There are some modern theologians I now couldn't not read. Sometimes a double negative is the best way to be emphatic, making a point by grammatical clumsiness. Double negatives act like speed-bumps on the rat run of our hasty assumptions.
So just to
slow you down
enough
to hear
the point I'm making,…..
There are some theologians you read and that's it, you've done it and you can move on. But there are others who aren't so easily assimilated, and who refuse to be reduced to the status of transient interest now dispensable.
For different people, the names would be different. I know readers of this blog have their own need-to-read authors. For myself I couldn't not read Moltman, Bonhoeffer, T F Torrance, Yoder, Newbigin, Brueggemann, Hauerwas, Rowan Williams.
From earlier centuries there are others I return to, and some of them I couldn't not read either (Julian of Norwich for one, the very different P T Forsyth for another). But for now I've been reflecting on why these particular modern theologians have so fully entered my theological bloodstream that they are now essential to my spiritual and intellectual health. It isn't that I agree with all that any one of them says. And not as if they are all from the same theological stable. Some of them are quite hard to read, several of them write far too much, and I haven't read all that any one of them has written.
But they are,
every one of them,
Christian theologians who have required of me
a new depth of response,
demanded a full measure of intellectual integrity,
and instilled a spiritual seriousness
that understands the necessary connections
between good theology,
Christ-like practice,
and the habit of doxology.
This coming year I intend to pick one book from each of these, and read them again. With one or two it might be one I haven't read before. But Moltmann's The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Newbigin's The Open Secret,
and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, (I see these two as essentially together), Yoder's Politics of Jesus, and Volf's Exclusion and Embrace, are all but self selecting. It's a sign of age I'm told – to re-read instead of reading what's new. To be honest though, even the five books cited above are hard to beat as worthwhile theological writing that is inherently if at times uncomfortably transformative for those who engage with them.
Which other theologians, writing today, meet the benchmarks of that italics sentence above?
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