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.