Baptist Ecclesiology?

A theology exam I took back in August made me realize that there are two big things I really don't know much about: ecclesiology and the sacraments.  This is not surprising, as these two are essentially absent in everyday Baptist theology.  Growing up, I heard lots in Sunday School and sermons about the inspiration of Scripture, the Trinity, Soteriology, Jesus' divinity, the nature of sin, and so on, but very little on "the Church" and very little on how God might be present to us in things like Baptism or the Lord's Supper.

As I fumbled through explaining Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's notion of the Church in my oral exam, a theology professor of mine, Vincent Miller, asked me what my own personal ecclesiology was.  What did I, as a Baptist, think the Church looked like?  The question stunned me for two reasons.  First, I've been trained in academic theology, and in the setting of things like theology exams, to only do theology through layering quotes and ideas from other theologians.  Second, because I had an answer, and it was one completely different from the sources I had read for my exam.

I told Vince Miller that my own experience of ecclesiology in working in a local church, like Lamberth Memorial Baptist in Roxboro, NC, was one where God took the institutional and cultural reality of brick and mortar southern Baptist culture and through the Holy Spirit did endlessly surprising and unexpected things in the lives of people.  While I had been taught, theologically, what would "work" to make "excellent" Christians at Duke, I was continually surprised when God exceeded the practical theology I was taught and spoke through people and events to testify to the power of the Cross and to Jesus' overturning of the powers in the world in ways I didn't expect.  To put it in more systematic terms, I see "the Church" as an overlapping context of (1) institutional bodies, church buildings, salaried ministers, committees, Sunday School classes, Wednesday night meals and so on and (2) the mysterious and constant work of the Holy Spirit in and beyond this setting in doing work to testify to Jesus continually and surprisingly.

Nietzsche on Writing: only when you forget, can you move forward

I mentioned in an earlier post that I've been reading Nietzsche.  Reading Nietzsche is very helpful for one of the main questions in my blog: how are writing and doctrine/theology and communication and doctrine in general, related?

I like this long quote from an essay by Nietzsche on history, and in this instance specifically on the danger of not being able to "forget" when one writes:

Forgetting belongs to all action, just as not only light but also darkness belong in the life of all organic things. A person who wanted to feel utterly and only historically would be like someone who had been forced to abstain from sleep or like the beast that is to continue its life only from rumination to constantly repeated rumination. Moreover, it is possible to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, as the beast demonstrates; however, it is completely and utterly impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to explain myself even more simply concerning my thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which something living comes to harm and finally perishes, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.

I have a tendency towards a kind of perfectionism, when I write or teach, in which I imagine all the ways that what I'm saying could be nuanced or wrong.  This tendency is especially dangerous in teaching Freshmen, as they get confused or bored really fast if I bring in all the standard academic nuance and profusion of disclaimers that accompanies theology at the graduate level.

When I teach I find I just have to "go on" with an interpretation that seems it makes the most sense to my students.  But I've been happy to discover that these interpretations usually end up being faithful to the original text in ways I didn't foresee.  In this way, I think Nietzsche finds something important for writing and teaching. Writing and teaching are all about a strategic forgetting.

Nietzsche as Christian theologian?

I've recently read Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and The Antichrist for teaching in my Freshman religion course.  We're teaching Nietzsche, along with Karl Marx, as part of a set of "modern challenges" to Christianity.  Until fairly recently, I wasn't really a "Nietzsche person" and I thought that engagement with postmodern readers of Nietzsche, the intellectual craze at Duke while I was there, was a weird trend that wasn't very fruitful for Christian theology.  The only Nietzsche I've read in the past was when a crazy atheist neighbor of mine lent me The Antichrist to read back in undergrad.  I've been surprised in going back to him in teaching this course.

Particularly, I've been startled by how "Christian" Nietzsche is - not in terms of personal belief - but in terms of how steeped Nietzsche was in the basic ideas and grammar of Christian theology.  The terminology, the setting, the basic concerns in Nietzsche's work all come from Christian theology, and the questions he raises about Christianity are incredibly helpful.

In my teaching Nietzsche I keep reminding my students to keep from saying "this one thing is what Nietzsche means."  The poetic, under-determined quality of Nietzsche's work has really struck me.  For instance, it's possible to read Nietzsche's account of master morality/slave morality in the Genealogy of Morals as simply "amoral," but it's equally possible to read this account as a critique of his German society’s own racist, "Christian" outlook on the marginalized/the poor/factory workers, etc. I think Nietzsche uses his discussion of "slave morality" to point to some of the more sinister ways in which Christianity functions to legitimate or theologize oppression through stirring up fear of dangerous "others."

Nietzsche also challenges a lot of the modern scholarly ideas of "objectivity" that are still present in university settings today.  Nietzsche, in some of his writings on history and historiography, shows how universities and academic settings create their own ends and goals that sometimes trick writers and thinkers into writing for the university, rather than writing to help people (or help the Church/preach the Gospel, for theologians).

Luther on bad and good theology

It's interesting to know which Luther sees as which.  I've been reading a book by Gerhard Ebeling, a pretty significant theologian from a past generation, on Luther.  Ebeling says that what Luther often condemned when he said negative things about "philosophy" wasn't reason or philosophy itself, but theology that became so academic as to become inaccessible.  This relates to my previous post on writing and theology a bit.  I thought it would be helpful to offer this quote from one of Luther's lectures that Ebeling cites at length:

I certainly believe that I owe it as a matter of obedience to the Lord to bark against philosophy and speak words of encouragement to the holy scripture.  For if perhaps another were to do this, who was not acquainted with philosophy from his own observation, he would not have the courage to do so, or would not have commanded belief.  But I have worn myself out for years at this, and can see quite clearly from my experience and from conversations with others that it is a vain and ruinous study.  Therefore I admonish you all, so far as I am able, to be done with this form of study quickly, and to make it your sole business not to allow these matters to carry any weight nor defend them, but rather to do as we do when we learn evil skills in order to render them harmless, and obtain knowledge of errors in order to overcome them.  Let us do the same with philosophy, in order to reject it, or at least to make ourselves familiar with the mode of speech of those with whom we have to deal.  For it is time for us to devote ourselves to other studies, and to learn Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

 Ebeling, Luther 78

Ecumenism and writing

I'm a Baptist interested in ecumenism.  Ever since I realized that there were groups of Christians who did things differently from my own Baptist church upbringing I've wondered, "what can Baptists learn from other Church groups?"

I realize, though, that I'm asking this question in a very particular way.  I'm asking it in a very fragmentary manner, on a blog with posts, comments, facebook links, and so on.  We can say at least that writing an "ecumenical blog," in this way, presupposes that writing in this setting can do something.  This blog, then, is not only motivated by an ecumenical question, but it's also motivated by a more philosophical question: what is the best way to write about theology?  What does it mean when we write about theology at all, whether in the customary form of academic papers in seminary classes or the more recent forms of theo-blogs or tumblrs?

If we believe, as folks like Karl Barth believe, that every believer has the vocation of a theologian and preacher as one called to proclaim the Word of God, what does it mean for the Church that a very small number of these believers ends up writing in the academic university discipline of theology? (or expressing elements of this discipline on internet theology blogs)

Maybe there's biblical precedent for the special selection of particular persons according to their spiritual or intellectual gifts. But I also think it is important for those who are working in the world we call "academic theology," those studying for degrees in university settings, to regularly think about what the Bible says about what they are doing. It is also important to think about the social "side effects" of a university education and how it might set you apart from others. What kind of language or dispositions does a university education give you that you might not realize? There are a lot of great recent books on this, two examples being James KA Smith's Desiring the Kingdom (which analyzes the "secular" nature of university formation, even in confessionally Christian schools), and Kathryn Tanner's Theories of Culture, which points out how academic theology is a customary institution that can blind theologians to the realities of the Church they serve.

Bartholome de Las Casas and ecumenical theology

I've done a bit of work in the past on Bartholome de las Casas, a Spanish Dominican who used theological and legal arguments to try and stop Spanish persecution of the indigenous Americans during the colonial period.

I think Las Casas is important for ecumenical theology for three reasons.

First, reading him and knowing about his historical context reminds us that Christians in history have regularly distorted the Gospel and "sacred doctrine" in order to justify exploitation or oppression. 

Second, he is the first instance of what we might call a "Global" Christianity.  More specifically, I think that the discovery of the Americas was an intellectual catastrophe for Western theology which led to a rethinking of grace and divine providence.  Brian Tierny argues, for instance, that the work at the Spanish school of Salamanca, responding theologically to this discovery, laid the groundwork for the modern notion of "human rights."  Many scholars are beginning to look at connections between the the European discovery of the Americas and the effect of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, which began at about the same time. 

Third, this is something of a controversial opinion, but I think that Las Casas shows how Christian theology can be used creatively to help those who are being oppressed.  To respond to Spanish theologians who argued that the American Indians were natural slaves, Las Casas mustered a number of theological and philosophical authorities, including some arguments from Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, to argue that the indigenous were fully human beings and thus had some degree of “derechos humanos,” or human rights.  Historically, Las Casas's arguments didn't have an enormous effect, but they may at least have stopped the Spanish Emperor from accepting a deal that would put the indigenous people in the Americas into a state of permanent slavery.

Being ecumenical by accident

It fell to me to decide how to teach Martin Luther in our experimental Freshman religion course, so I adopted a viewpoint that focused on Luther's text "On the Freedom of a Christian." I've never been super-familiar with Luther, although I've lately been interested in his theology of preaching.  I chose "Freedom of a Christian" for class because it seemed the shortest major text I could find, and I remembered reading it for Amy Laura Hall's Christian Ethics course at Duke. 

When I picked the text, I had forgotten (maybe I should have payed more attention in Christian Ethics) that "Freedom of a Christian" is the major focus for the "Finnish school" of Luther interpretation.  This "school," which now has adherents from theologians like Robert Jenson, finds a more "Catholic" (specifically more "Orthodox") Luther through similarities between his discussion of union with Christ and the idea of "theosis" or divinization in Eastern Orthodox theology. 

From my reading, Luther's work here describes a "union" or "mystical marriage" between the believer and Jesus Christ that makes the believer a sharer in Christ's nature and benefits.  Faith in the preached word of the Gospel makes this union possible, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  This union not only confers justification before God, but it also - importantly for the "Finnish School" and other recent Lutherans - begins a process of sanctification and "divinization" through which the believer is conformed to Jesus Christ.

What follows is a modification of some introductory words I provided to my students on this text and on this topic:


Luther’s message in this reading is that this freedom in Jesus Christ is freedom for Christians to more deeply love their neighbors in more radical ways.  “A Christian person is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian person is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.”  This phrase is the outline of the entire work.  Luther’s Freedom of a Christian is a meditation on “freedom” in the Bible, along with some rigorous theological thinking on faith and love and the behavior of Christians in the World.  

Freedom of a Christian is roughly in two parts.  The first part talks about faith and law and Gospel in a way that those who know about Luther will not find surprising.  But the second half of "Freedom of a Christian" has to do with what Luther calls the “outward man,” and here we have some of the thoughts that set Luther in this text apart from some caricatures.  This second half relates to where Luther says that a Christian is “the most dutiful subject of all, and servant to every one.”  How could this not contradict the first part, about the Christian’s freedom from works in faith?  Luther’s explanation, as you will see, is that good works naturally follow from faith.  Although Luther stresses in the first part that good works cannot justify human beings before God, he says in the second part that a faith that does not overflow into good works is not a real faith.  The freedom the Christian has is freedom thereby to spend their lives in service to God and to their neighbors.

This freedom in service, though, is not merely about being a good person, but for Luther it comes about through a mystical union with Jesus Christ that happens when the believer has faith.  The love or service we give our neighbors is only possible through our souls being united to Jesus Christ through faith.  Luther says that Christians become a “sort of Christ” through faith, and that in imitating Jesus through their care for one another, Christians become a community where Christ is in all.  Luther is able to put this point very elegantly in saying, “[we ought] freely to help our neighbor by our body and works, and each should become to other a sort of Christ, so that we may be mutually Christs, and that the same Christ may be in all of us; that is, that we may be truly Christians.”

Barth Renaissance soon? Yes please!

With the new $100 Hendrickson version of the Church Dogmatics being published, I'm excited to see how this affects Barth's role in American theology. A whole bunch of friends of mine are thinking about buying it, and the theoblogosphere is already teeming with planned group readings.

I hope Barth has a big impact, and I especially hope that Barth-buyers read and discuss Barth's lengthy discussion on the relationship between scripture, freedom, and authority in CD 1/2. Barth takes his starting point from the fact that, theologically, Christians who believe in the work of the Holy Spirit have to believe that God's Word has been present in Church history, not only present in one church group or in some kind of landmarkism that finds a true Church hiding among a false tradition. At the same time, the Word of God stands over tradition, and can challenge it or critique it in surprising and deep ways. God, through scripture and the leading of the Holy Spirit, may challenge tradition or even lead an individual towards a particular conviction - but this is a pneumatological reality, not an expression of individual conscience.

There has to be a kind of respect for one's forebears as preachers and stewards of the Word of God in the past, and Barth expresses this:

In what I hear as the confession of the Church, I will certainly have to reckon with the possibility of falsehood and error. I cannot safely hear the voice of the Church without also hearing the infallible Word of God himself. Yet this thought will not be my first thought about the Church and its confession, but a necessarily inserted corrective. My first thought in this respect can and must be a thought of trust, and respect which I cannot perhaps have for the men as such who constitute the Church, but when I cannot refuse to the Word of God by which it lives and Jesus Christ who rules it. How can I know Jesus Christ as the Lord who has called me by his Word if in relation to the rest of the Church I do not start from the thought that despite and in all the sin of the men who constitute it it too has been called and ruled by the same Word?"

This also applies well to some of the blog spat going on over "Bapto-Catholics" and a proposed revision of CBF NC's faith statement that included some rethinking of language on Priesthood of the Believer and the centrality of individual conscience in reading Scripture. Lengthy discussions on this topic here, here, here, and here. (Image borrowed from Faith and Theology.)

Theology? in my University?

I've been teaching theology to Freshman students for about three weeks now, and I'm thankful for it for giving me all kinds of new thoughts, both on the place of theology in the University and on some of the topics we're discussing.

Hopefully I'll have more articulate and theological thoughts soon, but for now I thought it might be useful to share a quote by John Webster, a theologian I'm liking more and more these days, on teaching theology in the University as an "eschatological reality." As part of a larger essay on the place of theology in the University, Webster makes the following statement after a quick run through of critical thinking by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu on how the “Life of the Mind” in Universities is a “customary” institution, and noting that theology can contribute to this critique:

“theology is a contrary – eschatological – mode of intellectual life, taking its rise in God’s disruption of the world, and pressing the academy to consider a quite discordant anthropology of enquiry.”

Two interesting things from this: (1) Theology in the University, as a discipline that presupposes the work of the Holy Spirit in eliciting faith in the theologian and the sanctification of scripture, can only be understood as an "eschatological" reality, a kind of snuck-in presence of the kingdom of God, among the other disciplines. And (2), this position puts theology on the side of critical theory and other approaches that find presuppositions behind supposedly "objective" academic knowledge or the idea of a "universal reason."

This is a really interesting idea to me, one I might even dare to share with my students. What I'm doing when I teach theology is something that would be, in the eyes of faith anyway, impossible without Jesus Christ's presence. My students' work in reading and participating in class - we're reading Augustine's Confessions next week, for instance - is a proleptic share in Christ's Kingdom. We're teaching and learning under God's time, established in Jesus Christ, right in the midst of the regular time of the University, the time of preparation for careers, of engineering and business schools.

I'm teaching!

This week I started teaching an introductory religion course here at Dayton. The class is designed for all students to take their first year, regardless of major, and we're fortunate at a Catholic University to have an administration that thinks the Catholic intellectual tradition is something very important and should be taken very seriously.

The design of the class is what I think is most interesting, and related to this blog. The course is framed by Benedict XVI's encyclical letter "Deus Caritas Est" (God is Love). We're using Benedict because he really brings out the particularity of the way Christianity as a religion has described God and love throughout history, against the reductive idea that "all religions are the same" that a lot of students come in with.

Benedict also talks about a lot of history, and references either explicitly or implicitly major figures from the Catholic intellectual tradition, like Augustine and Aquinas, and also modern critical figures like Marx and Nietzsche. So in this class we're going to start with Deus Caritas Est as a kind of introduction, but then read it again for the last few days of the course after the students have read many of the figures Benedict talks about, and the students can see how much of a richer understanding they have of the Encyclical and of the tradition that it's a part of.

We're also bringing in a lot of technology and research on teaching methods. I may post more on this, but for instance, we're incorporating videos into the course. Here's an example of one we used on the first day, that introduced the letter of 1 John as a way of getting into Deus Caritas Est.



(Open in a separate window to get the full view, I'm not sure how to make my blog window wider with this template)

More on "Tradition"...

I've been thinking more about what "tradition" means thanks to something I read recently.

Joseph Ratzinger/now Pope Benedict XVI, in a collection of some of his earlier essays on the Church and ecumenism, points out that different Christian groups - Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, etc. - have different fundamental understandings of what "tradition" is. Ratzinger points out that the word "tradition" itself is used to describe different things depending on one's church or denominational location, but says that the proper Catholic understanding of tradition involves a rather complex set of theological and historical presuppositions that line up with an idea like John Henry Newman's description of the "development" of doctrine.

In other words, Ratzinger distinguishes between little "t" traditions and big "T" Tradition; Ratzinger defines big T, Catholic "Tradition" as the providentially ordered progress of the Gospel through its contact with Greek philosophy and up through its shaping of the West into the modern age. "Tradition," for Ratzinger, is a development of doctrine through time that always builds on what came before. We can talk about Baptist or Anglican "traditions," but Ratzinger says that talking about these (the historical roots and practices of a social or religious group) is something different from this historical and theological claim involved in describing a big T "Tradition."

I'm not sure how I feel about this model in Ratzinger/BXVI's work, but it does describe "tradition" and "Tradition" in a clear way. I also wonder if there is a way to read groups like Baptists or Methodists theologically as themselves being legitimate "developments" of the Gospel's path through history.

Can we still talk about Adam and Eve? (Shifts in Theological Anthropology)

Theological anthropology has become perhaps the major question for folks doing systematic or dogmatic theology today. There are a lot of recent books on the topic: Kathryn Tanner's Christ the Key, David Kelsey's Eccentric Existence, and even beginner theology textbooks written around this topic, like God's Many-Splendored Image.

I'm sure work like this has already been done or is in the process of being done, but a history of the shifts in theological anthropology seems like an interesting topic. Particularly I think it would be interesting to look at how theological anthropology changed after modern science and history pushed the story of Adam and Eve into myth. I wonder if the "creation science" folks aren't really arguing for seven-day literal creation as much as worrying about what a modern view of the creation of the world and the evolution of humans does to the Fall story in Genesis.

The loss of a literal Adam and Eve is a big deal for theology. How thereby do we describe the source of sin? Theologians like Augustine or Aquinas had no problem referring to the story of Adam and Eve as a literal state of affairs that bears on our present condition. If we take away this literal state of affairs, how do we account for the presence of sin?

I know of a few theological responses. One, from the theologian Robert Jenson, says that we should find a different "origin narrative." Jenson says that when Christians think about sin and "the Fall" we should think about the events following the Exodus rather than Adam and Eve, since the sin of the Israelites in the wilderness, building the Golden Calf and so on, is more paradigmatic for the Old Testament than the fall of Adam. Another comes from Norris Clarke, a Thomist philosopher, who says that we may talk about a "creation" of human beings when God began to create immortal, intellectual souls once humans evolved to a particular point of development (following traditional Catholic thinking on the creation of each human soul by God at conception). In this way, there may have been an actual "Adam and Eve."

Does Christology obscure Jesus?

I was at a family dinner last week and a family member, a facebook friend of mine, told me he had trouble understanding what was going on in this blog. The family member who said this is a Baptist from the South, like me, and is in fact a very faithful church member. I think this is a theological problem, one I like to think about.

I looked over some recent posts and noticed that they were a bit technical, especially some of my Christology posts. When I say I write in a "technical" way I mean I use terms that would only be familiar to students who have taken a theology class or two, or to well-read self taught theologians. These are terms like "christology" or "eschatology." I write in a "technical" way also in that I presume basic knowledge of theologically significant figures like Thomas Aquinas or Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I write in this way for two reasons. One reason is to keep my blog short: the benefit of technical terms is that you can say a lot more in a lot less space when you wager that your readers can understand shorter references. A second reason is that I planned this blog to be for "academic" theologians, and the pattern of "ecumenical" discussion here follows the train of academic theology (looking at the theological and philosophical presuppositions behind doctrine, rather than local churches working together on service or worship projects, both of which are very important aspects of "ecumenism").

This said, the idea that posts on Christology are hard to understand bothered me. Didn't Paul proclaim "Christ crucified" as a simple (but difficult in a different way) message? Christ is the center of our worship and piety. The Bible says that Jesus not only is the image of the invisible God, but that in a way the whole world hangs together through him (Colossians 1:17). How can our Christology get so complicated that regular folks who have given their lives to Jesus can't understand what we are saying about him?

Christ as Son

By "Christ as Son" I'd like to call attention to a factor of Christology that has not fallen by the wayside due to philosophical shifts like Christ as "mediator," or snuck into theology like "presence," but seems to be growing steadily. This is a very broad, inductive idea I have here, but one I think fits a shift in theology: we could call it a shift to a more "Christological Trinitarianism."

A little description of the books I have in mind might flesh this out. I used an upcoming theology exam as an opportunity to read two books I wanted to acquaint myself with: Bruce Marshall's Trinity and Truth and Kathryn Tanner's recent book Christ the Key.

Both authors position themselves in their different contexts on what I think is the same foundation: what we learn about the Trinity through the life of Christ as described in Scripture.

Bruce Marshall uses this "Christological trinitarianism" to make arguments against the attempt of modern theology to justify the faith (including making the Trinity "make sense") on foundational arguments alien to Christian convictions. Kathryn Tanner uses a similar focus to argue against a too-easy "socio-political Trinity" that makes arguments for the way the human community should be based on developed Trinitiarian speculation, like saying that humans should embody the Trinity's own embrace of "difference" within itself. Tanner notes, rightly I think, that the Bible says that the only way human society images the Trinity is through the believer's being made one with the Son, i.e. being brought into Christ's body through baptism.

Bonhoeffer on Christ's presence

Continuing my look at theological articulations of Christ's presence, I'd like to now turn to some Protestant authors.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer paid special attention to the question of Christ's presence. In the last 1/3 or so of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer talks about the Saints, the visible community, and the Sacraments in light of the discussion in the first part of the book ("cheap" and "costly" grace, the Sermon on the Mount, etc). The angle Bonhoeffer uses has to do with Christ's presence. Bonhoeffer asks what seems to be a popular question in his time and ours: why and how should the life and work of a late Ancient Jewish man impact people today? In this part of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer is looking for theological and philosophical ways to say that Jesus Christ, and his personal call to radical discipleship, are still present to Christians today.

Bonhoeffer finds a way to articulate Christ's presence through Protestant theological ideas of Word and Sacrament. He says:

"The preaching of the Church and the administration of the sacraments is the place where Jesus Christ is present. If you would hear the call of Jesus you need no personal revelation: all you have to do is to hear the sermon and receive the sacrament."

In a chapter entitled "The Body of Christ," Bonhoeffer gives Christ's body - both Jesus' flesh and the body of believers with Jesus as their head - a central role in salvation that looks theologically very similar to that which we see with Aquinas. Bonhoeffer says that Protestants must never play down the importance of baptism and the Lord's supper because these are communion with Christ's body, both the body of the Church (in baptism) and Jesus' flesh (in the Lord's supper).

Bonhoeffer also says that Christ is present in the church's preaching, something that I have been interested in. Karl Barth also focuses his discussion of God's presence more strongly on preaching than the sacraments (and in fact critiques Catholics and some Protestants for over-emphasizing God's presence in the sacraments to the neglect of God's presence in the preached Word). I'll write more about the connection between preaching and God's presence in Barth and Bonhoeffer soon. For now I wanted to point out the discussion of presence in Bonhoeffer, and his surprising similarity to Aquinas.

Participating in Christ's presence (Aquinas)

Lately I've been doing a kind of mini-series on unusual or overlooked aspects of Christology. Last week I talked about the theological idea of Christ's "presence," a theological idea that has gotten more and more attention in recent years, especially by Protestant theologians. I'd like to present a a bit of what Thomas Aquinas says on Christ's presence this week, with a second post on the same issue by Protestant thinkers later this week.

One overlooked part of Aquinas's Christology is the way he talks about believers "participating" in Jesus's mystical body. He says that Christians are present in Christ, even though Christ's glorified body is sitting at the right hand of God (Heb. 1:3). While we are not actually physically close to Jesus' body, Aquinas says that Christ is present to us since all Christians have Christ as their "head." In discussing our participation in Christ's session, he says "since Christ is our Head, then what was bestowed on Christ is bestowed on us through Him." Aquinas here follows where Paul says that God "raised us up with [Christ] and seated us with him in the heavenly places" (Eph. 2:6).

Aquinas says that Christ is present to us mystically. Of course, Aquinas also holds that Christ's body is actually made present in the celebration of the Eucharist. But the "mystical body"-rooted presence with Christ outlined above gives us both a somewhat overlooked angle on Aquinas's thought, and a kind of ecumenical slant, as starting with this more neglected theological concept keeps us from getting bogged down in older debates.

Christ's Presence?

My last post addressed Christ's mediation, an older christological concept. In this post I'd like to address what I think is a newer christological concept: the idea of Christ's "presence."

"Presence" has quietly snuck its way into theological discourse. For example, the Baptist theologian James McClendon describes presence as a special Christian virtue. He says the virtue of presence is founded in the stories and beliefs we have about Jesus Christ: "God's presence with us is one of the great gifts of the gospel, associated with the incarnation of the Word, the giving of the Spirit, and the return of the Lord; in Christian history his presence is celebrated in every eucharistic meal, invoked at every baptism, and claimed anew at every gathering of disciples" (Ethics, 115).

McClendon finds clear reflections of this christological presence in the behavior of Christian people. He gives examples of Christians embodying the virtue of "presence" like the presence of Clarence Jordan's Koinonia farm in Georgia, or Catholic religious who live in prisons and jails in order to be present to the prisoners inside.

In the next few posts I may explore around to see the roots of this theological idea of "presence," which has become pretty much a set piece of christology and moral theology in certain theological circles, although not in others. I am also interested to see what the examination of new and old christological concepts teaches about the task of christology and theology itself.

Christ the Mediator?

An underappreciated aspect of Christology today is the role of Christ as mediator. Christ's "mediation" between God and human beings played a central role in the theology of the early Church and in Augustine and Aquinas. This reflection came from their reading of 1 Timothy 2:5 - "there is one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus."

Premodern Christian theology could sometimes have a much more creative and expansive meditation on the work of Jesus Christ in reconciling the world to himself than we have today. Aquinas, for instance, thought not only that the atoning sacrifice of the Cross was necessary in a way for our salvation, but also that the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and even the Ascension play essential roles in our salvation as well. Contemporary Christology, of various stripes and predilections, tends to focus the mystery of our salvation solely on the Cross. The sole emphasis of some preachers and authors on Jesus' death being a "satisfaction" of God's anger, for example, passes over this richer history.

Part of my inspiration for this comes from me working on my French by making a very elementary, very unofficial translation of a recently published article by Gilles Emery on Christ as Mediator in the Greek Fathers, Augustine, and Aquinas. Emery traces the history of reflection on Christ's mediation all the way back to Irenaeus who, in reference to 1 Tim. 2:5, said that Jesus Christ must be both divine and human to have "kinship" with both parties of God and humanity, so that, in Christ, "God might meet human beings and human beings might offer themselves to God."

Preaching and Theology

In thinking about what to write my dissertation on, I've been drawn to thinking about the intersection between preaching, doctrine, and catechesis. I'm drawn to this question because the theologians that I've probably spent the most time reading - Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and my favorite Baptist theologian, James McClendon - all wrote around the intersection of these three fields. Preaching, particularly, plays a major role in the work of all four (the role of preaching in Aquinas is just beginning to be explored). Preaching is also a major, if not the central, aspect of Baptist life and worship.

One of the ideas they drilled into us at Duke Divinity School that I'm most thankful for is their emphasis on Preaching as a theological event. This idea, which was usually taught to us through Barth or Bonhoeffer, was that a congregation that hears sermons based on scripture is hearing the Word of God, however weak and human the sermon might be. Bonhoeffer famously said to his preaching students before he read their work, "let's see what God is telling us today in your sermon." Karl Barth has a very strong emphasis on preaching throughout the Church Dogmatics, and he regards the common Sunday sermon as a theological miracle with its basis in the work of Jesus Christ. Barth says, for instance, "humanly speaking, it is a stark impossibility that men should speak what God speaks, but it is one which in Jesus Christ is already overcome" (CD 1/2-22).

This emphasis on the theological event of preaching was taught to me through largely Protestant sources. Yet as an "ecumenical Baptist" studying at a Catholic university, I'd like to have an "ecumenical eye" in these issues. I'm interested to learn more about theologies of preaching being developed by Catholic theologians, and to learn how they connect preaching and doctrine.

Is systematic theology sinful? (Scholasticism part II)

Is it sinful to arrange theological truth in a systematic manner? Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, in Resident Aliens, critique Paul Tillich for writing a "Systematic Theology," which they claim puts philosophical and apologetic interests over faithfulness to the Gospel. They contrast Tillich with Karl Barth, noting that Church Dogmatics seems like a much more theologically meaningful title for a presentation of Christian doctrine.

I've often heard people refer to Barth as a more "ad hoc" rather than systematic thinker, but I think this is actually a result of misreading Barth's style - particularly his use of repetition. Barth is actually just as systematic and philosophically rigorous as Aquinas. In the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, Barth summarizes a short section on systematic presentations of doctrine with the words "fear of scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet." Barth says, following a similar interest in Protestant Scholasticism, that Preachers need an organized, philosophically rigorous dogmatics in order to not contradict themselves. (Part of the way I'm reading Barth currently is to look at his reception of Protestant Scholasticism, an aspect of Barth's thought that John Webster points to.) This is different from saying that we need our dogmatics to answer every question posed by modern science or philosophy.

Yet at the same time you hear this language of "sin" or "unfaithfulness" sometimes used for systematic presentations of doctrine like in Paul Tillich or in "Neo-Scholastic" Catholic theology. You often hear that theologians writing systematic presentations of doctrine lose the mystery or impose alien categories on the Gospel.

Thinking through Christian teaching in a systematic way is good when it is used to excite the intellect towards the contemplation of God. Aquinas receives from Augustine and the Greek Fathers a strong notion of theology as a participation in God's own triune life through contemplation. Yet when one writes or teaches systematic theology not trying to seek to know God's will and to love God more deeply, but for the end of human intellectual satisfaction, then perhaps one has a problem. One of my professors at Duke, Willie Jennings, said that its important to always return to the fact that we are creatures when we are doing theology. He said that acknowledging that we are creatures frees our desire to know from the fear of not knowing or the obsession of knowing completely.

Why scholasticism is necessary for theology, part I

If you read theologians writing in the early 20th century, especially Catholic theologians associated with "Ressourcement" leading up to Vatican II, you often hear pretty strong words against "scholasticism." Protestant theologians like John Milbank tend to critique later Catholic scholasticism as well for corrupting the theology of Thomas Aquinas by downplaying the central Neoplatonic elements in his thought (which did happen).

Scholasticism can be defined historically as a web of theological works that began to be written in the Middle Ages that sought to give systematic expositions of Christian doctrine. Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas are all examples of "scholastic" authors in this vein. Recent scholarship tends to emphasize that scholastic works often had a lot to do with education. We can see an example of this in Aquinas. In the prologue to Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, Aquinas says that he wrote the work for students to help counter "the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments" in theological education in his day. Scholars these days often focus on the implied readers of scholastic texts and the history of their reception just as much as the philosophical ideas they express.

Scholasticism is marked not only by system and organization, but also usually by a precise terminology that allows the authors to write and explain things quickly. This terminology, or "apparatus," is usually derived partly from Aristotle, and is often difficult for beginners.

"Scholasticism" in this way has been a historical force in theology for centuries. After the Reformation, Protestants developed their own form of scholasticism that drew, surprisingly enough, on Thomas Aquinas as a guide. Eastern Orthodoxy also had their own scholasticism, which also benefitted from dialogue with Aquinas (Gregory Palamas read Aquinas).

Yet theologians from all three areas, Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox, all had some kind of reaction against scholasticism some time in the 19th and 20th centuries. But there were some voices, like Karl Barth on the Protestant side, who thought that scholasticism as a historical form of discourse gave theology something essential. I'll explore some pro/con arguments for scholasticism from a theological perspective in a later post.

Should we use denominational labels?

A new question I've been wondering about has to do with denominational labels. How much emphasis should we place on using them? This blog has a big one - I identify myself as an "ecumenical Baptist" - but what if this very definition is problematic? In my regular bible reading I've recently come across 1 Corinthians 1, where Paul chastises the Corinthians for divisions, with Corinthian Christians claiming "I belong to Paul," or "I belong to Apollos," or "I belong to Cephas" (1:12-13). Paul says later in 1 Cor. 2 that "we have the mind of Christ." Is our strong emphasis on denominational labels and identities - Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, and so on - holding us back from a more profound identity to which we are called? Would Paul accuse us of saying "I belong to the Baptist identity" or "I belong to the Methodists" instead of saying "I belong to Christ"? Is there something at stake in our language as Christians when we identify ourselves by denominations, rather than as Christians? (A profound gift of recent theology being the discovery that language is so important to who we are as Christians.)

One of the first things I learned in religious studies is where all the denominations came from and what they represent. This is something I loved learning, as I was puzzled as a kid what all the different labels, labels like "Methodist" or "Presbyterian," meant and why some of my friends went to different churches than me. For a long time I tended to give a slight sneer to people who said "I'm just Christian" when I asked for their denominational background. I thought that by calling themselves "just Christian" they were passing over a wealth of theological history and distinctiveness, but perhaps they read 1 Cor. 2 more than I did, and were expressing a more profound theological point than I was realizing.

In my mind, the best Protestant theologians are those who write as if their theology was "for Christians," rather than a particular expression of a historical group. Karl Barth's theology was entitled Church Dogmatics. He wrote assuming that his theological work expressed the way God relates to Christians, and assumed, whether we agree with him or not, that the historical form of Protestantism is the way God intended the Church to exist in the world. Robert Jenson's Systematic theology is a recent example: he says his theology assumes that the Body of Christ is one body, although he laments ecclesial divisions at the beginning of the work. I wonder if theologies that emphasize ecclesial location, like "Baptist theology," "Radical Reformation theology," or "Anglican theology" demonstrate not humility or attention to detail, but a lack of theological verve in the face of our call to have "the mind of Christ" that Paul talks about.

Theology as Spiritual Exercise?

I'd like to explore in the next few posts through examining the idea that theology should be seen primarily as a spiritual exercise, in contrast to other models. Such a view has implications for the connection between theology, especially academic theology, and the local church, and for how theology and doctrine divide people in ecumenical discussion.

When I was in undergrad and graduate school I was largely taught that theology should play a regulating role, ensuring that people's speech about God not overstep certain boundaries. A lot of theologians that influenced me early on, like James McClendon, pointed in this direction (McClendon says this especially regarding the Trinity). Many thinkers working from supposedly "post-metaphysical" perspectives, or those who like McClendon are heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, take this view.

Since being at a Catholic University I've heard from many folks here that theology should function as a kind of academic apology for the Gospel. One of my teachers at Dayton works hard to expose students to theologians like David Tracy, who I might summarize as a kind of "apologetic" theology, trying to make the Gospel accountable to the different publics of the society, the academy, and the Church itself. "Apologetics" is probably too loaded a word here, but it's hard for me to think of another: theology in this view isn't trying to "prove" itself as much as locate itself in academic and larger social discussions about life, ethics, and meaning.

Should theology be a spiritual exercise? As far back as Peter Lombard, scholastic theologians have been saying that one of the reasons for theology is for the "consolation and delight" of the faithful. Medieval scholastic theologians like Aquinas were fond of quoting 1 Peter 3:15 as a rationale for their writing - "always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you." Should we do theology as meditation on the Trinity, as a kind of spiritual exercise or contemplation? This view seems to make theology more "for everyone" than the first two options, which are in different ways more prevalent in contemporary theology. Seeing theology as a spiritual exercise means we can say theology is a way to love God with our minds.

Hanging out with other ecumenical Baptists

When one friend of mine saw the title of my blog, he asked if it was a contradiction in terms. However, I'm glad to say that I'm a little late posting this week because I've spent this weekend talking with other "ecumenical Baptists" at the annual meeting of CTS/NABPR in Portland, Oregon. This meeting is special to me for several reasons. The CTS, the “College Theology Society,” is a group of Catholic theologians and scholars with an interesting history documented by one of my professors at Dayton, Sandra Yocum. NABPR is the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, but the group of Baptists that meets jointly with CTS is actually a special “region-at-large” that meets especially for the purpose of discussion with Catholic theologians. This is my third year at the conference, with the conference the previous year being held at Notre Dame, and the year before that in Rhode Island.

The group of Baptist theologians who attend CTS/NABPR consists of several professors who influenced me early on, along with lots of folks from Dayton, Duke, Baylor, and Campbell, and I've even got a family member in the group. This meeting has become something of a hub for theologians interested in thinking through what Steve Harmon calls “Baptist Catholicity.”

The CTS/NABPR partnership was actually started by an important Baptist theologian, James McClendon, who worked with Terence Tilley to set up the joint meeting. The partnership has been going for 13 years now, and the group of Baptists interested in the meeting has been steadily increasing. I enjoy going to these meetings to compare academic notes with other Baptists who are interested in thinking about ecumenical topics, topics like whether or not we could describe a “canon” of the Church Fathers and Mothers, or the contribution of Black Baptist groups to the largely Catholic theological question of “nature and grace” (these latter referring to two great papers by Scott Rushing at Baylor and Derek Hatch from Dayton, respectively). I enjoy listening to the papers, but the best part is catching up with friends and professors from around the country and being extreme theology nerds for a few days.

Does pen and paper matter for theology?

I've always been drawn to folks who write theology about theology. Reinhard Huetter, one of my professors at Duke, is a good example of a "theologian's theologian," at least with his book Suffering Divine Things. As I'm reading Barth's Church Dogmatics I'm realizing that at least volume one is really something like "how theology should work," a methodological preface to dogmatics, rather than a dogmatic exposition itself (dogmatics itself being partly the task of the
Preacher in the local church).

Yet even Barth and Huetter don't seem concrete enough in terms of giving a "theological" reading of the material and social location of the theologian. How does theology's primary location at major universities like Duke or Chicago affect the discipline? A professor of mine here at Dayton, Vincent Miller, says that theology isn't doing its job if it ignores how even little things like garage door openers change our lives and set out our context.

We can think in an even more basic, material way. What is proper for a theologian to write on? Pen and paper? A computer? Do these things make a difference? Shelby Foote wrote only with a Dip pen, rather than with a typewriter or with regular pens, because he wanted to craft his sentences slowly and have them fully formed in his head before he wrote them on the page. Should theologians, as stewards of the Word of God and as those filled with the Holy Spirit, write with similar concrete means of care?

I think a lot of "ressourcement" theology in the 20th century really came about to address material and methodological questions in theology like these. This includes both the Catholic ressourcement movement of theologians like Henri de Lubac and attempts by Protestants like Karl Barth to bring about a "ressourcement" of the Reformers and the Protestant scholastics in the face of liberal protestantism. Yet even here I'd be interested in going beyond these theological retrievals to look at the "material" aspects of some of sources of the Christian tradition, beyond just mining ancient and medieval Christianity for "ideas." (Re: the first question in my post on an early church course, I actually tend towards the historical option). This blog seems to have two emphases so far, both of which seem crucial and also neglected in ecumenism: one is looking for philosophical presuppositions in theology ("ecumenism and philosophy"), and the other is asking this material/concrete question. So far this has taken the form of looking at the history of genres and forms of theology.

Five questions for a ma/patristics course

I'd like to get a directed reading group together this Fall for reading several late ancient Christian authors I'm dangerously unacquainted with, particularly the Cappadocians and late ancient women writers like Egeria. I'm sure I'd write a paper for the class, but I wrote out these five questions that I would like to answer in writing somehow.

1. How should people across different confessional lines read the Church Fathers/Mothers? Do we need a method before we start reading them? Should we read them for use in a kind of theological “bricolage” to address contemporary issues, or should we read them only in a fastidiously historical way, trying to ascertain what they “said” and “meant” in their context to the best of our ability? Contemporary readings of these figures seem to go either way.

2. Is "patrology" a proper theological locus, along with other topics like the Trinity or liturgy? (Barth has a long reflection on this question in CD 1/2). Is there already an early version of a patrology in the figures I'm reading?

3. Is heresy defined essentially as an over-rationalization of the Christian mysteries, as Henri de Lubac says? Or is heresy ill-read scripture, as the Fathers themselves seem to say? (Or is heresy a category that should be thrown out all together?!)

4. How does personal piety relate to theological reflection on Jesus Christ? What about liturgically formed, communal piety? Is there a clear distinction between these in the texts I'm reading, or are these two blurred?

5. What role does Jesus' life and ministry play in late ancient Christology, along and besides the incarnation itself and Jesus' cross, death, resurrection, and ascension?

Why we have to be ecumenical

I'm a Baptist at a Catholic University. I'm studying at a Catholic University because my professors, mentors, and pastors all believed that it was important for Baptists to learn and talk with other church groups. This doesn't mean we have to convert or give up our convictions.

Being Baptist at a Catholic University hasn't made me want to be Catholic. It's actually made me want to be more Baptist. By "more Baptist" I mean that I'm learning things that are distinct about Baptists in a way that I might not have without Catholics as conversation partners. It's one thing to sit in a Baptist Seminary and talk about how Baptists are "distinctive" in a seminar full of only Baptist students and teachers. This way of talking about Baptist distinctiveness bothers me (and friends of mine) because it usually ends up defining who Baptists are by caricaturing other groups. It's another thing to learn how distinctive we are by going out to other groups, talk with ministers, Priests, and laypeople, and find out what's distinctive in a more charitable way.

I don't think we have to be ecumenical because all churches should be one in a "visible communion." I know folks who would probably disagree with me on this. I think we have to be ecumenical because this is how we get to know ourselves. I think we have to be ecumenical because this is a way we can come to know the Gospel we preach in a deeper way.

One reason I've taken an interest in Barth on this "ecumenical" blog is because I have a hunch that Free Church theologians have to get to catholicity through Barth. Steve Harmon, one of my former Professors, points to this with an important chapter in his book Towards Baptist Catholicity that reads the early volumes of Barth's Dogmatics as a paradigm for Baptist "ressourcement." I think Barth is important for Free Church and Baptist theologians because he can do theology with a heavy emphasis on scripture, preaching, and the local church, and then combine this with a "dialectical catholicity" that searches for the faithful proclamation of the Word of God in all periods and church communities, even among "liberal Protestants"! Barth gives theoretical backing to the kind of practical engagement that I think is important here. Students, scholars and ministers should engage the ecumenical task in various ways not only for the goal of institutional unity, but also for the goal of learning to be better preachers and teachers of the Word of God.

From Aquinas to Barth

Some folks who know me know that I'm one of those Protestants who is always talking about Thomas Aquinas. I discovered Aquinas through G.K. Chesterton's biography of Aquinas, which made a big impact on me in a formative time in my life. While Aquinas has always loomed large for me, I've found it increasingly important, important all the more now that I'm studying at a Catholic University, to think about what's distinctive about Protestant theology as Protestant. Because of this I've started studying Karl Barth.

While there are other Protestant figures or theological perspectives I could focus on, I picked Barth because of something Bruce McCormack, a Barth scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary, said about Barth's "comprehensive theology." McCormack says that the Church Dogmatics is "comprehensive" theology because Barth works not only with scripture but also with a real Protestant notion of a "Holy Tradition." In addition, Barth thought Protestants needed a theological system, rather than occasional essays or theological bricolage, to give "rigor, breadth, and beauty" to the Church's preaching. I liked Aquinas back in my Chesterton days because Aquinas's own kind of "comprehensive theology" appealed to me as an expansive meditation on the mystery of human nature and God's graciousness in Jesus Christ. Seeing McCormack recommend Barth as a starting point for contemporary strains of Protestant "comprehensive theology" struck a chord.

McCormack goes on to say that Barth holds up in our “postmodern” philosophical context well, that he does theology in a state of intellectual and personal surrender to God, and - perhaps most interesting for me as a Baptist - that he writes theology with the local congregation more than the large ecclesial body in mind.

A defense of caricature

In what I've heard about Stanley Hauerwas's recent memoir from friends, blurbs, blogs, and facebook posts, I've seen a recurring phrase. People talking up the book's merits often throw in a line about Hauerwas being often "caricatured." They say that Hauerwas is misunderstood by his critics due to poor readings. I'm not bringing this up to argue with Hauerwas. From what friends tell me I think that his memoir is a powerful testimony to the power of the Gospel to change lives. I'm interested, instead, in dealing with "caricature" as a rhetorical tool in theology's toolbox.

Why is caricature seen as a bad thing? Often the theological caricature is a form of reductio ad absurdum that pushes lines of logic in an argument to their conclusion and finds inconsistencies down the line, so to speak. Caricature has always been used in theological argumentation, I'm sure going way back to the wrangling over trinitarian doctrine in the early centuries of the Church. Caricatures often start conversations or ferret out new dimensions of a particular perspective. To go to my initial example, how different would Stanley Hauerwas's work look today if he never had to answer to the (caricaturing) charge of being a "sectarian, fideistic tribalist?"

People describe caricature as if it were a vice opposed to the virtue of "charitable reading." But I'm not sure if it is possible to read a text, that is printed words on a page, with charity. (Studiousness might be a better virtue here, although it would work in a different and complex way.) This is because we read texts with inescapable presuppositions. Attempting to objectively catalog these presuppositions causes more problems then it solves as well, I think. We can fault people for caricaturing theological texts, but philosophically we have to realize that "caricatures" appear due to specific material reasons relating to the background of the reader, not because of a vicious lack of charity. "Caricatures" that arise when readers come to a text from different backgrounds can in fact be helpful as leading to conversation or making us notice things in our favorite texts that we've not noticed before.

Blogs or books: the future of theology?

Theology wasn't always about books. In an earlier post I gave a very brief summary of an unexplored avenue in historical theology: genres of theological writing. Those who think books are essential to theology should remember that the academic essay - a 200+ page book with footnotes and technical terms - has replaced the sermon or the biblical commentary as the primary vehicle for theological work since the Enlightenment.

The earliest theological texts were something different from today's theology books. Just look at the first chapter of Anselm's Why God Became Human?, which seems to suggest that the text is a transcription of a conversation for the sake of those who have questions about the faith and couldn't meet and talk with Anselm directly (although this certainly may be a literary device). Most scholars today say that Aquinas's Summa Theologiae wasn't meant to be a theological encyclopedia but instead a teaching guide, something like a plan for a curriculum, that reflected a context where theology was done to address thorny questions that consistently arose from scripture.

Blogs have certain theological and pastoral advantages to books. The format of blogging offers quick commentary on current events (often within minutes of something) and also encourages back-and-forth conversation in a way that is completely impossible with books. In addition, due to the restraints of blogging as a genre, theologians are forced to write without technical terms and to boil down prose to simple snippets. Consider that theology written in blogs has a wider potential readership than most theology books right from the start, and can be a great way for Pastors to do a little faith seeking understanding with the computer-savvy people in their congregations.

Finally, consider that the best theologians writing today know that theology isn't just about ideas, but also about communication - the recent NT Wright conference made me think about this when everyone praised Wright's ability to write and communicate well on both academic and popular levels. Karl Barth and Bernard Lonergan especially among 20th century theologians argued that the task of theology involves learning to be a good communicator. (Barth describes this with the term "practical theology," Lonergan with his idea of the functional specialty of "communications").

Does Theology need the Soul?

Throughout much of the history of Christian theology it was thought that humans were an immaterial soul inhabiting a material body, and that the immaterial soul goes to God when the body dies. Some theologians nuanced this like Thomas Aquinas, who thought there was an immaterial soul but that this immaterial soul was the "substantial form" of the matter that made up the human body.

My question basically is, does theology need the soul? Many theologians and biblical scholars, including Nancey Murphy, Joel Green, and others say no. Most contemporary authors writing on theological anthropology see the soul as outdated or disproved by modern neuroscience. They're not without their critics though, as ethicists like J.P. Moreland or Thomists like Norris Clarke say an immaterial soul is a fundamental and non-negotiable part of Christian theology and ethics.

This debate has become very interesting to me (and I just presented a paper on it with more detail, especially on Aquinas, for others interested). It is interesting because I feel like those who subscribe to a rigorous "Thomist" philosophy or epistemology, I'm thinking of something like Jacques Maritain's ideas in Degrees of Knowledge here, have to wrestle at some point with what contemporary neuroscience is saying about the brain and epistemology.

I am also interested in arguing over whether or not there is a soul because of how the soul relates to soteriology. I suspect that a lot of the contemporary "practical" or "community"-based accounts of Christian salvation and the Church owe something to the way the Soul has fallen out of favor in theology in recent years. The question of the soul in theology, in a way, is partly the question "what happens to me when I become a Christian?" Does God come to dwell in the soul as a friend with me through created and uncreated grace? (John 14:23). Or is becoming a Christian only an incorporation into new bodily practices as part of a new community and way of living in the world?

Theology pet peeve: treating theologians like scripture

I once tried to get out of an introduction to theology class at Duke. I had been a religion major in undergrad and read a decent amount of theology books, blogs, and so on, and I therefore decided that this class would be too easy for me. When I went to talk to Paul Griffiths, the chair of the theology dept that year, he gave me a kind of verbal quiz instead of asking for the usual previously written papers or syllabi from previous courses. It wasn't really meant as a test to let me into the class or not, but rather to make me ask questions to myself about how advanced in theological studies I really was. He asked me "how does the two-natures doctrine of Jesus as divine and human relate to soteriology?" I fired back, "that which is not assumed is not healed," a commonplace from Gregory of Nazianzus.

"Well, what does that mean? Describe how that works exactly." Paul Griffiths asked me. I couldn't answer.

I realized later looking back on this and other events that my theological education up to that point had largely been about learning phrases like this from theologians and treating them like scripture. I had the bad habit of prooftexting from the tradition with no regard to what the phrases really meant. I suppose there is a point when one is learning theology that this kind of pedagogy is necessary, but at the same time Paul Griffiths was suggesting to me that to learn theology, you have to move beyond the citation of authority and to start learning the internal grammar of the subject matter. (I ended up taking intro to theology, which was a great class).

The problem is that a lot of theology today seems to be stuck in the theologian-as-authority view. Theologians who gain a certain amount of popular esteem are used in arguments like scripture prooftexts. This involves philosophers too - I've seen John Webster complain about the way Ludwig Wittgenstein seems to be quoted in an "oracular" fashion by theologians in North America. We could perhaps also say the same for the current Christian interest in atheist philosophers like Slavoj Zizek.

What, pedagogically, would theology look like if we focused more on learning the practice of theology as in really getting to the ground of its subject matter? What if theology courses involved only asking questions like: how does your understanding of the second person of the Trinity affect everything else in theology? How are the Son and the Spirit "sent" to us when we worship God or participate in the liturgy? How can you begin to describe in words the wonder of God's salvation for us in Jesus Christ?

Duke/Yale Theology in the Local Church (Part II)

I really liked the conversation my last post caused, both on here and among friends in real life. Now to avoid controversy I will make everyone extremely bored by describing some of the philosophical background to what I'm thinking.

Kathryn Tanner's book Theories of Culture analyzes the social and cultural location of theology in universities through the lens of cultural studies. She points out how academic theology is a specifically located social practice, one that is located in a way that is invisible to most theology students or theologians. The one professor I had who ever talked about Kathryn Tanner's book and wrestled with what it said was Amy Laura Hall, who I remember trying to drill into her students' brains that by going to Duke they were at a specific social and cultural location.

Tanner's book does a great job of making the social position of theology opaque to us. She reminds us that "academic theology is itself a material social process, a kind of Christian social practice in its own right with material means, a specific type of product, and production values" (Theories of Culture, 72). She goes on to say, in a way that seems to describe current fashions coming out of a general "Yale" perspective, that specialized academic theology works for its own "self-continuance" (and we can say the same for the "emergent" theology industry, "process" theology, and so on). She says "the goal is to enable further investigation of the cultural dimension of Christian social practices in the same explicit terms" (81).

Tanner thinks theology should focus more on the lives of everyday believers in a more material rather than more abstract way. She says theology should involve the arrangement of the pews. Tanner is concerned that an academic theology like "Duke theology," "Yale theology," or "liberal theology" operates at a level of abstraction from everyday churches because they are fueled by academic/publishing institutions that make these theological perspectives self-perpetuating. She says, "Academic theology should not squander its advantages, as it does, when tempted by its relative autonomy as a field, it artificially reduces the scope of its materials. Focusing only on other specialized intellectual productions, academic theology sometimes turns away from all it can use. It blinds itself to everyday theologies, past and present, and to the immediate practical problems that pose difficulties for Christian social practices in the particular historical context in which it works" (89).

In a more theological vein, Tanner gives a kind of "Barthian" read of the diversity in the Christian tradition in the last chapter of her book to say that it is wrong for Christians to use theology as a club to pronounce which confessions or Christian practices are properly part of "the tradition" or not. She says there is no "deep underlying or hidden depth to Christian texts or practice [that] guides the course of Christian life over time and space" (162). Then she says that "diversity is a salutary reminder that Christians cannot control the movements of the God they hope to serve" (175).

This last bit is what really hit me in my work as a youth pastor in NC, and this is what I mean in my last post when I say I think Duke/Yale-inspired theology runs over the spiritual experiences of Christians in a local church. I feel like God worked in ways that I was taught weren't supposed to happen. That sounds odd, but I think a lot of theological educators tend to put God in a box in this way (and I should add that what I'm critiquing isn't the thought of Stanley Hauerwas per se, but the matrix of faculty, students, and general attitude in Duke-inspired circles that led to this particular perspective).

Can theology "fix" local churches? No (Part I)

I've been thinking a lot lately (some here on this blog) about what theology actually does. How necessary is theology, and how does it relate to the local church?

I've noticed that many theologians and theology students influenced by "Yale theology" or "Duke theology" tend to use this language of "brokenness" regarding regular local churches. You get this picture sometimes that local church congregations in the US are being unfaithful (through being too Americanized, etc.), and that we theology-trained pastors are supposed to "fix" them. One person I know called it the theology "trickle down" theory. My divinity school spent a lot of time and energy forming and educating Pastors with the goal of sending them out to pass their formation and knowledge on to churches that needed it in a model similar to this.

I think this attitude is wrong. This kind of theology emphasizes the "Church-as-polis" aspects of the Gospel, and in doing so I think plays down the language of sin and salvation used in most congregations where Duke or Yale-influenced Ministers would work. I've struggled with this perspective in my own work with churches. When I started working at churches I felt like I should almost correct people when they talk about "getting saved" in a particular experience ("no, you've actually entered a particular cultural-linguistic system and an alternate political witness to the heretical soteriology of the state"). But I learned that the "Church-as-polis" view tends to run rough over the spiritual experiences of many Christians, and not to mention the way many local congregations read the bible. I think some of the philosophical thinking behind this brand of theology puts seminarians' understanding of theology, theology as in reflection/talking about the Gospel, at a problematic remove from people in local churches.

I may be wrong here. I'd like to blog more on this with a little more philosophical/theological background soon (mostly using Kathryn Tanner's book). I'd welcome discussion.

Aquinas the Preacher?

Ever think about Aquinas as Preacher? In the Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth charges Aquinas and the whole Catholic tradition with privileging the Sacraments to the neglect of the preached word. However, Barth's charge may be the result of a limited reading of Aquinas. While Aquinas has no special treatise confined to the topic of preaching, Aquinas scholars are discovering a theology of preaching and of the preached word nestled in the Summa Theologiae and other works.

Recent scholarship points to a section of the Summa in which Aquinas meditates on "Christ’s Doctrine” (Third part q. 42). What Aquinas looks at when he asks questions about "Christ's Doctrine" is Jesus's teaching style as described in the Gospels. They say this is an unexplored aspect of how Aquinas’s liturgical and religious context influences his theology. Aquinas was a member, after all, of an "Order of Preachers." Avery Dulles also wrote a small article tracing out Aquinas's "theology of worship" from various places in the Summa, and made a special note on preaching in Aquinas. CUA Press just published this text, a collection of Aquinas's academic sermons. We already have translations of many of Aquinas's sermons and commentaries on biblical books like John's Gospel and Hebrews.

There is a lot of interesting material emerging to help scholars put together what "Aquinas the Preacher" might be like, and what groups like Baptists can learn from him.

A Protestant, Postliberal Aquinas?

Protestants of all kinds are getting interested in Thomas Aquinas, particularly those who write on "practices" and the virtues with inspiration from the work of Stanley Hauerwas. The "postliberal Aquinas" is very popular these days, especially for those who do theology in heavy conversation with Wittgenstein.

Aquinas's doctrine of the "hylomorphic union" of body and soul seems to appeal to the current Protestant interest in "embodiment" as well (Aquinas isn't like Plato: he thinks a human being is a soul and body united, and that our bodies are an essential part of who we are as human beings and how we relate to God).

Aquinas doesn't get a mention in James KA Smith's book Desiring the Kingdom, but there's a connection there that he may not have been aware of. Smith’s reading of “secular” and “Christian” liturgies and his focus on embodiment finds a clear parallel in one of Aquinas’s arguments for the necessity of the sacraments. In this argument in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas says that one reason that the sacraments were necessary was in order that human beings might be offered “bodily exercise” whereby they might be “trained to avoid superstitious practices, consisting in the worship of demons, and all manner of harmful action, consisting in sinful deeds” (III, 61.1).

Of course, Smith's understanding of the sacraments clearly differs from a lot of what Aquinas says, and he, along with Hauerwas and others, seems to be wary of the language of grace and individual salvation as was traditionally used by Reformed and Catholic theologians. At the same time this little overlap between Smith and Aquinas's Summa is notable for those interested in dialogue.