Links from the last few days:

***

According to Dr Scaer, the most common way people join the Church is that someone invited them. Guess what? If church sucks, people don’t invite others. They don’t think “Man, my friends have got to be here for this!” They think “Well, I might as well keep going here.” So here’s a fun list that can work for all denominations!

Read the Fearsome Pirate’s church growth tips here. He also gives a Lutheran perspective in outlining some of the things that he dislikes about the PCA worship that he has experienced.

***An interesting post from Leithart here. He observes the way in which we are shaped by popular culture, beginning with a series of tests to see how easily we identify with certain popular slogans, characters and advertisements from our culture and then how easily we identify with Christian counterparts to these. I think that I got a near perfect mark on every part except for the advertising slogans, which probably has something to do with living in the UK. However, I admit that the references to popular culture were generally more familiar than the references to the traditional hymns and references from classic literature. I could probably quote near-verbatim the lyrics from a few dozen rock albums, but I probably know no more than a score of psalms by heart. I have a troublingly vast quantity of pointless pop trivia in my head, so Leithart’s post was a good one for me to read.

Leithart argues that the way that Christians often characterize our struggle with the world is deficient. We tend to think primarily in terms of a struggle of ideas. However, the battle is, more often than not, a struggle of desire. As René Girard has argued desire is mimetic, and the world is consistently tempting us to model our desires after its pattern.

This is where the church comes in. If the battle we face in the wider culture were merely a matter of ideas and thoughts, then we might be able to withstand the onslaught of bad ideas on our own. We might be able to fill our minds with good thoughts and ideas through reading and studying, and when a bad idea came up, we’d pounce. If we are cultural beings, whose habits and practices and desires are shaped by the habits and practices and desires of others around us – and we are – then we can’t really stand up to the cultural temptations in isolation, by ourselves. We cannot resist on our own. We need to be part of a resistant community, a resistant community that recognizes the way the world seeks to shape us into its image, and self-consciously resists the world.

And we can’t resist something with nothing. To the world’s desire-shaping, formative practices, Christians need to oppose a different set of desire-shaping practices. We can’t say: I won’t desire what the world wants me to desire. We have to have positive, godly desires in place of the world’s desires. And these desires and habits need to be nurtured, cultivated, shaped and formed in a particular community. The church has a culture, and must be a culture, if it is going to resist the forces that would conform you to worldly culture.

Leithart also has a post on consumerism that I found interesting.

***Following on from his earlier post on Dawkins and Lacan, Macht observes the importance of un-clarity in argument if we are to truly communicate:

Being “unclear” in one’s writing, then, can perhaps be a way to get the reader to NOT translate what they are reading into familiar terms. A writer want the reader to think in ways they’ve never thought before and that may require unfamiliar terms. This will of course require more work on the part of the reader and may lead to misunderstandings, but that might be the price a writer needs to pay in order to get his point across.

This, I suspect, is one of the reasons why misunderstanding so often attends theological discourse. In theology our terms are generally given to us by Scripture. Our overfamiliarity with these terms can lead to misunderstanding when we read people like Barth and Wright, who use familiar terms in unfamiliar ways. It takes quite a conscious effort on our part to overcome the familiarity that we have with the terms and begin to appreciate the ‘otherness’ of the theology of such men, and not merely interpret them on our own terms.

John Milbank has also observed the importance of ‘making strange’: developing new language to replace overfamiliar terms, in order that the peculiarity and distinctive character of the Christian position might become more apparent. This, I suggest, is one argument in favour of those who are wary of a theological discourse that works almost entirely in terms of biblical terminology. Such a discourse is helpful among those who understand the positions being advanced, but it can provide an impediment to those who have not yet grasped them.

***Joel Garver begins to articulate some of his concerns with the recent PCA report on the FV/NPP.
***Paul Helm on biblical versus systematic theology. I believe that the way that we do systematic theology is overdue for a complete overhaul. I don’t believe that biblical theology is the answer to everything, but I would not be sad to witness the demise of the discipline of systematic theology as it is often currently practiced (something that I have commented on in the past). Much systematic theology is ‘timeless’ in a deeply unhealthy fashion. It tends to treat its subject matter as if it were timeless and it also teaches in a manner that abstracts the learner from the time-bound narrative.

Systematic theology often seems to aim to present us with a panoptic perspective on the biblical narrative. We look at the narrative from a great height, from without rather than from within. This ‘timeless’ perspective is very dangerous, I believe. A reform of systematic theology would reject this way of approaching the discipline and would approach its subject matter in a slightly different manner. We study theology from within time, as participants in God’s drama. Neither the subject matter nor the student of theology should be abstracted from time. Rather than dealing with ‘timeless’ truths, we should deal with truths that are ‘constant’ through time.

Peter Leithart has suggested that ideally systematic theology would play a role analogous to the role that a book entitled An Anthropology of Middle Earth would play relative to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Such a book would help the reader to understand the constant features of the narratives. However, its subject matter would never be detached from the narrative nor could it ever be substituted for the narrative itself. The narrative always retains the primacy.

***Michael Bird writes [HT: Chris Tilling] on the importance of the study of NT Theology and Christian Origins. Here is a taster:

…when students (esp. evangelical students) talk about the message of the New Testament, they usually mean Paul. And when they mean Paul, what they mean is Romans and Galatians. Their understanding (or sometimes lack of undestanding) of these two epistles often becomes the centre of not only Paul, but of the entire New Testament. Hebrews, Matthew, Revelation, and Luke-Acts are all forced into a Pauline framework.

How is this corrected? First, Christian Origins shows us the real diversity of the early church. You only have to compare the Johannine literature, Luke-Acts, and Paul to see that the saving significance of Jesus was expressed in different (I did not say contradictory) concepts, categories, and terms. Approaches to the law were diverse and pluriform as Christians struggled (in every sense of the word) to understand how the law-covenant was to be understood and followed in light of the coming Jesus/faith (cf. Gal. 3.23). A study of Christian Origins opens our eyes to the reality and goodness of diversity, so that Christians can learn to differentiate between convictions and commands, and discern between the major and the minor doctrines of Christian belief. I would also add that, despite this theological breadth to the early church, there was still unity within diversity, a unity apparent in the common kerygma of the early church. While there was diversity and complexity in the early church, it was never a free for all, and the desire to discern between true and false expressions of belief were part of the Christian movement from the very beginning. That leads us to New Testament Theology and rather than priviledging Paul to supra-canonical status (and Romans and Galatians and hyper-canonical), we should listen to each corpra on its own terms and to the issues to which they speak. A study of this kind will indicate where the theological (and dare I say) spiritual centre of gravity lies in the New Testament.

The evangelical and Reformed tendency to force the whole of the NT into a Pauline framework is something that is becoming increasingly apparent to me. Over the last few weeks I have been studying the doctrine of atonement, for instance, in the NT. I have been struck by how muted the theme of penal substitution is in much of the extra-Pauline literature (or even, for that matter, in a number of the ’secondary’ Pauline epistles). If our ‘canon within the canon’ consisted of the Johannine literature or of Matthew and James, rather than Romans and Galatians, evangelical and Reformed theology would probably take a radically different form. Recogizing this fact has made me far more sympathetic to a number of traditions whose theology differs sharply from Reformed theology, largely because they operate in terms of a very different ‘canon within the canon’. Paul is only part of the picture and his voice is not necessarily any more important than others within the NT canon.

I suspect that a number of significant theological advances could be made if we were only to put our favourite sections of Romans and Galatians to one side for a while. For instance, we might begin to see the continuing role that the commandments of the Torah performed in shaping the life of the Church. We might begin to have a clearer sense of just how Jewish the thinking of the early Church was. An overemphasis on Paul’s more antithetical and abstract ways of formulating the relationship between the Law and the Gospel can blind us to how Paul and other NT authors generally continue to take the particularities of the Torah as normative for the life of the NT people of God. The way that the Torah operates has changed, but it is still operational in many respects as the Torah of the Spirit and the Torah of liberty.

We might also find ourselves called to more concrete forms of discipleship and begin to move towards a gospel that is more firmly rooted in praxis. We might also discover that the message of the gospel is not just concerned with the overcoming of sin and death, but also is about bringing humanity to the maturity that God had always intended for it. We might also find ourselves moving towards a more sacramental gospel.

***John Barach ponders the relationship between the Ten Commandments and the ten statements of Genesis 1.
***David Jones at la nouvelle théologie gives a list of links to material relevant to the recent Wilson-Hitchens debate on Christianity and atheism. There is also an interesting article in the Daily Mail, in which Peter Hitchens reviews his brother’s book [HT: Dawn Eden].
***Al Kimel’s blog, Pontifications, has a new home [HT: Michael Liccione]. The RSS feed also seems to be better on this one.
***June 2007 Wrightsaid list answers.
***As someone who believes that the inerrancy debates are largely unhelpful, I found this post by John H quite insightful. The Scriptures are exactly as God wanted us to have them and fulfil the purposes for which they were given. They are trustworthy. In the comments to the post, it is observed that the Church would have been far better off fighting for the ground of Scriptural efficacy, rather than Scriptural inerrancy. The Scriptures perfectly achieve the goals for which they were given. A position centred on Scriptural efficacy also serves to remind us that fundamentalism is itself a threat to a truly Christian doctrine of the Word of God, generally denying or downplaying the saving efficacy of God’s Word in preaching, the sacraments and the liturgy. Thinking in such terms might also help to move us away from the overly formal doctrine of Scripture generally adopted by conservative evangelicalism.
***Matthew gives some helpful clarifications in response to my comments on his recent post.
***The Baptized Body, Peter Leithart’s latest book is released today. Buy your copy now!
***David Peterson, from Oak Hill, gives an introduction to biblical theology in a series of audio lectures. I haven’t listened to these yet, but some of my readers might find them helpful.
***Ben Witherington on Billy Graham.
***R.P. Reeves on evangelicalism:

With Hochshild’s case, I was surprised to learn how bare-bones Wheaton’s doctrinal statement is, but as I’ve tried to think through the history of evangelicalism in a more comprehensive manner, I’m no longer surprised; rather, it’s exactly what I expect from evangelicalism. One of the characteristics of evangelicalism that I am working on developing is that it is first and foremost a renewalist, rather than ecclesiastical, movement. In 16th century Protestantism, the doctrinal heritage of the church (notably the ecumenical creeds) was explicitly reaffirmed, precisely because the Reformation sought to reform the church. By contrast, Evangelicalism seeks to renew the individual (and then, once a sufficient mass of individuals a renewed, this will renew the church, or society, or the state, etc.). Mixed with a primitivist suspicion of creeds and traditions, it’s not surprising that a basic affirmation of biblical inerrancy was believed to be sufficient boundary for evangelical theologians, nor is it surprising that this thin plank is proving to be a shaky foundation.

[HT: Paul Baxter]

***A PCA pastor: “We wouldn’t ordain John Murray”. Sadly, this is only what one should expect when theological factionalism takes holds of a denomination.
***Byron is right: this is a very good parable.
***‘Begging the Question’ [HT: Paul Baxter]
***From the evangelical outpost: How to Draw a Head and Assess your Brain Fitness.
***The cubicle warrior’s guide to office jargon
***The unveiling of the logo for the 2012 Olympic Games.

Seb Coe:

It will define the venues we build and the Games we hold and act as a reminder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire everyone and reach out to young people around the world.

Tony Blair:

When people see the new brand, we want them to be inspired to make a positive change in their life.

Tessa Jowell:

This is an iconic brand that sums up what London 2012 is all about - an inclusive, welcoming and diverse Games that involves the whole country.

It takes our values to the world beyond our shores, acting both as an invitation and an inspiration.

Ken Livingstone:

The new Olympic brand draws on what London has become - the world’s most forward-looking and international city.

And the brand itself:

***Finally, some Youtube videos:

The new Microsoft Surface:

Battle at Kruger:

I’m a Marvel … and I’m a DC:

New Skoda Ad:

I returned from a few days back in Stoke-on-Trent on Tuesday evening. My time back home was full of activity, but very enjoyable. As there was a wedding on, I had the opportunity to meet a lot more friends than I would have met on another weekend. During the few days back home, I watched Spiderman III for the second time (I far prefer Spiderman II) and Pirates of the Caribbean III (none of the later films in the trilogy have lived up to the original). I helped out at a kid’s club, with preparation for the wedding celebration and had to preach at very short notice (I mainly reworked material that I had written and blogged about recently). I also enjoyed following the cricket when I had a few minutes to spare. The West Indies may not be the strongest opponents, but convincingly winning a Test match does provide welcome relief after the mauling of the latest Ashes series and our failure to make much of an impact at the World Cup.

Over the last few days I have read a number of books. On my way down to Stoke-on-Trent on the train, I finished reading L. Charles Jackson’s Faith of our Fathers: A Study of the Nicene Creed. I had the privilege of meeting Charles a couple of months ago and have enjoyed reading his book. It is a very helpful introduction to the Christian faith, following the statements of the Nicene Creed. Each chapter is relatively short and followed by some review questions. It would be a useful book for a study class and also provides the sort of clear and straightforward (but not simplistic) introduction to Christian doctrine that might be of use to a thinking teenager (Ralph Smith’s Trinity and Reality is another work that I would recommend for this).

On the train journey back I finished reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. A friend recommended the book to me when it first came out a few years ago, but I have only just got around to reading it (I bought a secondhand copy of the book from my housemate John a few months ago). Martel is a very gifted storyteller and the book is quite engrossing. Whilst I strongly disagree with the underlying message of the book (about the character of faith and its loose relationship with fact), I greatly enjoyed the book and may well revisit it on some occasion in the future.

I have also been reading a number of other works, including Courtney Anderson’s To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson, which a friend lent to me, in preparation for my visit to Myanmar in September. I am also reading Steve Moyise’s The Old Testament in the New, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Children of Hurin and I have been dipping into the second volume of John Goldingay’s Old Testament Theology. On the commentary front, I have been using Goldingay’s recent work on Psalms 1-41 and Craig S. Keener’s commentary on John’s Gospel.

At the moment I am reading up on the subject of the atonement. I am particularly enjoying Hans Boersma’s work, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition. I am also reading Where Wrath & Mercy Meet: Proclaiming the Atonement Today, edited by Oak Hill’s David Peterson (I am still waiting for my copy of Pierced for Our Transgressions to be delivered), Joel Green and Mark Baker’s Recovering the Scandal of the Cross and revisiting Colin Gunton’s The Actuality of Atonement.

Since returning to St. Andrews I have done very little. I spent much of yesterday playing Half-Life 2 (which I am revisiting after a few years) and reading. Today I expect that I will be a little more productive.

The following are some of the sites, stories, posts and videos that have caught my eye over the last few days.

Matt Colvin has an interesting post on ‘Headcoverings as Visible Eschatology’. Within it he argues that Paul’s teaching on the matter in 1 Corinthians 11 was not culturally determined, but informed by redemptive history.

***James Jordan has posted a series on the Biblical Horizons website: ‘How To Do Reformed Theology Nowadays’. As usual, JBJ has many useful and provocative observations. Here is one extended quotation:

The second problem is that since the academy is separated from the world, it is inevitably a gnostic institution. It is a place of ideas, not of life. For that reason it tends to become a haven for homosexuals (as it was in Greece, as Rosenstock-Huessy again points out in his lectures on Greek Philosophy). But apart from that problem, the separation of the academy from life means that the fundamental issues are seen as intellectual, which they in truth and fact are not. Clearly, conservative theological seminaries are not havens for homosexuals. But when what is protected is ideas and not women, then something is not right. Do academistic theologians protect the Bride of Christ, or do they protect a set of pet notions?

Consider: A man might say that when the Bible says that the waters of the “Red Sea” stood as walls and that the Israelites passed through, this is an exaggeration. What really happened is that a wind dried up an area of the “Swamp of Reeds” and the Israelites passed through. Now, this is a typical gnostic academistic way of approaching the text. The physical aspect of the situation is discounted. What is important is the theological idea of passing between waters. Human beings, for the academic gnostic, are not affected and changed by physical forces sent by God, but are changed by notions and ideas only.

The Bible shows us God changing human beings, bringing Adam forward toward maturity, very often by means of striking physical actions, such as floods, plagues, overwhelming sounds, and also warfare. It’s not just a matter of theology, or of “redemptive history” as a series of notions.

Now, some modern academics have indeed devoted themselves to social and economic history, and have seen that human beings are changed by physical forces that are brought upon them (though without saying that the Triune God brings these things upon them). This outlook, however, has not as yet had much impact on the theological academy.

The fact is that God smacks us around and that’s what changes history. Ideas sometimes smack us around, true enough. But the problem of the academy is that it is (rightly) separated from the world of smackings. From the academistic viewpoint, the actions of God in the Bible, His smacking around of Israel to bring them to maturity, are just not terribly important. What matters are the ideas.

This means the chronology is not important, and the events as described can be questioned. Did God really do those plagues in Egypt, smacking around the human race to bring the race forward in maturity? Maybe not. Maybe the stories in Exodus are “mythic enhancements” of what really happened. It’s the stories that matter, not the events. Maybe the Nile became red with algae, not really turned to blood. The blood idea is to remind us of all the Hebrew babies thrown into the Nile eighty years before.

Think about this. For the academistic, it is the idea that is important. Human beings are changed by ideas. And ideas only. Of course, it should be obvious that turning all the water in Egypt to blood (not just the Nile, Exodus 7:19) is a way of bringing back the murder of the Hebrew infants and of calling up the Avenger of Blood, the Angel of Death, because blood cries for vengeance. They had to dig up new water (Ex. 7:24) because all the old water was dead and bloody. An event like this changes people. The theological ideas are important. But the shock and awe of having all the water of the nation turn to blood is also important. It forces people to change.

***Josh, the Fearsome Pirate, puts his finger on one of the reasons why I would find it hard to become a Lutheran and reminds me of one of the reasons I so appreciate the Reformed tradition: ‘The Bible & Lutheranism’.
***Peter Leithart blogs on a subject that has long interested me: the necessity of the Incarnation. The question of the necessity of the Incarnation might strike some as needlessly speculative. However, our answer to this question does have a lot of practical import, not least in our understanding of the relationship between creation and redemption and the manner in which Christ relates to the cosmos. It raises teleological questions very similar to those raised in supra-infra debates, but does so in a far more biblical manner (supra-infra debates that are not grounded in Christology do strike me as unhelpfully speculative).
***Leithart also blogs on the subject of Pentecost on the First Things blog, one of a number to do so over the last few days. NTW sermons on Ascension and Pentecost have also been posted on the N.T. Wright Page. Joel Garver also blogs on Pentecost here. Over the next few months I will be doing a lot of work on the subject of canonical background for the account of Acts 2 (something that I have blogged about in the past). I will probably blog on the subject in more detail in the future.
***There have been a number of engagements with popular atheism in the blogosphere recently, particularly by Doug Wilson. Wilson’s recent debates with Christopher Hitchens can be found on the Christianity Today website: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. It is interesting to see how Hitchens consistently seems to fail to get Wilson’s point about warrant for moral obligation. Macht also has a helpful post in which he observes Richard Dawkins’ tendency to lightly dismiss positions (not just Christian ones) without ever taking the trouble to try to understand them first.
***Joel Garver summarizes the recent PCA report on the NPP/FV and posts a letter raising some questions and concerns on the subject.
***Ben posts an interesting list of recent and forthcoming must read theological books and Kim Fabricius loses all credibility.
***A recent convert to Roman Catholicism argues that FV theology leads Romeward. A recent convert to Eastern Orthodoxy argues that Peter Leithart was instrumental in his conversion. The first post prompted a very lively and rather heated discussion in the comments (which I participated in).

Frankly, while I do not agree with such moves and do not find the slippery slope argument — much beloved of FV critics — at all convincing, I am not surprised that a number of people make such moves and credit the FV with moving them some way towards their current ecclesiatical home. Unlike many movements within the Reformed world, the FV is heading in a (small ‘c’) catholic and principled ecumenical direction. The journey to Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism is far shorter from a catholic than a sectarian tradition. The FV is not generally given to overblown polemics against every theological tradition that differs from the Reformed and appreciates reading material produced by Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and Orthodox. It can open one’s eyes to the fact that there are actually some pretty fine Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theologians out there and that, despite a number of failings, they are often far better on certain issues than their Reformed counterparts. Differences remain, but they are put into a far more realistic perspective.

***John H on what lies beneath debates about Mary. He also raises the issue of the presence of the Eucharist in John’s gospel for discussion.
***The most blogged passages of Scripture [HT: The Evangelical Outpost].
***Christianity Today has its 2007 book awards.
***Encouraging signs from Dennis Hou’s blog.
***Edward Cook watches LOST with Hebrew subtitles.
***Best selling books of all time [HT: Kim Riddlebarger]
***118 ways to save money in college
Learn a new language with a podcast
Learn the 8 essential tie knots
***New music from The New Pornographers [HT: Macht]
***A third of bloggers risk the sack
***Life as a secret Christian convert
***Global Peace Index Rankings (if you are looking for the US it is down at 96 between Yemen and Iran)
***A wonderful new site where grandmothers share films of some of their favourite recipes.
***Boy kills a ‘monster pig’ [HT: Jon Barlow]
***Some Youtube videos.

George Lucas in Love

Five Hundred Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

Pete Doherty queues for an Oasis album. It is sad to see how messed up he has become since then.

Finally, from my fellow St. Andrews Divinity student, Jon Mackenzie, comes ‘The Barthman’s Deck-laration’

The following is a brief intermission in my month-long hiatus…

N.T. Wright has just written an article that brilliantly captures many of my feelings about current evangelical debates about penal substitution, which is currently causing all sorts of splits and disagreements in evangelical circles in the UK. He also addresses critics of the doctrine and clarifies where he stands in relation to the work of Steve Chalke, for example.

There are few things that frustrate me more than evangelical debates about penal substitution. I am convinced, with Wright, that, whilst they capture something of the Scriptural teaching of the atonement, most evangelical penal substitution accounts are woefully sub-biblical. All too often they consist of some decontextualized prooftexts loosely strung together by a rather abstract theological theory and fall far short of the rich and multifaceted story that the Scriptures present us with. Although I am persuaded of the truth of penal substitution, I usually feel that such theories are not a whole lot better than many of the accounts given by those who deny penal substitution altogether. I have also come to realize that evangelical rhetoric often merely masks a lack of receptive engagement with Scripture. It may seem strange to some, but I am increasingly coming to the conviction that, if receptivity to the Scriptures is what I am looking for, I might be better off reading some good Roman Catholics as, somewhat ironically, they are often less invested in the perfect truth of their tradition than many evangelicals are.

The following are some quotes from Wright’s article. I highly recommend that you read the whole thing.

And I was put in mind of a characteristically gentle remark of Henry Chadwick, in his introductory lectures on doctrine which I attended my first year in Oxford. After carefully discussing all the various theories of atonement, Dr Chadwick allowed that there were of course some problems with the idea of penal substitution. But he said, ‘until something like this has been said, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the full story has not yet been told.’ For myself, I prefer to go with Henry Chadwick, and James Denney – and Wesley and Watts, and Cranmer and Hooker, and Athanasius and Augustine and Aquinas – and Paul, Peter, Mark, Luke, John – and, I believe Jesus himself. To throw away the reality because you don’t like the caricature is like cutting out the patient’s heart to stop a nosebleed. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and all because of the unstoppable love of the one creator God. There is ‘no condemnation’ for those who are in Christ, because on the cross God condemned sin in the flesh of the Son who, as the expression of his own self-giving love, had been sent for that very purpose. ‘He did not spare his very own Son, but gave him up for us all.’ That’s what Good Friday was, and is, all about.

*

What then do I mean by saying that Pierced for Our Transgressions is deeply unbiblical? Just this: it abstracts certain elements from what the Bible actually says, elements which are undoubtedly there and which undoubtedly matter, but then places them within a different framework, which admittedly has a lot in common with the biblical one, but which, when treated as though it were the biblical one, becomes systematically misleading. An illustration I have often used may make the point. When a child is faced with a follow-the-dots puzzle, she may grasp the first general idea – that the point is to draw a pencil line joining the dots together and so making a picture – without grasping the second – that the point is to draw the lines according to the sequence of the numbers that go with each dot. If you ignore the actual order of the numbers, you can still join up all the dots, but you may well end up drawing, shall we say, a donkey instead of an elephant. Or you may get part of the elephant, but you may get the trunk muddled up with the front legs. Or whatever. Even so, it is possible to join up all the dots of biblical doctrines, to go down a list of key dogmas and tick all the boxes, but still to join them up with a narrative which may well overlap with the one the Bible tells in some ways but which emphatically does not in other ways. And that is, visibly and demonstrably, what has happened in Pierced for Our Transgressions, at both large and small scale.

*

But the biggest, and most worrying, unbiblical feature of Pierced for Our Transgressions is the outright refusal to have anything seriously to do with the gospels. This is a massive problem, which I believe to be cognate with all kinds of other difficulties within today’s church, not least within today’s evangelicalism. There is no space here to open up this question more than a very little. Let me just tell it as I see it on reading this new book.

I was startled, to begin with, at the fact that the foundational chapter, entitled ‘Searching the Scriptures: The Biblical Foundations of Penal Substitution’, has precisely six pages on the Gospel of Mark, a good bit of which consists of lengthy biblical quotations, and four on John. And that’s it for the gospels. I don’t disagree with most of those ten pages, but it is truly astonishing that a book like this, claiming to offer a fairly full-dress and biblically-rooted doctrine of the meaning of the cross, would not only omit Matthew and Luke, and truncate Mark and John so thoroughly (sifting them for prooftexts, alas), but would ignore entirely the massive and central question of Jesus’ own attitude to his own forthcoming death, on the one hand, and the way in which the stories the evangelists tell are themselves large-scale interpretations of the cross, on the other. One would not know, from this account, that there was anything to all this other than Mark 10.45 (‘the Son of Man came . . . to give his life a ransom for many’) and a few other key texts, such as the ‘cup’ which Jesus prayed might pass, but which he eventually drank.

*

I am forced to conclude that there is a substantial swathe of contemporary evangelicalism which actually doesn’t know what the gospels themselves are there for, and would rather elevate ‘Paul’ (inverted commas, because it is their reading of Paul, rather than the real thing, that they elevate) and treat Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as mere repositories of Jesus’ stories from which certain doctrinal and theological nuggets may be collected. And this, sadly, chimes in with other impressions I have received from elsewhere within the same theological stable – with, for instance, the suggestion that since Paul’s epistles give us ‘the gospel’ while ‘the Gospels’ simply give us stories about Jesus, we shouldn’t make the reading of the latter into the key moment in the first half of the Communion Serice. (In case anyone should rub their eyes in disbelief, I have actually heard this seriously argued more than once in the last year or two.)

*

There are large issues here of theological method and biblical content, all interacting with other large issues of contemporary hermeneutics: would I be totally wrong, for instance, to see some of the horrified reaction to Steve Chalke, and to some of the ‘Emerging Church’ reappropriation of the gospels, as a reaction, not so much against what is said about the atonement, but against the idea, which is powerfully present in the gospels, that God’s kingdom is coming, with Jesus, ‘on earth as in heaven’, and that if this is so we must rethink several cherished assumptions within the western tradition as a whole? Might it not be the case that the marginalisation of the four gospels as serious theological documents within Western Christianity, not least modern evangelicalism, is a fear that if we took them seriously we might have to admit that Jesus of Nazareth has a claim on our political life as well as our spiritual life and ‘eternal destiny’? And might there not be a fear, among those who are most shrill in their propagation of certain types of ‘penal substitution’, that there might be other types of the same doctrine which would integrate rather closely with the sense that on the cross God passed sentence on all the human powers and authorities that put Jesus there? John 18 and 19 as a whole (and not only in individual words and phrases), and 1 Corinthians 2 and Colossians 2 as wholes, have an enormous amount to say about the biblical meaning of the cross which you would never, ever guess from reading Pierced for Our Transgressions and other works like it.

*

Sadly, the debate I have reviewed – with the honourable and brief exception of Robert Jenson’s article which began this whole train of thought – shows every sign of the postmodern malaise of a failure to think, to read texts, to do business with what people actually write and say rather than (as is so much easier!) with the political labelling and dismissal of people on the basis of either flimsy evidence or ‘guilt by association’. We live in difficult times and it would be good to find evidence of people on all sides of all questions taking the attitude of the Beroeans in Acts 17, who ‘searched the scriptures daily to see if these things were so’, instead of ‘knowing’ in advance what scripture is going to say, ought to say, could not possibly say, or must really have said (if only the authors hadn’t made it so obscure!).

As I have already suggested, read the whole article for yourself.

Believe it or not, I really meant it when I said (about a month and a half ago now) that I had no intention of reducing my input on this blog to that of posting long lists of links. I apologize for the continued lack of substantial posting. Hopefully this will change sometime soon. However, I won’t make any promises, as I have not the best track-record of keeping blogging promises. What do you, my reader, think of my link posts? Should I stop them or make them more occasional? Are they worth reading or would you prefer me to do something different with my blogging time? Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

The following are some of the things that have caught my eye online over the last couple of days:

Matt Colvin, whose Lenten reflection was posted on this blog yesterday, posts further thoughts on his blog on the Last Supper and on Gethsemane. He also has posted some posts that are relevant to the interminable FV debates: ‘Dead Orthodoxy’ and ‘Head on a Platter’.

***The Fearsome Pirate has returned! He kicks off with a post on Lutheranism. Josh, we’ve missed you.
***Leithart posts on the subject of the consumer revolution and gives us quite a Girardian insight from an eighteenth century writer.
***On the subject of René Girard, Edward Oakes posts on Girard over on the First Things blog.
***Macht links to audio from Calvin College’s Faith and Music weekend. It looks interesting: Sylia Keesmaat, Lauren Winner, and a number of other speakers.
***If any of you are feeling like engaging in some extreme penance, Ben Myers links to a meme that might suit you. He also posts Kim Fabricius’s ‘Ten Propositions on Political Theology’, which Josh and Joel discuss over on the BHT.
***Stephen at the Thinkery links to a post with a series of accounts of anti-LGBT encounters. Whilst I believe that lesbian, homosexual, bisexual and transgender behaviour is sinful, I have long maintained that homophobia is real and ought to be shown up in all of its ugliness by Christians. Some of the stories recounted should give us food for thought.
***There are few examples of homophobia as extreme as that of the Westboro Baptist Church. The following is the first part of the BBC2 documentary, in which Louis Theroux meets the Phelps:

The other parts of the show are also available on Youtube — part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7.

***The audiobook of Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine is available for free download from Christian Audio this month [HT: Tim Challies]. Don’t miss out!
***Why PowerPoint presentations don’t work [HT: David Field]. I feel vindicated: I have long viewed PowerPoint presentations with a mistrust bordering on antipathy.
***

According to recent studies, Britain has 4.2million CCTV cameras - one for every 14 people in the country - and 20 per cent of all cameras globally.

It has been calculated that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.

Read the whole article here [HT: David Field].

***Tearfund has a new report on churchgoing in the UK. There is some comment on the report on the BBC website. Graham Weeks posts some figures from the survey here.
***NTW’s Maundy Thursday sermon.
***The Placebo Diet [HT: The Evangelical Outpost]. I just need to know how to turn this finding in my favour.
***As usual the Evangelical Outpost has a number of other interesting links, which I thought that I would pass on:

100 aphorisms summarizing Calvin’s Institutes
Some classic insults
34 Reasons Why People Unsubscribe from your Blog (a quick scan confirms my suspicion that I have been guilty of the majority of these at some time or other)
The Internet weighs 2 ounces
***Some British teachers drop teaching the Holocaust and the Crsuades to avoid offending Muslims and other schools are challenged to change their teaching on the Arab-Israeli conflict by some theologically confused Christians [HT: Tim Challies]
***A skeptical ex-scientist describes the funding process for peer-reviewed research.
***Some more useful links from lifehacker:

How to Read a Scientific Research Paper
How to make yourself happier within the next hour
Google launches My Maps
Ditto: A useful Windows clipboard extension
***I am glad that I am not the only person who writes e-mails in this way:

Some of the other Youtube videos that have caught my attention over the last week include: LisaNova does 300!, Sand Castle Explosions Backwards v.1 and Sand Castle Explosions Backwards v.2.
***Jeffrey Overstreet asks whether movies are increasing our capacity to see, and whether the narrative of film distracts us too much from the visual dimension [HT: John Barach].
***And, on the topic of the poetry of cinema, I will conclude this links post with one of my favourite scenes from Spirited Away, which I watched yet again last night. It grows on me every time.

The FV discussion continues on unabated. Matt Colvin has some very good thoughts on the debate here (makes sure that you read the comments). Lane Keister suggests that ego is the main thing standing in the way of FV people repenting of their errors. The huge number of comments that follow his post make interesting reading. Meanwhile, the Presbyteer posts an overheard comment.

***Mark Goodacre and Dr Jim West continue to discuss the value of Wikipedia.
***Richard Mouw writes on Calvinism and sewage [HT: Prosthesis].
***Paul Duggan (who really needs to sort out his permalinks) puts forward the following statements for discussion:

1. Some Christians, because of their great faith or piety, are more effective than other Christians in begging God’s favors, say for healing the sick.

2. Since some Christians are of that sort, it is a good idea to ask them, in particular, to pray for you, say, if you are sick.

3. It is ok to think, in the back of your mind, “that man is righteous: his prayer will be partciularly effective for my sickness”

4. Doing so is not blasphemous, nor does it impinge upon the complete salvation we have in Christ.

***Mererdith Kline’s works online [HT: Ros Clarke].
***R.C. Sproul reviews N.T. Wright’s recent book, Evil and the Justice of God.
***The good bishop is also in the news again, responding to a BBC Radio 4 show with the ‘controversial cleric’ Jeffrey John, who claims that the doctrine of penal substitution “is repulsive as well as nonsensical” and “makes God sound like a psychopath.” The Sunday Telegraph reports:

Mr John argues that too many Christians go through their lives failing to realise that God is about “love and truth”, not “wrath and punishment”. He offers an alternative interpretation, suggesting that Christ was crucified so he could “share in the worst of grief and suffering that life can throw at us”.

Church figures have expressed dismay at his comments, which they condemn as a “deliberate perversion of the Bible”. The Rt Rev Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, accused Mr John of attacking the fundamental message of the Gospel.

“He is denying the way in which we understand Christ’s sacrifice. It is right to stress that he is a God of love but he is ignoring that this means he must also be angry at everything that distorts human life,” he said.

Bishop Wright criticised the BBC for allowing such a prominent slot to be given to such a provocative argument. “I’m fed up with the BBC for choosing to give privilege to these unfortunate views in Holy Week,” he said.

***From Vern Poythress’s ‘The Church as a Family’, which I had occasion to read a few days ago:

[M]any evangelical churches today are seen primarily as lecture halls or preaching stations. People identify the church with its building, in contrast to the Biblical emphasis that those united to Christ are the real church. Moreover, the building is viewed merely as a place for hearing a sermon or enjoying religious entertainment. Such a view impoverishes our communal life as Christians. Certainly monologue sermons are important, since they are one means of bringing God’s Word to bear on the church. But God intends the church to be much more…

But in too many evangelical churches, people have little experience of the Biblical practice of common family life. There may also be no regard for the necessity of church discipline. The church leaders are nothing more than gifted speakers or counselors (paid ministers), or else managers of church property and/or programs (whether these people are called trustees or elders or deacons). Such “leaders” are just people whose useful gifts have brought them into prominence. In such situations, it is understandable that some people may fail to see why appropriately qualified women may not exercise the key functions they associate with leadership. In fact, Christians will not fully understand the logic leading to male overseers until they come to grips with what the church should really be as God’s household.

***Steven Harris posts a Palm Sunday confession.
***Byron Smith on the chocolate Jesus controversy.
***The Pirate comments on the erotic character of much contemporary worship:

Let’s point out the obvious: replace the buxom blonde babes with stout matrons in their late 50’s, and the worship experience just plain doesn’t happen. Hire an older fellow that walks with a cane as your worship pastor instead of that handsome, young, energetic Cedarville graduate, and Sunday morning just won’t “work.” That should indicate something is wrong. This kind of “worship” isn’t anything new. Maybe fog machines, synthesizers, and colored lights are new, but sensuality and eroticism in worship aren’t. It’s just that in the olden-tymie days, you had to go to a pagan temple to get that. They [presumably the Church — Al] did a remarkably bad job of incorporating the pagan culture into their worship. A few things changed with the imperialization of the Church, but the damage had already been done. Christian worship was doomed to centuries of reverence, formality, seriousness, regularity, and deliberation until the 20th century brought Aphrodite back to her rightful place as the orchestrator of our worship.

***Doug Wilson posts 21 questions for a prospective wife. And, if you are reading Dad, I still do not intend to need to use these myself anytime in the foreseeable future…
***John blogs on slinkies.
***Louis Theroux meets the Phelpses.
***How to paint the Mona Lisa with MS Paint:

It has been quite some time since anything was posted on this blog. The pre-Holy Week guest posts have dried up (although hopefully my youngest brother will have sent me something before the weekend). I am presently enjoying my mid-semester break, although not a whole lot has been achieved so far. We have eaten a lot, entertained a number of people, caught up on some DVD watching and played far too much Settlers of Catan and Canasta. I have probably only read no more than one hundred and fifty pages or so of various books within the last couple of days.

Later today we are having more people over for a big meal, prior to a Desperate Housewives evening that my housemate Simon is organizing. I think that I will probably opt out of that (and not just because Desperate Housewives jumped the shark a while back). Tomorrow we have an all-day Lord of the Rings session, where we will be watching the three extended versions back-to-back. I will try and get some study done this evening to help me to justify a full day off. We have a 24-athon planned for next week, which should be even more intense. Hopefully, the LoTR day will help me to get in shape for that.

The following are some of the various things that have caught my attention online over the last few days.

I haven’t read either of them yet, but David Field has posted links to two Oak Hill dissertations, one on Romans 2:1-16 and another on Romans 8:13.

***Kim Fabricius’ Ten Propositions on Being a Theologian
***Also on Faith and Theology, Ben links to reports of Kathryn Tanner’s Warfield lectures and talks about his top 20 theological influences (very interesting reading; I will have to try to put together such a list sometime).
***Peter Leithart’s recent Pro Ecclesia article, ‘Justification as Verdict and Deliverance’, is receiving positive press on a number of places on the blogosphere. Al Kimel (aka: The Pontificator) blogs about it here and ‘Martin Luther’ makes some — rather strange — remarks here.
***John H has some good remarks on faith and certainty:—

In other words, faith isn’t something we are to try to work up in ourselves. It isn’t some inner state of certainty to which we somehow attain. God, in his mercy towards us, does not require us to hold within our heads at one moment the whole truth of Christianity, and to assent to it. Rather, he comes to us with concrete, audible promises: “Your sins are forgiven”; “Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ”; “This is my body, given for you… this cup is the new testament in my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins”. Faith is believing the promise we are hearing right now.

Read his whole post here.

***Pope Benedict XVI tries to remind people of the existence of hell.
***Islamic feminist theologians (I suppose that that, like lesbian Eskimo bishops, some have to exist somewhere…).
***Garrett questions the value of long sermons.
***Mark Goodacre writes in defence of Wikipedia. Dr Jim West disagrees strongly.
***‘John Lennon’s Born-Again Phase’ [via Dave Armstrong]
***As usual, there have been some great posts on Leithart’s blog over the last few days. In this post he talks about a type of hospitality that has largely been lost or forgotten in our world.

The church set up various institutional forms of hospitality, including hospitals for the rejected and marginalized sick and weak. But the early church fathers also said that individual believers were supposed to show the same hospitality. Christine Pohl writes of Chrysostom: “Even if the needy person could be fed from common funds, Chrysostom asked, ‘Can that benefit you? If another man prays, does it follow that you are not bound to pray?’ He urged his parishioners to make a guest chamber in their own houses, a place set apart for Christ — a place within which to welcome ‘the maimed, the beggars, and the homeless.’”

It is quite easy to be charitable from a distance. The effort necessary to slow the frenetic pace of our lives down to be able to extend personal care and hospitality to people in need, rather than merely donating money is considerable. I have been very blessed by the example of my parents in this respect. Over the years we have taken many needy people into our home to live with us, for periods of time varying from a few days to a number of months. We have taken in itinerants, homeless people, students, recovering drug addicts and many others. Whilst our hospitality has been abused on more than one occasion, the experience of sharing your life with people in need is such a valuable and eye-opening one that I don’t think that we have any major regrets, even though we might do things slightly differently in the future. Quite apart from anything else, you learn a lot about yourself and your own weaknesses and failings.

Leithart also has some great posts on Jane Austen: ‘Keeping us Reading’, ‘Austen and Prejudice’ and ‘Communal Judgment, Communal Argument’.

***Tim Challies writes on the subject of discernment in the gray areas.
***Paleojudaica, Dr Jim Davila’s blog, turned 4 over the weekend. A belated ‘Happy Birthday!’.
***In my last links post, I linked to a post on speed-reading. Since then Matt has linked to this tool (I’m not sure that I find it particularly helpful, though) and the Evangelical Outpost links to this post on how to read a lot of books in a short time. John Barach speaks up on behalf of slow reading. It surprises some people when I tell them, but I slow-read most books, principally because I am of the conviction that the quality of one’s reading is more important than the quantity. The best books are to be savoured. I also slow read many of the worst books, as I feel duty bound to ensure that I understand someone very well before I strongly disagree with them. I also write lots of comments in the margins of my books and underline many sections, which slows down the reading process considerably.
***John Piper and Ligon Duncan speak on the subject of ‘The Challenge of the New Perspective to Biblical Justification’ on the Albert Mohler Radio Program.
***Some facts about the top 1000 books found in libraries [HT: Tim Challies].
***Josh, the fearsome Lutheran pirate, writes in defence of women’s ordination (don’t worry, he is not seriously advocating the position).
***Mark Whittinghill alerts us to a new posthumous Tolkien book. It should be released in under a month.
***Michael Spencer links to a list of D.A. Carson MP3s.
***Lifehacker tells us how to cure hiccups with sugar and gives a guide to power-napping.
***There is a new Youtube channel dedicated to material about the Archbishop of Canterbury. The first video contains the archbishop’s reflections on the slave pits in Zanzibar.
***Also in the world of Youtube, the Youtube Video Awards have been announced.
***Why models don’t smile and 101 great posting ideas [HT: The Evangelical Outpost].

installment bad loans credit

In many advanced markets from Japan and South Korea, to Scandinavia, to Israel, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, most children age 8-9 have installment bad loans credit s and installment bad loans credit accounts are now opened for customers aged 6 and 7.

student loans plus

The Internet-based transition was further marked in 2005 with the on-air, G4TechTV review of “SmashTheTones” (now “Mobile17″), the first third-party solution to allow student loans plus creation on student loans plus without requiring downloadable software or a digital audio editor.

loans credit for personal quick poor

AAC: Some phones like loans credit for personal quick poor Ericsson W810i support loans credit for personal quick poor s in “.

sloan carl

When sloan carl removes the SIM Card, it can be re-inserted into another phone and used as normal.

loans chance second

Today mobile payments ranging from mobile banking to mobile credit cards to mobile commerce are very widely used in Asia and Africa, and in selected European markets.

home loans clearwater

The Finnish government decided in 2005 that home loans clearwater way to warn citizens of disasters was the home loans clearwater network.

loans auto bankruptcy

The first downloadable mobile content was sold to loans auto bankruptcy in Finland in 1998, when Radiolinja (now Elisa) introduced the downloadable ringing tone service.

loan purchase home 100

SMS text messaging was worth over 100 billion dollars in annual revenues in 2007 and loan purchase home 100 average of messaging use is 2.

programs loaner

[17] This aspect of the mobile telephony business is, in itself, programs loaner e.

mortgages and loans home

currently has one of mortgages and loans home rates of mortgages and loans home penetrations in the industrialized world at 85%.

I do hereby conclude: When the Western Church fissiparated in the sixteen century, the Reformers took a portion of the essential patrimony of the Church with them, and they thereby left both the Roman Church and themselves the poorer for it.

Read the whole article by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. here. [HT: Michael Spencer from BHT]

There are a few things that make me really angry. People who throw around accusations and insinuations of heresy without bothering to get their facts straight first or without seeking to read those they criticize carefully and charitably rank very highly on this list. This particular quote from Dr. Fesko has been making the rounds of the blogosphere (see here, here and here):—

On core issues, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, Wright stumbles about. He defines the Holy Spirit in the following manner: ‘In Genesis 1.2, the spirit is God’s presence and power within creation, without God being identified with creation’ 1:169). Here Wright avoids pantheism (the idea that God is the creation), but leans toward modalism (the idea that God merely takes on different forms, rather than being three distinct persons). … While one cannot be sure what Wright’s personal views are on the Trinity, his statements reveal no concept of the personhood of the Holy Spirit. Given this absence, one suspects that Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnessess would have no problem with his definitions and descriptions of the Holy Spirit.

I have long ago ceased to be surprised at the bullshit that many Reformed writers spout on Wright and the FV. This is the sort of bullshit that you should expect from theologians who want to retain an appearance of competence, but lack the charity, honesty, commitment to the truth or self-discipline to make sure that they study very carefully before they open their mouths. The sheer quantity of bullshit that the present debates have produced is, it seems to me, very good proof that they are at least as much about power and maintaining the status quo as they are about substantial theological issues. There are theologians attempting to save face. Such accusations and insinuations are thrown out with ease and one will seldom if ever see them taken back or repented of. Nor will you see such accusations and insinuations really substantiated. The truth-value of such statements is not really important, precisely because they are attempts at bullshitting.

Sometimes it is good to call a spade a spade.

Picking up on some quotes by Roger Lundin, Leithart posts some helpfully criticisms of E.D. Hirsch, much beloved of conservatives for his insistence that the author’s intention is that which ultimately determines meaning. In the process, Leithart observes that the approach of men like Gadamer is probably far more Christian.

Intention
Gnostic Hermeneutics
Gnostic Hermeneutics 2
Fractures of the Mind

student guaranteed loans

When cellular telecoms services were launched, phones and calls were very expensive and early mobile operators (carriers) decided to charge for all air time consumed by student guaranteed loans user.

personal loan credit

The first commercial payment system to mimick banks and credit cards was launched in personal loan credit in 1999 simultaneously by mobile operators Globe and Smart.

excel loan formula

The concerns over terrorism and terrorist use of technology prompted excel loan formula by the British House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee into the use of evidence from excel loan formula devices, prompting leading mobile telephone forensic specialists to identify forensic techniques available in this area.

from bank loans

Mobile phones often have features beyond sending text messages and making voice calls, including Internet browsing, music (MP3) playback, memo recording, personal organizer functions, e-mail, instant messaging, built-in cameras and camcorders, ringtones, games, radio, Push-to-Talk (PTT), infrared and Bluetooth connectivity, call registers, ability to watch streaming video or download video for later viewing, video calling and serve as from bank loans modem for a PC, and soon will also serve as a console of sorts to online games and other high quality games.

deferred loans

In old phones, this voltage was used to trigger deferred loans electromagnet to ring a bell on the phone.

loans floor plan

As of June 2007, on loans floor plan definition there are 200 million subscribers on 3G networks.

and realestate home loans mandr

Mobile payments were first trialled in Finland in 1998 when two coca cola machines in Espoo were enabled to work with SMS payments.

easy loans student get to

However, one of easy loans student get to failed to detonate, and the SIM card in the corresponding easy loans student get to gave the first serious lead about the terrorists to investigators.

websites officer loan

Eventually websites officer loan spread and in 1999 the Philippines launched the first commercial mobile payments systems, on the mobile operators Globe and Smart.

interest low consolidation loans

The Independent newspaper cited interest low consolidation loans study claiming it provided evidence for the theory that interest low consolidation loans masts are a major cause in the collapse of bee populations, with controlled experiments demonstrating a rapid and catastrophic effect on individual hives near masts.

James K.A. Smith writes:—

I had the opportunity to “experience” a version of one of these services in Geneva (Service 10, “Queer”). This was going to be my first “emerging” worship experience, so I came with much anticipation. And I was not disappointed (I still have the shard of broken tile I took from the service). However, I was struck by one thing: the service was remarkably Protestant. By that I don’t just mean to toss out an epithet or a label. I mean it as a shorthand. By describing the service as “Protestant,” I only mean to say that I was surprised at how “heady” the service was, and how text-driven and text-centered the worship was. (Granted, we were just a few yards from John Calvin’s church, so maybe the sermon-centric vibes of the Reformation had wafted over.) While the service included key affective elements (the man’s body being marked by epithets, the very tangible pieces of broken rocks and tiles we could touch), this was happening around a very textual, cognitive, rather sermonic center. Granted, this wasn’t your grandpa’s “three point” sermon or anything, but it still required the sorts of cognitive processing that characterizes text-centered Protestant worship.

Now, why does this matter? Why focus on this point? Well, I think one of the key paradigm shifts that took place in modernity (particularly after Descartes) was the adoption of a new model of the human person that considered the human to be primarily and essentially a “thinking thing”—primarily a cognitive mind that, regrettably and contingently, inhabits a meaty body. As a result, the primary and most important activity that thinking things can undertake is, you guessed it, thinking. This shift manifests itself in the life of the church with the Reformation, which displaced the centrality of the Eucharist (a very tactile, affective, sensual mode of worship) and put the sermon (the Word) at the center. The heart of worship becomes “teaching,” and the shape of worship becomes driven by very cognitive, basically rationalist tendencies. This develops to the point of caricature in the evangelical worship service centered around bullet points on the PowerPoint presentation.

Despite the “postmodern” critiques of religion offered by Derrida, Caputo, et. al., I find that they continue to exhibit this modernist paradigm insofar as they still think that religion comes down to a matter of knowledge (or rather, not knowing). And I wonder if we don’t see the lingering effects of this in the liturgies sketched in Part 2 of How (Not) to Speak of God. Granted, this isn’t a pure rationalism—there are aspects of affective embodiment, and they are ‘liturgies,’ after all; but I do wonder whether they’re still not primarily “driven” by quite heady, cognitive, didactic concerns. In this way, they tend to reflect the kinds of wrestlings and wranglings of a certain class who have had the opportunity to get to have such doubts.

Perhaps I can put a point on this: for me, one of the tests of whether worship is properly “holistic” (and thus animated by a holistic, non-rationalist model of the human person) is the extent to which my children can enter in to worship. (Because of a certain worshiping community I’ve been a part of, I’m also attentive to the degree to which mentally-challenged adults can participate in worship as a criterion.) In the “Queer” service, my kids—who are, I think, pretty sharp—would have had a hard time ‘keeping up,’ had a hard time understanding what was going on. They would have been intrigued by the curiosities of the “marked man,” etc., but there was ALOT of words to process and they would have been lost in a sea of ideas.

I would contrast this to the affective simplicity of a traditional Tenebrae service on Good Friday (a “service of shadows”). While the service is organized by Christ’s seven sayings from the cross, there is not much else text or commentary. Instead, there is the simple amalgam of words, candles being gradually snuffed, sounds and silence. My children, from when they were little, sit enraptured by this service. Its affective simplicity testifies, I think, to a pre-modern understanding of the person as an affective, embodied creature—rational, sure, but not primarily rational.

This is why I wonder whether, for the future of the church, we really need to invent something new, or rather creatively retrieve premodern sources. While some are trying to imagine a new future for the church “after” modernity, I’m betting that the future is Catholic.

I am not sure that I would go quite as far as Smith does here, but I think that he makes some important points. In particular, I think that he is right in observing a connection between a particular — and rather questionable — understanding of the human being and the manner of worship. Protestant worship (and Reformed and Puritan worship in particular) often operates on the assumption that man is primarily a thinker. The rationalism that underlies many Protestant conceptions of worship has been observed by James Jordan and others like him a number of times in the past. The irrationalism that characterizes much contemporary evangelical worship is also largely a reaction to the rationalism that is seen to be the alternative.

Operating with a rationalistic definition of the human being, the worship service must downplay the body and focus on addressing itself to the mind. Candles, incense, clerical vestments, kneeling, processions, silence (except as a time for thinking), fine church buildings, and even in some cases music itself, are seen as distractions from rational worship, which should be removed. Elements of worship such as the Eucharist become increasingly treated as affairs of the mind. The Eucharist is reduced to a sign to be verbally explained, mentally interpreted and reflected upon.

Significant changes in my anthropology and in my view of worship over the last few years are by no means unrelated. Study of the Scriptures, self-reflection and engagement with others have progressively disabused me of any belief that I once held that we are primarily rational creatures. God addresses us at levels far deeper than our rational consciousness. I also believe that the idea that Scripture chiefly addresses us at a rational level should be questioned. The idea that Scripture always speaks first to our minds just seems wrong to me. This does not mean that the Scripture bypasses our minds altogether. However, it means that when the Scripture commands, exhorts, rebukes, comforts or encourages us, our minds are not the primary part of our make-up that God wants to engage with what is being said. God’s Word often addresses itself to our chests, before it ever speaks to our minds (or even to our hearts).

The narratives of Scripture are not primarily there to be picked at by our intellects, but to reform our imaginations. Intellectual reflection on the typology of biblical narratives, such as that which often takes place on this blog, is always a secondary activity, an articulation of something that should be grasped by the trained instinct of the person whose imagination is steeped in Scripture. There is always the danger that people will presume that the mind can substitute for the imagination. Reading a lot of books on biblical typology and symbolism will not reform your imagination in the manner in which attentive and receptive reading of Scripture can (although books on biblical typology can help you learn to be more attentive and receptive).

This is one reason why I like when passages of Scripture are read in Church services without being expounded in any way. Preaching is undoubtedly important, but if God’s Word is only encountered in the form of the preacher’s text — or as something to be rationally expounded — we can miss the point. The reading of passages apart from a preached explanation can encourage us to engage with the Scripture with our imaginations, just as we engage with other narratives and stories.

In my own personal reading of Scripture I often read and reread the same passage half a dozen times or even more. I try to practice listening attentively to the text and try to resist the urge to immediately explain it. I have found such an engagement with Scripture to be of great help in enabling me to imaginatively engage with the text. I begin to pick up things that I would have missed had I adopted a more scientific approach to the study of the text. I might later try to articulate these things in a more ’scientific’ form, but they were not arrived at by a regular scientific method. It is precisely through holding my rationality back from immediate engagement with the text that I begin to understand it at a deeper level.

In understanding the fact that man is not primarily a rational being, it is helpful to remember that most human communication is non-verbal. This is why liturgical training of the human body in posture, gesture and vesture is so important. As human beings we were designed to communicate with the entirety of our bodies and to receive communication with every part of our make-up. Much of the communication that we give is pre-conscious, as is the manner in which we receive much that is communicated to us. Often the most significant truths that we communicate or receive are the ones that we communicate or receive without even knowing that we are doing so, or without even thinking about it. Good liturgy can train us to communicate in Christian ways subconsciously, not just consciously. It can also communicate powerfully to the youngest person present in a way that a rationalistic service cannot.

There is a common polarization between the heart and the body in much popular Protestantism. It is presumed that if worship is primarily a matter of the heart then the body is relatively unimportant. The problem with this view is that it is quite unscriptural. The Scriptures frequently teach us what we need to do with our bodies. The separation between heart and body is one that exists because of sin and hypocrisy. The Scripture calls us to an integrated loyalty of heart and body. It calls us to a ‘hearty’ performance of bodily actions.

As I argue in the post that I linked to at the start of the previous paragraph, in the Scriptures heart and body are bound together to the extent that the heart cannot truly communicate itself apart from the body. To the extent that rationalistic Protestantism resists ‘body language’ in prayer (kneeling, arms up-raised, prostration, etc.), for example, we must ask to what extent it is failing to pray as truly as it ought.

Prosthesis links to this post by Thomas Adams at Without Authority:

The intellectual laziness of modern atheism is a shame because, as has been pointed out elsewhere, Christianity needs smart atheists to keep it honest. In my estimation, the best example of a “purifying atheist” is Friedrich Nietzsche (for a wonderful synopsis of Nietzsche’s contributions to Christian thought, please check out Byron Smith’s post here). The son of a Lutheran pastor, Nietzsche had a deeper understanding of Christianity than the vast majority of theologians, past and present. And unlike modern atheists, he took the idea of God very seriously. He may have reached some of the same conclusions about religion as modern atheists, but he took a very different route. His writings bear witness, not to a simple-minded dismissal of God, but to a profound confrontation with his religious heritage. In the end, his struggle may have yielded a purer and more faithful account of the Christian faith. Thus, Eberhard Jungel could say that “[Nietzsche's] thoughts come very close to the Christian truth which he was opposing. They merit special attention.” A hundred years from now, I doubt that anyone will be saying the same thing about Harris’ recent book.

A few days I picked up Theology After Wittgenstein and skim-read some sections of it, as I hadn’t done so for some time. Fergus Kerr comments somewhere that Wittgenstein was one of the last of the great philosophers to have his work so permeated by theological questions. Wittgenstein may not have agreed with the Christian tradition, but he believed that it was deserving of intellectual respect and serious engagement. With the lack of such engagement in the thought of most non-Christian intellectuals today and the gradual abandonment of a conversation between non-Christians with a genuine and sympathetic appreciation of the riches of the Christian tradition and thoughtful churchmen we are all poorer off.

Sometimes I wonder why Christians get distinctly second-rate critics like Richard Dawkins. Sometimes I wonder whether such critics are all that we deserve. Perhaps the world has lost interest in serious intellectual engagement with us because we are no longer prepared to listen; we are too interested in ourselves and how we are right to think that we might be able to learn from others, whether within the world or within different theological or ecclesiastical traditions. We want the world to listen to our voices, to read our books and to watch our films, because we think that we are right and the world is wrong (yet another manifestation of the narcissism that so often afflicts us). I am not so convinced that our voices are the ones that are most worth listening to, nor do I believe that Christians are always right and the world always wrong where we disagree.

In my recent post on theology and the life of prayer, I concluded by pointing out the important role that theology can play within the context of the academy, sustaining a conversation between the world and the Church, through which the Church can arrive at a deeper knowledge of the truth, and be delivered from certain errors. Lesslie Newbigin has a wonderful statement on this, which I find exceedingly helpful:

The church, therefore, as it is in via, does not face the world as the exclusive possessor of salvation, nor as the fullness of what others have in part, the answer to the questions they ask, or the open revelation of what they are anonymously. The church faces the world, rather, as arrabon of that salvation — as sign, firstfruit, token, witness of that salvation which God purposes for the whole. It can do so only because it lives by the Word and sacraments of the gospel by which it is again and again brought to judgment at the foot of the cross. And the bearer of that judgment may well be and often is a man or woman of another faith (cf. Luke 11:31-32). The church is in the world as the place where Jesus, in whom the fullness of the godhead dwells, is present, but it is not itself that fullness. It is the place where the filling is taking place (Eph. 1:23). It must therefore live always in dialogue with the world, bearing its witness to Christ but always in such a way that it is open to receive the riches of God that belong properly to Christ but have to be brought to him. This dialogue, this life of continuous exchange with the world, means that the church itself is changing. It must change if “all that the Father has” is to be given to it as Christ’s own possession (John 16:14-15). It does change. Very obviously the church of the Hellenic world in the fourth century was different from the church that met in the upper room in Jerusalem. It will continue to change as it meets ever new cultures and lives in faithful dialogue with them. — The Open Secret, p.180

If there is one thing that I have come to appreciate over the last few years, it is critics. We all need them. When there is a lack of genuine criticism, a lack of a party of considered dissent, we can become complacent and be content to live with half-truths. I have learnt more from interacting with people who disagree with me than I have from those who agree with me. One of the things that most distresses me in the current Church climate is the loss of genuine conversations about issues that we disagree over to the extent that all sides begin to preach only to the converted. The debates surrounding the work of N.T. Wright and the ‘FV movement’ are good examples here. With few exceptions, real critical engagement with the thought of Wright and the FV has been non-existent. For example, Wright has been dismissed by many without a serious attempt to understand him. The current Reformed climate is not able to support serious conversation between differing viewpoints, without an attempt to impose groupthink.

On this blog I have often been critical of certain tendencies of modern Reformed and evangelical churches. I write as someone who, if pushed, will admit to having a lot of ‘evangelical’ in him and as one who feels a deep affinity with and appreciation of many aspects of the Reformed tradition. My criticisms have often been harsh (often far too harsh), but these criticisms have been given, not as a means of dismissing evangelicalism and the Reformed faith, but as a means of calling people to greater intellectual honesty. I like to believe that the best movements are able to continue the tradition that we see in the Scriptures of prophetic critique from within and engagement with the thought of those without. I have been saddened to see that many are unhappy with the existence of such conversations, or are not prepared to take the effort that is involved in engaging with them. I have also been encouraged to find a number of exceptions to the rule.

Peter Leithart writes:

…[I]t would seem odd if the Lord gave Adam a commission to rule and subdue the earth, sent His Son to die and rise again as the Last Adam to restore humanity to that task, and then ended the whole process after a couple thousand years, just when we were beginning to make a few meager advances in achieving dominion over creation. Humanity – I say it with reverence – would feel more than a little cheated, like a teenager never given a chance to grow up.

Most editions of the Book of Common Prayer has a table for calculating the dates for feast days, and the table can be used up to about the year 6000 AD. I’m with those guys.

Writing on the subject of the whole Ted Haggard mess, Doug Wilson observes:

The second sign of trouble (evident long before the recent revelations) was the prevalent evangelical marketing of narcissism and celebrity as though it were a reasonable approximation of humility and ministerial service. What’s wrong with this picture? I remember, many years ago, long before the Jimmy Swaggart meltdown, talking to my wife about his record albums in a Christian bookstore. Album after album showed a close-up photo of his face, and nothing was more apparent than that something was seriously disordered about the whole operation. But that disorder was something that the evangelical market was more than willing to support and praise with their dollars. After it happens, the response among Christians was “how could this happen?” Are you serious? The real question should have been “how could it not?” Contemporary evangelicalism is nothing more than institutionalized narcissicism, and if the tree is rotten, it will continue to produce this kind of fruit.

Contemporary evangelicalism as ‘institutionalized narcissism’ is perhaps as good a description of the current state of affairs as any. It is something that I have drawn attention to in the past. For example,

Salvation opens us up to the Other. Only a Trinitarian and ecclesial understanding of salvation can do justice to this. The salvation paradigm of many within evangelicalism is akin to the romantic love paradigm of our society. It has little to say about the manner in which the Church is brought into a Trinitarian fellowship of love, focusing more upon the individual’s relationship with a god who is considered in largely Unitarian terms. You end up having two polarized parties and a love that closes in on itself.

Evangelicalism has little to say about our meeting of God in the commonality of our love for others. The Church as the community of the Spirit is that which frees to enjoy a non-narcissistic relationship with God. Evangelicalism’s failure to really recognize all of this has led, I believe, to its increasing self-obsession and introspectionism. Worship has become about self-stimulation rather than self-gift. There is also a tendency to project a domesticated god created in our own image, a god who reinforces our sense of self and never challenges us by His Otherness. When we worship such a god we are really worshipping ourselves. It should not surprise us that many contemporary worship songs focus more upon our act of worship than upon the object of our worship. The worship wars that rage through evangelicalism are not unrelated to this.

The collective narcissism of much modern evangelicalism (expressed in countless different ways) is perhaps, more than anything else, the thing that makes me want to get as far away from such forms of evangelicalism as I can. The soul of evangelicalism is afflicted by a disordered desire that will destroy it.

This disordered desire has innumerable manifestations. It can be seen in the way in which so many evangelical ministries operate without a regard to the rest of the Church, and particularly to the non-evangelical parts of the Church. It can be seen in the lack of interest in Church history. It can be seen in the insistence on singing modern hymns and choruses that conform to our personal tastes in music. In can be seen in the way that many evangelical churches are populated by clones.

It can also be seen in evangelicalism’s twisted aesthetics. It should be recognized that disordered desire will lead to a disordered aesthetic. It is not an accident that the narcissism and disordered desire of homosexuality is often expressed in a disordered aesthetic (camp, kitsch, self-glorification, etc.). Narcissistic aesthetics can take many different forms. They can consist in a purely ironic posture towards reality, in a playfulness that has no desire for costly engagement in reality, in the production and obsession with art that seeks nothing more than self-expression, in sentimentalism and sickly nostalgia (which almost invariably involves a narcissistic projection onto the past, rather than a genuine reckoning with the alterity of the past), among other things. Narcissistic aesthetics are the aesthetics of decadence and stem from a failure to engage properly with otherness, and from a weakening of faith.

Our aesthetic sensibilities are not morally neutral; they are as depraved and as needful of redemption as any other aspect of our human make-up. The scandal of the evangelical mind is well-known; it is high time that the scandals of the evangelical imagination and of evangelical aesthetics received equal notoriety.

The problem of evangelical narcissism is so huge that I am surprised that it has such a low profile.

This is an old post, but I have only just read it and felt that I had to quote it:

Q: What is Mother?
A: Mother is an entity, finite, mortal, changeable in her affections and good graces, but nonetheless remaining, at most times and in various places, affable, gregarious, sanguine, and benevolent.

Q: Are there more Mothers than one?
A: There are more Mothers than one indeed, except in the instance concerning that particular Mother belonging to me, in which case there is only one, the living and true Mother.

Q: What is the work of procreation?
A: The work of procreation is, Mother’s making of copulation with Father, for the purposes of impregnation and propulgation of the human race, and all very good.

Q: How do the benefits of procreation accrue to us?
A: The benefits of procreation accrue to us through no inherent desert of our own, but rather they are bestowed freely upon us due to the unmerited favor of Mother, and her volition to undergo the pangs of childbirth on our behalf.

Q: What are the benefits of procreation to the progeny borne?
A: The benefits of procreation to the progeny borne are, provision, oversight, reunion and inheritance, and the several subsidiary benefits that either do accompany or flow from them.

Q: What is reunion?
A: Reunion is that event in which the progeny borne are received back into the place of Mother’s oversight after long disjunction, and this is no process but is experienced instantaneously by those received.

Q: What does Mother require of progeny?
A: Mother requires of progeny honor and affection, and also obedience to her revealed will.

From Jamison Galt’s shookfoil blog.

As someone who believed medieval Rome taught a piecemeal salvation through a treadmill of sacramental performance, something which he equated in its essence to that of inter-testamental Judaism (aka Pharisaism) as a religion which rung the changes on works-righteousness — seeing both of these as examples of man’s innate tendency to idolatry and self-justification, he would not recognize the New Perspective as doing justice either to the exegesis of Scripture or a diagnosis of man’s real problem. He would regard it as wrongheaded pastorally as well as historically. As one who insisted on double-imputation, he would find the New Perspective’s denial of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness as wholly inadequate to deal with the real problem of fallen (Adamic) man’s relationship to God. As one who made the cross central, he would be perplexed at the inadequate responses of the New Perspective to the question which inquires as to the necessity of the cross or what it actually achieved. Penal substitution through satisfaction were Calvin’s main emphases and a perspective which substitutes ecclesiastical categories (who belongs to the covenant community?) rather than soteriological categories (how can a sinner be made right with God?), and one that answers the former by emphasizing “boundary markers” of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, he would view as Catholicism redivivus.

So claims Derek Thomas. I would like to think that Calvin would have done a better job of understanding the NPP before he dismissed it.

OK, it’s almost 4:30am and I still haven’t gone to bed. However, I felt that I had to post this Hauerwas quote, which has been doing the circuit of the blogs [HT: John Barach].

One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend. — Stanley Hauerwas, The Truth About God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Life, p.89

Couldn’t agree more!

We don’t take the issue of liturgy anywhere near as seriously as we ought to do. I believe that the bad taste in liturgy and hymnody demonstrated by so many modern congregations should be every bit as troubling to us as their weak ethical and doctrinal standards (Dennis commented on this a while back). Beauty, goodness and truth stand or fall together. The aesthetical crimes that one witnesses in the evangelical subculture — look in the trinket or art areas of your local Christian store to get a sense of what I am referring to — are indicative of a rottenness in heart of the movement itself. The narcissistic aesthetic of much of the subculture of evangelicalism, seen in the appeal of kitsch and of art that involves little more than its own self-projections, is evidence enough of a serious departure from Christian orthodoxy.

Whilst a study of the development of British evangelical identity might look slightly different, I have found D.G. Hart’s (not to be confused with David Bentley Hart, the Orthodox theologian) account of the construction of American evangelical identity quite insightful. The following quote is taken from his book Deconstructing Evangelicalism. I recommend it to anyone who wants to read up on this subject. Evangelical identity has been the theme of a number of the articles, books and booklets that I have read recently in some form or other. Hart’s treatment of the subject is one of the best that I have encountered.

~~*~~

On another level, the history of evangelicalism played precisely to the strength of the new model of religious history. Institutions, formality, official representatives—these phenomena were for many religious historians the antiquated subject matter of church historians. They did not embody America’s genuine religious vitality. So the profession moved from the pew, the pulpit, the church assembly, and the denominational periodical to signs of religious influence on culture, politics, economics—all walks of life where religion made a difference for the way ordinary people lived daily. It would be hard to imagine a recipe easier to follow by students of the new evangelical identity. After all, evangelicalism was a religion not confined to formal and bureaucratic denominational structures. Instead, it was a faith that gave ordinary believers the courage to get things done, whether on the farm, in the gym, in the public square, or on the mission field. In effect, born-again faith typified the mood of the new religious history; it was pluralistic, egalitarian, and utilitarian.

But it may not have been good for the understanding of either America religion or Christianity more generally. As much as Americans may participate in a variety of parachurch activities and support them with their hard-earned dollars, statisticians of United States religious life continue to make claims about American religiosity on the basis of church attendance. America is, according to pollsters, the most religious of Western democracies because roughly 40 percent of its citizens are in church every Sunday. If this is true, and if it is truly as significant as many interpreters suggest, then finding out what these Americans do every Sunday and what goes into that decision to attend or the consequences of such participation might be worthwhile pursuits for religious historians and other religious scholars. But the academic hostility to religious forms and institutions, a sort of scholarly pietism, has left the church out. In turn, the study of evangelicalism has profited from this rejection of denominational and congregational life. The history of evangelicalism has thrived while denominational history has atrophied. Yet if the Christian religion involves rites, offices, and creeds, then saying these things don’t matter does not make it so. Still, the construction of an evangelical identity has yielded the conviction that a faith freed from churchly affairs is the conservative expression of Christianity.

Either way, the expansion of interest in evangelicalism has been a mixed blessing. It has produced scholarship that obscures as much as it brings to light, and its assumptions about Christianity are as novel as the neo-evangelical project itself. Yet whatever one’s judgment about the born-again history of the last twenty-five years, it is reasonable to assert that the neo-evangelical effort to reduce Christianity to bite-size portions in the interest of creating a Protestant party to rival the mainstream looks remarkably similar to the way religious historians have defined evangelicalism and read it back into the American past in order to make larger claims about a bigger constituency than denominational or church history allows, ironically, by conceiving of the Christian religion as a short set of doctrinal truths and devout activities outside the church.

D.G. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham, pp.59-61

The issue of the death of God in Moltmann’s theology came up today on Byron’s blog. The issue of the death of God was also touched on in another context in which I found myself today. Whether this is to be attributed to divine providence, Jungian synchronicity, or blind chance, I don’t know, but I thought that the appropriate response would be to post the following lengthy quote from Hans Urs von Balthasar’s preface to the second edition of Mysterium Paschale (highly recommended reading).

~~*~~

For a number of years, indeed, the idea of a suffering God has become virtually omnipresent. Kitamori put it into official circulation. American ‘Process Theology’ nourished it. Then there were the polemics against the divine ‘impassibility’ (so strongly affirmed by the Church Fathers), and against God’s ‘immutability’ (denied, or so it seemed, by numerous Old Testament passages), as well as the Hegelianising theology of Jürgen Moltmann in his Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, and The Trinity and the Kingdom of God. All that appeared to suggest to Christians that the older dogmatics had blundered on an essential point of its interpretation of biblical revelation.

Doubtless the Kenosis of the Son will always remain a mystery no less unsoundable than that of the Trinity of hypostases in the single God. And yet, by placing the emphasis, in the doctrine of the Kenosis, so exclusively on the human nature assumed by the Son, or on his act of assuming that nature — the divine nature remaining inaccessible to all becoming or change, and even to any real relationship with the world — one was running the risk of under-estimating the weight of the assertions made in Scripture, and of succumbing at once to both Nestorianism and Monophysitism. Only the ‘Jesus of history’ would do the suffering, or perhaps the ‘lower faculties’ in Christ’s being, whereas the ‘fine point’ of his soul remained, even in the moment of the abandonment, united to the Father in a beatific vision which could never be interrupted.

It seems to me that the only way which might avoid the two opposed and incompatible extremes is that which relates the event of the Kenosis of the Son of God to what one can, by analogy, designate as the eternal ‘event’ of the divine processions. It is from that supra-temporal yet ever actual event that, as Christians, we must approach the mystery of the divine ‘essence’. That essence is forever ‘given’ in the self-gift of the Father, ‘rendered’ in the thanksgiving of the Son, and ‘represented’ in its character as absolute love by the Holy Spirit.

According to the great Scholastics, the inner-divine processions are the condition of possibility for a creation. The divine ‘ideas’ for a possible world derive from that everlasting circulation of life, founded as it is on the total and unconditional gift of each hypostasis to the others. De necessitate si est productio dissimilis praeintelligitur productio similis (Saint Bonaventure). Ex processione personarum divinarum distinctarum causatur omnis creaturarum processio et multiplicatio (Saint Thomas).

We shall never know how to express the abyss-like depths of the Father’s self-giving, that Father who, in an eternal ‘super-Kenosis’, makes himself ‘destitute’ of all that he is and can be so as to bring forth a consubstantial divinity, the Son. Everything that can be thought and imagined where God is concerned is, in advance, included and transcended in this self-destitution which constitutes the person of the Father, and, at the same time, those of the Son and the Spirit. God as the ‘gulf’ (Eckhart: Un-Grand) of absolute Love contains in advance, eternally, all the modalities of love, of compassion, and even of a ‘separation’ motivated by love and founded on the infinite distinction between the hypostases — modalities which may manifest themselves in the course of a history of salvation involving sinful humankind.

God, then, has no need to ‘change’ when he makes a reality of the wonders of his charity, wonders which include the Incarnation and, more particularly, the Passion of Christ, and, before him, the dramatic history of God with Israel and, no doubt, with humanity as a whole. All the contingent ‘abasements’ of God in the economy of salvation are forever included and outstripped in the eternal event of Love. And so what, in the temporal economy, appears as the (most real) suffering of the Cross is only the manifestation of the (Trinitarian) Eucharist of the Son: he will be forever the slain Lamb, on the throne of the Father’s glory, and his Eucharist — the Body shared out, the Blood poured forth — will never be abolished, since the Eucharist it is which must gather all creation into his body. What the Father has given, he will never take back.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, pp.vii-ix

Leithart makes a good observation:—

John’s suggestion that the world is made up not only of “things” (TA EN TO KOSMO, v. 15) but of desires is a rich insight. He doesn’t limit the world merely to the artifacts that are evident in the world, nor to the institutions and practices of the world. The plural reference in verse 15 covers these multiple manifestations of the world, but at the heart of what John calls the world, the source from which the world flows, is desire. To put it more sociologically, (sinful) human culture – its institutions, practices, products – are all embodiments of evil desire or boastfulness. John hints that we should evaluate the world not only on the basis of what’s done or what things it contains, but on the basis of desire. And desire has a multiple relationship with culture: Desires are the “contents” of culture – culture is made up of embodied dreams, aspirations, lusts; on the other hand, the world is the source of desire, evoking certain kinds of desire. John’s sociology thus encourages us to ask what desires are embodied in roads, buildings, automobiles, iPods, coffee, customs, schools, and so on. John encourages us to seek to penetrate below the surface of cultural life to the desires that are provoking and provoked by the world.

It is important to understand the emergence of the individual in Israel historically, but equally important not to succumb, as we have said, to ‘Whig history’, supposing that the trend from community to individual could simply be extrapolated to authorise any kind of radical individualism as its final term. For what Israel affords is a strong concept of the individual on a quite different basis from the individualism of the West. The community is the aboriginal fact from beginning to end, shaping the conscience of each of its members to greater or lesser effect. But when the mediating institutions of government collapse, then the memory and hope which single members faithfully conserve provide a span of continuity which can reach out towards the prospect of restructuring. The fractured community which fashioned the individual’s conscience is sustained within it and renewed out of it. And from having been preserved through single members’ memory and hope, Jeremiah anticipates, it will be the stronger, for it will incorporate that direct knowledge of Yhwh’s ways which each has won by his, or her, faithfulness. (We add the words ‘or her’ at this point without gratuitousness; for Esther is one of the models by which this faithfulness was commended.) The distinctive strengths of a voluntary community have been grafted on to the racial stock.

To generalise, as we have done before, we may say that the conscience of the individual members of a community is a repository of the moral understanding which shaped it, and may serve to perpetuate it in a crisis of collapsing morale or institution. It is not as bearer of his own primitive pre-social or pre-political rights that the individual demands the respect of the community, but as the bearer of a social understanding which recalls the formative self-understanding of the community itself. The conscientious individual speaks with society’s own forgotten voice.

Taken from The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, p.80.