) move:

Names that come immediately to mind include Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. Schleiermacher was keen on mining our innate religious sensibilities (the things we've intuited are true) to ground Christian faith. Ritschl celebrated the kingdom ethics of Jesus. Bultmann argued that first-century metaphors and worldviews should be abandoned. Tillich wrote of faith as accepting our acceptance. All these themes run through Bell's book, sometimes in compelling ways.

While it’s almost certainly true that some of these themes are running through Bell’s book, I highly doubt this is what Bell had in mind when writing that sentence! Galli has creatively turned Bell’s words into an opportunity to discuss the problem of liberalism. But before I address the hermeneutical problem that Galli highlights, I want to examine his presentation of these “liberal” thinkers and question the definition of liberalism.

What do we mean by the term “liberal”? The term is fraught with historical baggage. My interest in this conversation is due to the fact that my own research is focused on the theology of Rudolf Bultmann. I wish to recover him—as crazy as this may sound—for an evangelical audience. I think he is wrongly classified as a liberal, or at least this label cannot be used in a univocal sense for Bultmann as it is used for Tillich, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Harnack, and others. Let me explain. Bultmann’s theology can only be adequately understood as the rejection of 19th-century German liberal theology. From about 1922 until the end of his life, he stood with Karl Barth in opposing the central tenets of liberal theology, as it was understood in their context. Throughout his works, he stands resolutely opposed to the likes of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Troeltsch. We can define liberal theology here as the attempt to speak about God on the basis of certain historical or psychological “givens”; that is, grounding our God-talk on personal experience, historical research, religious piety, etc. What Barth initiated, and what Bultmann joined, is referred to as dialectical theology. By this, they mean that knowledge of God can only be given by God in the event of God’s self-revelation by grace and for faith. It is an event of God’s self-disclosure. There are no givens within the world by which we can reach some knowledge of God or meet God half-way (i.e., no apologetics, no rational proofs, no natural theology). Barthians often claim that Bultmann turned away from his early agreement with Barth toward a kind of existentialist natural theology, but this is a gross misunderstanding of Bultmann. The program of demythologizing is an extension of dialectical theology into the question of the relation between gospel and culture (to which I will return below). I will clear all this up in my forthcoming dissertation, though others like Christophe Chalamet have already made the essential defense. In any case, when Galli goes on to say that “Bultmann reinterpreted the New Testament as existential philosophy,” one can only repeat the famous response of Barth: Nein!

Bultmann’s stated purpose in his program of demythologizing was never to make the gospel more palatable for modern ears, but rather to discover and hear anew the true scandal of the gospel: the disruptive word of God’s judgment upon our sin and God’s justifying grace in Jesus Christ. In 1952, Bultmann states that demythologizing “exposes the real scandal that the Bible presents to us moderns just as to all other human beings” (New Testament and Mythology, 102). And in 1953, Bultmann writes:

The purpose of demythologizing is not to make religion more acceptable to modern man by trimming the traditional biblical texts, but to make clearer to modern man what the Christian faith is. He must be confronted with the issue of decision, be provoked to decision by the fact that the stumbling-block to faith, the skandalon, is peculiarly disturbing to man in general, not only to modern man. (Kerygma and Myth 2:182-83)

Finally, in his 1958 Jesus Christ and Mythology, we read:

Christian preaching, in so far as it is preaching of the Word of God by God’s command and in His name, does not offer a doctrine which can be accepted either by reason or by a sacrificium intellectus. Christian preaching is kerygma, that is, a proclamation addressed not to the theoretical reason, but to the hearer as a self. In this manner Paul commends himself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God (2 Cor. 4:2). Demythologizing will make clear this function of preaching as a personal message, and in doing so it will eliminate a false stumbling-block and bring into sharp focus the real stumbling-block, the word of the cross. (36)

Numerous critics of Bultmann over the years have argued that he was unfaithful to his own stated intentions. That is a possible line of critique that one is free to explore. I happen to think it is still wrong, in the end, but it’s at least an intellectually responsible position to take. What is not responsible is a mischaracterization of Bultmann work that ignores or obscures his intention. We can disagree with Bultmann, but he at least deserves to be treated fairly and accurately.

To be clear, I’m not accusing Galli of failing to anticipate my dissertation or of not being an expert in Bultmann’s theology. That would, of course, be entirely unfair to him. He is only repeating a general view of Bultmann that has been in wide circulation for many decades now. But that doesn’t make his statements any less wrong. They need to be corrected, because they perpetuate a false picture and do a great injustice to one of the great thinkers of the modern era. (I would also want to defend Schleiermacher and Tillich from misunderstanding, but their classification as liberal thinkers is much more apropos.) Does this mean Bultmann is somehow an “orthodox” and “evangelical” theologian? No, that would be overstating my case. But then again, those terms are not tidy and easily defined either. In fact, it is remarkable how similar the theological methodology of contemporary American evangelicalism is to the old German liberalism. Is it not the case that evangelicals largely emphasize personal experience and religious piety? And when someone like Josh McDowell and other apologists use historical data to establish the rationality of faith, is this not essentially the same kind of move that liberals employed when they tried to make historical data about Jesus the basis for faith?

The connections between liberalism and evangelicalism are far deeper and more intertwined than most ever realize. Both movements grew out of a common European reaction against Protestant orthodoxy and Enlightenment rationalism; the connection between pietism and liberalism is crucial. In fact, the one element of Bultmann’s theology that makes him the most liberal is precisely what also makes him the most evangelical! And that is his emphasis on the personal decision of faith as the basis for one’s saving relation to God. Bultmann rejects the liberal notion of experience (Erlebnis) or feeling (Gefühl) as the ground for one’s relation with God, but he maintains the emphasis on a personal decision. And this is perhaps what distinguishes evangelicalism above all else—the need to personally respond to God’s grace. What unites Bultmann, evangelicalism, and liberalism is the stress on individual freedom and the responsibility of the individual to respond to God in faith and obedience. The more recent turn towards a doctrinally-defined definition of evangelicalism is, in many respects, a betrayal of the originating insights of evangelical faith. It was the pietist opposition to the notion that faith is determined by one’s dogmatic commitments that spawned what we now know as evangelicalism.

I therefore want to strongly problematize the entire distinction between “evangelical” and “liberal.” I have written at length in the past about the possibility of providing a universal definition of evangelicalism. What I stated there bears repeating at some length:

While I support the attempt to specify as carefully as possible this particular group of people, I remain unconvinced that any definition will ever actually suffice. The basic problem is that even the most seemingly straightforward terms—such as “orthodox” and “biblicist”—remain irreducibly complex and diverse. These terms resist any singular meaning, and they are certainly not self-evident. There are very few evangelicals who actually agree on what these terms mean. [John] Stackhouse recognizes as much when he says that one has to abide by his definitions of these terms for the overall definition to work. But that just underscores the problem. The attempt to formulate a universal definition which will result in “accurate” polling data (as if that were even possible) requires that someone assume the role of evangelical magisterium. Someone has to determine what these words actually mean in order to specify who is in and who is out.

But it is my conviction that evangelicalism, at its heart, resists precisely this kind of magisterial power. If it is anything, evangelicalism is the rejection of any singular form or tradition in favor of a concrete, personal, and anti-institutional faith. I suggest defining evangelicalism not as a type or movement but rather as an attitude, as a particular disposition. Evangelicalism is not a substance whose attributes can be examined; it is rather an actualistic mode of being which resists any definitional foreclosure and instead bursts open our concepts, pluralizing and multiplying the dimensions of Christian faith—though always under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. This helps to explain why evangelicalism is marked by transdenominationalism, and why talking about “evangelical Catholics” is a problematic use of the word.

Certainly, there are many self-proclaimed evangelicals who seek to pin down a very narrow definition of evangelicalism in order to apply the label to themselves and to very few others, if any. But I contend that this kind of semantic violence is what constitutes fundamentalism—the redefinition of terms to validate one’s own ideas over against the ideas of others. That’s not to say that people like Stackhouse are fundamentalists. By no means! Rather, it is to suggest that the attempt to locate a universally applicable definition of what is “essentially” or “truly” evangelical is itself an anti-evangelical project. ... Any pursuit of a universally fixed meaning is an act of exclusionary violence which runs counter to the truest impulses of the evangelical spirit. ...

Evangelicalism is thus, in a very real sense, anarchic in nature: it resists attempts to universally fix or define what is truly Christian. Instead, it remains radically open to redefinition and recontextualization. Its missional character flows from the fact that no institution or tradition or culture can possibly be the sole bearer of the truth. In its best forms, therefore, evangelicalism is simply the openness of the church to the radical interruption of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

What is truly “evangelical,” I want to say, is precisely this liberal freedom of the gospel to transcend particular cultural, institutional, political, and even religious forms that attempt to fix and stabilize God’s Word in a permanent, universal, and secure modality. Evangelicalism is the refusal to allow God’s revelation to be objectified and petrified within a single dogmatic formulation or cultural-historical expression. In other words, evangelicalism is intrinsically missional, in the sense that it recognizes the cross-cultural freedom of God’s message of grace that continually bursts open the limits we try to impose upon it. The gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be contained in a safe and secure form. It transcends our attempts to pin it down. In this sense, 19th-century German liberalism wasn’t liberal enough—by which I want to say, it wasn’t evangelical enough!

All of this leads us to the problem of hermeneutics and the question of a missional hermeneutic.

B. The Problem of Hermeneutics. I have been reflecting recently on this topic, and I cannot replicate all of my thoughts here; it would take far too long to explain. So I will simply throw out a few nuggets that I hope will get the conversation started.

The recognition that everything is historical is the origin of the hermeneutical problem. Once every text is seen to be historically conditioned, it becomes clear that the ideas expressed in a particular document are shaped by the presuppositions of a specific time and place. Bultmann calls this cultural-historical framework or paradigm of thought a Weltbild or “world-picture.” A Weltbild is the set of implicit general presuppositions about how to understand the world within which one lives. Every cultural artifact is shaped by a particular Weltbild. There is no ahistorical concept, no ahistorical text or object. Every idea, every judgment, every debate is situated within a nexus of social, cultural, and historical relations. That doesn’t mean every idea or event is reducible to these contextual factors; it only means that they are inseparable from them.

The task of hermeneutics is then to translate from one cultural Weltbild to another, from the cultural-historical context of the text to the cultural-historical context of the reader. This task of translation does not mean that we can violently impose our contemporary thinking upon the text and thus make it say whatever we want. Rather it requires that we differentiate between the subject-matter (die Sache) of the text and the “world-picture” within which this subject-matter comes to expression in the text. In biblical terms, this is the distinction between gospel and culture, between the kerygmatic word of revelation and the historically-situated witness of the prophets and apostles. All of this presupposes a distinction between revelation and the text of the Bible. I take such a distinction for granted for numerous reasons that cannot be elaborated upon here. Without such a distinction, though, we end up with what Tom Greggs calls “biblio-idolatry.” The Bible as religious object becomes God’s Word, when the Bible is instead the authoritative witness to the Word of God that is Jesus Christ.

So far, all of this may seem rather liberal and non-evangelical—and based on certain definitions of evangelicalism, that would be true. What I want to suggest is that we need to rethink the problem of hermeneutics as a problem of mission. Because this is something I am working to develop in much greater detail, I will only hint at the general contours of this position. Missiologists like Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh have stressed the nature of Christian mission as translation. Walls speaks of missionary translation by analogy with the translating movement of God into human flesh in Jesus. The incarnation is the paradigmatic form of mission-as-translation, in which God translates God’s own self into the cultural-historical form of first-century Palestine. Sanneh rejects what he calls a “mission of diffusion,” wherein the gospel is bound up with a particular cultural form, such that the spread of the gospel involves the spread of a particular culture. This also goes by the name of Constantinianism or cultural imperialism. By contrast, Sanneh holds up the notion of a “mission of translation,” where a distinction is made between gospel and culture so as to facilitate the freedom of the cross-cultural mission of God. Walls provides two principles to conceptualize this mission of translation: the principle of indigenization and the principle of pilgrimization. The first emphasizes the fact that the gospel indigenizes itself in each cultural context, freely entering into and embracing what we might call the Weltbild of a particular situation. The second emphasizes the fact that the gospel disrupts and transforms this situation in light of the eschatological vision of God’s kingdom. The gospel does not just leave us as we are. Finally, I want to lift up John Flett’s thesis that the confusion of gospel and culture turns the Christian message into propaganda.

The conversation over universalism (among many other issues) has stalled because one side says, “Look, this is what the Bible says!” or “This is what the authors meant!” And that may be well and true. But does this mean we are bound to repeat what the texts say or what the first-century historical context believed? Is the task of understanding limited to mere repetition, copying from past to present with no translation? If so, then I’m afraid any distinction between evangelicalism and fundamentalism is lost entirely. God’s revelation is then something static, fixed, revealed; it is not a living word that interrupts us here and now and conscripts us as missionaries for a new time and place. The other side responds by saying: Look, some of the ideas and concepts are rooted in cultural presuppositions that we no longer share, nor are they necessary components of the gospel message itself. We need to think together about how to understand and communicate the gospel in a new world. Otherwise we are left with a mission of mere diffusion and absorption. And this does not accord with what we see in Jesus Christ, or what we see occur in the translation movement from Jews to Gentiles in the story of Acts. Are there mythological notions within the biblical text? Yes, there are. The task of interpretation, as Bultmann stated in 1941, is not to eliminate myth but rather to interpret it. If we fail to do so, we turn revelation into propaganda. We transform the transcendent Word of God into a finite and culturally-confined word of human beings. The problem with both liberalism and evangelicalism—at least as they are presented by Galli—is that both are forms of propaganda, in the sense that both tie down the gospel to a specific cultural form and thus define mission as the universal diffusion of this form.

I want to make two claims here. First, I would (and will, in my dissertation) argue that Bultmann’s program of demythologizing is a missionary hermeneutic that encompasses the two aspects of indigenization and pilgrimization. It is faithful to the missionary impulse of the gospel. That is not a claim that I can explore or develop here, but it needs to be said in order to demonstrate the problems with classifying Bultmann and other hermeneutical thinkers as “liberal” in a facile manner. Second, and more relevant to Galli’s review, I would suggest that Bell is fumbling towards precisely such a missionary hermeneutic, even if he has failed to articulate it. I say this realizing that I don’t know Bell’s actual intentions. It is merely my attempt to provide an alternative narrative to the one that Galli has provided. Instead of distinguishing between evangelical and liberal, I want to suggest distinguishing between missionary and non-missionary. That, I believe, is a far more productive and helpful distinction.

Is there any evidence that Bell is thinking along these lines? Absolutely. In his earlier work, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, he uses the analogy of painting for the task of Christian faith and mission. He writes the following near the beginning:

Here’s what often happens: Somebody comes along who has a fresh perspective on the Christian faith. People are inspired. A movement starts. Faith that was stale and dying is now alive. But then the pioneer of the movement – the painter – dies and the followers stop exploring. They mistakenly assume that their leader’s words were the last ones on the subject, and they freeze their leader’s words. They forget that as that innovator was doing his or her part to move things along, that person was merely taking part in the discussion that will go on forever. And so in their commitment to what so-and-so said and did, they end up freezing the faith.

What gets lost is the truth that whoever painted that version was just like us, searching for God and experiencing God and trying to get a handle on what the Christian faith looks like. And then a new generation comes along living in a new day and a new world, and they have to keep the tradition going or the previous paintings are going to end up in the basement.

The tradition then is painting, not making copies of the same painting over and over. The challenge of the art is to take what was great about the previous paintings and incorporate that into new paintings.

And in the process, make something beautiful – for today.

For many Christians, the current paintings are enough. The churches, the books, the language, the methods, the beliefs – there is nothing wrong with it. It works for them and meets their needs, and they gladly invite others to join them in it. I thank God for that. I celebrate those who have had their lives transformed in these settings.

But this book is for those who need a fresh take on Jesus and what it means to live the kind of life he teaches us to live. I’m part of a community, a movement of people who have been living, exploring, discussing, sharing, and experiencing new understandings of Christian faith.

My claim is that this “movement of people” goes by the name of evangelicalism. If someone wants to call this “liberal,” so be it, but it’s only the liberalism that is intrinsic to evangelical faith. It is the truly liberal freedom of the gospel that is “always reforming” (semper reformanda). An evangelicalism that is content with “making copies of the same painting over and over” is a stale, frozen, dead evangelicalism. It can hardly lay claim to being part of the same movement associated with the likes of Wesley, Finney, Edwards, Blanchard, and others—much less the original Reformers.

I’m not suggesting that Bell is free from criticism. By no means. I would certainly want to question certain ideas and presuppositions. He does not seem to have adequately engaged in the hermeneutical reflection that I think is necessary. He speaks above of taking “what was great about the previous paintings” and incorporating them into new ones. I would want to clarify that and speak of newly translating the gospel kerygma that is never captured in any painting, but rather remains an eschatological message to which our finite paintings seek to bear faithful, if fallible, witness. But the general thrust of Bell’s idea remains sound—and soundly missional and evangelical. For an accessible articulation of some of these themes, I recommend John Franke’s Manifold Witness.

C. The Problem of Particularity. Returning now to Galli’s review. He says that liberalism is guilty of two errors: (a) it undermines the particularity of the gospel, and (b) it undermines the exotic nature of Christian belief that makes Jesus so interesting. Let’s take these in order. First, the particularity of the gospel must not be conflated with the cultural-historical forms in which this gospel comes to expression. This means that the gospel authorizes new translations, new paintings, in the here and now. But here’s the point: it is precisely the particularity of the gospel that makes such translation possible. It is only when we turn the gospel into a universal worldview—in which one cultural context seeks to absorb and nullify all other contexts—that we lose the particularity, and thus the translatability, of the gospel message. Bultmann is the theologian of particularity par excellence! In fact, what’s ironic about using Bultmann as an example is that he was adamant in the opposition to universalism because of his strict emphasis on particularity. Bultmann opposed Barth’s universal scope of election because it did not take the particular decision of faith seriously enough, in his mind. So again, Bultmann is a witness for evangelicalism!

What I find very problematic about Galli’s review are statements like the following: “[liberals] believe it is no longer reasonable to hold to one or (usually) more core teachings of the New Testament”; “what novelist John Updike ... said about the Resurrection applies to all the central teachings of the New Testament”; “for liberals, the sensibilities of the age trump biblical revelation.” I want to ask Galli, what are these “teachings” of the NT? Galli gives the impression that the Bible presents us with fully-formulated doctrines that we either affirm or deny, as if faith is merely a matter of rational assent. (Faith as assensus, by the way, was a notion that the Reformers vigorously rejected in favor of faith as fiducia or “heartfelt trust.”) But the Bible nowhere gives us doctrine. It gives us contextual witnesses to a disruptive truth of God’s judgment of sin and God’s gracious reconciling love, both made actual and concrete in Jesus of Nazareth in the power of the Holy Spirit. The church rightly felt compelled to conceptualize issues like the relation between Jesus and YHWH and between divinity and humanity. These are crucial issues that have to be assessed again and again. But to say that the Bible “teaches” substitutionary atonement is incredibly misleading, if not simply false. The Bible doesn’t teach the Trinity, nor does it teach the divinity of Christ. These doctrines are “answers” that the church provided in response to the “questions” presented in the text. But the text itself does not give us the answer. Does that mean these doctrines are simply dispensable? No, because the question is there in the text and it compels us to give a faithful and responsible answer. But these answers have to be negotiated anew in every new time and place. The Bible, in other words, does not give us a “Christian worldview.” If there is anything that has misled evangelicalism in recent history, it is thinking in terms of worldviews. Few things could be more at odds with Christian faith.

Second, what about the “exotic” and “interesting” aspect of Christianity? Here I confess confusion. Does Galli really believe that orthodoxy is superior “because it is culturally exotic”? Does he think it is a mark of true faith when Christianity is a sacrificium intellectus? I wonder what he thinks about cross-cultural mission. Does he believe that missionaries to the Global South are supposed to impose Western religious forms? They would certainly be exotic! But is that faithful to the gospel? Is he emphasizing the exotic character for us because Christianity is often too domesticated? If so, does he really think that imposing an old Protestant orthodoxy is really disruptive to North American culture? Isn’t the deeply practical and concrete message that Bell is trying to emphasize actually quite a bit more exotic to a way of life that is so consumeristic and bourgeois?

It’s hard for me to see what Galli could mean by exotic other than a sacrifice of the intellect, the blind adoption of a set of doctrinal commitments for the simple reason that it appears alien and absurd. But is Galli then confusing the alien character of the gospel with the alien intellectual worldview of a particular time in the church’s life? Is he not confusing faith with an uncritical anti-intellectualism? Sure, the various parts of orthodoxy “work together and hold together in a way that makes sense,” but just because something is internally coherent, does that make it true? Does internal coherence plus intellectual bizarreness really equal Christian faith? A lot of systems are internally coherent but false to the subject-matter they claim to explicate. Could this not be the case for Protestant orthodoxy? Are we bound to either uncritically accept a system of beliefs and thus be counted as evangelical, or critically assess our faith and thus be labeled liberal? Are those the only two options? Is there not a way beyond this binary opposition?

I realize that Galli is trying to say that orthodoxy offers a more intellectually compelling narrative, because it doesn’t conform to what we naturally think ought to be the case; it appears as something novel and strange, something that makes sense according to a logic that is disorienting and yet persuasive. That’s Galli’s intention, and I get that. But as compelling as this may sound, Galli is on very dangerous territory. When the scandal of the gospel is being defined by how it contradicts our intellectual instincts, one is still defining the gospel according to a contemporary standard—albeit in a negative way, rather than the positive way for which he criticizes liberalism. This is a problem we see in metaphysics. Defining God as either omniscient or immortal are both forms of metaphysical thinking, because God is being defined according to the human person: the first is positive (we have limited knowledge; God has perfect knowledge); the second is negative (we are mortal; God is immortal). Both are two sides of the same problematic coin. Put differently, Galli’s version of orthodox evangelicalism is just the mirror image of liberalism. Neither properly grasps the missionary hermeneutic that distinguishes between gospel and culture. Liberalism collapses the gospel into a modern cultural form, evangelicalism into a premodern cultural form. Both need to be demythologized.

I have sought to problematize the definitions of “liberal” and “evangelical.” These terms have a wide range of meanings, and they are often used arbitrarily or uncritically. If evangelicalism hopes to have a future, I firmly believe it will need to move beyond these static terms that often replace the hard work of historical scholarship, theological reflection, and charitable dialogue. Their use tends to involve overly simplistic distinctions where a much more nuanced and complex relationship actually exists. I offer my missiological analysis as one way to rethink the relation between gospel and culture in a manner that brings the so-called “evangelical” and “liberal” insights together. I hope this is only the start of a much longer (and never-ending) conversation.

Beyond Binaries: A Response to Mark Galli, Part 3

2011-03-16T12:00:00.003-04:00

Read: Part 1, Part 2

2. The Cross. Mark Galli turns from the problem of universalism to the doctrine of atonement. This is a very complicated and important issue, and he is right to emphasize its importance. I cannot defend Bell here, but I can assess the arguments that Galli uses to criticize Bell’s understanding of the cross. The first two paragraphs read:

Bell asks questions of other doctrines that are even more problematic. Take his understanding of Jesus' death. Like many contemporaries, Bell notes the many biblical metaphors that describe what Christ's death accomplishes—a ransom, a reconciliation, an acquittal, a sacrifice, and so forth. He's most taken with the idea that in the resurrection, "the powers of death and destruction have been defeated" and that this "inaugurates a movement to … renew, restore, and reconcile all things." But he is vague about how this happens. While clearly favoring the one metaphor—defeat of death—he says the point is not to "narrow it to one particular metaphor, image, explanation, or mechanism. … The point, then as it is now, is Jesus."

Yes, what happened on the cross is richer than any one metaphor can comprehend. Yes, the point is Jesus. But when Bell suggests that Jesus (and similarly, the whole New Testament) doesn't say "how, or when, or in what manner the mechanism functions that gets people to God through him"—well, it's hard to know what he's talking about. What is Romans 3-8 if not an explanation of such? Does the fact that there are a variety of ways of understanding that "mechanism" mean that some of the explanations aren't fuller and more inclusive? In fact, as we've argued in the pages of the magazine, there are strong reasons for substitutionary atonement being the controlling biblical metaphor, and the other metaphors only make sense in light of it.

Here we have an issue of the history of doctrine and biblical interpretation. Galli is perfectly within his rights to argue that Paul’s letters favor substitutionary atonement as the “controlling metaphor.” But it is quite problematic to suggest that Bell simply hasn’t been reading his Bible carefully enough. Just because one chooses to elevate certain passages in Paul does not mean it is self-evident that substitutionary atonement is the correct position. The ancient church was dominated by the view of Christ’s death as the “defeat of death,” as a cosmic victory over the powers of evil—the very view Galli cites Bell as advocating. Moreover, the Greek church has always been dominated by an emphasis on the incarnation as the atoning event, in which the assumption of flesh is already the act of deification that the cross and resurrection then complete. We see this especially in the writings of Cyril of Alexandria, for example. The Greek fathers made the Gospel of John their controlling text, where it is not the sacrificial work of Christ on the cross that is atoning, but rather the person of Christ himself as the Word made flesh. The cross is his glorification, not a debt-paying sacrifice. It is because of these conflicting metaphors about atonement that the church never gave a conciliar statement about the atoning work of Christ. There is no dogma of the atonement. Instead, as Robert Jenson puts it, we are left with “an inherited heap of proposals.”

My point here is that Galli is expecting Bell to provide something that the church has never felt capable of deciding one way or the other in the past: viz. an explanation of the “mechanism” by which atonement is achieved. Despite his conviction that Rom. 3-8 provides this mechanism, it is by no means self-evident to a large number—perhaps the majority—of Christians throughout history. Moreover, Bell’s emphasis on the “defeat of death,” if Galli has cited that accurately, is itself just such a mechanism! That is the classical theory of Christus Victor. Perhaps Bell is vague in his description of it, or perhaps he does not remain inconsistent with that insight. That may be the case, though we should remember that this is a pastoral text, not an academic monograph. Nevertheless, Christus Victor, whatever its problems, is a theory of the atonement. One gets the impression from Galli that only substitutionary atonement can lay claim to being a true theory of the atonement, while everything else serves as merely a multifaceted metaphorical buttress.

Galli cites Mark Dever to support his case. This is an interesting move. Dever isn’t exactly a scholar of the atonement, and it shows. The article contains no serious theological reflection on the atonement. Instead, it lists some of the main arguments against substitutionary atonement—to which, by the way, he never actually responds—then proceeds simply to cite a long list of passages from the NT that have substitutionary overtones or implications. He then notes a couple opposing arguments against the use of these texts and makes some brief replies. The article concludes by then arguing that substitution is “the center and focus of the Bible’s witness.” In other words, the “argument” that Galli claims has been provided in the pages of CT comes down to little more than a list of proof-texts that have substitution language in them. There is no serious reflection on hermeneutical presuppositions or on the actual dogmatic content of the atonement.

(As a side note, Dever doesn’t even defend substitution adequately when he attempts to do so. He mentions the case of the railroad tracks, in which the Father is portrayed as shifting the train to run over his son so as to spare the rest of humanity. It’s a compelling image that seeks to portray substitutionary atonement as divine child abuse. Dever’s response is that this image is “inadequate because it does not include the Holy Spirit.” What does that mean? How would the Spirit change the picture? No, the correct response is that the analogy presupposes a false view of the Trinity as three independent subjects. The atonement is always wrongly conceived where the Father and the Son are viewed as two subjects on analogy with two human beings. In such a view, the cross will always be abusive. Instead, we have to see that the Father and the Son are a single divine subject. It is one and the same God who sends and who suffers and dies. This was Thomas Aquinas’s correction to the Anselmian tradition, and it is the kind of dogmatic reflection on the cross that Dever conspicuously fails to provide. But without such reflection, we never get beyond who has the longer list of proof-texts.)

Finally, the term “substitutionary atonement” itself is remarkably ambiguous. One could quite justifiably respond to Galli with Galli’s own criticism of Bell: “he is vague about how this happens.” What kind of substitution? Is substitution being conflated here with satisfaction? Those two terms are not coextensive. Here is a bit from George Hunsinger on Anselm:

Anselm’s critics are incorrect if they associate the view of “penal substitution” with Anselm. While penal substitution became a predominant idea in post-Reformation Protestant theology, two things need to be remembered, namely, that penal views of the atonement are not necessarily substitutionary, while, in turn, substitutionary views are not necessarily penal. In one respect Anselm represents the first option; Athanasius represents the second. ... Anselm’s view of the atonement thus involved penal elements without being substitutionary. By contrast, for Athanasius, who was following a Greek patristic tradition, Christ’s death was substitutionary but not penal. (The Eucharist and Ecumenism, 295-97)

Dever is not sensitive to these concerns, and essentially lumps substitution, sacrifice, and satisfaction together. The lack of careful distinctions and the lack of attention to historical accuracy plague his essay, and so also Galli’s assessment of Bell.

But that’s not the only reason why substitution is ambiguous in this review. How exactly is Christ functioning as a substitute? Are we speaking about the humanity of Christ as ontologically united with all humanity? That is certainly a classical way of construing it. But then what is the basis for the ontological unity—is it some human essence shared by all, is it an ontological conception of divine imputation? Or is the substitutionary aspect achieved by the mediating power of the Spirit? Or is it some kind of cultic event, as in ancient Israel when the priest laid hands on the sacrifice and so identified the animal as the representative for the people? Substitution can itself be understood in a number of ways that conflict with each other. But let’s probe the matter even further. Is substitution effective apart from our response of faith? Does the atoning work on the cross achieve the actuality of reconciliation or merely its possibility?

See, the ironic thing is that substitutionary atonement actually provides the single best argument for universalism! If, as Paul says, all humanity stands under the wrath of God, and if Christ is our representative who takes on the sins of the world, then it follows that his substitutionary death is the liberation of all humanity from their sin and guilt. Galli cites Romans 3-8, which is doubly ironic because Rom. 5 is one of the most universalistic passages in all of Scripture and it operates on precisely the logic of substitution that Galli is commending (cf. my series on “Paul Among the Evangelicals”)! Christ stands in the place of Adam: “just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (Rom. 5:18). Traditionally, evangelicals (i.e., those who reject the Calvinistic doctrine of limited atonement) will back up and say that Jesus only makes reconciliation a possibility. But not only does this conflict with many of the NT statements, especially in Romans; it also weakens the logic of substitution. What kind of substitute is Jesus if we have to actually complete the substitutionary bond ourselves? Does Jesus completely stand in our place or does he not? Too often the evangelical position seems to say that Jesus is only potentially our substitute; to finish the job, we have to assist him, in which case we have to save ourselves. At the end of the day, there are only two (theo)logically satisfactory options: either limited atonement or universalism. And of those two, only one makes the best overall sense of the biblical witness. (And it’s not the first.)

I’m tempted to stop, but there’s still much more about Galli’s review that warrants our attention, especially since we haven’t quite reached the part that supports his identification of Bell as a liberal. Reading on, we discover that Bell describes Jesus as “the source, the strength, the example, and the assurance that this pattern of death and rebirth is the way into the only kind of life that actually sustains and inspires.” Galli pounces on this. He calls it “the classic exemplar model of atonement,” which is “a standard of liberal Protestantism.” Here we have to stop and reflect for a moment. Why is Galli so quick to label this as a particular theory of the atonement, when he overlooked the fact that three paragraphs earlier he had cited a passage from Bell that describes the Christus Victor theory? Galli did not mention that Bell stands in a long and ancient line of biblical interpretation regarding the “defeat of death,” and yet he immediately lumps Bell in with Protestant liberalism the moment we encounter the notion of Jesus as exemplar. Even if that turns out to be an accurate description of Bell, it is not a charitable assessment. It comes across as if Galli means to suppress Bell’s connection with the ancient church in order to emphasize his liberal heritage. This becomes more apparent in the third section of the review, which I will address tomorrow.

As if recognizing that he might be reading too much into Bell, Galli steps back a bit: “Again, Bell says Christ's death and resurrection have cosmic, universal effects, but it was never clear to this reviewer how or why they have these effects. To be fair, he says he doesn't reject substitutionary atonement outright. But in this book, he apparently thinks it unimportant or uninteresting.” We encounter the same problems noted above. Why is Bell required to explain “how or why” Christ’s death has these effects? Simply mentioning substitution does not provide an explanation. The only way to really do so is to write a systematic theology, or at least a dogmatic inquiry into the atonement. But that isn’t the purpose of this book. If Galli wants a systematic treatment, he’ll have to look elsewhere (or wait for my book coming out in a few years from Wipf & Stock).

Would it be great if Bell could have provided such a text? Of course! But then we would be expecting him to act as an academic theologian, and not as the pastor that he is. I am uncomfortable with Galli’s review at this point because it seems that there is a double standard. Dever, and many others, are able to “pass the evangelical test” with hardly any theological reflection whatsoever, mostly just a list of verses. And yet when Bell proposes to look at things differently, he is asked to provide logical, systematic explanations—quite beyond what Dever or Galli offer regarding substitutionary atonement. Now, to be fair, many others have indeed provided systematic accounts of substitutionary atonement, but still others have provided systematic accounts of other theories and ways of interpreting the cross.

These factors lead me to the uneasy conclusion that there seems to be some kind of doctrinal legalism at work here. If a theologian espouses substitutionary atonement (even just using the term will suffice), then that person is evangelical. But if another person seems to make substitutionary atonement marginal (even by simply remaining silent or elevating other ideas), then that person has to be scrutinized and is quite probably outside the circle of evangelicalism. Am I off-base here? Is this an accurate reading of Galli? I’m quite willing to be proved wrong, because I think Galli has the very best of intentions. He’s certainly been the most reasonable voice amidst a cacophony of accusations against Bell. But I remain deeply unsettled by this review, precisely because it seems to make one’s explicit defense of substitutionary atonement (though how it is to be understood remains unclear) the mark of one’s evangelical identity. I realize there is anxiety today about just what “evangelical” even means, and perhaps this is an effort to provide some kind of definition. But there are numerous—one might even say, disastrous—problems that attend such a move. For the sake of the future of evangelicalism, I hope we do not feel the need to do what the early church never could, viz. declare one theory of the atonement to be the “orthodox” position.

Finally, this section of the review ends by transitioning to the problem of liberalism more fully. The real basis for Galli’s claim seems to be that Bell finds the sacrificial metaphor for the cross “culturally irrelevant.” We no longer live in a culture that practices animal sacrifice and blood offerings. To continue to think in such terms about the cross results in missing the point of the story altogether. As Galli cites him, Bell then interprets the death and resurrection of Christ in a more symbolic way: “For Bell, the Cross is ‘a symbol of an elemental reality, one we all experience,’ and the Resurrection is not a new concept, but ‘something that has always been true. It’s how the world works.’ He’s referring to that pattern of death and rebirth.” If this is really how Bell conceives of the cross, then I too would have some concerns, but my focus is just on the review itself. What I find interesting is that Dever’s article, the one cited above, also mentions the irrelevance argument. The source there is the book by Joel Green and Mark Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (InterVarsity, 2000). Here are two professors from Fuller Seminary and Fresno Pacific Seminary—both evangelical institutions. Are they liberals for questioning the relevance of the sacrificial logic for theology and proclamation today? Even if sacrificial imagery is central to the NT, does that require us to keep that same imagery in our explanations of the cross for today? Is revelation being defined by and confined to a specific set of textual metaphors? What does this mean for our doctrine of revelation? What biblical hermeneutic are we operating with when we interpret these passages? And how might a doctrine of mission influence the way we look at this problem?

These are some of the questions to which I will return in tomorrow’s post, when I take up the liberal/evangelical divide directly.

Beyond Binaries: A Response to Mark Galli, Part 2

2011-03-15T11:15:00.053-04:00

Read: Part 1

1. Universalism. Galli rightly acknowledges that there are passages in the NT which lean in a universalistic direction. He also acknowledges that Bell does not use the word “universalist” and nowhere clearly identifies himself with that position, though he does say, “it’s hard for me to believe that Bell doesn’t espouse universalism.” The problem here is that Galli does not seem to be as conversant in the history of this idea as he ought to be. In response to Bell’s “arresting” (Galli’s word) question, “Will God get what he wants?” Galli goes on to say:

It's rhetorically compelling, but he misleads at points. He says this theme has a "long tradition" and "an untold number" of devout Christians have believed it. Well, only a tiny minority of Christians have espoused it in 20 centuries. The church has consistently rejected it because the arguments for it have never been compelling. Bell doesn't wrestle with counter-arguments, other than to suggest that to believe in eternal judgment is to believe that history is tragic and that God doesn't get his way. But of course, proponents of eternal judgment think no such things.

Galli is certainly correct to say that proponents of eternal judgment (hereafter EJ, though I will have occasion later to criticize the choice of this terminology by Galli) have theologically robust ways to respond to Bell’s universalist-leaning questions. But this paragraph, and the rest of the section, misses the target for several reasons.

First, the paragraph sidesteps the arresting question by Bell. It’s understandable why Galli would move to discuss universalism and its standing within the tradition. But that’s not the immediate point of Bell’s question. Bell is asking about the nature of God. I don’t know how Bell develops the question, but I can think of some ways. For instance, a bone of contention within American evangelicalism is whether individual human freedom decides whether one is finally “saved” or not. The Reformed position has traditionally upheld divine sovereignty over against human freedom, hence the positing of a double predestination in eternity as the theological explanation for belief and unbelief in time. The evangelical position associated with the likes of Charles Finney rejected the Reformed doctrine of election because it wasn’t “useful” in facilitating conversions. Election went the other direction; the human person was the one who “elected” God. The problem then is that faith becomes a work. Jesus only accomplishes part of our reconciliation, and we have to supply the other half.

We have here the classic monergism-synergism debate, the well-known tension between divine sovereignty and human freedom. I cannot say where Bell himself falls on this debate, but I can say that his question is the right one. He is gesturing (and perhaps the book makes this more explicit) toward the claim that the sovereign power of God has to be united with the loving will of God. The two must not be placed at odds with each other, or else we have God against God. This leads to the uncomfortable but logical conclusion: according to the EJ position, either God wants to save all but cannot, or God does not want to save all and can. The former is the view of most American evangelicals (i.e., non-Reformed); the latter is the Reformed position. The problem is that each results in a view of God that more and more people today find irreconcilable with the biblical witness. The former is powerless against the human will; the latter hardly seems to be the God of love attested in Scripture (i.e., love and justice compete with each other). Bell’s question remains the right one: if God desires all to be saved, as we find proclaimed in the Bible, then does it really make theological sense to say that God cannot accomplish God’s own will? The majority position among evangelicals today seems to be the “argument from freedom,” viz. that God’s love compels God to give us the freedom to reject God. But this quickly unravels. If God knows what is best for us, then is it really loving for God to “respect our freedom” by letting us damn ourselves to hell for all eternity? Is this not the mere projection of a modern notion of respect for individual autonomy onto the being of God? It seems to me that Bell is attempting to move beyond this stale binary opposition between divine sovereignty (divine justice without love) and human freedom (divine love without power). Whether Bell’s attempt is successful or not is another question, but it seems that Galli has missed an opportunity to explore the issue in a more nuanced way than is often the case.

Second, to say that universal salvation (hereafter US) is a “minority” position is true, but surely something is not true just because it is in the majority! I’ll certainly grant that “majority rules” is generally how orthodoxy was decided in the past, but that does not oblige us to imitate our ancestors in the faith. Here and elsewhere, Galli comes close to espousing what I criticized in my response to Colson, viz. a doctrinal legalism that defines one’s “orthodoxy” (a word to be assessed later) based on whether one affirms a set of dogmatic statements held by others in the past. That kind of thinking leads almost inevitably to the conviction that Scripture plus Tradition constitutes the norm for Christian faith and practice. But that is a decidedly un-Protestant way of thinking. I do not think this is Galli’s position, or that he intends to go down this path—though I honestly cannot say, not knowing him personally—but this is the danger that I perceive in some of his statements scattered throughout the review. I will return to this point at the end of the series.

To be sure, Christians have to have some faith in the church of the past, since without the church there would be no canon and no creeds. Galli could quite justifiably respond that though Scripture alone is normative, we are dependent in some way upon the general contours of those who have gone before us. And we depend especially upon those thinkers and leaders in the church who have defended the truth of the gospel against error. Without that, we lose the ability to make distinctions between truth and false, between what accords with the gospel and what does not. But the question is to what extent are we free to critically assess the past. Can we make the judgment today that past judgments by church leaders and councils were, in fact, themselves in error? Surely the Reformers felt free to do so. Just because the rejection of US is the majority report in church history, does this make EJ the only correct view? Do we have the freedom to look afresh at the biblical text and discover a new word for us today, even if that word breaks with the majority? It would be a strange kind of evangelicalism that declared an unequivocal “no” to that question.

Third, it’s not only the questionable doctrinal limitations that Galli seems to place on Christian faith; it is the apparent lack of awareness about those who have actually espoused universalistic views in the past. As the new book, “All Shall Be Well,” edited by Gregory MacDonald/Robin Parry (of The Evangelical Universalist fame), demonstrates rather nicely, the position of Christian universalism does indeed have a long pedigree in the church. I’ll grant that Origen and Gregory of Nyssa do not a “long tradition” make, but neither are they insignificant. Nor are they the only ones, by any means. There are many within the Eastern church that espoused universalist views. And even if most of the proponents of US appear in the modern era, it would be a great injustice to these major theological voices to imply that they are all liberals. Galli does not actually make that connection, but based on where he goes in the rest of the review, that is certainly the strong implication. More on that point later.

Fourth, Galli goes on to argue that the refusal of Scripture to decide one way or the other regarding US and EJ “should give us pause.” I am deeply sympathetic with this view. It is the one that holds someone like Hans Urs von Balthasar back from outright affirmation of US. And yet it strikes me that Galli has not entirely heeded his own advice. For nowhere in the review do we hear of the need to refrain from advocating EJ. He rejects a “barbless universalism” that “risk[s] sentimentalizing the gospel,” but then proceeds to advocate “warning [people] of the eternal rewards and consequences of following Jesus.” If both tendencies are present in Scripture—the universalizing and the particularizing, so to speak—then it stands to reason that there ought to be caution on both sides. Here I would say that no church should make either US or EJ part of its doctrinal statement, since both positions find support in Scripture. To declare either as the “orthodox” position that ought to be held by all is to be unfaithful to the complexity of the scriptural witness. Galli, it seems, is quite willing to espouse EJ, but this is no better in the end than any outright universalism.

Here is a modest suggestion. Proponents of both US and EJ need to acknowledge that there is textual support for each side in the Bible. This means, especially, that proponents of EJ need to stop pretending that they have a monopoly on the meaning of the biblical text, just because their position is the majority report. Both sides need to acknowledge that, beginning with either the US or EJ texts, one can offer cogent explanations for the other set of texts. Neither side has a self-evidently knock-down argument in their favor. Galli gestures towards one by appealing to Jesus, which is a common EJ tactic. But this is theologically fruitless. For starters, that is precisely the argument that Unitarians and other non-Trinitarians used in the past, because Jesus makes a strong differentiation between himself and the Father. Moreover, Jesus offers no soteriology, no doctrine of the atonement. The appeal to Matthew 25—which is done so often and usually in a very irresponsible manner, and Galli is to be praised for not mentioning the passage—is empty of any force. One cannot take its parabolic description of a separation between sheep and goats literally without also taking literally Jesus’ words about what divides the two groups: doing good works, such as feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. The result is—horror of horrors!—precisely the kind of works-righteousness that the NT largely condemns, not to mention the Protestant Reformers and their descendants. Finally, the appeal to Jesus just doesn’t work because the gospel accounts on their own do not make the Christian faith. Christianity is inconceivable apart from the Pauline epistles, which are also the earliest texts we have.

The attempt to make the words of Jesus (as narrated in the gospels) the norm is, in the end, historically and hermeneutically naive. We have to think canonically and theologically. The mere fact that Jesus is recorded as speaking of hell or Gehenna is by no means a knock-down argument. Galli’s question—“If universal salvation is true, why does Jesus not showcase it?”—is thus a bit silly. We could turn this around quite easily. For example, if the doctrine of the Trinity is true, why does Jesus not showcase it? Or, if the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is true (as Galli claims), then why does Jesus not showcase it? Galli quickly appeals to Romans to justify his belief in that doctrine, but why is he able to use Jesus against Bell on EJ while appealing to Paul for the atonement? Why can’t Bell appeal to Paul for US, since it is the Pauline witness that is decisive here? Galli is guilty of what might be called “shifting the goalposts.” He isn’t playing by the same rules. Bell is being asked to justify his position based on what Jesus says, when Galli allows himself more biblical liberty. While this appears to be intellectually disingenuous, I don’t think Galli has any dishonest intentions. It seems to be more of a blindspot.

Back to my modest proposal. Let’s decide to acknowledge that people on both sides have valid and biblically-based reasons for holding to their position. That much is the necessary first step to a generous and honest conversation about this crucially important topic. Then, I wish to suggest, let’s acknowledge that individual theologians—since they do not speak for the church, but seek instead to think critically and reflectively about the church’s faith in Jesus Christ—are free to explore a theology that adopts either US or EJ. Let’s allow for both without impugning the evangelical faith of the other. That’s not to say each side cannot demand exegetical rigor and theological sophistication from the other. (On that point, I actually think advocates of EJ have much to learn from advocates of US!) It only means that EJ proponents need to recognize that there are good evangelical reasons for holding to US—as Gregory MacDonald, among others, has demonstrated. The problem with Galli’s review, which I will explore in more detail later, is that he identifies Bell as a “liberal.” There’s a lot of baggage that goes with that word. Often it functions in evangelical circles as code for “here is someone who may have good intentions, but he is outside the circle.” Galli is much better than that. He does not succumb to the temptation of writing Bell off simply because he leans in a universalist direction. For that reason alone, Galli deserves our thanks. The basis for the identification of Bell as a liberal only then becomes clear in his discussion of the cross and the atonement in the next section, to which I now turn.

Beyond Binaries: A Response to Mark Galli, Part 1

2011-03-14T21:12:00.003-04:00

Let me be clear: despite appearances, I am not trying to pick on Christianity Today. They often do a fine job of walking that moderate evangelical line. And I am a huge supporter of Books & Culture. But it just so happens that they have published some pieces recently that have hit a nerve and warrant responses. Last month it was Chuck Colson, this month it is the review of Rob Bell’s controversial new book, Love Wins, by senior managing editor, Mark Galli.

First, a disclaimer: I have not read Bell’s book. My response to Galli is thus not a response to his portrayal of the book. Others who have actually read the text may offer their own responses to his presentation of Bell’s claims. For my purposes here, I will simply trust that he has represented Bell fairly and accurately.

Galli’s review is an attempt to avoid the empty rhetoric and hasty judgments that so characterized the recent online firestorm (e.g., “Farewell Rob Bell”). In this task, he is largely successful. Galli begins by embracing Bell’s concern to stress the cosmic scope of the gospel and the fact that Jesus cannot be confined to our safe religious boxes. As Galli puts it, “This stuff will preach.” But fairly quickly Galli changes his tune. He compliments Bell for being a “master” of asking questions that challenge “traditional doctrines.” But it’s a somewhat backhanded compliment; the implication—which later becomes explicit—is that Bell can challenge orthodoxy, but leaves one without a substantial or satisfactory alternative. This is essentially Galli’s thesis. Bell asks good questions, but doesn’t provide (the right) answers.

Whether this is accurate cannot be evaluated here for reasons stated above. What I wish to address is the way Galli goes on to locate Bell in the tradition of Protestant liberalism over against orthodox evangelicalism. It is this overly simplistic binary that I will interrogate, along with some related issues. I will follow the order of Galli’s review, beginning with (a) the question of universalism, moving to (b) the cross and the atonement, and concluding with (c) the liberal/evangelical divide.

Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Protestant-Catholic Dialogue

2011-03-05T14:12:00.000-05:00

The annual Karl Barth Conference is taking place again this summer at Princeton Theological Seminary. This year the topic is very exciting: “Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Protestant-Catholic Dialogue.” The conference is co-sponsored by the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary and the Thomistic Institute of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies. You can sign up to receive news and updates. You can also follow the conference on Facebook and Twitter. (Show them some love and sign up today, if you haven’t already!)

For those who have been keeping score, there have been two major Catholic-Protestant conferences in the past several years that have helped lead up to this conference. The first was the 2007 Providence College Symposium on “Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering,” at which Bruce McCormack and Robert Jenson offered Protestant and post-Barthian perspectives in favor of divine passibility. The proceedings from that conference were published in 2009. The second was the 2008 conference on “The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Anti-Christ or the Wisdom of God?” Bruce McCormack and John Webster represented Barth’s position at that event. Those proceedings were very recently published in December of 2010.

All of that leads up to the conference event coming up this summer. Whereas the previous conferences were stacked in favor of the Catholic position, with a minority Barthian representation, this upcoming conference is being structured as a point-counterpoint dialogue. There are five areas or doctrines under discussion, each with a Protestant and Catholic scholar speaking:

Divine Being: Robert Jenson • Richard Schenk

Trinity: Guy Mansini, OSB • Bruce McCormack

Christology: Keith Johnson • Thomas Joseph White, OP

Grace and Justification: Amy Marga • Joseph Wawrykow

Divine and Human Action: Holly Taylor Coolman • John Bowlin

Registration for the conference is $125. There is also a special $60 rate for graduate students, though there are only 30 spots available—so claim them soon! Lodging and meals are optional, but they are also available: $65/night for lodging, and $70 for all meals.

For more information, contact barth.conference-at-ptsem.edu. It should be an excellent conference with important implications not only for Barth and Aquinas studies, but also for future ecumenical conversations.

Upcoming Events: Koinonia, AAR, and Notre Dame

2011-02-23T14:50:00.000-05:00

There are some events coming up with which I am involved that are worth taking note of—and attending, if you happen to be in the particular region.

The first is the Annual Forum of the Koinonia Journal, taking place on March 3-4 at Princeton Theological Seminary. As the executive editor of Koinonia, it is my responsibility to organize the forum that becomes the following year’s journal. Our theme this year is “New Conversations in Religion and Popular Culture.” It should be an exciting conference, and I invite anyone in the area to attend. Here is the schedule of events:

Thursday, March 3, 2011 – 7:00-9:00 pm (Stuart Hall 6)

Jeremy Ian Kirk (Union Theological Seminary, New York): “James Cameron vs. James Cone: Avatar’s False Messiah and the Continued Relevance of Liberation Theology”

Emily Dumler (Princeton Theological Seminary): “A Profile in Courage: A Young Woman in No Country For Old Men”

Respondents: Adam Hearlson and Courtney Palmbush (both of PTS)

Friday, March 4, 2011 – 12:00-2:00 pm (Mackay Student Center, Main Lounge)

Peter Kline (Vanderbilt University): “Christ-Haunted Ohio: The Spiritual and Theological Vision of Over the Rhine”

Nicholaus Benjamin Pumphrey (Claremont Graduate University): “Judges and Heroes: The Scholarly Misinterpretation of the Biblical Judges Reflected in Modern Superheroes”

Marc Boswell (Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary): “Thomas Merton Gets the Blues: A Theopoetics of Cultural Engagement”

Respondents: Blair Bertrand and Sarah Stewart-Kroeker (both of PTS)

The second event is the Mid-Atlantic Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), which will take place on March 17-18 at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick, NJ. As usual, Princeton Seminary students will be out in force at this conference. My own paper is entitled, “Event and Being: Bultmann Reads Badiou.” It is an attempt to reassess the relation between Alain Badiou’s philosophy and Christian theology by bringing Badiou into conversation with Rudolf Bultmann (who is the subject of my dissertation). My starting-point is a paragraph tucked away in a blog post by Carl Raschke, professor of religious studies at the University of Denver, who writes:

I've never been able to prove that Badiou all along has been reading Bultmann's theology of several generations ago about the "Christ event" that is historical, though unintelligible to history itself. But these associations are not merely aleatory. It is not accidental that Badiou's well-received book on St. Paul really complements Bultmann, or that Badiou himself is a source of growing fascination among a newer generation of "postmodern" academic theologians (though they all struggle to follow him half the time, as they once did with Derrida). Badiou is probably more instructive for latter day "Bultmannians", since he has unshackled himself from Heidegger, which Bultmann couldn't.

The third event is the upcoming graduate student conference at the University of Notre Dame on the theme, “New Conversations on Bonhoeffer’s Theology,” sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. In addition to public lectures by Bernd Wannenwetsch, Christiane Tietz, and Robin Lovin, there will be twelve graduate student papers. I will be one of those presenters. My paper is tentatively titled, “Bonhoeffer and Bultmann: An Overlooked and Misunderstood Relationship.” Here I will attempt to redirect the conversation regarding these two giants of 20th-century theology. The problem is that most scholars, with the notable rare exceptions of Gerhard Ebeling and Gerhard Krause, have accepted Bonhoeffer’s critical comments on Bultmann at face value. Theologians from Götz Harbsmeier to Russell Palmer to Adam Kotsko have made a sharp distinction between Bonhoeffer’s non-religious interpretation and Bultmann’s program of demythologizing, but really without probing the deeper underlying issues that connect and divide them. I will examine the problem of the relation between the ontic and the ontological—which first appears in Act and Being—since this is the issue that really vexes Bonhoeffer; I will offer a critique of Bonhoeffer’s critique of Bultmann and propose that soteriology, not hermeneutics, is the true point of divergence; and I will conclude by suggesting reasons for and ways of bringing Bonhoeffer more in line with Bultmann.

So that’s Princeton, New Brunswick, and South Bend. If you’re around any of those areas in the coming two months, I hope you’ll consider coming to these events. Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

“The truth will make you free”: a response to Chuck Colson

2011-02-22T20:32:00.003-05:00

In a blog post published yesterday on Christianity Today (“Doctrinal Boot Camp”), Chuck Colson argues that the church needs to treat catechesis the way the military treats new cadets: “Just like the Marine Corps, the church has learned what works and what doesn't, what is right and what is wrong. And the goal of Christian discipleship is to conform to the truths of the Christian faith, just as a marine has to conform to the truths of the corps.” According to Colson, there is an instructive analogy between boot camp and discipleship: in both cases, the “old man [sic]” is destroyed and a new person is created with “a new set of beliefs and standards.”

Let’s examine this thesis. Colson’s post is situated in the context of an ongoing dispute with the so-called “younger evangelicals”—which is the term he uses, borrowing from Robert Webber’s typology. Colson has long struggled to oppose the rise of what calls “postmodern” or “emergent” forms of Christian faith and practice. Back in June, 2006, I wrote a blog post responding to another column of his on a similar theme (“Emerging Confusion”). Then and now, Colson is concerned with the notion of “truth.” As Pilate puts it in the Gospel of John, “What is truth?” Today, there are no shortage of answers to this question, and Colson defends a popular version of it, viz. the “cognitive-propositional” type, to use George Lindbeck’s famous typology. The examples he gives of such truth include the Nicene Creed, the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the recent Manhattan Declaration. Truth, on this model, is a logical statement or propositional sentence that makes a particular claim about something; it is either true or false, and there are no ambiguities. Either one affirms the truth, or one (sinfully) denies it. The attempt by these “younger evangelicals” to redefine the meaning of truth is considered a failure to be a faithful Christian.

I find it especially odd that at this point, Colson turns to the analogy of a Marine boot camp to convince his readers. Surely, this is a rhetorical error on his part. Those younger evangelicals seeking to think differently about truth are precisely the ones least likely to find a military example compelling. But let’s ignore the misstep in presentation and focus on the content of the analogy. And for the sake of argument, let’s think within this analogy instead of too quickly dismissing it. (The time for dismissal will come later.)

Colson compares the “truths of the Christian faith” to the “truths of the corps.” Just as the troops must obey the truths of the corps, so too the Christian must obey the truths of the faith. For this analogy to work, however, we need to come to some understanding about what the “truths of the corps” actually are. But immediately we come up against a serious problem. For the truths of the corps are not at all a set of propositions about the Marine corps (or anything else for that matter). They are instead the commands of the drill sergeant. These commands are concrete, contextual, and relational: they are grounded in a personal relation between the commanding officer and the obedient cadet, situated within a particular context determined by a concrete time and place. To obey the “truths of the corps” is thus to obey a living voice, a commanding presence, that meets us within our particular historical situation. I am the one commanded. In short, the “truths of the corps” are ethical truths—related, that is, to the question of concrete human agency—not cognitive truths. If anything, boot camp is about stripping away cognitive knowledge and forming a purely ethical agent, one who is conditioned entirely by the relation of command and obedience.

Let’s assume then that Colson simply hasn’t thought through the analogy. What are the specific reasons he gives for using it? In what ways does he actually draw out the comparison? Here it will help to form a list:

“I asked him about younger evangelicals who believe that we oldsters aren't being sensitive enough to their concerns. ‘Can you imagine,’ he asked, ‘what would happen if a scruffy young recruit were to tell his Marine drill instructor at Parris Island that he ought to be more sensitive to his needs?’ We both chuckled, knowing what would happen to the poor recruit. If he survived, he'd be doing 100 pushups a day for weeks.” Conclusion: the truths of the faith are to be blindly adhered to without critical scrutiny and without concern for the individual.
“The psychology of boot camp is instructive. The first six weeks are spent—figuratively speak-ing, mostly—beating out of recruits every habit, attitude, and preconceived notion about life and the world. You are told you are worthless and are ‘not a special snowflake,’ as Campbell says. ... After the drill instructors get rid of the old man—there's a good analogy—the instruction changes dramatically. They now tell you that you're a marine and can achieve anything if you live by the rules.” Conclusion: catechesis is about creating a blank slate (i.e., brainwashing), getting rid of all prior conceptions and practices, and learning to follow a new set of “rules.”
“This is what becoming a Christian means. We put off the old man, get rid of the old habits, and embrace a new set of beliefs and standards defined in Scripture and lived out over 2,000 years. Just like the Marine Corps, the church has learned what works and what doesn't, what is right and what is wrong. And the goal of Christian discipleship is to conform to the truths of the Christian faith, just as a marine has to conform to the truths of the corps.” Conclusion: the truths of the faith are the doctrinal beliefs and standards that the “church” has determined over the years (i.e., sacred tradition) in its struggle against heresy.
“Come to think of it, isn't the church today in a far more serious battle than any the Marines have fought? Aren't we called to make disciples who will advance the kingdom of God in an extremely hostile world? Haven't we inherited 2,000 years of very hard-earned lessons?” Conclusion: Christians are in a spiritual battle that can only be won through blind obedience to the doctrinal tradition that we have “inherited.”

It is crucial to see what Colson has done here. Even though the article repeatedly states that the analogy is between the “truths of the Christian faith” and the “truths of the corps,” he nowhere discusses the actual “truths” in each case. There is absolutely no doctrinal content anywhere in this article. Instead, the analogy merely concerns the form in which the content is delivered and obeyed. The form of the Marine truths is a “psychological” beat-down that destroys the old person and fashions a new totally obedient servant of the armed forces. The “form” of the Christian truths, according to this analogy, is a “psychological” brainwashing in which the catechumen is stripped of all prior ideas and compelled (under threat of hell, I suppose, comparable to dishonorable discharge) to adopt whatever teachings are given by the authorities.

What is the nature of the obedience presented here by Colson? Quite clearly, it is a purely formal obedience and thus a purely formal authority. Rudolf Bultmann’s description of Judaism in his book, Jesus (ET Jesus and the Word), is perfectly applicable here:

Obligation to obedience depended no longer upon content but upon formal authority; not what was commanded determined the will of the person acting, but the fact that such and such was commanded. ... The commandments were kept because they were commanded. ... The fundamental desire is to be obedient to the sacred Law, without reference to what it commands. Obedience is the essence of Jewish morality. ... The fundamental idea of the Jewish ethic [is] blind obedience. ... The will of God is the formal authority of Scripture; ethic is therefore not distinguishable from law. (Jesus and the Word, 66-7, 70)

Bultmann goes on to sharply distinguish between Jewish morality and the ethic of Jesus, calling the latter “radical obedience”:

What God’s will is, is not stated by an external authority, so that the content of the command is a matter of indifference, but man is trusted and expected to see for himself what God commands. God’s requirements are intrinsically intelligible. And here the idea of obedience is first radically conceived. For so long as obedience is only subjection to an authority which man does not understand, it is no true obedience; something in man still remains outside and does not submit, is not bound by the command of God. ... In this kind of decision a man stands outside of his action, he is not completely obedient. Radical obedience exists only when a man inwardly assents to what is required of him, when the thing commanded is seen as intrinsically God’s command; when the whole man stands behind what he does; or better, when the whole man is in what he does, when he is not doing something obediently, but is essentially obedient. (Jesus and the Word, 76-7)

Why this excursus on Bultmann and the ethics of Jesus? There are a few reasons. First, the model of Christian discipleship that Colson is promoting is indistinguishable from, and in fact identical to, the formal legalism that the New Testament opposes from Jesus to Paul to John. It is a “blind obedience” imposed “from above” with no concern for the specific situation of the one who obeys. Here gospel has been conflated with law. Bultmann notes that such legalism coincides with a kind of meritoriousness (think: works-righteousness), i.e., the notion that we have some claim upon God’s favor through our action. And is this not precisely what we see in evangelical legalism, the notion that our obedience and morality wins us the favor of God and the church? As one who grew up within this culture, I can attest wholeheartedly that such is indeed the case.

Second, there is a more subtle, but far more serious, problem lurking within legalism. It is a problem of mission. Here, again, the comparison with Judaism is insightful. The mission of Israel has always been one of expansion or absorption: according to the prophetic visions of the New Zion, all the nations will submit to the Law of God and find their center in the city of Jerusalem. Beginning with the Abrahamic covenant, the mission of Israel is global in scope. The whole world is to become Israel. Now, within such a vision, it makes perfect sense for there to be a universal law that is applicable for all times and places. In the legalist framework, mission takes the form of extending the normative law-code to new people groups; mission is simply the subsumption of other cultures under the one normative culture defined by the law. It is a mission of diffusion and expansion. When such a mission is forcefully carried out (as it was throughout much of Christian history), it is a form of imperialism.

All of this changes, at least in theory, with the coming of Christ and the pneumatic calling of the church. In the New Testament framework, exemplified by the Council of Jerusalem and the work of the early apostles, mission takes the form of contextually proclaiming the christological “word of the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18), the scandalous gospel of the crucified and risen Lord. This gospel does not come attached to any particular culture or nation; it comes instead as an apocalyptic invasion of the world, as the event of a heavenly reign that does not arise out of or become inscribed into the prior conditions of the world. For this reason, the community called to participate in the mission of God is not one institution or nation among others, competing with other cultures or nations or ideologies. The ecclesial community is wholly and radically free with respect to the various historical-cultural contexts that it encounters. The church’s mission is not the assimilation and absorption of other cultures into its monolithic institution, but instead it is the ongoing concrete translation of the gospel into new cultures and contexts. Mission thus occurs as the gospel is proclaimed and heard in each specific culture. When we ask what unites the churches in Galatia, Rome, and Corinth, for example, it is not that they share the Greek language or Paul’s leadership; it is instead the simple fact that they share “the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name” (Rom. 1:1-5). It is this kerygmatic word of Jesus the Messiah that indigenizes itself into each new context and transforms that context in light of God’s eschatological hope. The gospel does not come prepackaged with a set of rules. On the contrary, it disrupts the entire logic of abstract rules and regulations and establishes a new logic of radical indigenization and contextualization (see Andrew Walls). In sum, what differentiates law and gospel are two different conceptions of mission: a mission of absorption and diffusion versus a mission of translation (cf. Sanneh). The former turns the gospel into a piece of propaganda—defining propaganda here, in agreement with John Flett, as the ideological extension of a particular cultural form. A mission of translation differentiates between the gospel and every cultural instantiation.

Ethically, this means that the command to love others—which is the only command of the NT, all others being contextual applications of this one command—is not an abbreviation of the Levitical law-code. On the contrary, the crucial significance of this radical recapitulation and summarization of the Torah is that the Christian community does not know in advance and in the abstract what it must do in every conceivable situation. Christian faith is not a totalizing worldview that prescribes how every believer must live in the world. It does not provide us with an abstract casuistic ethical system that can describe in advance how everyone ought to act. This is precisely what Jesus attacks in his conflict with the Pharisees. What exercises Jesus is the fact that the Pharisees have established an oral law designed to account for every conceivable problem or issue that might arise in a person’s life. The Pharisees seek to systematically organize life according to the law, whereas Jesus comes as the liberator from formal legalism and the giver of God’s Holy Spirit. The Spirit illuminates the concrete content of God’s will in each specific situation.

Doctrinally—and here we return to the core issue raised by Colson—this means that we are not given a timeless doctrinal “law” to which we must assent. Revelation is not a set of abstract propositions whose concepts and claims are universally valid. In other words, the Christian community does not know in advance and in the abstract how it must speak the kerygma in every conceivable situation. The contextual form of the gospel is intrinsically open to new conceptual formulations. Scripture witnesses to a gospel message that is infinitely translatable. The Spirit is the one who empowers this ongoing work of translation, liberating us from a formal obedience to a particular confessional law-code. To use the helpful formulation of John Franke, the truth of the faith intrinsically embraces a plurality and multiplicity of possible contextual translations. Christian truth requires a “manifold witness.”

The truth of the gospel frees us from every worldview (Weltanschauung)—whether ethical or doctrinal. Worldviews are universal ideas, beliefs, or norms that claim to determine what is true or right in advance and in the abstract. But Christian faith knows of no worldview binding for the believer. There is no universal doctrinal formulation to which all must blindly assent, nor any legalistic command which all must blindly obey. And this is because worldviews are inherently untranslatable, and thus antithetical to the translatable mission of God; they are inevitably a form of diffusion and absorption. Worldviews are always a form of propaganda. Contrary to every worldview, the gospel of Jesus Christ is a liberating truth. It frees us from every ideology, every law (i.e., formal legalism), every cultural-historical claim upon the apocalyptic revelation in Jesus Christ. To know the truth is to know that we are set free from these powers and principalities, even when they masquerade as “biblical truth” and “church tradition.”

With a proper missiology in place, we can assess Colson’s deeply misguided position. My thesis can be stated as follows: Colson promotes, on the basis of his militaristic analogy, a form of doctrinal legalism in which it is not what we believe that matters, but the mere fact that we believe. Missiologically, the implication is that the truth of the Christian faith is a form of propaganda. Colson is, to put it simply, a propagandist. According to Colson, Christians are supposed to blindly assent to whatever the church teaches. Discipleship is the process by which the “old man”—and here it includes everything that is particular about a person, including their cultural-historical context—is destroyed so that we will accept with open arms whatever we are told by the church authorities. Discipleship is thus diffusion. It is a process of colonization. Everything that is culturally specific about a person is nullified so that each person can be remade in the image of the colonizing (i.e., catechizing) power. This is not merely a formal authority, in which content is irrelevant and only our blind, abstract obedience is demanded; this is also an imperialistic authority, in which those in power violently subjugate others for the purpose of replicating their culturally-defined beliefs, norms, and practices. In every conceivable respect, this is the antithesis of the mission of Jesus Christ, who kenotically abandoned all pretensions to such power, going into the far country in total abandon, offering himself in submission to others to the point of death—even death on a cross. Colson’s is a theology of glory and self-aggrandizing power. The way of Jesus Christ is the way of the cross. Colson promotes a blind obedience to an abstract authority. Christ seeks concrete obedience to a crucified Lord. The chasm between Colson and Christ is the chasm between the Roman Empire and the Christian community, between propaganda and gospel, between a world turned in on itself and a God turned out toward the world. Chuck Colson’s Christianity Today column is titled “Contra Mundum” (“Against the World”). The God of Jesus Christ, by contrast, is always and eternally pro mundo, “for the world.” Between them, there is an Either/Or.

Besides the fact that Colson’s online column is a shockingly blatant recommendation of individual brainwashing and cultural imperialism as the mode of catechesis, there are a number of other issues to address.

Who are the authorities? Which church is Colson referring to? In his blog post, he mentions the Nicene Creed, the Westminster Confession, and the Manhattan Declaration. Surely, he realizes that some Christians accept one or two of these, but not all three. Does he believe that one must affirm all three of these in order to be a faithful believer? Can one accept Nicaea but reject Westminster, or affirm Nicaea and Westminster but reject Manhattan? Colson gives no guidance on this problem. He seems to suggest that these are all “rooted in Scripture” and therefore self-evidently correct. But then he would find himself in the very awkward position of flatly opposing many conservative evangelicals who strongly support his view of truth and yet are not Reformed, and so do not accept Westminster, or at least not all of it. Throughout this column, Colson tosses around the terms “church” and “the Christian faith” as if their meaning is entirely obvious. As if we know precisely what “truths” to which we are supposed to assent. All of this stems from the larger problem of his abstract doctrinal formalism. Colson pays no attention to the content of our faith, because that isn’t apparently a question in his mind. He seems to think that all Christians who uncritically affirm whatever their (denominational) tradition stands for are “good” Christians, regardless of what they actually believe. So a Wesleyan Christian and a Westminster Christian are both properly faithful believers as long as they blindly assent to their traditions. The actual content of the debate over predestination, for example, is essentially irrelevant.
Closely related to this first problem is the issue of the relation between scripture and tradition. Colson’s piece is a striking parable of the state of evangelical Protestantism. He mentions scripture explicitly twice: once to say that the Manhattan Declaration is “rooted in Scripture,” and another to say that becoming a Christian means to “embrace a new set of beliefs and standards defined in Scripture and lived out over 2,000 years.” Far and away, these vague references are overshadowed by references to what we might call the “Tradition.” He refers to the fact that we have “inherited 2,000 years of very hard-earned lessons,” analogous to the 230 years of Marine Corps training. He says that “the church has learned what works and what doesn't, what is right and what is wrong.” He speaks of the “rules” that we must learn to obey. He refers repeatedly to doctrines and “dogmatic statements.” At the end, the reference to catechisms comes before the Bible in a list of things the church has to get serious about.

But let’s back up. The two main references to scripture are incredibly problematic. First, in what sense is the Manhattan Declaration “rooted in Scripture”? If one looks at that document, one quickly notices that there is no exegesis anywhere. In fact, the only use of scripture is the quotation of two verses before each section. This form of proof-texting presupposes that the meaning and significance of these verses is self-evident, when of course that is not the case at all. There is no defense of the verses it employs. More egregiously, many of the arguments actually employed are rooted in natural law theories, especially in the section on marriage. In fact, there is little basis for the claim that the Declaration has a grounding in scripture at all. It is merely the formulation of a particular set of cultural norms and practices, baptized in the language of Christian faith. Some of what it says might be quite justified, but as it stands, it barely escapes the label of propaganda discussed above.
The other reference to scripture is even more problematic. What exactly are the “beliefs and standards defined” in scripture? Surely, Colson does not abide by many of the laws in the Levitical code. And where, might I ask, does one find the doctrine of the trinity or the hypostatic union in the biblical text? Colson might respond, “There are biblical reasons for no longer abiding by OT laws and there are texts in the NT which give support to these doctrines.” Yes on both counts. But what are the criteria by which we decide what laws to follow and which doctrines are legitimately supported by scripture? Colson uses the word “defined,” but that simply cannot be the case. The word “trinity” is not defined anywhere in the Bible, much less words like “homoousias” or “predestination.” Not even core Christian practices such as baptism are given a clear definition. What Colson and other evangelicals sorely lack is the articulation of a hermeneutic by which to read and interpret scripture. But the real issue is that they do not seem to even see the need for a hermeneutic. And that is the crucial problem here. Without a defined hermeneutic, Colson remains trapped in a cesspool of contradictions. He’ll say, on the one hand, that his positions are supported by scripture. But on every material point, he either refers to something defined hundreds of years later by the church’s tradition, or he cherry-picks passages to accept and others to ignore. The result is a muddled picture that lacks coherency.
All of this would be different if Colson came out as a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, where “Sacred Tradition” does indeed stand on equal level with scripture as the normative authority for faith and practice. But no Protestant, and certainly no evangelical Protestant, can say such a thing without betraying the heritage of the Reformers. Colson is an excellent representative of the deep contradictions within current Protestantism. They want to claim the label sola scriptura, but they cannot help elevating some extra-biblical text as equally authoritative. It’s interesting that Colson refers to the neo-Reformed movement sweeping the nation, because they of all people have been the most blatant offenders. Their elevation of the Westminster Confession to the status of regula fidei is just a Protestant mirror of Roman Catholicism. Colson, it seems, wants something along these lines.
We can put it this way: Colson’s doctrinal legalism implies also an ecclesiological traditionalism. The truth of the faith for Colson is not a gospel message that transcends every particular cultural-historical form, including the Bible itself. Instead, the truth of the faith has been confined to particular historical confessions and declarations. The goal here is to eliminate uncertainty so as to gain control of the faith. A revelation that refuses to be determined by a particular historical form is a revelation that cannot be used to colonize; such a revelation always resists petrification and manipulation. But Colson needs a revelation that can be used to create an army of formally obedient Christians to then take over the world (“contra mundum,” remember). Colson needs an ideology, not a kerygma. And for that reason, he needs the static words of logical propositions and creedal formulae. He has no need for a divine word that speaks to us today; he does not need the kerygmatic witness of the community. He needs only a set of traditional beliefs and standards about right and wrong. And as we’ve already established, the actual content of these beliefs is irrelevant, so long as they are capable of commanding conformity.

Finally, Colson seems to think that those who have rejected the Manhattan Declaration have done so purely out of a lack of comfort with dogmatic statements and doctrinal propositions. But on what evidence? He cites “one young evangelical,” but he could easily be misrepresenting this person’s view. And certainly it is impossible to extrapolate from this one example and say that all young evangelicals who reject the document do so for the same reason. That would be a gross logical fallacy. Yet Colson does not seem to appreciate the possibility that there might be good biblical reasons for refusing to affirm what it says. He seems to be under the illusion that there is only one right way to be a Christian, only one right answer for every question. He thinks that the “young evangelicals” who reject the Manhattan Declaration do so out of a weak faith. He doesn’t consider the possibility that it could in fact come from a much stronger faith! This is the problem with an orthodoxy that has made “being orthodox” into a badge of honor: it becomes doctrinal works-righteousness. To be a true Christian means to unquestionably affirm everything that your “elders in the faith” affirm. Critical thinking is discouraged and is seen as the mark of a sinful ego that has not submitted to Christ. So long as Christians continue to identify orthodoxy with anti-intellectualism, the result will be a dead faith in a dead god.

Having probed the numerous problems with Colson’s militaristic analogy for Christian discipleship, we can finally turn to the most obvious problem, the one that we held off criticizing at the start: specifically, the fact that Colson has the audacity (in the worst possible sense) to compare the church with a military power. Disciples are compared with soldiers; discipleship is compared with boot camp; the struggle of the church is compared with a military conflict; evangelism is implicitly compared with colonialism and military invasion. It’s probably not worth condemning this; it should be self-evident how inappropriate it is to describe the truth of the Christian faith in these terms. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a gospel of peace. Jesus came as the prophet, priest, and king of a new peace that puts to rest the violence of the nations. To use an analogy like this is an act of disobedience to the very Lord that Colson claims to serve. It misrepresents the church—confusing its mission with the false missions of the authorities of this world—and it misrepresents the lordship of Jesus Christ—confusing the power of God with the powers and principalities that keep this world in bondage.

In conclusion, it is time to return to where we began, viz. with Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” Colson speaks repeatedly of “truth,” and as I stated earlier, it is always in a cognitive-propositional manner. But is this faithful to the biblical witness? Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6). The truth isn’t a doctrine about Jesus; it is simply and concretely Jesus himself. But perhaps this is too obvious of an answer to satisfy some people. So let’s look a bit further. In the fourth gospel the truth is identified as Jesus’ own word: “because I tell the truth, you do not believe me” (Jn. 8:45). The Spirit is called the “Spirit of truth,” and yet the Spirit “will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears” (Jn. 16:13). Again, it is the word of Jesus himself, the word that Jesus himself is, to which the Spirit testifies. But even if this truth is about Jesus, it is nothing more than the truth “that Jesus is the Messiah” (Jn. 20:31). Looking beyond the gospel of John, what do we find elsewhere in the NT? Paul refers to the “truth of the gospel” in Galatians 2:5 and 2:14. In Ephesians 1:13, we read about “the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation” (cf. Col. 1:5). And later we read of “speaking the truth in love,” and the fact that “truth is in Jesus” (Eph. 4:15, 21). I could go on and on, but the point has been made: “truth” in the NT refers not to doctrinal or logical propositions, but rather to the saving knowledge that Jesus is the Messiah. But this is an existential or personal knowledge. It is not a cognitive fact but a translatable proclamation.

To clarify, I am in no way suggesting that doctrines do not matter or that we can just dispense with dogmatic statements. On the contrary, I have long advocated on this very blog for catechesis and theological training in the church. I am an ardent supporter of confessional statements that clarify our faith. We need much more education and catechetical instruction—on that critical point I am in firm agreement with Colson. But there is a crucial difference! He elides the distinction between revelation and the human testimonies to and clarifications of revelation. And this is because he thinks revelation is a set of dogmatic-doctrinal statements. The fact that scripture does not contain any of these statements obliges him to elide the distinction between scripture and tradition. The end result is that Colson cannot help but elide the distinction between Christ and the church. Though he probably does not intend it, his position eventually requires one to call the church the “prolongation of the incarnation.” Revelation is no longer the apocalyptic event of God’s reconciling grace in Jesus Christ—the position we find articulated in Paul’s epistles. Instead, revelation is the “sacred deposit” of the church, the various rules and statements established by the church over the centuries. This leads us to the following conclusion: the commanding authority that Colson sees as the analogue of the drill sergeant is not Jesus or God, but rather the church. It is the authority of the church, not the authority of Christ, that demands our formal, blind obedience. Colson’s theology is the deification of the church, and thus the deification of a particular cultural form. Despite his best intentions, the gospel on such an account is simply propaganda.

Evangelicals have given Chuck Colson a pass for far too long. It is high time that we see his statements for what they are: the battle-weary cries of an evangelical who cannot accept that there might be ways of being a faithful evangelical Christian that do not involve doctrinal legalism (much less ethical legalism). He cannot see the “younger evangelicals” as anything but “wussies” in the faith, unwilling to really commit to the boot camp of discipleship. But in his fight for the truth, he has wandered into falsehood. In his concern for formal obedience, he has forgotten about the actual content—and so missed the truly radical obedience to which Jesus calls us. He is unable to see that his reactionary struggle contra mundum has led him away from the gospel: “For God so loved the world...”

Guillermo del Toro’s theopolitical imagination

2011-01-31T10:03:00.001-05:00

My latest publication is an essay in the new issue of Cultural Encounters. The paper explores the work of director Guillermo del Toro—specifically, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth—in conversation with William Cavanaugh. The basis for this interdisciplinary dialogue was an interview that del Toro gave on National Public Radio on Jan. 24, 2007, in which he discussed the way all social reality is a form of fantasy and imagination, a claim that Cavanaugh himself makes. According to del Toro,

The entire world we live in is fabricated: Republican/Democrat, left/right, morning/night, geography and borders—all these things are conceits. Borders are not visible from a satellite picture. The fact [is] that you can have a civil war where two sides kill each other, and essentially from afar they look exactly the same. They are both the same human beings. They share the same taste for food. They sing the same songs. This imagined conceit can create such horrors.

Del Toro went on, then, to argue that there are two kinds of imagination: one that creates and reinforces the horrors we encounter in the world, and another that rebels against the Establishment, as he calls it, with “a beautiful sense of anarchy.” My essay explores the way this gets fleshed out in two of his films.

By linking these ideas up with Cavanaugh, I argue more generally that, despite del Toro’s association of Christianity with the Establishment, there is a very real sense in which his films are theologically profound. He presents us with an anarchic “spiritual imagination”—analogous in a way to Cavanaugh’s “Eucharistic imagination”—that promotes a humanizing communal praxis in the midst of a disenchanted and dehumanizing world. His films confront the Christian church, in particular, with a kind of post-Christian challenge: which imagination will the church embody, one that rebels against the Establishment, or one that actively sustains it? Seen in this light, del Toro’s work demands thoughtful theological engagement.

Review: Darren Marks, Bringing Theology to Life

2011-01-30T10:52:00.000-05:00

Darren C. Marks, Bringing Theology to Life: Key Doctrines for Christian Faith and Mission (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 190 pp. (review copy courtesy of the good folks at IVP)

The disconnect between the church and the academy is one of the scandals within Western Christianity—and it is one in which both sides are guilty. The academy produces theology for other academic theologians, often with little to no concern for how this theology will serve the mission of the Christian community. Theology is just one discipline among others fighting for intellectual legitimacy and serving as the field within which a person gains academic recognition. The disregard most ministers have for academic theology is thus perfectly understandable, even if it only serves to further exacerbate the divide.

The problem from the church’s side is that many ministers no longer think theology is necessary for the work of the church. They no longer read the ancient doctors and magisterial Reformers, much less modern giants like Schleiermacher, Barth, Tillich, and Moltmann. It’s not simply that contemporary theology is often irrelevant to the church’s mission; now many ministers no longer care if it’s relevant or not, because theology per se is often viewed as antiquated and rigid, incapable of informing the concrete issues of faith and practice. It is also often viewed as divisive, which is not an unfounded charge considering the acrimonious nature of much theological debate. What Western Christianity desperately needs are theologians attentive to the concerns of the local and global church as well as ministers attentive to the debates in contemporary theology.

Enter Darren Marks. In this new volume, Bringing Theology to Life, he attempts to bridge this scandalous gulf between church and academy. In the introduction, he points out the problem of most academic theology—specifically its divorce from concrete, parish life—while noting that this is not the intention of most academic theologians. His goal in this book is “to redress that imbalance [between theology and church life] by clarifying that Christian theology is exactly the content of the life of the Christian community in terms of its worship and therefore its understanding of God in Christ” (10). He intends to “introduce the church to the insights of academic theologians” (ibid.). Marks seeks to accomplish this not by surveying various theologians or schools of theology. Instead he presents a kind of abridged “systematic theology” designed for the layperson or “armchair theologian.” It is abridged in that he only covers specific topics and doctrines, but it is systematic in that he still addresses the full scope of theology in a way that demonstrates how these doctrines are interconnected. The chapters are, as he says, “thematic and interwoven” (ibid.). Finally, to his great credit, he avoids academic jargon and arcane debates throughout the book.

The doctrines Marks chooses to address, and the way he frames them, are interesting. He begins, like any good theologian after Barth, with the doctrine of the Trinity. Then, in a move that at least appears to depart from Barth, he discusses the doctrine of sin before moving on to the incarnation. The next two chapters look at pneumatology and the Bible and sacraments. Finally, in a surprising move, he examines the doctrine of heaven (as opposed to eschatology) before concluding with ecclesiology.

The first chapter on the Trinity is the most elementary of the book; it reads like an embellished lecture, which is a good way to begin a book of this kind. Marks presents an overview of the basic trinitarian heresies, including monarchianism and modalism, among others. He then discusses gnosticism and Marcionism, wisely using the doctrine of the Trinity as a response to the bifurcation between the Creator God and the Redeemer God, between YHWH and the Messiah. Brief discussions of creation, perichoresis, and the doctrine of appropriations are all found here. The last half of the chapter recount the “demise” of the doctrine of the Trinity in modernity and its “reemergence” in the work of Karl Barth.

The next two chapters look at sin and the incarnation, respectively, but they should really be read as a single chapter divided into two parts. The reason for this becomes clear on the first page of the chapter on sin, where Marks states up front: “To talk of sin, we need to talk about Jesus Christ” (35). His argument in this chapter is that we must view sin theologically or christologically, not anthropologically. A doctrine of sin thus works backwards from “who Jesus is and what Jesus did” (38). While the chapter is titled “the doctrine of sin,” it should really be called “soteriology” or “the doctrine of salvation.” Marks rightly recognizes that christology is first and foremost soteriology; the person of Christ is determined by the saving work. What follows is thus a discussion of the atonement, based on Gustav Aulén’s book, Christus Victor. Marks takes Aulén’s widely-criticized scholarship for granted, and agrees with making the “Christ as victor” model the dominate one for thinking about the atonement: “Christus Victor is the only cry of Christians!” (45). The chapter on the incarnation follows Marks’s analysis of the cross by looking at Jesus’ identity as the Son of God. Against liberalism, Marks argues that Jesus displays the “unambiguous coming of God” (61). This means that “God is Christlike” (64), which leads Marks to endorse Moltmann’s idea of the “crucified God.” The rest of the chapter focus on soteriology again, this time positively appropriating both deification and forensic justification, while concluding with a brief discussion of election as God’s faithfulness as our savior.

The rest of the book—roughly two-thirds of the overall text—is devoted to the third article of the creed, that is to say, to the questions of pneumatology, ecclesiology, sacramentology, and eschatology. It’s clear from this where his own interests lie; his writing during these sections becomes more animated and more detailed, indicating a greater investment in the subject-matter. I will briefly describe each of these four chapters in turn, devoted to the “Holy Spirit,” “Bible and Sacraments,” “Heaven,” and “Church,” respectively. What becomes clear is that all four chapters are different ways of speaking about ecclesiology, which is really the center of gravity of the entire book.

The chapter on pneumatology begins by resisting reductionistic perspectives of the Spirit—such as associating the Spirit’s work with charismatic Pentecostalism or individual spirituality. The biblical witness leads us to a much broader and complex understanding of this doctrine. The Holy Spirit is God’s “power and presence” throughout creation. The Spirit is the agent of God’s mission in the world. Here Marks adds to his christocentrism a kind of pneumatocentrism: “God . . . is Spiritlike” (85), in addition to being Christlike. As with his earlier affirmation of an Eastern Orthodox conception of deification (69), Marks also sides in favor of the Eastern understanding of the trinitarian relations over against Augustine and the filioque, which he charges with implicitly “depersonalizing” the Spirit (83). The rest of the chapter looks at sanctification, drawing mostly upon Calvin and Barth to argue that the Spirit grants us freedom to live in hope before God. The Holy Spirit transforms us into “pneumatic humans” who reflect Jesus, “the first truly pneumatic human” (89).

Marks next turns to sacramentology, wherein he includes both the Bible and the traditional sacraments of baptism and eucharist. He describes his position as “a middle line between highly sacramental and nonsacramental theology,” which he takes to mean that “both the Scripture and sacraments are vehicles in which Christ is made objectively and personally present” (97). He defines a sacrament as a “mediating grace,” a means by which God is made manifest for the believing community. Scripture is a mediating grace as God’s revelatory speech. After an odd and lengthy discussion of history, Marks draws on Eberhard Jüngel, John Webster, and Barth to develop a theology of Scripture and preaching that emphasizes God’s self-communicative presence in and through these creaturely media. When he turns to the Lord’s Supper and baptism, Marks addresses the problem of distinguishing between sacramentality and the sacraments. He develops an “ecumenical proposal” for the sacraments, drawing heavily upon Catholic sources, focusing on their mediating and unifying character. He concludes by stating that the church is a sacrament.

At this point, a chapter on the being of the church itself would seem most natural, but Marks makes the reader wait until the last chapter for a proper discussion of ecclesiology. Between sacraments and the church, he inserts a chapter on heaven. This awkward ordering is revealing: it indicates Marks’s attempt to resist as strongly as possible the association of heaven with the “afterlife” or the “beyond.” After another odd aside on Max Weber, election, and the “prosperity gospel,” he briefly describes the images of the New Jerusalem and the beatific vision before turning to a lengthy and very well-done section on the “problem of heaven” in modern theology. Here he touches on Kant, Hegel, Weiss, Schweitzer, Barth, Rahner, Moltmann, and others. Marks argues for a church of hope and a theology of hope which together recognize that the doctrine of heaven is not some abstract idea about what comes after death. Eschatology is not about the “last” things in terms of chronology, but about the “final” things in terms of significance. Heaven refers to the eschatological future of God as it continually breaks in to the world here and now. God’s future guarantees our own future in fellowship with God, and we are called to live now as a “missionary presence in the world” in corresponding witness to this eschatological reality (159).

The closing chapter on the church is simply a recapitulation of the previous chapters. The first sentence states: “The end (telos), at least on this side of heaven, is the church” (165). As should be clear by the attention he gives to the doctrine, Marks has a very high ecclesiology. He states that the church is “the place in which God chooses to work in the world” (166). The last part of the book explores the moral and theological problems associated with the church—the former exploring the Pelagian and Donatist controversies, and the latter going through the creedal confession (in the order: apostolic, holy, catholic, and one). One error stood out in this chapter. Twice in the discussion of the moral problem, Marks refers to the church as “a mixture of saints and sinners” (172) and, even worse, “a mixture of sinful and justified [!]” (174). I suspect this is merely a slip of the tongue—surely, as a Protestant, Marks does not mean that a person is either sinful or justified, either a saint or a sinner—but it’s a fairly important slip, and one that is easily misleading to a populace that tends to think in false dichotomies.

On the whole, this book succeeds in making academic conversations accessible and meaningful to a larger audience of Christians. Marks uses mostly jargon-free language, and he makes complex debates easily understandable. Theologically, Marks presents a “generously orthodox” Protestant perspective, influenced especially by Barth and Moltmann. He tries admirably, as he puts it, to “be generous in roaming the theological family tree.” And it is to his credit that he is “not particularly attached to any single tradition, denomination or account of the Christian life” (11). He does not engage in confessional polemics and freely appropriates insights from various traditions in an ad hoc manner. He thus models an ecumenical openness to the global diversity of the Christian witness.

As helpful as this is, there is at least one noticeable drawback. Marks does not provide the theological and historical context for many of the ideas that he borrows, and this can be confusing, even misleading. Take, for example, his use of the Eastern Orthodox notion of deification. When he lifts this up as a helpful image of salvation, he defines it as “the process of growing into true spiritual maturity; it is participating in or enacting that truest reality by being like God” (69). And while this is certainly a key aspect of deification, it obscures what sets it apart from other soteriological images, viz. the fact that it involves an ontological participation in the essence or energies of God. Deification is not merely an image of salvation; it carries with it an entire theological ontology shared by the ancient Greek doctors of the church. As Marks uses it here, the word “deification” just becomes a synonym for “sanctification.” And that can be misleading for Christians looking for intellectual clarity, and not simply ecumenical cherry-picking.

One other problem bears mentioning. The inescapable danger of a book like this is that it will oversimplify key figures and ideas. While Marks generally does a fine job of summarizing, there are certain places where his use of typologies and overly-broad categories results in some specious statements. For example, in both the chapters on sin and incarnation, Marks makes some disparaging remarks about Christian existentialism, and Rudolf Bultmann in particular. The fact that Bultmann is widely misunderstood is no excuse for statements like the following: “Faith [in Christian existentialism] is not faith in God or even God’s presence, but rather faith in one’s ability to choose to be a whole person in the midst of a confusing world. This is the understanding of sin of many popular TV self-help gurus” (48). Or this one: “Like Schleiermacher and [Thomas] Jefferson [!!], Bultmann finds an extraordinary Jesus, but not a supernatural Christ” (60). In addition to the false dichotomy between extraordinary-human and supernatural-divine, he misconstrues both Bultmann and Schleiermacher. Lumping them in with Jefferson the Deist is akin to theological libel.

It would be grossly unfair to Marks to go through and critically analyze each particular statement. The fact remains that the book is indeed quite helpful in many ways and deserves an audience. But issues like the ones noted above lead me to the conclusion that to use this book profitably in, say, a Christian education class at a church would require an educated teacher capable of elucidating and disambiguating some of the claims that Marks makes. There are also key doctrines missing entirely from the book, such as the doctrines of creation and providence. I thus cannot entirely endorse it as a stand-alone guide for a lay believer seeking a deeper and more thoughtful faith. However, when used in concert with other materials, or aided by a teacher, it can indeed serve a crucial role in connecting the church and the academy. Perhaps the best feature of the book is the fact that every chapter ends with discussion questions and a brief bibliography for further reading. This makes it especially suitable for use in Christian education.

There is much to appreciate about this work. Marks introduces many debates, concepts, and theologians that are likely unknown to the vast majority of Christians. And he does so in a way that makes them relevant to the concerns of everyday Christian life and practice. The book begins by stating that “the lack of intersection between the life of parish [sic] and Christian theology short circuits effective Christian mission” (10). While not without its problems, Marks has taken an important and helpful step in redressing this widespread disconnect. For this reason, Bringing Theology to Life makes a crucial contribution to the future vitality of the church’s mission in the world.

The Top 50 Albums of 2010

2010-12-17T15:31:00.001-05:00

In many ways, 2010 was a disappointing year. Apart from a few magnificent films (e.g., Inception, The Social Network, Toy Story 3), it was one of the more lackluster years at the box office in recent memory. There were very few exciting new books, and even the best (such as Franzen’s Freedom) received fairly mixed reviews. And, of course, 2010 was a complete and utter disaster politically. All of this places the year’s music in high relief. And what a year it was! From Beach House’s Teen Dream to Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, 2010 was a watershed in the history of music. It was also one month short of including new releases by Iron & Wine and The Decemberists. And it sounds like the new Radiohead album is also complete and only waiting for the right distribution. But that’s OK; the year was amazing enough as it stands. Usually I only put together a top 25 list, but there were too many excellent albums deserving of recognition, so I’ve doubled it this year. Feel free to add your own lists in the comments.

1. Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

Arcade Fire is that rare band capable of filling Madison Square Garden without sacrificing one ounce of their musical and lyrical integrity. They make stadium-filling indie rock music without capitulating to the market’s demand for a radio-ready single, always focused from start to finish on making the complete album a coherent, beautiful, and profound work of art. While their legacy will probably always be defined by the perfection of Funeral, on The Suburbs, their third LP, Arcade Fire have managed to further mature as musicians. The album replaces the childlike idealism of Funeral and the dark apocalypticism of Neon Bible with a gritty, concrete, localized realism. It eloquently captures our post-industrial, consumeristic ennui, along with the internal tension between wanting to escape the vacuity of modern suburban existence, feeling resigned to the present state of the world, and yet still recognizing and embracing the small joys the appear in each new moment. All of this was perhaps captured best by two music videos: Spike Jonze’s video for “The Suburbs” and the technologically-brilliant creation by Chris Milk for the song, “We Used to Wait.” In a year that will go down as one of the greatest years in music history, The Suburbs stands out as a magnificent monument of our times.

2. The National, High Violet

The National rose to prominence with 2005’s Alligator and further perfected their blend of rugged, rural Midwest and intellectual, urban Northeast rock music on 2007’s critically-acclaimed Boxer. But on this year’s High Violet, the group reaches a level of maturity and depth that rivals groups like Arcade Fire and TV on the Radio. Standing at the center of the album, “Bloodbuzz Ohio” is the undisputed standout track. The pounding drums juxtaposed with gentle piano and strings—all enveloped by Matt Berninger’s rich baritone—represents what The National are capable of in their best moments. Other excellent tracks include “Terrible Love,” “Afraid of Everyone,” and “Conversation 16.”

3. Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

It would be satisfying to dismiss Kanye’s new album based on his egomaniacal antics and easy to regard it as overrated based on near-universal critical adulation (a 10.0, seriously?). But one listen is enough to make anyone a believer: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a pop masterpiece. The seemingly impossible claim that it is our generation’s Thriller is really not far off the mark. MBDTF is proof that, for all Kanye’s personal issues, he is a musical genius, the likes of which are rare indeed. The clear centerpiece is “Runaway,” which would be enough on its own to secure this album’s place on almost any top 10 list. The fact that the rest of the album is of the same absurdly high quality is something of a miracle. If all of this weren’t enough, the 35-minute short film Runaway that Kanye directed is a remarkable work in itself, well worth watching in its entirety, but specifically for the stunning ballet scene that accompanies the title track.

4. Sleigh Bells, Treats

Pure sonic bliss. Aural crack. Without question, the party album of the year, maybe of the decade. This is the kind of album that I would expect to hear in dorm rooms across America. Of all the albums that came out this year, Treats gave me the most pleasure. It truly lived up to its name. Trying to pick the best tracks is very difficult, but in an album of gems, my favorites are “Rill Rill,” “Kids,” and “Crown on the Ground.” Perhaps the best thing I can say about Treats is that whenever I listen to it on my iPod, I couldn’t care one bit what others think when they see me banging my head.

5. Sufjan Stevens, The Age of Adz

No album was more a surprise than The Age of Adz (pronounced “odds”). In interviews and other statements over the past couple years, Sufjan Stevens gave the impression of giving up music altogether. His fans began to despair, wondering if he would ever release another album. And then, his mammoth EP, All Delighted People, dropped out of the blue. It wasn’t his best work, but it was vintage Sufjan. It showed an artist in a period of transition. But a transition to what? A few weeks later came the news: The Age of Adz, a primarily electronic album reminiscent of his very early work in Enjoy Your Rabbit and A Sun Came (see especially “Joy! Joy! Joy!”). When the album finally arrived, it was a shock to the system, but in every good way. The songs are just as grand and orchestral as his previous work—and the apocalyptic themes harken back to Seven Swans, as does his persona as preacher (compare “I am the Lord” in “Seven Swans” with “You know you really gotta get right with the Lord” in “Get Real Get Right”)—but it isn’t just a throwback. Sufjan has clearly matured as a musician and songwriter. Taking inspiration from the schizophrenic artist Royal Robertson, the album is an intensely personal work, most noticeably in the self-references in “Vesuvius” (“Sufjan, follow the path … Sufjan, follow your heart”). Unquestionably, the make-it-or-break-it aspect of the album comes in its 25-minute closing song, “Impossible Soul,” performed in its entirety during the tour. In the opinion of this reviewer, it stands as one of Sufjan’s greatest achievements, a breathtaking tour de force that marks this as one of the year’s best albums. For a free remix by InfinitiRock of the song “All for Myself,” click here.

6. Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma

Flying Lotus (AKA FlyLo AKA Steven Ellison) makes music that is completely unclassifiable, bending and mixing genres so effortlessly and brilliantly that any notion of genre ceases to be meaningful. His second album, 2008’s Los Angeles, put him on the map. But Cosmogramma is in a league of its own. There isn’t any single track that stands out, because it’s meant to be heard as a composite whole, a singular work of art that punishes any attempt to confine it within predefined musical boxes.

7. Jónsi, Go

Sigur Rós have made some of the most enduring and beautiful music over the past decade. Their signature sound is unlike anything else. The question then, when lead singer Jónsi set off to make a solo record, was whether this would just be a Sigur Rós B-sides or whether the album would stand on its own. The result, Go, certainly operates within the general landscape of Sigur Rós’s music, but it stands apart as a remarkable achievement, exceeding virtually every expectation (and those expectations were already high!). The album has all the exuberant energy of Sigur Rós, but Jónsi has made the ethereal otherworldliness of his band’s previous work sound more intimate and subtle, more concrete and whimsical. While I eagerly await the next Sigur Rós album, I am now equally excited to hear Jónsi’s follow-up.

8. Robyn, Body Talk

2010 has been dubbed the Year of Robyn, and for good reason. June saw the release of Body Talk Pt. 1, which introduced us to sizzling electro-pop songs like “Fembots,” “None of Dem,” and especially “Dancing on My Own.” In September, the Swedish singer dropped Body Talk Pt. 2, including the non-acoustic version of “Hang With Me” and “U Should Know Better” (with Snoop Dogg). Finally, in November, Robyn released the full LP of Body Talk, combining tracks from the first two EPs with new songs. The result is the dance album of the year.

9. Marnie Stern, Marnie Stern

Without question, the most underrated and overlooked album of the year. Marnie Stern consistently makes great rock music, and her trademark finger-tapping style gives her a sound all her own. But it is only with this, her third release, that Marnie has learned to refine her songwriting to appeal to those outside of a select group of indie enthusiasts. The result is an infectious album, brimming with power-rock singles like the opening stunner, “For Ash,” which I have as one of the top 5 songs of the year. Like all of the best albums of 2010, though, this too is a complete album experience. And there’s never a dull moment. Once “For Ash” seizes you by the collar, you’re in the album’s grip until the end, and it’s a great ride.

10. Beach House, Teen Dream

When Beach House’s Teen Dream dropped in late January, it set the stage for one of the best years in music. At the time, I was convinced we had already heard the best the year had to offer. And while I was wrong in that judgment, I was not wrong in realizing that this album would be among the best of the year when all was said and done. Teen Dream is dream pop perfection. Every song is a carefully crafted gem. While it doesn’t have the lyrical depth of The Suburbs or the creativity of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or the daring of The Age of Adz, it is a stunning achievement from beginning to end. Beach House’s haunting, atmospheric, shoegaze-inspired sound has never sounded better. Their 2008 album, Devotion, was great; this is a masterpiece.

11. Four Tet, There Is Love In You

12. LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening

13. Twin Shadow, Forget

14. Caribou, Swim

15. Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me

16. Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest

17. Das Racist, Sit Down, Man

18. Broken Social Scene, Forgiveness Rock Record

19. Gorillaz, Plastic Beach

20. Vampire Weekend, Contra

21. Avey Tare, Down There

22. The Walkmen, Lisbon

23. Scissor Sisters, Night Work

24. Liars, Sisterworld

25. Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot

26. Janelle Monáe, The ArchAndroid

27. School of Seven Bells, Disconnect from Desire

28. Hot Chip, One Life Stand

29. Delorean, Subiza

30. How to Dress Well, Love Remains

31. Wolf Parade, Expo 86

32. Antony and the Johnsons, Swanlights

33. Belle & Sebastian, Write About Love

34. Ceo, White Magic

35. Emeralds, Does It Look Like I’m Here?

36. Girl Talk, All Day

37. No Age, Everything in Between

38. Teengirl Fantasy, 7AM

39. Menomena, Mines

40. Owen Pallett, Heartland

41. New Pornographers, Together

42. Tame Impala, Innerspeaker

43. Best Coast, Crazy For You

44. These New Puritans, Hidden

45. Wavves, King of the Beach

46. Wild Nothing, Gemini

47. Mystery Jets, Serotonin

48. Rock Plaza Central, …At the Moment of Our Most Needing…

49. Fang Island, Fang Island

50. Matthew Dear, Black City

The TSA as a Tower of Babel

2010-12-12T08:49:00.000-05:00

“Modern man is in danger of forgetting two things: first, that his plans and undertakings should be guided not by his own desires for happiness and security, usefulness and profit, but rather by obedient response to the challenge of goodness, truth and love, by obedience to the commandment of God which man forgets in his selfishness and presumption; and secondly, that it is an illusion to suppose that real security can be gained by men organizing their own personal and community life. There are encounters and destinies which man cannot master. He cannot secure endurance for his works. His life is fleeting and its end is death. History goes on and pulls down all the towers of Babel again and again. There is no real, definitive security, and it is precisely this illusion to which men are prone to succumb in their yearning for security.”

—Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 39-40.

Review: Van Driel, Incarnation Anyway

2010-12-06T18:32:00.000-05:00

I have a new book review up at the Center for Barth Studies on Edwin Chr. van Driel’s Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology. Here’s the opening paragraph of the review:

The debate between infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism is often treated as a matter of only historical interest. The perceived esotericism of the words and their connection to speculative flights of scholastic fancy have led many to believe that these positions are irrelevant to contemporary constructive theology. It is therefore much to Edwin van Driel’s credit that he demonstrates the significance of this debate for theological work today. The question raised by these two positions is whether “the incarnation is contingent upon sin” (4). Does the divine will to become incarnate logically precede or follow the will to allow sin? The majority report throughout Christian history has been the infralapsarian thesis that incarnation follows sin. That is, God would not have become incarnate had humanity not fallen into sin. Van Driel presents a case for the minority view that God would have become incarnate regardless.

Read the full review.

The varieties of divine transcendence

2010-12-03T15:25:00.037-05:00

There has been some concern recently that defenders of divine transcendence are attempting merely to perpetuate a dead concept, one that has long-since been obliterated by modernity (for various reasons). I have a vested interest in this debate, insofar as I agree with those who wish to dispense with metaphysics, mythology, and other forms of theological discourse that only reinforce the ideological confinement of religious God-talk. For the sake of discussion, I will accept that the burden of proof rests with those like myself who wish to continue to speak of a transcendent God after the death of God (understood in both its christological and modern-historical senses). What follows then is a very brief list of the varieties of divine transcendence, beginning with the two versions to be rejected. It also goes without saying that these are not all mutually exclusive. Finally, I do not claim that this list is exhaustive, and I am happy to add further items based on suggestions in the comments.

Metaphysical (or analogical) transcendence. This is the form of transcendence as posited by the via triplex and other forms of classical analogical modes of God-talk. Here transcendence is defined either as the projection or the negation of some mode of finite immanence. Both of these modes are grounded in the more basic form of metaphysical transcendence, which is causal: God is here the Prime Mover or First Cause.
Mythological transcendence. I take this point from Bultmann, who famously defines myth as representing the transcendent as “spatially distant,” as in the three-tiered cosmos. Myth is understood thus as a crude, primitive version of metaphysics.
Reformational transcendence, or transcendence as deus absconditus. The transcendence of the “hidden God” is a prominent theme in Luther’s theology, and it appears in Calvin and others as well. Here there is a sharp distinction between the hidden and revealed God that corresponds to the distinction between law/wrath and gospel/grace. Transcendence in this sense is posited on the basis of our human sinfulness, rather than our finitude. God is transcendent in the sense that God is removed from us as our judge.
Mystical transcendence. The description “mystical” is hotly contested and I use it tentatively, but in essence I refer to the notion that God is transcendent as “wholly other” in a timeless and ahistorical sense. It often takes a Platonic or Neoplatonic form, as in Meister Eckhart, and in this sense overlaps with metaphysical transcendence. But the crucial difference is that this form of transcendence is not simply an idea to be posited and analyzed through the faculty of reason; it is instead a transcendence to be practiced and experienced through forms of spiritual ascesis. Mystical transcendence is primarily a mode of orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy.
Dialectical-eschatological transcendence. What I call dialectical-eschatological transcendence is the form of divine transcendence represented by Bultmann and the early Barth, where God is understood as “wholly other” but in a concrete and historical sense. Transcendence is here not a “realm” to be reached by reason or experience; it instead refers to the fact that God cannot be objectified or mastered. God is not an object available for our investigation, neither a “thing-in-itself” nor a thing as it appears to us, to use Kantian distinctions. Instead, God is a particular event or encounter within history and only perceptible to faith. Bultmann writes: “The idea that divine action is unworldly or transcendent is preserved only if such action is represented not as something taking place between occurrences in the world but as something that takes place in them .... God’s act is hidden from all eyes other than the eyes of faith. The only thing that can be generally seen and established is the ‘natural’ occurrence. In it God’s hidden act takes place.” This notion of transcendence is thus set wholly against all forms of supernaturalism, which attempt to identify places within history where God is directly accessible, i.e., where a miracle occurs. Dialectical-eschatological transcendence reserves no space for the supernatural. It therefore also excludes all natural theology, since there is no way from “here” to “there,” because there is no “there” as an identifiable place or object. The “there” (or the divine) occurs within the “here” (or the worldly). Eschatological refers to what is qualitatively different from the world as available to scientific and historical research. Some opponents might also refer to this as fideistic transcendence, since there is no proof for such divine action; certainty only comes within faith, not outside of it.
Dialectical-analogical transcendence. What I am labeling dialectical-analogical transcendence is that form of divine transcendence often associated with the middle-to-later Barth—though whether rightly or wrongly is still a matter of much debate. It refers to the relation between the immanent and economic Trinity as a dialectical and analogical relation. Three features of this model make it differ from the metaphysical model noted above: (a) the basis for the analogy is strictly located in Jesus Christ as God’s self-revelation; (b) there is nothing about God’s immanent transcendence that is not revealed in God’s economic immanence; and (c) the entire relation between transcendence and immanence is known only to faith. This version of transcendence is grounded in what Barth calls the analogia fidei, as opposed to the analogia entis that grounds the metaphysical version. What makes this model differ from the dialectical-eschatological model is that what occurs in time and space is identified as a communication or manifestation of what is already actually the case in eternity.
Analogical-ontological transcendence. This is the version represented by Radical Orthodoxy and its fellow-travelers, the most brilliant version of which is found in David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite. The emphasis here is on the ontological plenitude of God’s transcendent being, which is analogically mediated to the world. The analogia entis is, on this account, the sine qua non of Christian theology. For the most part, this is a subset of the metaphysical transcendence mentioned above.
Apocalyptic transcendence. This model, which I derive from Nate Kerr’s writings (particularly his 2009 essay in Political Theology), understands transcendence non-analogically. It opposes both the “univocal production of pure immanence” and the “analogical mediation of transcendence in immanence.” For this reason, apocalyptic transcendence is a thoroughly non-ontological conceptuality, leaving the sphere of ontology to materialist ontologies of immanence. As Kerr defines it, transcendence is here understood in terms of (a) the “priority of grace”—God is “beyond” as the free initiating action of God’s subversive reign within the world—and (b) the doxological response of the human person to this initiating action. Transcendence thus takes place as a form of theopolitical agency, simultaneously divine and human, initiating and following. The main point is that God’s transcendence refers to a particular mode of action within the world that suspends immanence and funds a new form of human action in response. It is therefore, in my view, a political and doxological variation on the dialectical-eschatological model.
Postmetaphysical transcendence. A number of theologians could claim the label of postmetaphysical, but in this instance I define it according to Eberhard Jüngel’s theology, particularly as represented by Gott als Geheimnis der Welt. This work does not use the term “transcendence” very often in a positive way; this is because the book is directed against any notion of God as an ens necessarium or supreme being. Moreover, his analogy of advent is directed against thinking of God as “wholly other” or “beyond.” He repeatedly uses the line from Luther that quae supra nos, nihil ad nos: “things that are above us are of no concern to us.” And yet one can discern in the midst of all this a creative renewal of the language of transcendence in his radical identification of God with the dead Jesus, such that God is defined as the concrete unity of life and death on behalf of life. This (Hegel-inspired) unity of life and death in God that Jüngel posits allows for transcendence to be understood as the soteriological otherness of God in the word-event (Wortgeschehen or Sprachereignis). God is transcendent in the sense of being the word of address that comes from outside of us (extra nos) and so separates us from ourselves. God is the qualitative distance between the old self and the new self, between sin and grace. God’s transcendence is thus an existential distancing of the ego through the event of the word, in which God is present as absent, transcendent as immanent. As Jüngel puts it, “God is my neighbor. He comes nearer to me than I am to myself. Faith opens itself up to this nearness of God. ... In the word, God is present as the absent one. Faith allows God as the absent one to be present. ... Without a fundamental extra nos faith knows of no deus pro nobis and certainly no deus in nobis. God is only near to us in that he distances us from ourselves” (God as the Mystery, 182).
I-Thou transcendence. By this I mean all of those conceptions of transcendence that locate the “beyond” in the neighbor or the Levinasian “Other.” The absolute alterity of the Other is the encounter with the absolute horizon of our future. The Other is the limit of our existence, and so the experience of transcendence. This of course need not be theological, insofar as such I-Thou transcendence can be thoroughly atheistic.
Religionless transcendence. Bonhoeffer’s prison writings are replete with powerful insights into a post-metaphysical, post-religious way of speaking about God. I am calling his model religionless transcendence simply because he refers to the need for a “religionless Christianity.” But a more descriptive term would be socioethical transcendence. Of course, the seeds for this are sown already in his earliest works. In Sanctorum Communio, he speaks of the “transcendence of the You” as an “ethical transcendence,” and in Act and Being he refers to the “illusory transcendence” of the analogia entis formulated by Przywara. Then in his 1933 lectures on christology, he says that the question of transcendence is the “question of the neighbor.” All of this leads to his famous “Outline for a Book” written in prison in 1944. The description of the second chapter reads:
Jesus’s “being-for-others” [Für-andere-dasein] is the experience of transcendence! Only through this liberation from self, through this “being-for-others” unto death, do omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence come into being. Faith is participating in this being of Jesus. (Becoming human [Menschwerdung], cross, resurrection.) Our relationship to God is no “religious” relationship to some highest, most powerful, and best being imaginable—that is no genuine transcendence. Instead, our relationship to God is a new life in “being there for others” [Dasein-für-andere], through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendent is not the infinite, unattainable tasks, but the neighbor within reach in any given situation. God in human form! Not as in oriental religions in animal forms as the monstrous, the chaotic, the remote, the terrifying, but also not in the conceptual forms of the absolute, the metaphysical, the infinite, and so on, either, nor again the Greek god—human form of the “God-human form of the human being in itself.” But rather “the human being for others”! therefore the Crucified One. The human being living out of the transcendent. (DBWE 8:501)
Here I think we find a version of transcendence that shares aspects with the dialectical-eschatological, postmetaphysical, and I-Thou models of transcendence. But that it remains a conception of divine transcendence is indisputable, however much it departs from the tradition.
Eschatological transcendence. Under this heading I include all those theologians who understand God’s transcendence as his eschatological futurity. God is transcendent as the coming horizon of the future that transforms our present. There are a number of variations of this view. Robert Jenson and the early Moltmann embrace this form of transcendence. But it is the early Pannenberg, with his affirmation of the retroactive ontological significance of God’s eschatological future in Jesus Christ, that is the most extreme form of this model.
Maqom transcendence. The most recent works by Jürgen Moltmann speak of God as the Maqom (מָקוֹם)—which means, in its fullest theological sense, “sacred dwelling place,” though Moltmann generally refers to it as the “broad room” or “living space.” The word has its traditional home in Jewish theology of the temple, and it is associated in the Hebrew scriptures with everything from the Israelite tabernacle to sites of theophanies to the promised land itself. God as Maqom is the “broad room” who invites us into covenantal fellowship, who proclaims the mystery of divine grace: “I will dwell among the Israelites, and I will be their God” (Exod. 29:45). Jürgen Moltmann adds to this the notion that God not only dwells with creation but creation dwells in God. He thus speaks about an asymmetrical mutual indwelling of Creator and creature: “God’s indwelling in the world is divine in kind; the world’s indwelling in God is worldly in kind” (God in Creation, 150). This version of transcendence is thus dependent on a certain kind of panentheism.
Transcendence as wonder. In her excellent new blog post on “Thinking Otherwise,” Mary-Jane Rubenstein summarizes a key point from her book on Strange Wonder as a way of overcoming the impasse between the religious and the secular. The religious perspective (she uses RO as the key example) advocates for transcendence as the way to justify and ground a theocratic imperialism; divine transcendence legitimates a tyrannical theology and politics. The secularist perspective cuts itself off from the surprising encounter with anything new; it makes everything that is all there is. The “third way” is to see “the extraordinary in and through the ordinary.” Following Heidegger, Rubenstein calls this “wonder” (thaumazein), which is a way of seeing the world that marvels “at the strangeness of the everyday.” There is a remarkable similarity between this account of transcendence and Bultmann’s dialectical-eschatological account described above, which is to be expected considering Bultmann and Heidegger were friends and colleagues who learned much from each other. Interestingly, Bultmann has an essay on “The Question of Wonder [Wunder]” (Glauben und Verstehen 1:214-28; Faith and Understanding, 247-61) where he articulates a non-miraculous conception of divine action which makes it “really possible for the Christian continually to see new wonders.” For Bultmann, anything in the world at any moment can become the shocking occasion for encountering “the extraordinary,” which he understands as God’s action in the world.
Noncompetitive transcendence. Many of the above models could rightly claim the label of “noncompetitive,” but I include it here to acknowledge the distinctive contribution of Kathryn Tanner to the conversation about divine transcendence. Tanner’s work intends to show the radical political potential in classical Christian concepts, and transcendence lies at the heart of her project. Her position is opposed to competitive or contrastive notions of the divine-world relation: “Divinity characterized in terms of a direct contrast with certain sorts of being or with the world of non-divine being as a whole is brought down to the level of the world and the beings within it in virtue of that very opposition: God becomes one being among others within a single order. Such talk suggests that God exists alongside the non-divine, that God is limited by what is opposed to it, that God is as finite as the non-divine beings with which it is directly contrasted” (God and Creation, 45-6). Against the competitive model (which I would identify with the metaphysical and ontological models), she argues that “an extreme of divine involvement requires, one could say, an extreme of divine transcendence” (ibid., 46). Divine action and creaturely action do not function in a zero-sum game. God’s increase does not require our decrease, nor does our increase require God’s decrease. It is precisely God’s absolute otherness from the world that allows God to be absolutely with the world. This way of understanding the transcendence of God allows Tanner to argue in Christ the Key that grace is not some “extrinsic addendum,” but is rather more “natural” to us than so-called “nature”; the gratuity of grace is not a function of some presupposed contrast between creatures and God, between nature and grace. It is this absolute transcendence of God that funds Tanners account of radical politics, particularly her understanding of a noncompetitive economy.

I welcome your thoughts and your input regarding other versions not included in this list. I know there are many that I have overlooked. Please feel free to add them in the comments.

On the speciousness of the charge of “decadent Barthianism,” or, the problem with fundamentalism

2010-12-02T11:50:00.001-05:00

Let’s be honest and admit: there are indeed “Barthian scholastics” or “Barthian fundamentalists” who seem to think that the Swiss theologian could do no wrong and that any real criticism of him is based on a misunderstanding or is the result of a faulty presupposition. I have met such people in the past and I know they exist. In fact, if I am honest with myself, I was probably such a person at one time—though I am certainly not guilty of that today, as all of my friends can well attest (for ample evidence, see the comments here). But the truth is that such Barthian fundamentalism is actually rather rare—or at least all ostensible instances of it cannot simply be lumped together into some abstract category of “decadent Barthianism.” The truth of the matter is much more complicated.

The problem here is not that so-called Barthians are blind to Barth’s errors. The problem is rather with the way that these critics of Barth are approaching the conversation. There are two presuppositions for all meaningful dialogue:

Careful engagement with the texts or ideas in question; and
A mutual willingness to learn from another and to have one’s horizon of understanding expanded through the dialogical encounter.

The first point refers to the necessary scientific understanding that seeks to learn the facts of the matter: e.g., what is being argued here, what are the terms being used, and what is the logic being employed? The second point refers to the participatory understanding that requires one to approach the subject-matter with an existential openness to the new and unknown. As Rudolf Bultmann rightly puts it, “To understand history [or anything, for that matter] is possible only for one who does not stand over against it as a neutral, nonparticipating spectator but also stands within it and shares responsibility for it” (New Testament & Mythology, 150). These two points—which we might distinguish in terms of knowledge and truth, or science and existence—are directed against two errors: the first is the error of anti-intellectualism (the notion that one can make a judgment without attending to the materials at hand), while the second is the error of fundamentalism (the notion that one’s judgments are not open to criticism and reassessment, i.e., the confusion between history and eschatology, as if one’s position is already the final telos of all possible positions).

In a fascinating 1961 letter to Geoffrey Bromiley, Karl Barth identified both of these points as the reason why he would not respond to the questions put to him by American evangelicals. It is instructive, I think, to quote him at length:

Such a discussion would have to rest on the primary presupposition that those who ask the questions have read, learned, and pondered the many things I have already said and written about these matters. They have obviously not done this, but have ignored the many hundreds of pages in the C.D. where they might at least have found out—not necessarily under the headings of history, universalism, etc.—where I really stand and do not stand. From that point they could have gone on to pose further questions. ...

The decisive point, however, is this. The second presupposition of a fruitful discussion between them and me would have to be that we are able to talk on a common plane. But these people have already had their so-called orthodoxy for a long time. They are closed to anything else, they will cling to it at all costs, and they can adopt toward me only the role of prosecuting attorneys, trying to establish whether what I represent agrees or disagrees with their orthodoxy, in which I for my part have no interest! None of their questions leaves me with the impression that they want to seek with me the truth that is greater than us all. They take the stance of those who happily possess it already and who hope to enhance their happiness by succeeding in proving to themselves and the world that I do not share this happiness. Indeed they have long since decided and publicly proclaimed that I am a heretic, possibly (van Til) the worst heretic of all time. So be it! But they should not expect me to take the trouble to give them the satisfaction of offering explanations which they will simply use to confirm the judgement they have already passed on me . . . These fundamentalists want to eat me up. They have not yet come to a ‘better mind and attitude’ as I once hoped. I can thus give them neither an angry nor a gentle answer but instead no answer at all. (Letters 1961-1968, 7-8)

The problem with every fundamentalism is the adoption of the role of “prosecuting attorney,” the identification as “heresy” that which violates one’s securely-held orthodoxy. And this is the crucial point: by and large those who criticize Barth scholars for a “decadent Barthianism” are simply unaware of their own basic fundamentalism. One can find such fundamentalism in both conservative evangelicals and in dialectical materialists. The securely-held orthodoxy can be almost anything, from the decretum absolutum of Reformed orthodoxy to the “ontology of peace” of Radical Orthodoxy, from the absolute rejection of German idealism to the idolization of German idealism, from the doctrine of inerrancy to the rejection of all divine transcendence as the theological instantiation of a Big Other. Heresy takes any number of forms and, in a post-dogmatic or post-conciliar age, is always in the eye of the beholder. (Parenthetically, when your position is one that rejects all divine transcendence, along with the concepts of sin and grace, as a religious imposition that merely subordinates human persons to a “master signifier,” then it is not Barth with which you have a problem but rather the entire Christian faith.)

It is certainly the case that in many situations the problem is simply a failure of scientific understanding, i.e., a lack of careful engagement with Barth’s massive oeuvre. There is the additional—not to be underestimated!—problem of the fact that Barth contradicts himself numerous times over the course of his career and changes his mind on dozens of issues. The result is that, like the Bible, one can justify almost any interpretation of Barth’s text so long as one remains on a surface-level interaction. But for the most part the source of the problem is a fundamentalist approach towards others, one that divides the world into black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. Either you affirm the notion of inerrancy or you don’t; either you accept the concept of divine transcendence or you don’t. There are no grades or variations, no nuances on either side; there is only the stark Either-Or which determines whether a person is a “heretic” or not.

If theology is going to be more than an academic brawl, and thus a conversation that is actually worth listening to, then we need to set aside our fundamentalisms. I don’t excuse myself from this imperative. I’ve been quite guilty of overly zealous heresy-hunting myself, as this blog’s history can attest on numerous occasions. And while there is a place for such criticisms, that place has to be within the scope of a more generous openness to others. A hermeneutic of suspicion has to be located within a larger and more dominant hermeneutic of charity; that is, the No has to be in service to the Yes, as Barth would have it. I am as willing and ready to critique Barth as anyone else, but this critique is first located within a prior desire to give him the best hearing possible, to treat him as I would be treated. It is only after listening to him as a friend and neighbor that I can then properly point out his flaws.

C. S. Lewis captures this hermeneutic of charity quite well in his An Experiment in Criticism, where he writes:

“No poem will give up its secret to a reader who enters it regarding the poet as a potential deceiver, and determined not to be taken in. We must risk being taken in, if we are to get anything.” (94)

“We can find a book bad only by reading it as if it might, after all, be very good. We must empty our minds and lay ourselves open. There is no work in which holes can't be picked; no work that can succeed without a preliminary act of good will on the part of the reader.” (116)

Fundamentalism refuses to be “taken in”; it refuses to “lay itself open,” to demonstrate any “preliminary act of good will.” Fundamentalism lacks the willingness to establish a “common plane” for mutual, participatory understanding.

To conclude, the charge of a “decadent Barthianism” is specious insofar as it is born of this nonparticipatory fundamentalism that can only converse with like-minded fundamentalists, and which approaches all others with a silencing hermeneutic of suspicion. The irony is that, on this score, the materialists and atheists stand as one with the conservative evangelicals that they so virulently oppose.

2010 KBBC: Week 3

2010-11-29T10:30:00.000-05:00

The third and final week of the 2010 Karl Barth Blog Conference begins tomorrow. See the introductory post at DET for more details.

Confession: on negotiating my ecclesial identity

2010-11-09T14:56:00.000-05:00

This past week, Amy and I became new members (or as they would rightly prefer to say, new disciples) at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church—no doubt to the chagrin of many friends, colleagues, and professors. This is the first time either of us have ever belonged to a mainline denomination, having spent our lives primarily in non-denominational evangelical churches. And I always assumed, being at Princeton Seminary, that we would end up as Presbyterian, not Lutheran. But we feel really good about this decision. It represents the culmination (for now) of a long transformation in our theological commitments and ecclesial identity. While we still identify ourselves as “evangelical”—taking advantage of the term’s ambiguity, diversity, and multivalence—we also identify with many of the concerns and traditions of the mainline churches.

Because most of my friends and colleagues are of the Reformed persuasion, I want to use the remainder of this post to make explicit where I stand in terms of my Reformational identity. Before I outline in detail where I agree and disagree with Lutheran and Reformed theology, let me begin with a biographical note. I knew next to nothing about Lutheran or Reformed theology prior to coming to Princeton Seminary. I had read Bonhoeffer in college and fell in love then with Christian theology, and I read extensive amounts of Eberhard Jüngel between college and seminary. But I had only the faintest notion of them as “Lutheran” theologians, and I really didn’t know what distinguished them confessionally from someone like Karl Barth.

All that’s to say, I was a theological and ecclesial neophyte when I came to seminary. I approached these and other figures with no confessional agenda, no preconceived notion of what was “right” or “wrong” regarding the Reformation. I have always been and always will be a “free church” theologian, in the sense that I serve no particular confession or denomination, but rather serve Jesus Christ alone. I do not engage in theological work in order to bolster or defend a particular ecclesial identity. I am always ready to rebel against a tradition, institution, or theologian when I have reason to go in a different direction, but I am equally ready to make alliances in the most unusual and unexpected places (e.g., Barthian-liberationist or Anglican-Anabaptist).

Those trained to see Christian identity as the rigorous and faithful extension of a secure tradition will no doubt see this as a kind of radical voluntarism, the kind born of a Western spirit of individualism that leads precisely to today’s self-centered, seeker-sensitive, church-hopping culture. In response, I would reject both the notion of a “secure tradition” that only needs to be extended (rather than reinterpreted and renegotiated anew every day) and the notion of a traditionless voluntarism that refuses all norms apart from the sovereign preference of the individual will. Instead, I seek to embody a missionary openness to the claim of the moment, to the word of the gospel that addresses me here and now with God’s sending command. Our identity is never a secure possession, never a settled fact; ecclesial identity has to be discovered ever anew as we encounter the word of God today.

With this preface, let me now identify where I stand in the debate between Lutheran and Reformed theology. I will proceed as follows: (a) agreement with the Lutheran tradition over against the Reformed, (b) agreement with the Reformed over against the Lutheran, and (c) disagreement with both in favor of other ecclesial options.

A. Lutheran against the Reformed

The first point to make is simply that I identify with Lutheran theologians far more than with Reformed. To be honest, apart from Barth, Schleiermacher, Calvin (and Calvin only read in light of Barth), and the Heidelberg Catechism, I would have virtually no interest in the Reformed tradition. While I have certainly learned much from Reformed theologians (though almost exclusively from “Barthians”), I have been under the tutelage of Lutheran theologians. These include Eberhard Jüngel, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gerhard Ebeling, G.W.F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Robert Jenson. The fact is that I read Barth in the light of what I have gained from these Lutheran thinkers, particularly Jüngel and Bultmann, though of course the influence is mutual.
Of the two central theological points of agreement with Lutheran theology, the first to note is the emphasis on the concrete and present-tense over against the abstract and past-tense. Put differently, I agree with the Lutheran emphasis on the present proclamation of the word as the decisive event over against the Reformed emphasis on God’s abstract, pre-temporal predestination (Barth, I want to say, represents a complicated via media that is neither Reformed nor Lutheran).
The second central theological point concerns christology. Historically, of course, this is what separated the Lutherans and the Reformed. Here my views are quite complicated, since I both agree and disagree with both Lutheran and Reformed views on Jesus Christ. In terms of agreement, I side with Lutheran theology in emphasizing the radical unity of divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ. That is, I see myself as standing in the so-called Alexandrian tradition of Athanasius and Cyril, though perhaps more accurately in the neo-Chalcedonian tradition of Maximus the Confessor. Of course, I submit this tradition to a thoroughly historical-critical revision in the wake of Schleiermacher, Strauss, Troeltsch, and Bultmann. So I would prefer to speak of a non-competitive “paradoxical identity” of divinity and humanity in Christ, rather than speak in terms of a logos-sarx relation as favored in the ancient church. And I would start “from below” with the concrete human person, Jesus, rather than “from above,” with the Logos, as did the Alexandrian tradition. It is the human Jesus who is identical with and constitutive of God, not a metaphysical Logos who then assumes human flesh. But I nevertheless rigorously reject the quasi-Nestorian christology manifest in the Reformed tradition, which is so concerned about protecting the sovereignty and majesty of God that it all-too-often forgets that Jesus redefines divine majesty in the form of a humble servant who suffers and dies. For this reason, I cannot accept the concepts of logos asarkos and extra Calvinisticum without serious reinterpretation.
Less important, but no less true, is my rejection of the Reformed opposition to art and iconography within the church. On this point I stand with the Eastern Orthodox, Catholics, and Anglicans, in addition to the Lutherans. Theologically, of course, this is derivative of the christological point made above in #3.
Liturgically and sacramentally, I firmly believe that the eucharist should be celebrated as often as the community gathers. For this reason, the Reformed practice of at least once every quarter (or as often as monthly) simply does not suffice.

B. Reformed against the Lutheran

Returning to the christological debate, I agree with the Reformed against the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity—both the Swabian doctrine of absolute ubiquity and the Martin Chemnitz’s relative ubiquity or multivolipraesentia. This means I also reject the Lutheran use of the genus maiestaticum (genus of majesty), which involves a communication of attributes from the divine to the human nature as part of the perichoretic union of the natures. Against this, I hold to a kind of genus tapeinoticum (genus of humility) in which human attributes are communicated to the divine. The point is: I do not accept the Lutheran christology that undergirds its eucharistic theology. (But neither do I accept the Reformed christology that threatens the unity of deity and humanity in Christ. My christological moves are possible within a broadly Lutheran framework, even if I disagree with standard Lutheran orthodoxy.)
Along with my rejection of the Lutheran genus maiestaticum, I also side with the Reformed in terms of eucharistic theology. The Lutherans, holding to the ubiquity of Christ’s body, advocate a kind of consubstantiation, in which Christ’s body is substantially given “in, with, and under” the eucharistic elements. My view would be closer to Calvin on this point, who argues instead that the Holy Spirit makes Jesus Christ present in the elements, but without substantially localizing him on the basis of a doctrine of omnipresence. I prefer the Reformed view primarily because of its pneumatological orientation and its actualistic character: Christ is present in the Spirit and in this concrete moment of word and sacrament. I prefer to ground the eucharistic presence of Christ in the pneumatic epiclesis than in the priestly consecration. Having said that, I would still construe my theology of the Lord’s Supper in modern Lutheran terms as a visible word-event (Wortgeschehen) in which the elements become the tangible signs of God’s kerygmatic presence in the moment of word and faith.
Finally, because of the genus maiestaticum and other tendencies, Lutherans tend to favor notions of deification and mystical union. While there are strands of this in the Reformed as well, by and large I agree with the Reformed in rejecting all notions of divinization. Of course, figures like Jüngel and Bonhoeffer are quite adamant on this point as well, so the problem is not the Lutheran tradition per se but certain contemporary versions of it.

C. Against both Lutheran and Reformed

I stand against both of these traditions in their Constantinian legacy. Both Lutheran and Reformed churches failed to break free from the catastrophic church-state partnership that has characterized the Christian faith since Constantine. While the Reformed have been more successful than the Lutherans in this regard, I actively stand with the Anabaptists in their non-conformist rebellion. This coincides with my views on mission and missiology. A Constantinian church believes that mission takes the form of extending the structure of the church to unreached people groups. A “free church” missiology recognizes that the church has to be freely translated from one culture to another. Mission is translation, not diffusion and expansion. Here I would borrow from Bultmann and Barth, along with contemporary voices in the field of missional theology (e.g., Guder, Flett, Sanneh, and Newbigin).
Along with the rejection of the heresy of Constantinianism, I also reject the tendency and temptation to turn a particular confession, such as Augsburg or Westminster, into a norm of orthodoxy. To be sure, this is a temptation that threatens the Lutheran tradition more than the Reformed (with its stress on the semper reformanda), but it is nevertheless a battle that wages in both churches. I firmly believe that we are faithful to God alone, and to the scriptures that bear witness to God. All creeds and confessions have only a relative authority, and they are entirely provisional in nature.
While I have come to embrace infant baptism as an acceptable rite—rightly understood, of course—I also affirm adult baptism (perhaps even as the norm).
Again with the Anabaptists, and John Howard Yoder in particular, I would also insist that the Christian church must be confessionally nonviolent. Participation in the military, for example, is a violation of one’s commitment to Jesus Christ.
Finally, as a “free church” theologian, I have doubts about all denominations, not only because I have an issue with static institutional identities that are by nature conservative and resistant to change, but also because I do not think the future of the church is going to be found in religious brick-and-mortar congregations that have visible, public properties with salaried staff. If there is a future for Christianity, it will be located in the marginalized homes and communities that serve as nodes in a global matrix of concrete social action and worldly solidarity.

These are not all of the factors involved. This list could easily be twice as long. But I hope this gives at least a glimpse into what I think it means to be a “free church” Reformational Christian. While my family now belongs to a Lutheran church, I do not think this makes us “Lutheran,” as if our faith now receives an indelible label. Like many in my generation, I disdain attempts to locate my faith within predefined categories. But I also do not believe that I am “cherry-picking” my allegiances. Instead, as with theology, I find myself compelled by my confession of Christ’s lordship to transgress boundaries and erect new ones in pursuit of a more faithful Christian self-understanding. Theology, as Barth said, must always begin again at the beginning. Perhaps the same is true in our confessional and ecclesial identity.

Koinonia Journal: Call for Papers on Religion and Popular Culture

2010-10-12T00:16:00.000-04:00

As the new executive editor of the Koinonia Journal, I want to share the following call for papers/proposals regarding our upcoming annual spring forum. I should have posted this earlier, but hopefully there will be a few readers out there who can still submit something. If you have any questions, leave a comment or send me an email.

Religion in Popular Culture

We live today in a world in which popular culture—Hollywood, Billboard Hot 100, professional sports, New York Times bestsellers, etc.—constitutes our lingua franca, our society’s “common language.” Pop culture functions today as a key location for the shared exploration of what it means to be truly human. For this reason, it is appropriate that Christians attentively engage pop culture in a scholarly fashion. Doing so not only helps to bridge the divide between the academy and the wider society, but it also disrupts the temptation toward religious insularity and creatively expands the horizons of Christian self-reflection. For these and other reasons, the thoughtful analysis of religion in popular culture is an important task today.

Koinonia is seeking original paper proposals on religion in popular culture that interact with recent discussions in a particular area of study. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

Theology of Culture – Film and Theology – Cultural Theory – Postmodernity – Sacred and the Profane – LOST – Myth and Fantasy – Horror and the Horrific – The Hollywood Jesus – Christ-figures – Stories of Sin and Redemption – Sport and Spectacle – Technology – Image and Icon – Pop Music – Philip Pullman – Cormac McCarthy – Apocalypse and the Post-Apocalyptic – The Question of “Redemptive Violence” – Cultural History – World Cinema – Harry Potter – U2 – Sexism and Heterosexism in Contemporary Culture – Avatars and Virtual Reality – Superheroes

Submissions are encouraged from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, biblical studies, church history, theology, ethics, and practical theology. Proposals that approach the topic from a feminist, African American, Latino/a, and/or other similar context are especially encouraged. Winning proposals will be selected based on strength and originality of argument, as well as the potential for interdisciplinary dialogue.

One or more author/s will be invited to present a paper at the Koinonia Annual Forum during a visit to Princeton Theological Seminary in February 2011. All expenses for attendance at the forum, including travel and lodging, will be paid for these authors. Forum papers will be published in the 2011 issue of Koinonia Journal.

Authors must currently be enrolled as doctoral students in an accredited graduate program. Paper proposals should be 750-1500 words in length. Proposals may be sent via email to koinonia.journal-at-ptsem-dot-edu, as may inquiries or requests for an expanded prompt.

Koinonia is published annually by Ph.D. students under the auspices of Princeton Theological Seminary and is indexed in the ATLA Religion Database and available in theological libraries across the country.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: November 1, 2010

2010 KBBC: week 1 has begun

2010-09-27T10:11:00.000-04:00

The first post and response in the 2010 Karl Barth Blog Conference is now online. The author is Matthew Aragon Bruce, a friend and colleague at Princeton Seminary. His piece engages Barth and Schleiermacher on the scientificity of theology. It is an excellent and highly-informed essay. The response is by none other than Matthias Gockel, known for his very fine book, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election.

2010 Karl Barth Blog Conference

2010-09-26T23:29:00.000-04:00

The 4th annual Karl Barth Blog Conference (KBBC) begins tomorrow. This year’s conference is on the theme, “Karl Barth in Conversation with...” I have had the privilege to assist my good friend and colleague, Travis McMaken, with the planning and organizing of this event—and, trust me, it will indeed be an event in the theo-blogosphere. The topics are wide-ranging and immensely interesting. Many of the pieces will undoubtedly provoke intense discussion and debate. More exciting still is the fact that some of the contributions will be expanded and collected as a book to be published by Wipf & Stock.

See Travis’s introductory post for more information.

Review: Arcade Fire-Spoon Concert (8.2.10)

2010-08-04T11:01:00.003-04:00

Even though I have been to many concerts over the years, I haven’t written any concert reviews in large part because it is so difficult to capture the experience in a few words. I will fare no better in this effort, but I will try to put something down in writing anyway. (Thanks to the magic of YouTube, I also have links to videos of most of the songs.)

Tuesday night was my third Arcade Fire concert. I first saw them in Portland in 2004 during their very first tour in support of Funeral. They were the third of four bands. I bought my ticket at the door for $10. The relatively small room was only sparsely filled. I could easily walk up to the front of the stage, which is exactly what I did. That show still sticks with me as my most transformative concert experience. Thinking back on it now, almost six years later, I still well up with emotion. (I have bootleg recordings from that first tour, and they instantly thrust me back into that moment.) Sadly for me, I will likely never hear the Arcade Fire in such an intimate setting again. The second time I saw them was at Tower Theater in Philadelphia for the Neon Bible tour, a 3000-seat indoor theater. Today they are stadium rockers capable of filling Madison Square Garden—which they will do tonight and tomorrow night (and tomorrow you can see them live online). The fact that Spoon opens for them is remarkable.

The show last night was held at the Mann Center, which is an outdoor covered pavilion with an uncovered lawn in the back. It is located in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park and hosts a variety of cultural art events, including many orchestral performances. The Mann Center holds roughly 14,000 people, and from the looks of it, it was filled to capacity. Thanks to a presale ticket, I was in the four row on the left side.

Spoon’s opening set was very good, as expected, though not overwhelming. As with all such outdoor shows, the opening band has to play while it’s still light out and with half the seats empty. The effect of the music is considerably diminished. While it’s understandable, Spoon also chose to play almost exclusively from their last two albums, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and Transference (six and five songs, respectively, out of a total sixteen songs). “Written in Reverse” and “Got Nuffin” were both solid performances. I happen to think their latest release, while still quite good, is one of their lesser albums. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a superb album, no question, and since it launched their current popularity, it is understandable that they would emphasize it so much. But my personal favorites are Kill the Moonlight and Gimme Fiction. They played three from the former (“Small Stakes,” “Stay Don’t Go,” “Jonathon Fisk”), and only one from the latter (“I Summon You”—sadly, not “I Turn My Camera On”). In any case, the real standouts from their set were all from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Specifically, “Rhythm and Soul,” “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” and near the end of the set, “Don’t Make Me a Target.” The last of these got the crowd on to its feet, which is significant considering the countervailing factors noted above. All in all, they put on a good show, with a good use of the stage and limited lighting.

The Arcade Fire put on a trademark Arcade Fire performance. By that I mean they were as energetic, athletic, and carefree as they always have been. Where Spoon portrays themselves as professional rockers—with the skinny jeans, untucked button-up shirts, low-hanging guitars, and expressionless faces on everyone except the lead singer—Arcade Fire is intentionally un-professional. As Will Butler said in a recent NY Times article, the band seeks to maintain “that amateur sheen, that nonprofessional sheen that I treasure.” Early on, Win Butler began a song, but then had to start it over again. Some of the other musicians weren’t quite ready yet. As anyone who has seen them live knows, they like to switch instruments frequently, often between every song (and during the first tour, they switched within songs as well!). As a result, they can sometimes take awhile to get settled. It’s all part of that “nonprofessional sheen.” Their usual on-stage antics were also on full display here, and considerably more so than during their Neon Bible tour. Win came out into the crowd several times, taking the mic with him. There was a wall enclosing the pit, and he walked along that a few times. At one point, he threw the mic back to the stage and ventured beyond the wall, climbing over the chairs. And near the end of the set, Will Butler (Win’s brother) ran all the way through the crowd to the very back of the pavilion pounding on a drum.

As far as the music itself, the concert fulfilled every expectation. I mean this not only in the sense that they performed another incredible show, but also that they performed it in a way that I had been expecting based on prior reports and reviews. For instance, back in June they played a private show at the Notman House in Montreal. A person privileged enough to be there wrote a review mentioning the fact that they now use two drum kits again. He also said that the new material “didn’t bother with instrumental novelties: no hurdy-gurdy, melodica or accordion. Instead, there were often just four electric guitars, heavy as hell, and charging.” This proved to be quite accurate. While some may want them to return to the instrumental form of Funeral, this concert solidified these songs as a new stage in their progression as a band. The kids have grown up and now have their own kids. Now they live in suburbs, where “dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains,” as Régine Chassagne sings on “Sprawl II” (more on that song later). Suburban angst runs through the entire album.

If Funeral is the youthful response to memory and regret, and if Neon Bible is the translation of this response into an ambitious world-changing idealism, then The Suburbs is the abandonment of global slogans and the return to a kind of existential locality (or maybe local existentialism)—smaller, more concrete, images of sorrow, joy, nostalgia, anxiety, and rage. The problems that need to be addressed are work routines, the businessmen who “drink my blood,” “living in the sprawl” of endless shopping malls, the rise of technology, and the loss of small pleasures like writing a letter. And, of course, “the kids,” or now, “the modern kids,” as Win sings in the new song, “Rococo.” While kids have always been a motif for the Arcade Fire—all the way back to “No Cars Go” from their original EP—the new album makes this the dominant theme from beginning to end. Almost every song references “the kids” in some way or another, but now with a sense of distance and reserve that wasn’t there before. One of the reports I read noted that the band was playing very little from Neon Bible on their tour, and that proved to be the case on Tuesday night. After listening to the new album, this makes sense. Funeral and Suburbs are almost of a pair: they have musical similarities, for sure, but thematically there is a close connection between them.

The set opened with “Ready to Start,” one of the new “heavy as hell” songs that is sure to be an instant hit from the new album. From there they turned to more familiar territory: “Neighborhood #2 (Laika),” which they performed with their usual crowd-involving dynamism and forcefulness; “No Cars Go,” which seemed even more intense and rousing than the Neon Bible tour (preceded by Win giving the crowd permission to do “whatever the fuck you want,” to the consternation of the Mann Center staff!); and then, perhaps most powerfully, “Haïti,” which was a true highlight of the night. The original song is an acoustic showcase for Régine’s beautiful vocals, and while she stole the show again with her charming trademark dancing, the song was transformed into a heavy, electric-guitar rocker. By the end of the song, it bore little resemblance to the original version on Funeral. It could have held its place alongside “Neighborhood #3” or “Intervention” in terms of sheer force. Interestingly, when they played “Intervention” several songs later, it was quite a bit more subdued than the version they played on the Neon Bible tour—further evidence of their de-emphasizing of that album.

After “Haïti,” they played four new songs. The first was “Rococo,” which is a great song on the album, but even greater live. Win sung it with much greater intensity and bite than on the album, the repetitive chorus becoming a raging cry juxtaposed with the melodic background vocals of Régine and others. In the middle he added, “I’ve gotta feeling that tonight’s gonna be a good night.” Then, in one of the surprising moments of the night, they played a cover of Jay Reatard’s punk classic, “Oh It’s Such A Shame.” Arcade Fire is known for great covers, and this one has to be among their very best. Reatard, if you don’t know, died in January at the age of 29 due to drugs and alcohol. I can’t describe how moving it was to be there for that performance. I think everyone had chills from it. They then played two more songs from the new album, “Deep Blue” and “The Suburbs.” Both captured the album perfectly.

The band then played “Intervention” (this is a high-quality video), which I have already mentioned. Next was “We Used to Wait,” about the loss of letter-writing and today’s culture of instant gratification. The video behind them showed pictures of old QSL postcards (the kind used by ham-radio operators) from the collection of the Butlers’ grandfather, at least according to the NY Times article cited above. Then came the moment everyone knows from their live show, when play “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” and “Rebellion (Lies)” together. This goes back to their very first tour. It was, without question, the climactic point of the entire show—as it should be. (This video captures the transition from the one song into the other, as well as the thrill of being there; click here for a high-quality video just of “Rebellion,” which, when it zooms in, also roughly shows you how close I was, though I was even closer than that.) The performance of these two songs eclipsed almost everything from the previous Arcade Fire shows I have seen. It was a transcendent moment.

I was afraid, for a second, that they would end the main set here. But they continued, to my delight, with “Month of May”—the heavy punk rock song from the new release—and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).” (The video of the latter is very poor, but it’s the only one I could find.) Though the “Neighborhood-Rebellion” performance is still the climax of the show, “Sprawl II” was a close second. Régine is my favorite member of the band, and she dominated the show with this song. It’s clear that this song will be featured in every future show for a long time. It is a highlight of the album, and it was a highlight of the concert. The main set concluded with “Keep the Car Running” from Neon Bible. In many ways, the most fitting transition to the encore: “keep the show running!”

The three-song encore was as remarkable as always. They started with fan-favorite “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” again more guitar-driven and charging than the album version. They transitioned into the new hit “Modern Man,” which has already established itself as one of the standout tracks from The Suburbs. Finally, as usual, they closed with an epic performance of “Wake Up” (see also here, here, and here), in my opinion the greatest song of the 21st century. Even though everyone knows this song is coming, it never gets old and never ceases to amaze. It is truly one of the great live songs of all time, and it brought to a close one of the best concerts I have ever seen.

What was missing? Most noticeably, “Empty Room” from the new album. This really surprised me. It is one of the strongest, loudest, and most concert-ready tracks on the entire album. I wish they had performed it, especially since it features Régine’s voice and Sarah Neufeld’s violin. They also didn’t play my personal favorite song from The Suburbs, “Half Light I,” but this didn’t surprise me considering it is one of the softer and more subdued tracks. As expected, they also skipped many of the hits from Neon Bible, including “Black Mirror,” “Black Wave/Bad Vibrations,” “Ocean of Noise,” and “Windowstill.” All in all, they played six songs from Funeral, three from Neon Bible, and eight from The Suburbs. I really could not have asked for much more. It was a stunning concert. They infused each song with an intensity and urgency—one might say, an apocalyptic exigence—that transfigured this one night among other nights into a singularly unanticipatable event, a sonic encounter with something beyond. Truly, an epic concert.

Update: Video links added for “We Used to Wait” (partial), “Keep the Car Running,” and “Neighborhood #1.” At around 0:20 on the “We Used to Wait” clip, Win is standing about 10 feet from where I am.