Terrific YouTube videos

Loads of great YouTube videos, with Bauckham, Thiselton, Dunn, Wright, Hurtado, Stanton, Burridge and others, talking about Ricoeur, the kingdom of God, the divinity of Jesus, the Gospels and eyewitnesses, the Gospel of John and much more.

http://www.youtube.com/user/StJohnsNottingham

Enjoy!

A moment in the Tilling family home

I had just entered the lounge having prepared my breakfast with a bit of honey

Anja (still in the kitchen): Where is the honey?

Chris (now sitting down in deep thought on something or other): Where is was! (thinking Anja was implying I had not put it back in the right place)

Anja (slightly irritated): That's not very helpful! Where is the honey?

Chris (still in thought and slightly bothered another question had been posed): Where it is now!

Anja (after a minute or so of some muttering coming from the kitchen direction, having finally found it on her own): You could have said 'in the corner cupboard on the left'!

Confession of the day

I believe in God, Father, Son and Spirit, yet my quest for theological truth is often nothing more than a series of question marks left in the wake of this God's presence in my life. I think this is partly because the nature of Truth is not just something we ask about, seek to understand and analyse in terms of probabilities, rules of contradiction etc. Rather, Truth – if that is really what we are dealing with – often puts the question to us.

Anyway, enough profundity for now. I'm off to see if I can actually belch my way through the 39 Articles, or at least the Barmen declaration.

Happy Birthday Bultmann

I have often posted on this blog about my admiration of Bultmann, perhaps the greatest biblical scholar of all time. This can perhaps be said due to the sheer number of subjects he influenced: from methodology to the historical Jesus, from John's Gospel to Paul's letters and theology, from Christology to anthropology, from New Testament soteriology to hermeneutics, and so on. His scope of vision was indeed breathtaking and he managed to think through all of this in such a way that gracefully interwove the various themes all together into the kerygma, God's address to us all in Christ. Indeed, his passion was faithful commitment to the Gospel and he resisted the various distractions on offer in, for example, the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Perhaps most notable is Bultmann's 'conversation' with Heideggerian themes such as isolation and anxiety, which he seized and 'inhabited' with the Gospel, drawing fresh insight from the correlation. Though one must immediately add that Heidegger's influence on Bultmann can be exaggerated, and it must be remembered that Heidegger himself denied his thought was concerned with existentialism or existentialist philosophy. That said, the influence is palpable: just look at the themes Bultmann covers in his NT theology of Paul! Thus pens John MacQuarrie in his 1955 work, An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann: 'WHETHER for good or ill, it is a fact that throughout its history Christian theology has fallen at various times under the influence of different secular philosophies'.

But herein lies the problem, and the soft underbelly of the great man's work. MacQuarrie is wrong. The supposed influence of 'secular philosophies' has not been a fact 'throughout' the history of Christian theology for one simple reason: 'secular' is a relatively modern invention. Yes, this 'Radical Orthodoxy' critique of Bultmann must be heard. In his method of correlation, of seeking to find space for the kerygma in 'secular' philosophy, Bultmann had inadvertently bought into a worldview deeply antithetical to the Christian vision that God is the source of all being and knowing. This led him to the further mistake of confusing the existential content of the resurrection of Jesus on the disciples with the external-to-human-disposition event-edness of Easter.

But Bultmann was simply standing in a long German tradition in this respect, and his work within that institution was without peer. Pick up a book by Bultmann today, and sit at the feet of one of the most important theologian-biblical scholars ever. But read critically, as I am sure our birthday boy himself would encourage you to do.

Quote of the day

'The Pharisees represented a pious movement. They enjoyed wide popular support and were dedicated to an interpretation of the biblical texts that was anything but rigid and literal. The fact that Paul was nurtured in an environment that saw new interpretations of the biblical texts as a natural part of the divine revelation is an important aspect when trying to understand his way of reasoning'

(from Magnus Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul: a student's guide to recent scholarship, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009, pp. 15-16)

This reasoning of course speaks against the kind of Pauline handling of scripture proposed by Scott Hafemann, as seen for example in Paul, Moses, and the History of Israel: The Letter/Spirit Contrast and the Argument from Scripture in 2 Corinthians 3 (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2005).

The Wisdom of Tony Blair

Being part of a community is not necessarily about all being like-minded in everything, but rather about being happy to share your spiritual life and development with that group.

Ten reasons why you shouldn’t trust me

Now for a moment of self-indulgence

1. I tend to think Christian Universalism has way more going for it than most think. Not a Universalist myself, but boy am I tempted.





2. This one is terrible and I suppose I should repent. I have been known to swear in the sort of company that considers 'rude words' the worst of all sins. Actually, some swear words still make me chuckle like a 13 year old boy, hence my best friend, Simon, often has me in fits of laughter (he has one seriously contemptible gutter mouth)





3. I am way more sacramental in my theology than I was a few years ago. I think celebration of Eucharist is at the centre of a Christian's relationship with God, and those who think otherwise are, I suspect, heading towards heresy.





4. I tend to think many theologians have more confidence in answers than biblical scholars who are daily confronted with a deeply subversive text full of tensions and difficulties that often resists any systematising answers, never mind just simple ones.





5. What is more, I find myself perplexed by so many different theological, historical and exegetical perspectives, I tend to think of my theology as a series of question marks left in the trail of God's presence in my life.





6. My theological approach is accordingly comparable to the Socratic Method without, hopefully, falling into the sort of postmodern nihilism of Caputo (for example, I think it crucial to be able to confidently label false religion as false)





7. However, I suspect there is a level of Christian maturity ahead of me that will significantly qualify my present celebration of unanswered questions – if for no other reason than the necessity of helping others find faith in God (if God 'accommodates', shouldn't we too?) That said, little would change my mind that plenty of 'Christian apologetics' is, at an epistemological level, an over-realised eschatology.





8. I have (albeit very) occasionally smoked pipes, cigars, sheesha and cigarillos – and I have no intention of repenting. But I hate beer (Beelzebub's urine), and people who drink it are compromised to the core.





9. I think Bultmann was an incredible exegete, perhaps the greatest NT scholar ever. His scope of vision was as majestic as it was mislead.





10. Fundamentalists, wishy-washy liberals and 'secular' Christian-bashers (whether in the biblical studies, scientific or theological guilds) - all have the ability, more than any others, to utterly perplex and exacerbate me.

Eduard Schweizer on Universalism

There are passages in the New Testament describing the group of the blessed and that of the cursed ones (as in Matthew 25:34-41), and there are other passages declaring that "all men have been consigned to disobedience that he (God) may have mercy upon all" (as in Romans 11:32). We certainly need the warning of Matthew 25 that there is a dimension of eternity in which all our living on earth has to be seen. We also need, equally urgently, to be reminded of God's grace (as in Romans 11), from which nobody and nothing can separate us, which is stronger even than our disobedience. This twofold message is the word of God, as it has to live among us. But if we tried to build up a doctrine of an indispensable belief in hell or of universal salvation, we would put ourselves above God, since we would pretend to know exactly how he would have to act on the last day. How he will really act in the last judgment is beyond the threshold of human knowledge, and nobody is allowed to pass this threshold before it is revealed in the parousia of Christ.

From "Colossians 1:15-20", Review and Expositor, 87 (1990)

A good read

Two friends have insisted that I read anything by James K. A. Smith, so I took up the challenge and purchased Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology, Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2004, and Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007, is in the post.

I'm only 90 pages into the first but I highly recommend it: deeply learned, clearly written and best of all I am having many 'aha!' moments.

Michael Bird's little book, Are You the One Who Is to Come?: The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question, Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009, happily dropped through the letterbox the other day, which I really look forward to reading in more depth. I quickly purchased another roughly related book from a completely different perspective to add a bit of zest to the summer. Namely, Thomas L. Thompson's The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, London: Pimlico, 2007 which comes with back cover blurb stating 'the Jesus of the gospels never existed'. I might take this last one on holiday with me, actually.

I suppose I should look for the links to the other books, but I can't be bothered. Bung 'em in Google yourselves!

Bauckham comments on creation ex nihilo

I recently posted some thoughts about creation ex nihilo in light of 2 Peter 3:5, and offered three ways of dealing with what we are to make of the (later) doctrine of ex nihilo in light of such biblical themes.

In short I suggested: 1) reject ex nihilo, 2) claim ex nihilo came ex nihilo, but is still correct and 3) argue ex nihilo, while a later development, is consistent with seeds of truth already to be found in the NT and Apocrypha.

Richard Bauckham e-mailed me a fourth possibility that I had not even considered, one I find very appealing:

"Another possibility is that 'chaos' was a sort of mythological way of imagining 'nothing.' To imagine a pre-creation chaos and to say that God created all things was perfectly consistent, because no 'thing' existed until God formed it out of chaos"

What do you think?

David Bentley Hart on reading books

A friend recently drew my attention to Hart's new article on First Things, which made for amusing reading. Here he discusses his reading neurosis:

"Admittedly, this last judgment is based upon only a partial sampling of the work. I am, by nature, a neurotic "completist"; I feel I must finish any book I begin, no matter how great a torment it turns out to be. But I have to confess that, in two attempts to get through The Spiral Ascent, my will has proved unequal to the task. On both occasions, there came a point (and roughly the same point) at which the poor laboring beast of my attention span lay down in the dust and mulishly refused to move forward another inch, no matter how savagely I cursed and flogged it. Thereafter, I merely skimmed through the final pages, simply to confirm for myself that life—even a life as protracted as, say, Edward Upward's—is not long enough to make room for such an ordeal. Others, however, have found the books more inviting than I, and perhaps my failure to follow Upward's tale to the end bespeaks something shallow and dilettantish in my nature"

What happens if a slightly impatient angel dropkicks your happy sacks halfway through singing a song?

The answer:

HL: Scotteriology

Yea Tiger, be glad I chose theology

Theological nutters

I've recently been busying studying the psychological areas of Transactional Analysis (TA) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) mainly because I'm a bit mad and thought I could do with a decent psychological thrashing to sort out the 'frothing mouth' aspects of my psyche. Fascinating stuff, actually, and in my humble opinion more so even than the psychoanalysis schools of Freud, Lacan and others who have managed to get some modern continental philosophers so excited.

But in my own general inclinations to lunacy, I am apparently in good company. For on the way, I read the plausible hypothesis that Luther, Teresa of Avila, John Bunyan, Ignatius of Loyola and others suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and that this influenced many of their theological decisions. Of course, obvious to all, it occurs to me that many other theologians and biblical scholars were just plain simple bonkers, having fallen right out of the crazy tree onto the rabid-brain farm: Zwingli, for example. He had 'please lobotomise me' written all over him.

In TA there are three basic ego states: Parent, Adult and Child, and I can't help but reflect a little on such verses as these.

• 'When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways' (1 Corinthians 13:11)
  
• 'For though you might have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers. Indeed, in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel' (1 Corinthians 4:15)
  

Is this Paul evidencing Adult and Parent ego states? I don't think we will ever know.

Created out of water

I'm rather enjoying my break this summer, but I did want to share one thought on a NT understanding of creation.

A while ago I noted that (I think) most OT scholars think Genesis 1 – together with the other known myths in Akkadian literature – reflects a belief that creation was not there understood as creation ex nihilo, but rather as the command of order on chaos. This view reflects a more popular reading of Genesis 1:1 as 'In the beginning when God created' or 'in the beginning of God's creation, the earth being ...'. 'The narrative', as OT scholar John Goldingay argues, 'indeed presupposes the existence of matter, of raw material for God to use' (Old Testament Theology. Volume 1: Israel's Gospel [Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP, 2003], 80).

Rather interestingly, though many jump to passages in Paul to defend creation ex nihilo in the NT (which I suspect only suggest the seeds for a later ex nihilo doctrine), such as Romans 4:17, have you ever meditated on 2 Peter 3:5?

'They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water'

Richard Bauckham comments in his Word commentary:

'According to the creation account in Gen 1, and in accordance with general Near Eastern myth, the world—sky and earth—merged out of a primeval ocean (Gen 1:2, 6–7, 9; cf. Ps 33:7; 136:6; Prov 8:27–29; Sir 39:17; Herm. Vis. 1:3:4). The world exists because the waters of chaos, which are now above the firmament, beneath the earth and surrounding the earth, are held back and can no longer engulf the world. The phrase ἐξ ὕδατος ("out of water") expresses this mythological concept of the world's emergence out of the watery chaos, rather than the more "scientific" notion, taught by Thales of Miletus, that water is the basic element out of which everything else is made (cf. Clem. Hom. 11:24:1)' (Bauckham, R. J., Jude, 2 Peter, p.297).

I find it particularly interesting that the context of 2 Peter 3 links this to God's faithfulness to his promises, which once again links God's faithfulness to his covenant to the whole of creation. But in terms of creation, what are we to make of the (later) doctrine of ex nihilo in light of such biblical themes. One can either:

1. Reject ex nihilo as a doctrine in light of scripture, which would, for example, perhaps help deal with the knotty problem of theodicy. 'God did not created chaos', it could be argued, his creation power was its limiting.
   
2. Argue that ex nihilo is an entirely new doctrinal development, yet can be embraced as a correct doctrine on the basis of the Spirit's guidance of the church
   
3. Maintain that ex nihilo, while a later development, is consistent with seeds of truth already to be found in the NT and Apocrypha. This the doctrine reflects a legitimate and further nuanced development of the understanding of creation (ex nihilo only being clearly formulated, so maintain I think the majority, in the 2^nd century AD). Perhaps the church's developing formulations of Trinitarian faith is an inadequate potential comparison.
   

Darwin and God

I'll deliver a lecture at our (rather large!) church week away at the end of the month, celebrating Darwin's 200^th birthday. During my research I've used some useful introductory books on Darwin, such as Jonathan Howard's contribution to the Very Short Introduction Series, and Jonathan Miller's Introducing Darwin.

Both were helpful, but when they turned to matters of religion they tended to be disastrously naive and inaccurate. For example, Howard writes that it has become 'hard, perhaps impossible for the orthodox Christian to come to terms with Darwin' (106)! Let's give him a bit of slack; he is a Geneticist after all, not a theologian, but this is nevertheless an absurd claim! Some key Christians, both in the UK and in USA, were the first to promote Darwin's theories in the 19^th century, while some 'secular' scientists opposed it! As for the whole creationism debate, Darwinism poses a problem only for a very culturally specific and dubious reading of Genesis. Where it does get trickier is in the magnification of the theodicy problem, which did not appear on Howard's radar. Darwinism is actually exciting, for traditional Christian dogma, in the way it helps the Church rethink some of its anthropological and philosophical assumptions, and regain a closer approximation to the more relational biblical intuitions.

Nick Spencer's little book, Darwin and God thus comes as a real breath of fresh air, and deals with the nature and development of Darwin's religious beliefs. Thanks to my kind American friend, David Vinson, for the copy! My colleagues recently interviewed Nick for our college podcast here, which makes for interesting listening.

Quick notice

David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.

One word:

WOW

One of the most important books I have ever read. Utterly brilliant. Prophetic. Extremely lucid. Violently convincing.

And it is one of the most devastating critiques of anything, anywhere, never mind just the particular squabble it addresses. Daniel Dennett, for example, is absolutely shredded. My jaw was left on the flaw. But it is so much more than a simple critique of the silly New Atheist High Priests.

Please get this book. Seriously.

I stand rebuked

Innocently as you can imagine, white as the driven snow, pure as ... well, you get the idea.

But that's me, folks. Plain, old, simple holy.

Not all, however, seem to appreciate my generally elevated levels of sanctification, even though it shines in such wise forms as this post: A Biblical Guide to Dating.

Nevertheless, an 'Anonymous' (surprise, surprise) felt the need to chastise my winsome words in the comments:

"This is not funny. And the message of Yahweh Elohim and his Son, Yahshua the Messiah should not be taken lightly. Have your fun now, but I tell you the truth: it won't last long. You will regret ever putting your foolish advice on the web. Let me ask you this: If you have a daughter and she believes in the Word, would you want some perverted man to be misusing her belief for his own twisted sexual interests? Is that how you would want your daughter to be treated? Is that how you would want your mother or sister to be treated? Grow up, men. The world needs men who can lead nations and conquer kingdoms, not treacherous and deceptive men. We need honorable, valiant men in this world. We need leaders. Are you going to waste your life setting foolish traps for women? Is that what you call purpose? Arise, men of God. Arise to your position in the true Kingdom of Yahweh. Arise to honor. Arise to Truth. Arise to purpose. It is time"

OK, I cleaned up some of his grammar, but you get the idea: I've apparently pooped the holy pants, soiled the sanctity nappy.

So .... *takes a deep breath* ... I guess I had better say an apology:

"I am very sorry, Anonymous ... that you have no sense of humour".

I'll be the guy giving you a smarting wedgie in the in the New Jerusalem.

The New Church of England Logo

Wright’s badges

I do like Wright's approach to Paul. I especially like how he manages to plausibly explain the (narrative) structure which gives Paul's arguments fresh coherence. In this respect I think his commentary on Romans is an example of Wright at his lucid, most insightful best. That said, I find myself intuitively suspicious of the 'faith as a badge' proposal. And I get the feeling that if I pull that thread loose, quite a bit besides will potentially unravel. In a nutshell, it strikes me as an insufficiently relational understanding of faith (I have wondered if Wright's claim perhaps, in part, depends on an implicit pre-Heideggerian metaphysics of representation – but this is an underdeveloped thought).

Any of you ever had suspicious thoughts about the 'faith as a badge' business? Or do you think it makes sense, especially in light of the Dunn-Wright take on 'works of law'?