the delicate art

I haven't posted for a while because life as been incredible busy. Just about everything has changed. I have left Wycliffe Hall in Oxford and Joanne and I have moved to East London. I have started a new job in Spitalfields and three weeks ago I was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England. Getting used to those three changes is hard work so things have been crazy over the last few weeks.

I have just discovered Halden Doerge's blog Inhabitatio Dei. Halden is a regular reviewer on Amazon and a thoughtful theologian and blogger. This is the first of two blog entries I find particularly helpful and provocative. In our sexualised culture, a reaffirmation that our core identity is not found in our sexuality but outside of ourselves, in Christ, is an important message to hear, as is the consequence of that, namely that our source of stability is not marital union, but ecclesial fellowship, not marriage but Pentecost!

As some of you will know, Kevin Vanhoozer is one of my favourite theologians who has significantly shaped the way I understand and do theology. His most recent book The Drama of Doctrine, despite a sickeningly orange cover is a tour de force that pulls together Scripture, theology and the church under the one metaphor of the dramatic performance. "Doctrine is the stuff of life" says Vanhoozer, the script of the performance, the Bible, is to be performed and improvised by local communities as they live out the final acts of the drama. Scot McKnight describes it as "the best book on Scripture for the new century." Read together with John Webster's Holy Scripture: a Dogmatic Sketch, and Telford Work's Living and Active, I think he's probably right. Byron Smith recently posted an excellent review on his blog. Below are some extracts. I hope they inspire you to buy it and read it.

I had a very interesting conversation this week about the way in which we relate to God. A friend of mine spoke about 'pressing into God' a phrase that I had heard before from a number of different quarters. It is a phrase that appears to be gaining wide currency amongst Charismatics. I asked what it was he meant by the phrase and he replied "I view God as a giant marshmallow. As you press into it, it surrounds and envelops you." In many ways its a powerful image of union with God, a real immersion or participation in the divine life, a popular metaphor for the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis or deification. But I have to be honest with you, the conversation left me feeling a little uneasy.

I have just started reading a new book edited by Ben Quash and Michael Ward called 'Heresies and How to Avoid Them'. Stan Hauerwas, a theologian at Duke University, offers some interesting thoughts in the forward to the book.

Hauerwas says that a book on the ancient Christian heresies is still important because it "rightly helps us see that how we speak as Christians makes all the difference if we are to be faithful witnesses in a confused Church and in an even more confused world."

Its amazing how much discussion and interest there is at the moment about the cross and the nature of the atonement. Jeffrey John has received a lot of coverage for his rather rabid caricature of penal substitution on Radio 4.

Now, Tom Wright the Bishop of Durham wades into the debate with an article posted on the fulcrum website. He is clearly frustrated with the apparently ill-informed assault on the doctrine and he systematically takes Dr John’s argument to pieces (it is worth reading in full). He concludes by saying that:  

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 is perhaps most interesting about the article though, is that he doesn’t stop there. Having successfully rebutted and refuted Jeffrey John’s caricature of the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, he turns his attention to the new book on substitutionary atonement by Mike Ovey, the new Principal of Oakhill theological college.  

I wrote an essay last term on reading as discipleship. Its always frustrating when you come across something that would have been really helpful for the essay if only you had found it, or it had been published earlier. This happened to me when I read Rowan Williams recent lecture: "The Bible Today, Reading and Hearing". He speaks of Scripture as a word of summons or invitation that requires to be heard, that call the church, the community of the word into existence. He speaks of the active restlessness of the text calling the reader to change and transformation. He speaks of Scripture as the vehicle of God's act to bring about salvation. Its a brilliant, fascinating and provocative lecture from an Archbishop who clearly loves the bible, (he even refers to two of my favourite theologians: Karl Barth and Kevin Vanhoozer!) so I'm blogging it all.

"One of the things that most clearly and universally identifies Christians as Christians is that they habitually read the Bible -- or have the Bible read to them. From the most liberal to the most conservative, from Pentecostalists in Venezuela to Orthodox in Albania, those who call themselves Christians are engaged in a complex and a varied set of relationships with this written text, relationships which shape the patterns of worship, teaching and ethical discourse. Not even the most tradition-bound and hierarchical Christian community has ever seriously argued that the authority of the contemporary hierarchy can wholly displace the reading of Scripture, or that the language of scripture is anything but finally normative in some sense for the community. And even the most ideologically insistent liberal is unlikely to argue that Scripture can be relegated entirely to the level of illustrative historical material about the remote beginnings of the faith (though the last century has seen a repeated swing in that direction, even if it has never quite got to that point of blunt denial). In what follows, I don't intend to offer a novel theory of inspiration, or a set of tools that will finally settle the current debates over interpretation within and between the churches; my aim is a very modest one, to examine the practice of reading the Bible so as to tease out some of what it tells us about the nature of Christian identity itself. Because some of our present difficulties are, at the very least, compounded by the collision of theologically inept or rootless accounts of Scripture, and it seems imperative to work at a genuine theology of the Bible as the sacred literature of the Church. Popular appeals to the obvious leave us battling in the dark; and the obvious -- not surprisingly -- looks radically different to different people. For many, it is obvious that a claim to the effect that Scripture is 'God's Word written' implies a particular set of beliefs about the Bible's inerrancy. For others, it is equally obvious that, if you are not that savage and menacing beast called a 'fundamentalist', you are bound to see the Bible as a text of its time, instructive, even sporadically inspiring, but subject to rethinking in the light of our more advanced position. As I hope will become evident, I regard such positions as examples of the rootlessness that afflicts our use of the Bible; and I hope that these reflections may suggest a few ways of reconnecting with a more serious theological grasp of the Church's relation with Scripture.

Giles Fraser has worked hard this easter grinding his axe against the necks of evangelical Christians. Together with Jeffrey John, the target of Giles's assault has been the doctrine of Penal Substitution - the belief that Christ dies in our place on the cross, taking upon himself the punishment we deserve for our rebellion against God's kingdom and rule and our rejection of his Messiah.

In an article in the Church Times this week Giles argues it is liberal Christians who really believe in the resurrection. Its the evangelicals that don't. The reason, he says is this; penal substitutionary atonement renders the resurrection irrelevant. "It is finished", the words Jesus uttered on the cross, for the evangelical, mean that salvation has been won, the wrath of God has been satisfied, sin has been paid for, humanity in saved - and all without any mention of the resurrection.

One of the issues that I've been wrestling over with my Episcopalian friends during the last year has been the relationship between Scripture and the church.

Scripture needs to be interpreted they say so who says which interpretation is the right interpretation? The church of course! So the authority of the church must be prior to the authority of the Word. The revisionists in the Episcopal Church, they say, are simply good spirit-filled protestants who interpret Scripture according to their own consciences. Evangelicals, they argue, can't really complain. Catholicism is the only legitimate response.

I came across this very interesting reflection on worship by Peter Leithart a fascinating theologian and the pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Idaho. How should such an understanding of the service of God to us influence the shape of our services?