Category: Theology

The Mystery of the Trinity and the Beauty of the Infinite

"From an aesthetic perspective, David Bentley Hart offers an impressive trinitarian account of beauty that presents Being as primarily the shared life of the triune God: ontological plenitude and oriented toward another. The beauty of the infinite is reflected in the dynamic co-inherence of the three divine persons, a perichoresis of love, an immanent dynamism of distinction and unity embracing reciprocity and difference. The triune God does not negate difference; rather, the shared giving and receiving that is the divine life may be compared to an infinite musical richness, a music of polyphonic and harmonious differentiation of which creation is an expression and variation."

An Introduction to the Trinity, Declan Marmion and Rik Van Nieuwenhove, (Cambridge, CUP, 2011) page 218.

No, it isn't dumbed down theology – and yes, it is a piece of demanding and precise discourse upon the Trinity. But why would we think any serious contemplation of the mystery of the Triune life of God should be immediately accessible in everyday vocabulary? This is a very good book on the Trinity, one that will find its way into our course on Rediscovering the Triune God. It is written as good theology should be – scholarly, lucid, presupposing serious effort from the reader, and rewarding those readers who love to think and for whom thinking deeply and honestly and openly and receptively about God is a way of loving God with mind and heart.

The drawing by William Blake is one of the most delicately subtle pieces of theological art I know. A print of it hangs in my study.

1 July 2011
Why we all need to get a theological life!

The great and erudite and sometimes not easy to read Jaroslav Pelikan, once wrote a book called The Melody of Theology. A Philosophical Dictionary. It is both a dictionary and an autobiography in which Pelikan discusses alongside philosophical theology his own faith and convictions. The metaphor of music for theology, with the appeal to composition, melody, harmony, disciplined originality, precision and improvisation, provides a wonderful range of possibility in the thinking, writing, speaking, listening, conversing and praying that is the theological life.

I can hear already some sighs of impatience with such an apparently self-conscious and self-indulgent phrase – what on earth is a theological life? Anyone who leads one or wants one needs to get a life. Aye, but what kind of life? Because at its most creative, transformative and fruitful, it is a well lived theological life that not only helps us get a life, but helps make it a life worth getting! And no, I don't want to turn everyone into amateur dogmaticians, two words that should never be juxtaposed outside of an irenic spirit. Nor do I think everyone should give up other life pursuits, intellectual interests, family commitments, cultural experiences, leisure and entertainment pleasures, personal development for work, just to waste the time saved doing God stuff.

The theological life is life lived with God always on the horizon, and often in the foreground.

The theological life is a worldview interpreted through what we believe about God.

The theological life is what we believe about God being brought into conversation with our lived experience in our daily world, from the personal to the global.

The theological life is a way of listening to our lives, the world and the voices of all the others we encounter in the I-Thou of our living relatedness to all around us.

The theological life is to take with both committed seriousness and creative openness, the central truths of Christian existence and experience through which God has addressed His creation with the I-Thou of eternal love.

And thus the theological life is to live and learn, to give and take, to wonder and worship, to desire and enjoy, the great symphony of purposeful, precarious yet persistent love that has as its dominant theme what God has said and done in Jesus Christ.

And so the theological life is to see our lives, our world and the future of all creation as that symphony moving towards its thunderous, rapturous and sublime finale.

And so the theological life is to get a life, and one worth getting – and giving in love and service to one another, and to the Triune God, Father Son and Spirit, One God, Blessed forever.

24 June 2011
Divine Humanity – in defence of Kenosis

A while since I wrote a post in the category Confessions of a Bibliophile. And this is a seriously embarrassing confession. David Brown's book on kenotic Christology has just been published. The price is outrageous, and email correspondence with SCM merely confirms that as an academic book with a limited market it has to be fixed at a viable price. no apology, no compromise, no sympathy. So. No guessing games. The paperback copy of 273 pages cost £50. That's 5.5p per page.

If you are regularly around this blog you'll know my interest in Trinitarian kenosis and kenotic Christology. To buy this book you need a kenotic wallet, self-emptying! I'm not sure what response to make when a publisher produces a book that has this kind of price tag. I understand the need to be competitive. I recognise that academic books have a smaller circulation and thus a narrower margin for profit. I also acknowledge the quality and importance of good academic theology being published and flowing out into wider peer discussion. But the price has got to be affordable, the book accessible, and have some sense of value for money – I don't mean cheap, I mean fair.

So my wallet has self emptied, and I've already used a large gulp of the book allowance. That said – this is an important book, an elegantly written and openly positive defence of kenotic Christology. Nearly half way through it and have enjoyed the careful clearing of the ground through context, historical theology and constructive proposals. What is most impressive is that in defending Kenosis as a viable theological category in Christology and Trinitarian theology, Brown doesn't overstate the case or overlook the theological difficulties with kenotic theology – but neither does he gloss over the theological difficulties and serious questions raised by the Nicean and Chalcedonian definitions. The orthodox position is not itself so rooted in biblical categories and exegetical foundations that it avoids serious questions of adequacy and sufficiency as a Christological definition persuasive to contemporary minds.

One of Brown's major contentions is that a kenotic trajectory is not dependent on the classic text of Philippians 2.5-11. The Synoptic Gospels in narrative drive and plot portray Jesus in terms that are not incongruent with a kenotic motif. Once I've read it all, and thought some more, I'll post again.

Another research interest is the hymns of Charles Wesley, whom brown quotes – and here the kenotic imagery is made to bear the full Christological weight:

Emptied of His majesty,

Of His dazzling glories shorn,

Being's source begins to be

And God Himself is born!

Theological adventurousness is not inimical to Evangelical orthodoxy, it seems.

26 May 2011
Intellectual work, breaking sweat, and theological reading!

Delivery

Customarily, I rise early and spend

a couple of hours in my study before

washing and shaving. One morning

last week, the postman catching me

in night attire, I explained I had been

up for ages, rhyming away. Today,

exercising, I was perspiring freely

when the bell rang: he eyed me

impassively, then went on his way

murmuring, "Heavy work, this poetry!"

Stewart Conn, The Breakfast Room, Bloodaxe, 2010, p.33

Poetry, theology, philosophy – all three ways of writing, speaking and spending time. Not everyone would call such reflective thinking, intellectual exercise, and mental discipline, work. So I like the postman's ironic scepticism, or innocent wonderment at the thought that hard thought and careful writing breaks sweat! And I'm sympathetic to a poet who does a couple of hours before the working day starts – Some of my best hours are early morning too – that's when I slowly make my way through the big books, several pages at a time. It's an interesting thought that 5 pages a day can give access to 1,825 pages – which is a lot of poetry, theology, philosophy or whatever else takes our interest. Six three hundred page volumes – do that for a few years and you become dead erudite so you do!

My current reading is a book that needs that slow, attentive listening. Mark McIntosh is a theologian who understands the connection between the study of theology and the encounter the theologian is likely to have with the Subject of her study. Divine teaching. An Introduction to Christian Theology (Blackwell: 2008), takes the view that in studying theology, if the mind and spirit are open to it, the theologian is taught by the One who is the subject of study. It's a fine book, and one that offers an innovative and inviting approach to theological reflection.

1 May 2011
Tomas Halik – on not flat-packing the Infinite

The Renaissance of interest in Kierkegaard in recent decades is not without significance for Halik. The move in the 19th century from "study of God" (philosophical theology) to "an hermeneutic of the existential experience of faith" leads Halik to suggest that faith is the most radical existential expereince. And that theological tradition may have even more to say to our culture now than it did even in the existentialist high points of the mid 20th century.

"Out of all theological disciplines, that theological current is probably closest to spiritual theology; after all, spirituality is without doubt the dimension of Christian faith most relevant to the spiritual climate of present-day Western society. However if the theological impulses I have indicated are embodied in a lived faith and spirituality, then this liberation spirituality or exodus spirituality should not lead to shirking our responsibility for the society in which we have been placed. On the contrary, one of its essential tasks is sensitivity to the signs of the times in the cultural and political climate of today's world. "Solidarity with seekers" implies sharing in their seeking and questioning."

Here again Halik is arguing for a Church that vulnerably and willingly moves away from assertion and proclamation of claimed truth, to the much more humble position of listening, seeking and offering of truth from the experience of lived faith. To live responsibly in our culture, alert to the signs of the times, listening to the heartbeat and longings articulated by those who share our times and places, seeking a life more humane in which peace, forgiveness, conciliation, justice and mercy are lived out precisely as principles of a Gospel of peace, forgiveness, conciliation, justice and mercy. It isn't that the church should not be confident in the Gospel, but that it should stop being so self-confident that in its words and concepts, by its institutions and worship, in its history and traditions, through its theological articulations and apologetic arguments, it in any definitive sense HAS the Gospel as possession, has the truth in its finality, knows all there is to know, understands the incomprehensible, or conveniently flat packs the Infinite. The Church itself receives within its limited finitude only what it is given of the infinite riches of God in Christ, and so the Gospel is bigger than the church's idea of it, as Christ is greater than any formulation or conception purposed to contain Him.

A church confident in the Gospel is by definition one that should be the last to be guilty of self-confidence, and the first to confidently sit alongside the seekers of our age and culture and converse, explore, share and commend, review and revise, persuade and be persuaded as true, a way of life that in its embodied integrity gives credibility to those humble words we feel are capable of telling the truth, of bearing witness, to the reality of God as we have discovered that Loving Reality in Jesus.

I doubt if Halik would own all the weight I put on this – but I am largely persuaded for myself that such humble confidence, shared in the confidence of trust, would be a deep, and patient, and valid alternative form of witness to the One who once said to seekers who asked where he stayed, "Come and see". Confident in the Gospel of Jesus? Absolutely. Confident too, that the One for whom all things were made, who is the last word in wisdom and understanding, will lead those seekers in our own times, into that way that is truth and life. The role of the church may well be to create places of openness, moments of graced meeting and speaking, occasions of spiritual hospitality, encounters between those who seek and the One who is sought.

18 October 2010
Tomas Halik and the felled, lifeless trees of wrongly presented truth.

When I said I was reading this book slowly, I meant patiently, taking time to let a different voice say new things, or familiar things in new ways. I wasn't aware it would be read slowly, a page or two at a time, lying in hospital, with time to think between each reading, a miasmic doze, and the next couple of pages. Not sure anyone sucks lozenges nowadays – the word lozenge seems to refer now to a medically laced sweet from a bygone age. But as a sweet to be sucked rather than crunched, slowly ingested rather than consumed, enjoyed for lasting taste rather than eaten for short term satisfaction, the metaphor still works. This book is a lozenge type read.

The cliche graffiti story, "Jesus is the Answer" to which someone allegedly wrote below "What is the Question", may in the end be mere baseless anecdote at best; at worst, a preacher's invention. But Halik pushes the point and arrives at a different intellectual level. Quoting the philosopher Eric Voegelin, Halik asks whether the biggest problem for Christians today is not that they don't have the right answers, but that they've forgotten the questions to which they were the answers. Then Halik continues:

Answers without questions – without the question that originally provoked them, but also without the subsequent questions that are provoked by every answer – are like trees without roots. But how often are Christian truths presented to us like felled, lifeless trees in which birds can no longer find a nest?

There in a couple of sentences is the diagnosis of the church's contemporary malaise and missional confusion. We talk dialogue and practice assertion. We claim to present, embody, live by, know, the truth, but to put it in the words of that most unmetaphysical of movie characters, Jack Nicholson, "Son, you can't handle the truth!" Because the truth is bigger than our capacity; the truth is stranger than our conceptual field can contain; the truth is never our possession always our gift, and never entirely given. And whatever else I make of the Colossian Christ, the Johannine Logos, the Hebrews "God's last word" claim about Jesus Christ, whatever else I make of the NT claims to apostolic testimony to the truth, it never was that the church can simply take truth for granted. We don't possess it, it possesses us; we don't control it, truth compels and constrains us.

And while Halik can push too far his hesitations about just how much truth can be understood, held to, made the base convictions of life, he is absolutely right in his image of felled lifeless trees, truths nobody cares about any more; truths that don't shelter; truths that have lost the sap of life. And therefore truths cut off in the deforestation of a landscape that should include mystery, miracle, question, search, enquiry, discovery, newness, oldness, longing and finding, losing and recovering, sunlight and shadow, the colour and tone of life rather than the settled leafless skeletal greyness of what used to be a magnificent rain forest, a life-giving canopy under which human life is explored in the mystery and history of a God loved world.

And yes that is idyllic, and a bit overblown. But I do sense in our cultural landscape that deforestation of religious ideas is well underway, a land-stripping of those vast questions that have always fascinated and terrified, opened us up in mind and heart, to a universe at once alien and home. Which brings me back to the New Testament. Because I happen to believe its outrageous claim that in Jesus Christ the universe co-inheres, all things hold together. That in Jesus Christ, the Lamb Slain from the foundation of the world, the Word uttered by the Father, the Life that Lightens every human being, the heart of God is revealed. And the mind of God is glimpsed – not captured, not contained, not comprehended – but we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth. And when it comes to beholding glory we can only glimpse - because to gaze would be blindness.

Here's Halik again

It takes the confrontation of questions and answers to return a real meaning and dynamic to our statements. Truth happens in the course of dialogue. There is always a temptation to allow our answers to bring to an end a process of searching, as if the topic of the conversation was a problem that has now been solved. But when a fresh question arrives, the unexhausted depths of mystery show through once more. let it be said over and over again; faith is not a question of problems but of mystery, so we must never abandon the path of seeking and asking.

I think Halik is, quite simply, right. And I wish the church was able to recover the intellectual humility to recognise that what is now needed is a reforestation of the cultural landscape, a church with a sense of the greatness of God's humility, a church unembarrassed by the vastness of the truth of who God is in Christ. And a church lost in wonder at a Love way beyond our mere intellectual constructs, but purposefully present and deeply entangled within those profound and mysterious depths of human brokenness and aspiration that define us as human beings, made in the image of God.

17 October 2010
A theology of friendship – who knows where to start?

Radical Believer asked in his comment about a theology of friendship. My own study and thought has tended to explore the wider range of human experiences gathered under the multi-referential term love. Friendship is one expression of human love, and the classic exposition of love, friendship, affection and eros is C S Lewis, The Four Loves. Lewis's book suffers from the qualities and limitations of all Lewis's work. It is sexist, partial and at times infuriatingly condescending, with the tone of the University Common room of the mid-20th Century. But it is also written by a man who had married late, out of compassion which had grown from intellectual companionship to a love the intensity of which makes A Grief Observed one of the most genuine documents ever written on human love and loss. As well as which, Lewis is a moral writer, not moralistic, but ethically alert to those inner mechanisms of motive, human relationships, intellectual and emotional intelligence. So his book is still my starting point – and I've just used it again as a way into a quite significant theological exploration of love as self-giving. The scanned picture is of my hardback First Edition :))

A theology of friendship has been explored recently in several interesting contexts. One in particular is of significant interest to me. Friendship has become a major theme in developing an adequate theology of disability. Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology and Ethics by Hans Reinders is a substantial exploration of what it means to be human. The relation between our humanity and our capacity for friendship is the context within which Reinders explores the theological significance, and ethical implications of what it means to be a friend. In the background are two of the most important figures in the past 60 years, so far as our understanding of humanity and friendship are concerned. Jean Vanier and Henri Nouwen live the theology of friendship, and friendship is defined in the actions and dispositions we inhabit as we love and accompany others in life together.

But radical believer is looking for starting points. Can readers of this blog suggest some of these in the comments? Who knows what to read, where to look for theological reflection on friendship? And you poets out there – poems on friendship?

24 September 2010
“An Explanation of Everything” – Atheism and Insects Victorian Style

I suppose the argument from design is unlikely to persuade many in the contemporary intellectual climate created by militant atheism, or perhaps atheistic fundamentalism is the better term. The idea (with a long and respected history) is that there are some things that seem so wonderful they plausibly suggest design and designer rather than random occurrence. And that includes the known and acknowledged unknown marvel of a universe like the one we inhabit. I'm waiting for the new book of Hubble space images. While waiting I'm reading other stuff – as I do. Came across the following paragraph from an 1843 pamphlet Instructions for Collecting, Rearing and Preserving British and Foreign Insects. No author indicated. It is the argument from design innocent of the arguments that raged 20 years later on the publication of the Origin of Species. It is so quaintly naive in its assumptions that it is worth reading, if only to recover a sense of that lost innocence that can look and wonder, and give value to that ability to recognise beauty, intricacy and diversity as at least clues to a universe in which meaning is not ruled out as a prior assumption.

The contemplation of the works of the Creator is the highest delight of the rational mind. In them we read, as in a volume fraught with endless wonders, the unlimited power and goodness of that Being who, in the formation of atoms, and of worlds, has alike displayed unfathomable Wisdom. There are few objects in Nature which raise the mind to a higher degree of admiration, than the Insect creation. Their immense numbers – endless variety of form – astonishing metamorphoses – exceeding beauty – the amazing minuteness of some, and the wonderful organization of others, far exceeding that of the higher animals – all tend to prove an Almighty artificer, and inspire astonishment and awe.

That paragraph is likely to inspire quite other responses in Dawkins. Hitchens, Hawking and others. And yes, it no longer sounds self evident. But I wonder if in our intellectual lust for dominance we may have lost the intellectual moderation that comes from wonder, astonishment and awe. Intellectual power without intellectual humility can become intellectual hubris. Whether or not – the above paragraph is a reminder that this wonderful universe is to be gazed at as well as analysed, and thus understood at a deeper level than 'an explanation of everything'.

15 September 2010
Christian witness – bespeaking hopefulness to a culture mired in its own despair

Hope. To look to the future as open and replete with new possibility. To see our past and our present circumstances without conceding they determine who we will be, and what is now possible.

If there's one disposition, one emotion, one word for which our times are sick with hunger, it's hopefulness.

Are any of us immune to that darkness and heaviness of soul that occasionally descends as we glimpse our own shallowness, sense the superficial transcience of a life lived too rapidly, and long for something more permanent, durable, worth giving our lives to?

How to bear witness to Jesus who brings freedom in a culture suffering an advanced case of creeping exhaustion through trying to keep the creaking economic machinery going through the cycle of sustainable economic growth, global recession, and economic recovery. Remorselessness engenders hopelessness, and it's no accident that a theology of hope has an umbilical connection to liberation theology.

And alongside the search for meaning and identity through our capacity to participate in a consumer culture, isn't there something existentially significant about the contemporary pursuit of belonging, identity and connectedness through Facebook, Twitter and yes the blog?

One way or another we each try to locate our own living in the excitement and sameness, the creativity and the mess, the valuable and the trivial, the enduring and the disposable, the worthwhile and the wasteful, the optimism and the despair, that is the cultural flux of our times.

So I think of some of the great words that bespeak hopefulness. Bespeak – that is speak and make be. Speak into existence. Talk up. Not in the silly sense of make-believe, but in the prophetic sense of re-imagining a world in which hope and not cynicism is the default posture of our forward thinking. For example:

Amos 9.13, at the end of a doom laden sermon or two:

The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.

Isaiah 55.12, as a promise that simply denies to the status quo its claims to permanence and determinism

You shall go out with joy, and be led forth in peace, and the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Revelation 22.1-2, one of those texts that Hollywood would need CGI's to do justice, a vision of life and movement, of growth and fulfillment, of international healing and peace.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. on either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

And the lines from Browning's Paracelsus, Victorian rhetoric and human longing for a future drawn forwardt by the sense that in the murk and darkness we might be a bit like Moses sometimes, and have to draw near to the thick darkness in which god dwells…..

If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time. I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day.

God is love. God is light. But a Christian understanding of God, standing this side of resurrection, manages to look at a tired, scared, fragmented world, buckling under the strain of human activity, and pray, The God of hope fill you with all hope. It is God who bespeaks the future, not us. Thank goodness, and thank God!

Faith then, is
both defiant and imaginative – refusing to concede that how things are
is how they must be. Instead faith sends out trajectories of hope
towards a future differently imagined. Not because we can simply wish
fulfil the future – but because wherever our human future takes us, God
is already there, and there as eternally creative love, reconciling our
shattered cosmos, and bringing to completion our own brokenness through
that same reconciling love.

The Colossian Christ, the image of the invisible God, the one in whom all things hold together, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell – there is the core of any theology that claims to be Christian and relevant to a culture mired in its own despair, and apparently hell-bent on foreclosing on its own future. To bear witness to a different future, and live towards that future by a life of peace-making and conciliatory love, and to embody these in actions of generous, gentle, costly healing of whatever is hurting around us, – that is to bespeak hopefulness, is to be the Body of Christ, broken for the nourishment of the world.

In Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.

(The painting is Hope in a Prison of Despair, Evelyn De Morgan, Pre-Raphaelite)

(The space image above can be found here )

5 September 2010
Karl Barth and a Qualified Kenosis?

If then, God is in Christ,

if what the man Jesus does is God's own work,

this aspect of the self-emptying and self-humbling of Jesus Christ

as an act of obedience

cannot be alien to God.

But in this case we have to see here

the other and inner side of the divine nature of Christ

and therefore of the nature of the one true God –

that he himself is also able and free to render obedience.

Church Dogmatics, IV.1 Page 193

That is as succinct a summary as I know of the theological importance of kenosis as an interpretive category of Christology that derives ultimately from the intra-trinitarian life of God. "Kenosis articulates the act of love revealed in the Word made flesh." Kenosis is not so much an attribute of God as the quality that defines how the attributes of God are expressed in love towards all that is.

1 September 2010