Comic strip: theological superheroes

When I was gathering the abstracts for the Sarah Coakley symposium, I kept pestering Oliver Crisp to write an abstract. So finally, just to appease me, he submitted the following title and abstract:

"Coakley vs. Martians in Manhattan Showdown": In this paper I will argue that the psychic powers Coakley has developed in her work would enable her to deal with and destroy any bid made by desperate extra-terrestrials to take over Manhattan just by thinking the words "feminist theology rocks".

I mentioned in yesterday's comments that this entire paper could be written as a graphic novel. So Oliver Crisp has come through with the goods – behold, the theological superheroes comic strip, starring Sarah Coakley (click to enlarge):


No doubt about it: this is gonna be an interesting symposium...

Best theology books of 2009

Over the next week I’ll post some roundups of the year’s highlights. Here’s my selection of the best (mainly theological) books of 2009:

• Theology: David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, 2 vols. (WJK)
• Biblical studies (NT): Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Eerdmans)
• Biblical studies (OT): John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology: Israel's Life (IVP)
• Systematic theology: T. F. Torrance, Incarnation and Atonement (IVP)
• Essay collection (single author): John Milbank, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Cascade)
• Essay collection (multi-author): Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea (eds), Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (Oxford UP)
• New edition: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 31 vols. (T&T Clark)
• Critical edition: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 12 (Fortress)
• Teaching resource: Eugene Rogers, The Holy Spirit: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Wiley-Blackwell)
• Reference work: Herman J. Selderhuis (ed.), The Calvin Handbook (Eerdmans)
• Translation: Elsie Ann McKee (trans.), Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition (Eerdmans)
• Theological history: John Witte Jr., The Sins of the Fathers: The Law and Theology of Illegitimacy Reconsidered (Cambridge UP)
  
• Commentary: Douglas Harink, 1 & 2 Peter (Brazos)
• Journal issue: 25-year special issue of Modern Theology (Wiley-Blackwell)
• Essay: Sarah Coakley, "Is There a Future for Gender and Theology? On Gender, Contemplation, and the Systematic Task," Criterion 47:1 (2009)
• Political thought: John Gray, Gray's Anatomy (Allen Lane)
• Literary criticism: Annabel Patterson, Milton's Words (Oxford UP)
• Biography: Rupert Shortt, Rowan's Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury (Eerdmans)
• Novel: Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Penguin)
• Children’s novel: Kate DiCamillo, The Magician's Elephant (Candlewick)
• And finally, the year's best theology book cover (T&T Clark; painting by Oliver Crisp):
  

A painting of Karl Barth

Speaking of Oliver Crisp, here’s a photo of the painting he made for me in Princeton. It will soon be hanging proudly on my study wall:

2009: the year of the Calvin

Jean Calvin was born in July 1509 – so all around the world this year, there will be celebrations of his 500th anniversary. Princeton Seminary has organised “A Year with the Institutes”, a wonderful programme in which people can join together reading through Calvin’s Institutes this year. The seminary will provide a daily text (just a few pages), together with an audio reading of the text. So you can subscribe to the audio version through iTunes (it’s all free), and by the end of the year you’ll have gone through the entire Institutes. All the details are here.

So why don’t you join in the fun, and read Calvin’s Institutes this year! No matter what you might think about Calvinist theology, the Institutes is one of the most remarkable theological works ever written. And don’t be taken in by those rumours about Calvin’s gloomy austerity – as far as works of dogmatics go, the Institutes is almost unrivalled for its sensitivity to scripture and its pervasive pastoral warmth. If you want to learn what it really means to think theologically, you could hardly find a better guide than Calvin. Even his mistakes are full of momentous significance; even in his worst moments, he is a magnificent figure who towers above most others.

Anyway, to help correct the impression of Calvin’s bleak austerity, here’s Oliver Crisp’s new painting of the young Calvin – a portrait in a sort of Flemish style, painted recently in Princeton. I think this beautifully captures something of Calvin’s personal sensitivity, his resolute but deeply pensive sense of vocation and commitment to the will of God:

Ten theological theses on art

I was talking the other day about art with the delightful and incomparable Oliver Crisp (who went to art school before he studied theology). So here’s my attempt at ten brief theses on art (with a picture below of one of my favourite paintings in New York – Picasso’s 1936 Girl Asleep at a Table):

1. Art is not a representation of the world or an expression of feeling, but a construction of form
   
2. Nature is flawed; art is more perfect than nature
   
3. Art is therefore a parable of the redemption of the world
   
4. Art is tradition; it opens the future by renewing the past
   
5. Art is the occurrence of the new; metaphysics trails in art’s wake
   
6. Art may be true or good to the extent that it seeks only the beautiful
   
7. Didacticism is therefore the enemy of art. Bad art is not harmless; it is a betrayal of the world, violence against beauty
   
8. Beauty in art can take form as grotesqueness, fragmentation and dissonance
   
9. The beauty of grotesqueness, fragmentation and dissonance has a special proximity to a Christian theology of the cross
   
10. God is beauty; the crucified Christ is the beauty of God

A portrait of Barth

In a forthcoming collection of essays entitled Engaging with Barth, a group of leading evangelical scholars (such as Henri Blocher, Paul Helm, Michael Horton and Oliver Crisp) seek to offer sympathetic critique of Barth’s thought. They’ve got a nice website with further details – and, best of all, they’ve also included an image of the new portrait of Barth by Oliver Crisp (which I’d been hoping to see). The eyes are especially good – here’s the portrait, together with a detail:

Inhabitatio Dei

In case you had’t noticed, the very best theological blogging at the moment is taking place over at Halden’s blog, Inhabitatio Dei. Halden is in the midst of a brilliant series on radical trinitarianism, and yesterday he posted a wonderfully grumpy polemic against Radical Orthodoxy, as well as a probing critique of George Hunsinger’s reading of Robert Jenson.

Speaking of Jenson-criticism, I recently posted a critique of Oliver Crisp’s reading of Jenson, and I pointed out that Crisp’s article “hasn’t made the necessary imaginative effort of entering into the writer’s own thought, in order to critique that thought from within.”

Well, if you want to read a much better critique of Jenson – a critique arising from a real engagement with Jenson – then you should check out Paul Cumin’s excellent new article: “Robert Jenson and the Spirit of It All: Or, You (Sometimes) Wonder Where Everything Else Went,” Scottish Journal of Theology 60:2 (2007), 161-79.

A rejoinder from Oliver Crisp

Yesterday I posted a brief critique of Oliver Crisp’s new article on Robert Jenson; and I invited Crisp to offer his own rejoinder to my critique. Here’s his rejoinder:

It seems to me that whether a particular theological argument is coherent or not is of utmost importance. Part of the reason for writing this piece was that it seemed to me that the obvious resources Jenson could have availed himself of (viz. recent philosophical work on these matters by metaphysicians) he was unable to avail himself of, because of his views about the nature of metaphysics. The result is that what he comes up with does not work.

As I hope came out in the article, I am an admirer of Jenson’s theology, which is provocative and insightful. But, as Jenson himself admits, it is the fate of any theological system to be dismembered and analysed. I was simply subjecting one aspect of his thinking to such analysis to see whether it made better sense than traditional ways of thinking about this matter. In my estimation, it did not. Naturally, this is not the only important matter one could discuss with respect to Jenson's work. But – to repeat – if all truth is God’s truth, it surely matters if a particular view advanced by a leading theologian as an alternative to other, traditional accounts of a particular doctrine, is not a more complete, or satisfying, or coherent alternative. To that extent, I think the essay was worth writing.

Oliver Crisp on Robert Jenson

The other day I mentioned Oliver D. Crisp’s new critique of Robert W. Jenson: “Robert Jenson on the Pre-Existence of Christ,” Modern Theology 23:1 (2007), 27-45.

Oliver Crisp is an impressive young British scholar, and he’s emerging as a significant new voice in the contemporary theological conversation. He’s a very fine interpreter of American theologians like Jonathan Edwards and W. G. T. Shedd, and he has been doing some important work on the doctrine of sin.

So it’s a shame I can’t be more positive about his new paper on Jenson. In this paper, Crisp’s argument is (in a nutshell) that Jenson’s thought is incoherent. His recurring criticism is: “I cannot make sense of what Jenson says” (p. 44).

The main problem with this critique, in my view, is that it lacks imagination. Crisp has his own set of classical doctrinal and metaphysical categories, which differ pretty radically from the categories of Jenson’s own thought. And when Jenson’s ideas cannot be interpreted in the light of these ready-made categories, Crisp simply protests that Jenson doesn’t make sense. For example, one of Jenson’s central themes – that ontology is structured eschatologically and narratively – is said to be senseless: “it seems intuitively obvious that no being that is temporal can constitute its own past and present from its future. This just makes no sense” (p. 42).

Certainly this is one way of critiquing a writer; but it’s not a very interesting way, since such a critique has not yet made the necessary imaginative effort of entering into the writer’s own thought, in order to critique that thought from within.