Wednesday 28 November 2007

Bruce McCormack: Scottish Journal of Theology Lectures

Next week (4-7 December), Bruce McCormack will present the Scottish Journal of Theology Lectures at St Andrews University. His lectures are entitled The Humility of the Eternal Son: A Reformed Version of Kenotic Christology. There will be four lectures, as follows:

Lecture 1: “Immutable in Impassibility: The Role Played by Classical Theism in Creating the Unresolved Problems in Chalcedonian Orthodoxy” (Tuesday 4 December)

Lecture 2: “Passibility in Mutability: The Failure of the Older Kenoticism” (Wednesday 5 December)

Lecture 3: “Immutable in Passibility: The Contribution of Karl Barth” (Thursday 6 December)

Lecture 4: “The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism, Trinity and Election” (Friday 7 December)

I reckon this will almost certainly prove to be the year’s most important theological event. Bruce McCormack is one of the most profound and creative theological thinkers working today, and I believe the future of Barthian dogmatics lies very much with him. In these lectures, McCormack’s sophisticated historical analysis in the first three lectures will open up into the fourth lecture’s constructive dogmatic vision of a new (post-metaphysical) kenotic christology.

You can download a brochure here; and for those of us who can’t make the trip to Scotland, the lectures will subsequently be published by Cambridge University Press. Meanwhile, another event to look forward to is the publication next year of McCormack’s collected essays on Barth, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008).

6 Comments:

Anonymous said...

That's fantastic news! I wish I could get to Scotland, but I guess I will just have to keep an eye on Amazon. Ever since the sensational Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (don't you just love the catchy title!) I've been waiting for more exquisite beef from (dare I call him) the Big Mac. And, yes, McCormack points the way forward in Barth studies - with George Hunsinger in tandem, of course!

So thanks for the heads-up, Ben.

Drew Tatusko said...

Thanks for posting. Certainly worth looking for. I took his class on election at PTS and still read the notes from the class on occasion.

Jon said...

If anyone wants to travel up then please get in contact with me and you can stay in my flat for free (as long as you don't mind roughing it on the floor! Or sharing a bedroom)

Email jonmackenzie at gmail dot com

Esteban Vázquez said...

Why, if McCormack had presented these lectures some 7 years ago, perhaps I should have been able to remain in the ministerium of the Dutch Reformed church, and not have to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy! ;-) These look quite exciting; I'm already looking forward to their publication.

(How interesting, incidentally, that McCormack attended Nazarene institutions; goes to show that those of us who have such educations can eventually amount to something!)

Anonymous said...

I know your not particularly enthusiastic about Gunton's theology but I wonder whether there may be some overlap between McCormack's approach and the Christology that Gunton developed in conversation with Irving and Owen?

Unknown said...

I can report that the first two papers have been top notch. As an OT research student I'm listening in as something of an outsider, and I know I'm missing out a number of technicalities (even my theology peers have been puzzling over certain aspects). But McCormack presents a clear and followable thesis.

It's been worth watching our faculty engage with him. I also note that John Webster has made the trip down from Aberdeen each evening, though he has yet to raise a question. I do anticipate some fireworks when McCormack gets to the core of his proposal, tonight and tomorrow.

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