Theology as Divinization?

Karl Barth connects theology with something like divinization or theosis - that is, salvation as involving a kind of union with God. I thought I'd share some thoughts I jotted down on this. I've recently been thinking through the connection between Christology and theosis, a connection that Michael Gorman's recent book Inhabiting the Cruciform God put in my head. What follows are some notes I made on Barth's words in the early part of Church Dogmatics 2/1.

Barth says that in faith, God becomes a new “subject” for the human being seeking knowledge of objects - “knowledge of faith means fundamentally the union of man with the God who is distinct from him as well as from all his other objects” (15). B. says later: “Knowledge of God is thus not the relationship of an already existing subject to anobject that enters into his sphere and is therefore obedient to the laws of this sphere. On the contrary, this knowledge first of all creates the subject of its knowledge by coming into the picture” (21)

Further on in the “small print” section, Barth connects this new subjectivity and new identity for the Christian “knower” in faith to holiness and sanctification: with an emphasis on being “set apart.” Further on, He says that our knowledge of God is a participation in God’s self knowledge, which B. interprets in a strongly Trinitarian way (16, later p.48)

Therefore Barth starts off with an image of theology where human work or human intellectual gifts are subordinated to this transformation which comes through faith. This is why later on Barth will say that theologies which try to explore outward boundaries of theology or to look for the Gospel in alien cultural systems are a problem (see 94-95, for instance). Barth takes very strongly in his theology that theology must begin with the fact that God exists and exists for us as Trinity - and that theology must work in faith to this setting and never doubt it - thus more abstract “religious studies” is not theology, but Barth says a perennial temptation of theologians who want to do work without this intellectual submission to the living God (26). If prayer is unnecessary for one’s academic work, one is no longer doing theology, for Barth. Drawing on Calvin on 1 John, Barth says theology is discipleship: God’s revelation of God’s will and human response to this (28-29).

This all has a Christological spin as well, as the theological knowledge Christians have of God is essentially and solely the “God-manhood of the Mediator Jesus Christ” (20) - something which Barth connects with God’s revelation to Israel as well. Union with God through the knowledge of faith means knowing Jesus Christ, for Barth (see 48). Any Lutheran “veiling” or accommodation in the revelation of God hangs only on the fact that God has mysteriously become so objective in Jesus Christ and not in other ways.

Barth adds an ethical or even “political” aspect to this knowledge as well. He criticizes theological knowledge written in the form of an abstract construal as missing the demands/actions/rhythms that faith demands (like church attendance and prayer) (22). Barth’s reading of “humans before God” is one where God in a way “re-creates” (not B’s term) the human knower into a new form of life determined by trust in the Triune God.

Nerds and Theology

There's something of a rise in "geek culture" these days: one of the company mottos for Blizzard Entertainment, a prominent video game company, is "embrace your inner geek." On their website, Blizzard says "Everyone here is a geek at heart. Cutting-edge technology, comic books, science fiction, top-end video cards, action figures….Whatever it is they’re passionate about, it matters that each employee embraces it! Their unique enthusiasm helps to shape the fun, creative culture that is Blizzard Entertainment."

I've found that the amount of nerds has increased the farther I go in the academic world. Now that I'm in a Ph.D. program it seems that not a week goes by that I don't have a conversation on the relative merits of Battlestar Galactica seasons. Students aren't the only nerds either: the Baptist theologian Stanley Grenz, for instance, began his book on postmodernism by talking about Star Trek: The Next Generation. John Milbank recently published an article defending "Constantinian" use of power that references Gandalf and Frodo from The Lord of the Rings.

I wonder if folks fifty years from now will be discussing how science fiction and fantasy writing influenced our theology. I think that a lot of dispositions and habits of thought are put in theologian's heads from reading sci-fi and fantasy books. It's probably not accidental that almost every person I know who is really into Aquinas uses lots of Tolkien metaphors. A friend of mine once told me that only two types of people get theology Ph.Ds: people who are nerds, and people who are generally eccentric.  As a nerd myself, I can say that theology nerds find aspects of the Christian faith fascinating, enjoy reading books and articles, and decide to try to make a living out of it. But I think it's worth reflecting on how the "nerd culture" a person lives in can affect their intellectual work.

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."