Trinitarian Theology for the Church: Social Trinitarianism

The next issue I want to highlight in IVP’s volume Trinitarian Theology for the Church is the view of social trinitarianism. We are given two specific essays towards this end, the first by John Franke, discussing the social Trinity and the mission of God, and the second by Mark Husbands whose focus is explicit in his title: “The Trinity Is Not Our Social Program.” Franke follows a stream of interpreters (such as Gunton) who pit Augustine against the likes of Richard of St. Victor, creating a dualism between what is seen as a relational model and a psychological model of the Trinity. This is certainly not my area of expertise, but as far as I understand it, this conception of history is universally deemed anachronistic, positivist and overly-simplistic. Franke fails to interact with the likes of Ayres (amongst others), for instance, and therefore fails to do justice to the scholarship available for this kind of account.

10 Theses on Ministry to the Disabled

My family and I recently served at a camp for people with mental and physical disabilities and their families. Although I have been reflecting on ministry to the disabled for some time, this experience pushed me to bring some thoughts together in the following 10 theses:

1. The church’s ministry to the disabled must disavow itself of liberal society’s measure of human worth – autonomy, individualism, reason, rationality, independence and the capacity for self-advocacy (Stanley Hauerwas has shaped my thinking on this)
2. and allow its understanding and practice of human personhood to be disciplined by a doctrine of humanity according to which the creation of human persons in the image of God entails both endowment (human dignity) and summons (eschatological horizon).
3. Emphasis on creation and eschatology reminds its participants that as those given life and shaped in the “image and likeness” of their creator (creation), they stand in the world “worth-full” and called forward to the completion and consummation of the image found in Christ (eschatology).
4. The church’s ministry to the disabled therefore includes more than evangelism;
5. rather, as one facet of the Kingdom’s restorative work in broken creation it participates in the eschatological restoration and repair of human dignity in all its facets (most properly God’s activity into which he invites participants). This framework invests those “ordinary” gestures such as wheel chair etiquette with Kingdom significance, makes plain the importance of play, laughter, and the arts, and orders evangelism within an encompassing vision of the divine economy.

Trinitarian Theology for the Church: Vanhoozer Part 2

In this chapter, Vanhoozer continues his look at Scripture by working through Barth and Wolterstorff, merging the “best” of each to “set forth an evangelical, gospel-centered account of the Trinity and Scripture” (51). Initially, Vanhoozer addresses issues related to God and language, claiming that “God both creates and covenants by speaking” (51). Language functions to convey information, but not merely to do so; language establishes relationship. In the incarnation, finite discourse truly does assume the infinite, because God as infinite can assume the finite. In a telling claim, Vanhoozer states:

…by examining the economy, we see that God’s being is in conversing, and whatever we say the Bible is, it must, precisely as the word of this God, relate to this God’s triune conversation. God communicates himself – his love, knowledge and life – through himself. This conversational analogy depicts God’s being as essentially communicative and the three persons as a dialogue between communicative agents” (58).

The way Vanhoozer parses the concept of divine discourse in a trinitarian fashion is by invoking “unified action” with “three dimensions.” This sounds nice, but how does this trinitarian grammar function?

Trinitarian Theology for the Church: Vanhoozer Part 1

I have begun reading IVP’s new release of the 2008 Wheaton Theology Conference called Trinitarian Theology for the Church: Scripture, Community, Worship edited by Treier and Lauber. I want to work through several specific chapters, the first of which (actually two chapters) is worth the price of the book. Instead of having one chapter significantly longer than the rest, Vanhoozer has two chapters to start of this volume! You can’t blame him for being a little wordy when it is this good.

Vanhoozer starts by addressing the ETS doctrinal statement, looking to do some housekeeping work on coherence. My interest in these chapters has to do with the dogmatic location question which Kevin picks up and carries through his discussion. I want to address this because it seems to be the most important question for further dogmatic work. In the first chapter, he looks through various options: First, inspiration and providence, which suggests that the Bible is ‘of God’ because it is the direct result of divine providence (31). The second, inspiration and incarnation, pushes the discussion into Christology through an incarnational analogy of the text. Vanhoozer quotes Balthasar here, “The Word that is God took a body of flesh, in order to be man…He took on, at the same time, a body consisting of syllables, scripture,…verbal utterance” (35).

Teaching Spiritual Formation

In light of our recent post on spiritual formation and the seminary, I thought I would share a bit about my recent teaching experience. I have been off of the blog for a little while now as I teach a spiritual formation class at Talbot School of Theology on “Jonathan Edwards’ Spiritual Theology.” I have never taught a semester length class before, so I was baptized with fire as I taught for three weeks, five days a week for three hours a day!

The way I approached the class was to try and help the students understand what it means to honor someone like Edwards. Following Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous talk “The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards,” I suggestd that the only way to honor Edwards was to take on the spiritual and practical nature of his theology as we worked through the content of it. Therefore, I put together an hour long “Edwardsian prayer exercise” utilizing Edwards understanding of aesthetics, nature and spiritual imagination. Likewise, the class was oriented towards developing a spiritual discipline (for the final project), which would be grounded in the overarching movement of Edwards’ thought, starting with the doctrine of the Trinity, and working one’s way down to creation, fall, redemption on to glorification. My hope was to help students understand the systematic and practical nature of theology, and hopefully help them to see how important doctrinal development is for spiritual formation.

Has anyone else taught a class like this? I’m thinking through how to make this class better, as well as how to teach other classes like it. Has anyone found a way they find helpful to integrate prayer and the student’s spiritual lives in with the material of theology? I would love to hear any ideas.

Is the spiritual formation movement in theological education wrongheaded?

This question is one of many raised by Edward Farley’s Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (one I wish I would have read years ago!). Let me give you Farley’s assertion, then the argument that informs it:

[T]heological education has assumed that its unity and subject matter had no relation to the sapiential knowledge which accompanies faith’s concrete existence (piety). The flurry of activity going on these days about ‘formation’ and ‘spirituality’ is no doubt some sort of attempt at the restoration of piety [in theological education] … Because the aim has been to spiritualize the theological school’s life and ethos but not its course of studies, the formation movement perpetuates the inherited separation of piety and intellect. Presupposed here is that spirituality pertains to a realm other than the subject matter and end of studies … Furthermore, formation and spirituality seem to be viewed as to have little to do with faith’s sapiential knowledge (theologia). This may be why it has been so easy to talk about and urge a formation which lacks spirituality’s very essence, namely, discipline. This lack of a cognitive element and the discipline necessary to it may be the reason formation in the present-day sense exports intellect from piety (pp. 160-61).

How does this strike you?

Lying  behind Farley’s statement is a rather detailed historical tracking of theological education’s circuitous route from the patristic age to the present. The result:

N.T. Wright and the Reformed

I, unfortunately, have not had the opportunity (as of yet) to read N.T. Wright’s new book on justification. I have had the opportunity to follow several blogs work through it, and I wanted to chime in on a certain point. I was reading Scot McKnight’s analysis of the volume recently (which has been incredibly helpful), and he noted Wright’s decision to read “the righteousness of God” as “covenant faithfulness” (see this post specifically). I was surprised to see how the comments on this post expressed the conviction that while this position is not new to Wright, it was still seen as “new” nonetheless. One commentator states that while this is not idiosyncratic to Wright, it is certainly not from the reformers. I think this is a bit naive, and is using “reformers” in some sense like “Calvin.” Note this quote from Jonathan Edwards:

“So the word righteousness is very often used in Scripture for his covenant faithfulness; so ’tis in Nehemiah 9:8, “Thou hast performed thy words for thou art righteous.” And so we are very often to understand righteousness and covenant mercy [to] be the same thing, as Psalms 24:5, “He shall receive the blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of [his salvation],” Psalms 36:10, “O continue thy lovingkindness to them that know thee; and thy righteousness to the upright,” and Psalms 51:14, “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation; and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness” and Daniel 9:16, “O Lord, according to thy righteousness, I beseech thee, let thine anger and thy fury be turned away” and so in innumerable other places.” (Y9:114-115)

Edwards continues on to add, “God’s righteousness or covenant mercy is the root of which his salvation is the fruit.” In a debate with Piper, this would have probably come in handy! My worry with this debate (without having read it yet), is that “reformed” can be taken in too narrow a sense, thereby ignoring the insights of the later reformed orthodoxy. Has anyone noticed the actual debate taking this turn at all? Have both sides been fair to the historical issues?

An Exciting New Release from IVP: Ancient Christian Doctrine

This month marks the release of the first two installments of InterVarsity Press’s new series, Ancient Christian Doctrine, a companion both to the wonderful Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture and to the Ancient Christian Texts. The first two provide relevant passages from patristic sources respective to their aims while the last offers fresh or first time translation of various patristic commentaries. I have yet to see a volume in the ACT, but I am familiar with the ACCS as I use it regularly for sermon preparation and Scripture study. In my judgment, the latter is best used as a sort of reference volume whereby the reader can encounter various patristic comments on biblical texts, decide which one is most serviceable, and then go study the actual commentary. Patristic commentaries are too complex for one to understand what’s being said from a brief snippet. Hence, the launch of the ACT was quite important. Nevertheless, the ACCS is a good reference work that speeds up engagement with patristic sources.

The ACD goes through the Nicene Creed in 5 volumes.

Unlocking Romans Pt 2

The second chapter of Daniel Kirk’s Unlocking Romans explores occurrences of ‘resurrection’ in the Second Temple literature. Kirk discovers that ‘resurrection’ could serve a number of functions, but most can be traced back in some way to the issue of theodicy where such is not the abstract problem of evil, but the temporal question of how God could be faithful to his covenant at a time when it appeared his covenant people were faithful, yet not experiencing the promised covenant blessings. Resurrection revolves around ‘the vindication of God’ (p. 31). The level of engagement is mostly survey, but that does not keep Kirk from genuine insight. 

Chapter 3 turns to Romans, arguing

Sapiential Theology – Knowing & Loving the Truth

Sapiential truth [i.e. "engaged knowledge that emotionally connects the knower to the known" p. 4] is unintelligible to the modern secularized construal of truth. Modern epistemology not only fragmented truth itself, privileging correct information over beauty and goodness, it relocated truth in facts and ideas. The search for truth in the modern scientific sense is a cognitive enterprise that seeks correct information useful to the improvement of human comfort and efficacy rather than intellectual activity employed for spiritual growth. Knowing the truth no longer implied loving it, wanting it, and being transformed by it, because the truth no longer brings the knower to God but to use information to subdue nature. Knowing became limited to being informed about things, not as these are things of God but as they stand (or totter) on their own feet. The classical notion that truth leads us to God simply ceased to be intelligible and came to be viewed with suspicion.

Ellen Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine [Oxford, 1997], 236).

The Self-Effacement of the Spirit and the World’s Spiritual Ignorance: A Reading for Pentecost

‘No one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God’ [1 Cor 2.11]. Now God’s Spirit, who reveals God, makes known to us Christ, his Word, his living Utterance, but the Spirit does not speak of himself. The Spirit who ‘has spoken through the prophets’ [quoting the Nicene Creed] makes us hear the Father’s Word, but we do not hear the Spirit himself. We know him only in the movement by which he reveals the Word to us and disposes us to welcome him in faith. The Spirit of truth who ‘unveils’ Christ to us ‘will not speak on his own’ [Jn 16.13]. Such properly divine self-effacement explains why ‘the world cannot receive him, because it neither sees him nor knows him’ [Jn 14.17], while those who believe in Christ know the Spirit because he dwells in them. (Article 8 of Catechism of the Catholic Church, Popular and Definitive Edition, p. 158)

Torture and Paul

My friend Henry, a former Ph.D student in New Testament at the University of Aberdeen, published an article on St. Paul and Torture (click to read) at Religion Dispatches.

What are your thoughts? My initial thought was Paul’s comment at the end of Galatians where he talks about the real brand marks of the Christian being stigmata, the brand marks of Christ (namely, Paul’s beatings). Torture belonged, it seems, to the realm of worldly and fleshly opposition to the way of Jesus.

This issue is increasingly becoming a major topic of concern among Christians, particularly after hearing how the conservative side tends to be fine with a little torture now and again. How as Christians should we engage, both theologically and socially, with this issue?

A Note to Calvinists

As this July people will be celebrating Calvin’s quincentenary, a lot of books on Geneva’s reformer are appearing. One that is not getting the attention it deserves is Herman Selderhuis‘ John Calvin: A Pilgrim’s Life. I’ll be reviewing the book here in a few weeks (thanks to IVP for the review copy!). But for now, I thought I’d note one of Selderhuis’ observations that Calvinists eager to rejoice in Calvin’s legacy should bear in mind. It also explains why Barth was a good Calvinist.

“Suspense is always present when Calvin talks about God, and at times he himself does not understand God at all. Throughout his entire life Calvin busied himself with the question of who God really is, continuing his search for the Father he had found” (p. 22).

“Practical” Theology?

I have been talking with one of my new colleagues at Huntington about the nature and tasks of “Practical Theology” and its relationship with other theological subdisciplines (systematic, biblical, historical, etc.). She teaches in the department of Ministry and Missions and wonders if the theological work she does there is best characterized as “practical theology”. In some sense it boils down to how you define practical theology, and that in turn has implications for how you understand the roles of other modes of theological reasoning.

For sake of clarifying the issue, consider the following definitions and weigh in: Which do you find more satisfactory? And, does either map the relationship between practical and “systematic” theology in a compelling way?

As a theological discipline [Practical Theology's] primary purpose is to ensure that the church’s public proclamations and praxis in the world faithfully reflect the nature and purpose of God’s continuing mission to the world and in so doing authentically address the contemporary context into which the church seeks to minister … [Practice theology] extends systematic theology into the life and praxis of the the Christian community (Ray Anderson, The Shape of Practical Theology, pp. 22-3).

[Practical theology] begins and ends with inquiries focused on practices. The ground for this focus is an understanding of faith as a lived entity. Our task is to think through faith and “belief” in terms of their embodiment in life. Thus the primary reference of our theologizing is the lived life in all its contemporary forms. This contrasts with biblical studies’ focus on texts, systematics focus on doctrines, church history’s focus on the history of the community of faith, but relies on these forms of inquiry in understanding what it means for faith to be lived (Brock and Swinton, The Aberdeen School of Practical Theology).

Another part of my interest in defining practical theology is my concern that systematic theology not be understood as a practice sequestered from the lived existence of the church