Rémi Brague, Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age

I imagine that many readers are familiar already with the French historian and philosopher Rémi Brague. My first encounter with him is via his latest book, Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for a Modern Age (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). It's a stitched-together collection of nine papers that Brague has given to English-speaking audiences in recent years. But that's not to say this little book doesn't put forward a coherent argument.

Brague is a conservative in the deepest sense of the word. He is concerned with the conservation of humanity itself, which he takes to be under assault in the modern West. Exhibiting his wit (not to mention his obsession with etymologies and his mastery of the English language) he commits a "deliberate spoonerism" and argues that the civilization-saving conservatism we need is essentially a commitment to conversation--conversation both with the human past and with nature itself.

Modernity is, according to Brague, a type of barbarism, defined as a "refusal to communicate". Modernity refuses to communicate with the past or with nature by way of its mythical conception of self-determination, which denies continuity with what came before and which promises a future of humanly achieved progress. The driver of this barbarism is modernity's methodological atheism which, while it allows for the description and even exploitation of the world, can offer no compelling reason why it is good for human beings to exist and to keep existing. Thus, the assertion of human autonomy inevitably results in a type of deep existential malaise. Reason itself must be seen as a product of irrational forces. Rather than grounds for meaningful action, there are merely deterministic causes.

The central move to treat modernity's condition must be a recovery of the notion of the Good in the Platonic rather than Aristotelian sense. If we are to have a reason to live, we must understand the Good not merely as something we do, but rather as the necessary ontological ground of all that exists. Brague argues that the necessity of the Good is implied in the modern (Kantian) concept of ethics as rational action (ie, action rooted in the Being of the subject), and evil as an irrational perversion of this freedom. This is a roundabout confirmation of, not only the Platonic vision, but the biblical creation story, both of which state that the Good is given to us with Being and must therefore be received as gift.

Recovering the necessity of the Good requires a return to a cosmological view of nature--the belief that the universe not only can be described in its present state or understood in terms of the mechanisms of how it came to be what it is, but rather that it is inherently meaningful and intelligible. The cosmos must be seen in terms of logos--communicating goodness to us. Humanity is not a stranger to this good nature (or "creation"), but rather at home in it, part of it. Within this good creation human freedom must be conceived as the freedom to manifest what we are as given by, in, and with nature, and not in some sort of rebellion against it. Freedom is responsive human communication with the goodness of nature. Culture is the byproduct of this communication, a cultic overflowing of praise to God (whether we realize it or not). This means, Brague says, that Christianity, if it is the true religion, is not itself a culture. Instead, it exists as a conserving conversation with every culture.

The necessity of the Good, and the attendant recovery of premodern notions of nature, freedom, and culture, Brague contends, should lead to a reintegration of both the ancient pagan virtues and the biblical commandments. Virtues are habits that allow us to "do good", to act in accordance with the nature of things. The biblical commandments of the God who says of creation "it is good" are never antithetical to this, but rather must always be species of the mandate to "Be what you are!' This rediscovery and reintegration of virtues and commandments can only take place in the family. The modern state and the modern market militate against the family. The former consistently reduces people to atomistic individuals, whereas the latter trains them as individuals who think of everything as a commodity. But the family is essential for society. The biological bond between parents and children, and the unconditional love that go with it, communicate the givenness and goodness of one's being. The family, or those things founded on the notion of family (like monarchies or the church), are the only institutions that can care about "the very long run". Only they can have a deep sense of responsibility to, and gratitude for, the past, and an existential concern for the future.

Brague's Curing Mad Truths is a radical assault on many of the things taken for granted in modern liberal societies. Nevertheless, as a "conservative" (read: conserving through conversating) project, it does not advocate some impossible return to the past. It calls us to reconnect the branches of truth upon which modernity sits to the metaphysical trunk from which they have been severed. It's a provocative, convincing, and accessible little book (only 115pp., notes and index excluded) by an important scholar, and it deserves wide attention.

2 reviews: Cortez and Volf/McAnnally-Linz

The new book by Marc Cortez, Christological Anthropology in Historical Perspective, offers

interesting snapshots of the interaction of christology and anthropology in the history of Christian thought.  Cortez constructs his argument on the assumption that Christ reveals both natures of the hypostatic union: Christ discloses humanity to us.

Cortez orders the book around thematic expositions of the christologies of select figures from Christian history. He assembles a solid cast of theologians from history to probe the question of Christ’s humanity and ours. The inclusions and topics are select but pertinent: Gregory of Nyssa and gender, Julian of Norwich and suffering, Luther and justification as the foundation of humanity, Schleiermacher and ecclesially mediated humanity, Barth and embodiment, Zizioulas and personhood, and Cone and liberation. Each chapter offers a coherent and focussed reading designed to illuminate the impact of christology on the considered topic of theological anthropology. The figures are utilised more as models of thinking through the issues of humanity rather than as offering settled conclusions.

For instance, his discussion of gender through a reading of Gregory of Nyssa works its way right into the heart of contemporary questions about biological sexuality and constructed gender. But rather than argue that Gregory’s theology furthers (or hinders) arguments for gender fluidity, Cortez hones in on the way that Gregory’s discussion of gender pivots on the resurrection. It is to the author’s credit that he pulls back from proclamatory judgements. Cortez’s mostly noncommittal stance invites the reader to reflection.

However, the curation of topics and authors does not escape a sense of arbitrary judgement. Why does the book avoid Augustine, Irenaeus, Kathryn Tanner, and the many others who meet the book’s guiding criterion of developing a christology that sheds light on humanity? The selection criteria are obscure. 

Further to this, the rendering of the human developed here is fragmentary and incomplete, which seems to be an accident of design, rather than a deliberate constructive proposal. Expected topics were omitted without explanation—sin, the human and the environment, culture, etc. The conclusion attempts to tie the readings together, but this serves primarily comparative purposes, rather than offering a unique vision of the human through the lens of Christology.

The main contribution of the book lies in its offering of these models of thinking, rather than in any proposal of a christological anthropology. This is a fine end in itself, and the book would be at home on any undergraduate reading list in theological anthropology.

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This decade seems to be marked by a gradual escalation of Christian concern for public issues. A new book co-authored by Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz,  Public Faith in Action: How to think carefully, engage wisely, and vote with integrity, addresses these concerns directly. Born from a series of Facebook posts, the book contains short digestible chapters arranged by topic. Volf and McAnnally-Linz aim to equip Christians to reflect on public issues. The authors attempt to avoid needlessly adopting stances that would only limit discussion, and instead aim to provoke questions that might lead to healthy dialogue and debate. Each chapter closes with an excellent list of introductory and advanced readings (Quite a number of ABC Religion and Ethics pieces appear in these lists).

The authors have aimed their book at the church, hiding much of the theological reasoning behind the text. Most of the time this method proceeds without difficulty. For instance, the authors outline four possible approaches to the question of same-sex marriage, and comment that each stance has compelling theological reasons, without delving into the theologic itself. On other occasions, however, they advocate a settled “Christian stance” on a particular issue. Can opposition to the death penalty, for instance, be argued to be the only (note the italics) option available to Christians? I fear that only a very limited definition of “Christian” would enable such a claim. Similarly, the authors present opposition to euthanasia as the Christian stance, and then back this up with social rather than theological argumentation. The authors would have been better served at these points to put forward such positions as compelling rather than exclusive.

Despite this limitation, Volf and McAnnally-Linz have produced a very fine book that will ignite some healthy discussion in the churches about our common life. Kathryn Tanner once wrote that fruitful theological discussion emerges as we are drawn to the controversial edges of belief and thought. This book is all about such edges, and invites every Christian to reflection and disputation.

On the strangely graced lives of Christians: a book launch talk

I had the pleasure of speaking at the launch of a fine new book of essays on George Whitefield on the weekend. The volume arises from a conference held in Oxford at the tercentenary of Whitefield's birth, and is edited by Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones. 

The editors must have exhausted all of their good judgement on the construction of the volume, since they asked a theologian to launch a book of historical scholarship. I gleefully accepted my charge, and waxed rhapsodic about the lives of strange Christians. Here is a sample taken from the talk, for those who are interested.

George Herbert describes the Christian life as a colour-stained window: itself “brittle crazy glass” that is brilliant only as it is illuminated by the sun. Such windowed lives release the divine colour into the world as they are transparent to God’s light. We have sometimes called such lives “saintly”. But our conception of “saintliness” sometimes gets in the way of our appreciation of the Christian past.

Historical study has two cardinal sins: anachronism and hagiography. Anachronism is an aberration in historical methodology, but the problem with hagiography is entirely theological: the hagiographer doesn’t understand sainthood. The saints are not blandly impeccable. As G. K. Chesterton observes, a saint is simply someone who knows that they are a sinner. Perhaps there is something of this in Whitefield—though it's not always visible. The editors note in their introduction that Whitefield drew “audacious comparisons between his own life and the life of Christ” as he published his own hagiographic autobiographical journals (in his twenties, no less!). It was only later in life that he removed some of the more purple-tinted passages from these journals. We won’t understand our saints by overlooking their faults, as this book makes plain.

We have before us the many Whitefields. Here stands the superficial Whitefield: the dramatic and tearfully flamboyant preacher, afflicted with a “squint” since childhood, and endowed with a resonant voice. And beside him see the self-important Whitefield: convinced of divine calling, capable of discerning divine will, illusioned with notions of greatness, who at one time shared that he was predestined by divine fiat for the episcopacy. Behold here the evangelical Whitefield: with a certain formula for salvation, convinced of humanity’s great need of divine grace. Meet Whitefield the controversialist: picking fights with theatre groups, denouncing rationalists, and attempting to moderate John Wesley’s aversion to Calvinism. Know the travelling Whitefield: fostering the revivals in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and traversing North America and allowing his heart to settle in its towns, eventually releasing his soul there. And contemplate the difficult Whitefield: a failure at familial relations, terrible with friendships and women (once proposing by asking “Can you, when you have a husband, be as though you had none?”), finally unhappily married, and unreconciled with his Mother before her death. He was an uncomfortably ardent supporter of slavery, controlled by the belief that the institution of slavery must be refined rather than abolished by the Christian gospel.

A hagiography could never be so interesting—and a life is never so simple as being merely an example of impeccable spiritual performance. Just like the saints, Whitefield’s life can only speak to us if it is a human life. How can we understand grace, if we have never allowed ourselves to see the gaps in nature?

The real gift of this volume is the way that the perceptible texture of Whitefield’s life comes across in some of the more surprising essays. Braxton Boren studies the acoustics of Whitefield’s voice—just how accurate are those reports of crowds in the tens of thousands? As one who’s always thought that these scenarios are either highly unlikely, or would be ripe for misunderstanding— producing something like the confusion of the sermon on the mount in the Life of Brian (“blessed are the cheesemakers”)—the results of this chapter were quite a surprise. It seems that Whitefield had an able voice. In a chapter that can only remind one of the rough and impassioned preacher from Moby Dick, Stephen Berry writes of Whitefield’s relationship with the Atlantic. Added up, Whitefield spent three full years at sea. “He was”, Berry writes, “a wandering sailor awaiting his final harbour.”

My favourite chapter is Emma Salgård Cunha’s piece on Whitefield’s use of literary technique to stimulate the affections. “Whitefield’s primary activity… was to preach”, she writes. He even wrote a sermon on how to listen to sermons—an idea that we should seriously consider filching. Whitefield saw some connection between the material mechanics of the sermon and divine grace. And yet, he was keenly aware of the distinction between genuinely graced affection, and human emotional manipulation—exploiting it crucially in one particular sermon by bringing his congregation to tears and back, only to show them how moved they are by human tragedy while yet remaining unmoved by Christ’s passion.

Tears, you might know, are a common theme when discussing Whitefield. He is a man always on the verge of embarrassing himself by weeping. Tears, as Whitefield himself knew, are not always pious and admirable. They can be petty. Whitefield, in this volume, weeps both kinds of tears.

This book is mostly historical, and we are told that the good historian will not insert themselves into the past, but that is not to say that the past won’t rush forward to meet us in the present. My discipline is sometimes called “systematic theology”, which sounds like an orderly and tidy discipline. But if my profession is marked by anything, it is an ardent disrespect for boundaries. The systematician doesn’t want to leave the past in the past, but wants to see it come alive in the present. I want to see all the great Christians of history standing before me: I want to see Ignatius before the lions, hear Origen reading scripture, observe Macrina instruct her brothers, hide behind the pear tree as Augustine sins, sit in the cells across the centuries with Evagrius and Symeon and John and Theresa contemplating the darkness, witness the storm with Luther, and live in the city with Calvin. And I want all of this so that I can learn what faith is, so that I can know how to pray.

We look to our Christian forebears to see the cracks in our nature, and to find where grace fits. And we have to thank Geordan Hammond, David Ceri Jones, and all the contributors to this fine volume for lifting up the window of George Whitefield’s life, so that we can examine the brittle glass in the hope that the sun might strike it and shine through into our dark halls.

Review of Donald Norwood, Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II

Donald W. Norwood, Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II (Eerdmans, 2015)

This is a timely book. Indeed as Donald Norward had been hatching it long before Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013, it is a prophetic book. Unitatis Redintegratio, the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism, states: “In its pilgrimage on earth Christ summons the church to continual reformation, of which it is always in need, in so far as it is an institution of human beings here on earth.” Yet after nearly fifty years this promising declaration seemed, to many an ecumenical Simeon, to have become a forlorn hope. Then, suddenly, habemus papam whose agenda actually includes – “reforming Rome.” (Well, at least the Roman Curia!)

At 232 pages of text Reforming Rome is not a long book, but its 25-page bibliography is suggestive of its compact comprehensiveness. It is hugely instructive and illuminating about Vatican II, not only in terms of input and output, but also as an event. That is, it not only provides a description and analysis of the Council’s work, it also gives a vivid sense of the Council as a kind of huge ecclesial gala for gift-exchange, as much about relationships as ideas. How delightfully Norwood weaves into his narrative snippets of the personal interactions of members and guests, before and after the Council as well as during it. Thus Vatican II becomes a model for the way to do our ecumenism today: unity-through-friendship. Which doesn’t mean that we must always be nice to each other, let alone agree with each other, but it does mean that we will always have each other’s backs.

Enter the ever polemical Karl Barth. From the first volume of his Church Dogmatics when he (in?)famously declared that the analogia entis, the ontological foundation for doing natural theology, is “the invention of Antichrist,” Barth was always up for a theological punch-up with Rome. Until the (school) bell, that is, when many of his Catholic interlocutors became beloved companions (particularly the two Hanses, Urs von Balthasar and Küng). Indeed for all his tenacious cross-examination of the Council’s documents – he lamented the failure of Nostra Aetate “to set forth an explicit confession of guilt” for the Church’s historic anti-Semitism; dubbed Dignitatis Humanae a “monstrosity”; and remained underwhelmed by even the moderated Mariology of Lumen Gentium – Barth was a dedicated evangelist for Vatican II, convinced in his dotage that there were now no “irreconcilable differences” to block the eschatological not-yet of unity from becoming ever more realised.

Other areas of contemporary as well as historical interest covered by Norwood – “The past is not dead; it is not even past,” wrote William Faulkner – include the excellent section devoted to the question of women (Barth told Rome that it still has work to do; women told Barth that he still has work to do too!); an update on why the doctrine of justification by faith should no longer be considered a church-dividing issue (though in my view the 1999 Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on Justification by Faith might be even more of an ecumenical game-changer had insights from the “New Perspectives on Paul” on the ecclesiological import of the doctrine informed the biblical studies done by its working party); and the parts that touch on polity, hierarchy, and the purple elephant that won’t leave the building, i.e., episcopacy (Barth, I sense, would support the ecumenical consensus about the threefold ministry, as long as there are laocratic checks and balances to the exercise of episcopal authority).

Reforming Rome is a must-read for anyone interested in Vatican II, in Karl Barth, and for all engaged in current ecumenical discussions, not least for the contagiousness of the author’s unquenchable enthusiasm for visible unity. In the book’s acknowledgements, Donald Norwood writes that “without the support of my lovely wife Margaret, I could not write another word.” To which uxorial praise I would only add: Margaret, stay healthy!

First published in the Society for Ecumenical Studies Journal

Review of Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels

A guest-review by Jeff Aernie

Richard Hays’ 1989 publication Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul was—without exaggeration—a watershed moment in New Testament studies. Hays’ careful theological and exegetical analysis of the way the Scriptures of Israel reverberated through the corridors of the Pauline epistles sparked a hermeneutical conversation across the theological landscape. Teachers and students were required to read Paul again—to hear afresh the way the apostle called forth Israel’s narrative within early Christianity.

Nearly thirty years later, Hays has provided another masterful foray into the hermeneutical question of how the New Testament authors read Scripture: Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Baylor University Press, 2016). In this volume Hays turns his attention away from Paul and toward the authors of the fourfold Gospel. His primary aim, in his own words, is to offer “an account of the narrative representation of Israel, Jesus, and the church in the canonical Gospels, with particular attention to the ways in which the four Evangelists reread Israel’s Scripture” (7). Hays describes the key for this interpretive task as reading backwards or figurally—by which he means that the Evangelists’ engagement with the text is primarily retrospective. Again, to quote Hays: “the Evangelists were convinced that the events of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection were in fact revelatory: they held the key to understanding all that had gone before” (358). The re-interpretation or re-narration of Israel’s story for the life of the church is necessarily mediated through Jesus.

Hays pursues this interpretive agenda by providing a separate chapter on each of the Gospels which provides extensive exegetical analysis on each of the key aspects of his wider thesis: how each evokes Israel’s Scripture to re-narrate Israel’s story, to portray Jesus’ identity and significance, and to describe the church’s role in the world. I am tempted to fill the rest of this brief post with quotations from these chapters, since Hays’ analysis of each of the Gospels reflects the type of exegetical care that should be a standard for the discipline. But I will confine myself to one extended quotation. In his conclusion to the chapter on the Gospel of Luke, Hays highlights a point which, I think, should influence our reading of each of the Gospels:

Luke’s Christology of divine identity requires a fundamental rethinking of our notion of “God.” Jesus is the Kyrios; the Kyrios is Jesus. God is therefore not a concept subject to general philosophical elucidation but a “person,” an agent known through the complex unfolding of his narrative identity—and only so. And precisely for that reason, the “low/high” christological categories collapse completely. God discloses himself to us precisely in lowliness (280).

The key emphasis here is Hays’ rejection of the artificial construction that certain Gospel authors develop distinctly “low” or “high” Christologies. He argues convincingly that the Gospel authors are re-narrating Israel’s Scripture in their own context precisely to engage with the mystery of how Jesus can simultaneously embody both Yahweh and humanity. For Hays, it is in recognizing the Evangelists’ figural reading of Israel’s Scripture that we are enabled to understand the complexity and depth of their narratives. “For the Evangelists, Israel’s Scripture told the true story of the world. Scripture was not merely a repository of ancient writings …; rather, it traced out a coherent story line that stretched from creation, through the election of Israel, to the telos of God’s redemption of the world” (360).

Importantly, Hays’ delineation of this Scriptural storyline is a reminder that the interpretive task never ends with narration. The Evangelists’ reading of Scripture does not culminate in mere exegetical assent. Rather, their portrayal of Jesus is also a call for the church to participate in that narrative. It is a commission to Christian discipleship. This, it seems to me, is what we have in Hays’ volume: an act of Christian discipleship that seeks “to carry forward the story of Jesus with new freedom and faithfulness” (366).

Jenson as teacher: an almost-review of A theology in outline

Robert Jenson writes and speaks neatly. Such a gift is rare within the academy. This generation’s greatest baroque theological stylist, David Bentley Hart, once lauded Jenson’s ability to produce “formulations of a positively oracular terseness”, even if this tone contrasts with Hart’s own “taste for the sesquipedalian and pointlessly elaborate.” (Jenson returns the compliment by observing that “Hart never uses one clause where twenty will do”). Such rhetorical reserve may appear casual—and frequently masks both the imaginatively spectacular and fervently orthodox character of Jenson’s theology—but it is in fact the sign of a strictly disciplined teacher.

Academics are often maligned for their delight in linguistic obfuscation. We will, we are told, always find the most difficult way to say something. Such judgements represent a deplorable misconstrual of the situation. Explaining a complex idea by the employment of technical and complicated language is easy. The great challenge is disciplining oneself to say something plainly. Why do academics speak and write incomprehensibly? Because we are not clever enough to speak neatly. Colouring inside the lines is beyond us.

Given this situation, there is no task more difficult for the professional theologian than teaching an introductory course in theology. In our cowardice, many of us take the painless option by giving a comprehensive historical survey of the discipline liberally peppered with Latin axioms and eloquent anecdotes: providing the students with dates, technical formulae, and names to memorise. The more difficult way to teach theology is to inhabit the world of these thinkers and their arguments, and attempt to speak plainly of their concerns and ours. This is how Robert Jenson teaches.

And we owe our thanks to Adam Eitel for allowing us to see this clearly as he invites us to sit with him in Jenson’s classroom during a series of undergraduate lectures given at Princeton University in 2008. The manuscript of these lectures, A Theology in Outline: Can these bones live?, shows that Jenson’s skill for “oracular terseness” extends to his extemporaneous teaching (as Eitel describes it in his introduction).

This is not Jenson’s systematics in brief. It is rather a public performance of Christian theology. Jenson describes it in his preface as something of a taster of Christian thought intended to whet the appetite. For this reason, the book bears more in common with a catechism than a standard academic introduction to theology. What Jenson introduces us to here is not theology as an academic discipline, but as a vocation. What do we receive from the tradition and the great thinkers of Christianity, “from Augustine to Hildegard of Bingen to Barth”? The exhortation to pray.

Jenson follows his usual method of explaining the tradition while simultaneously reinterpreting it and presenting it as a living option for present life. There is no need to summarise Jenson’s arguments: the book is short enough, so just read it yourself. Rather, it is Jenson in the mode of a teacher that is of particular interest. In all of his writing, Jenson asks us to evaluate how we undertake the theological task. 

A typology suggests itself here. Take a basic Christian claim: “Jesus is Lord”. Theology done in the usual way will consider this to be a densely-packed idea needing to be unfurled into elaborate theological rhetoric. Jenson’s theology, on the other hand, treats “Jesus is Lord” as a large billowing idea that needs to be compressed into theological claims to be shared. It is this compressive character of Jenson’s theology that leads Hart to write that a single phrase of Jenson’s might “detonate” if mishandled. Rather than expending his energy by expressing simple ideas through grand flourishes, Jenson saves the grandness and the energy for the ideas themselves.

This, I suggest, is what we learn from Jenson as a teacher. The basic stuff of Christian faith is conceptually grand: “Christ is risen”, “this is my body”, “your sins are forgiven” and so on. Moreover, they are grand in a metaphysical sense. Metaphysics is not to be contrasted with existence: “when we begin doing metaphysics—that is, when we begin asking questions like ‘what is it “to be”?’—we are not just playing empty word games. The questions we ask and the answers we give both express and shape the way we perceive and act in the world" (p. 108). Our metaphysical construal of such claims is the manner by which we decide how we will live. As Jenson treats the gospel, any word spoken about Jesus is simultaneously a telling of our own stories. A grand story, Jenson suggests, is one that makes room for all of us. Theologians might do well to foster more audacity in their thinking, and then they may be enabled to write neatly of the things of God.

A postscript on the “comprehensive” bibliography:

Eitel has enlisted the help of Keith Johnson to compile a very good list of academic works published by Jenson for inclusion in this volume, but it is a shame that it is not as “comprehensive” as advertised. Two of Jenson’s ALPB books are missing, Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse, and On the Inspiration of Scripture. His book, Lutheranism, co-authored with the late Eric Gritsch is omitted, as is the volume of essays that Jens and I produced together, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation. While essays from The Futurist Option (co-authored with Carl Braaten) appear, the book itself has no entry. Seemingly by design, Jenson’s occasional writings are left off the list (published letters and his many captivating editorials written for Dialog). And a significant number of essays are nowhere to be found: “What kind of God can make a covenant?”, “Deus est ipsa pulchritudo”, and many others. This does not reflect poorly on Eitel or Johnson, since Jenson himself has lost track of his publications. But it does seem that researchers wanting access to all of Jenson's writings will have to continue compiling their own lists.

Tweet review of Edwin Hatch, The organization of the early Christian churches

It is a rare thing to come across such a hair style, or such a book. Edwin Hatch's 1880 Bampton Lectures gave a groundbreaking economic and institutional history of early Christianity. The lectures were published in 1881 as The Organization of the Early Christian Churches. The book was considered so important that it was promptly translated into German by no less a person than Adolf von Harnack. The book was recommended to me by one of my PhD students, and I'm very glad I read it. I was lucky enough to get a copy with uncut pages so I had the added pleasure of cutting the pages with my breakfast knife (following the revered example of Dr Johnson). I reviewed the book with a series of tweets, compiled here for posterity:

Lecture 1. Early Christian institutions have survived. This gives them a false air of familiarity and makes historical work bloody hard.

Lecture 2. The church was one of many civil clubs. Its special mark was almsgiving. This required financial administrators ("bishops") as well as distributors ("deacons").

Lecture 3. Early Christian governance was a continuation of the Sanhedrin: a court of collegial elders ("presbyters"), mostly for purposes of moral discipline.

Lecture 4. The apostles were succeeded by these councils of presbyters, but divisions soon led to the elevation of bishops as symbols of unity.

Lecture 5. Early Christian ordination was appointment to office, the same as in civil institutions. It did not confer spiritual powers. (Tertullian and the Montanists were defenders of tradition in the face of rapid institutional change.)

Lecture 6. So how did the clergy become a spiritually distinct class? Through state exemptions, they first became a civilly distinct class. The spiritualisation of this distinctiveness came later.

Lecture 7. Imperial power helped to weld the churches together until "church" came to mean a confederation ruled by councils.

Lecture 8. The medieval divide between parish clergy and cathedral clergy came from the way differing forms of civil organisation were adapted to urban and regional settings.

Conclusion: Every aspect of church order can be explained by external influences. Institutional forms are not fixed but elastic. They can and should be modified today. Attempts to rehabilitate the forms of earlier ages (he is thinking of the Oxford Movement) are misguided.

Tweet review of Christoph Markschies, Christian Theology and Its Institutions in the Early Roman Empire

The book is Christoph Markschies, Christian Theology and Its Institutions in the Early Roman Empire: Prolegomena to a History of Early Christian Theology, newly translated by fellow blogger Wayne Coppins (Baylor University Press 2015). I reviewed it on Twitter as I was reading it over the last couple of days. I've pasted all the tweets below – first a summary of the book and then some general thoughts.

Summary of each section

1.1 Christian history is not a one-way street of development or decline.

1.2 New ideas have to take root in new social forms. A history of theology is a history of institutions and their guiding norms.

2.1a Early Christians generally participated in the pagan education system with very little fuss.

2.1b Christian teachers adopted diverse educational institutions. This helps to explain the diversity of early Christian theology.

2.1c While some Christian teachers (e.g. Justin) were free-wheeling philosophers, Origen's school was more like a formal university.

2.2 The Montanists sought to recover the power of primitive Christianity by adopting the institution of the pagan oracle cult.

2.3a A third new institution: the Christian worship service. This absorbed elements of both pagan and Jewish cults.

2.3b School-theology was urban; prophetic-theology was rustic; liturgical-theology was universally accessible.

2.3c Early eucharistic prayers show a high degree of adaptation to local contexts. Liturgy was a vehicle of theology.

2.4 When Christianity transformed institutions, the old forms remained recognisable; that was part of the attraction.

3.1a The development of fixed norms isn't a power-play or a theological regression. It's necessary for the formation of new institutions.

3.1b Normative lists of a NT canon weren't only used in ecclesial institutions but also in the free-wheeling schools.

3.1c Marcion's institutional setting was Alexandrian philology. He wasn't trying to create a new canon but to edit an existing one.

3.1d Powerful bishops and free-wheeling teachers both used a NT canon in exactly the same way.

3.1e The Gnostics, free-wheelers par excellence, presupposed the same normative canon but interpreted it differently.

3.1f The point of this is that the canon was not an authoritarian construct used to suppress dissident voices.

3.1g But the canon wasn't monolithic either. Different communities had slightly different canons with a common centre.

3.2 This (amazing) section on the canon has been a case study in the way norms functioned in the new Christian institutions.

4.1 Walter Bauer's thesis of early Christian plurality and of orthodoxy as power remains dominant, even though it can be seen now as a piece of liberal protestant apologetics.

4.2 If Bauer's basic thesis of early Christian plurality is correct, is there nevertheless a deeper unity of Christian identity amid the plurality?

4.3 In opposition to Bauer, the inculturation view argues for a deeper unity by positing an original (culturally pure) gospel embedded in diverse cultures.

4.3b If Bauer's model is an apologetic for liberal protestantism, the inculturation model is an apologetic for Catholicism. Both models impose too much on the sources.

4.4 Plurality and identity go together. Early Christians forged a coherent and bounded identity out of plurality.

4.5 Early Christianity was a pluralism centred on an identity-forming centre articulated in theological institutions.

Bibliography: 100 pages. Small font. German encyclopedic erudition. Anglo-American scholarship well represented too.


General thoughts

Best part is the very rich and very important section on the NT canon. The book is worth getting for this alone.

Other highlights: the account of Origen's school, and the surprising demonstration of local improvisation in early eucharistic prayers.

I see this as a revitalised history-of-ideas approach. It doesn't see ideas as the products of social struggle.

Nor are ideas timeless truths. Nor do they unfold teleologically. Ideas belong to the engine of social life.

The book argues that early Christian plurality is best explained by the diversity of its institutions.

It includes research from ritual studies and material culture (e.g. a nice little section on ancient libraries) but also shows the validity of the "great authors" for early Christian history.

After all, individual talents like Origen weren't just products of institutions but were creative agents of institutional formation.

Compared to the rest of the book, the theoretical basis of the plurality/identity thesis (sections 4.4 – 4.5) seemed a bit thin.

The three institutions studied here are selective and illustrative. But it got me thinking about the theological function of other institutions like baptism, burial, martyrdom, etc.

I wish there'd also been a section on early Christian preaching (especially since Markschies has done top work on preaching elsewhere, e.g. in his book on Origen). But I'm not complaining. 

Also really useful is the way the book maps out the field of early Christian studies. Great section on Walter Bauer and his reception.

All in all, I don't think I've learned so much about early Christianity since reading Peter Brown or Elizabeth Clark.

When God was everything: A review of Ian McFarland's From Nothing

We theologians are often accused of writing a lot of nothing about God, which occasionally may be the case. But it takes a careful hand to write a lot about God and nothing. “Nothing” is an undeniably slippery concept. As soon as you make a statement about it, you’ve gone and turned it into something! But, if Ian McFarland is to be believed, we can’t just let the nothing be. It simply won’t do to go about life carelessly ontologising nothing. Theology must grapple with nothing, which is to say, it must cease trying to grapple with nothing as though it were something (because it looks rather silly to wrestle with the air).

McFarland has called his book From Nothing. I often berate my students for beginning their essays with clichés, such as “Since the beginning of time…” However, after reading From Nothing, I think that I have been mistaken. I should be praising my students and their clichés. After all, they have demonstrated that they have the theological sense to discern that time has a beginning. This is a fine point to make, as long as one doesn’t make it too finely. Once the theologian starts discussing what existed “before” creation, the language can get rather muddled—since the whole discussion employs a creaturely temporal framework. Of course, some theologians claim that an awful lot existed before creation, even if the things that did exist were the wrong shape and all the bits were in the wrong place.

The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is sometimes accused of being alien to the Bible—a downright unscriptural philosophical intrusion into the theological purity of the Christian tradition. The students of Whitehead continue to tell us that ex nihilo—if nihil really means nihil—makes God responsible for the evils of the world. The creation narrative presented by process theism provides a tidy solution to the problem of evil: a God whose creative activity is limited to the persuasion of pre-existent matter cannot be held accountable when that obstinate matter shapes itself into unpleasant things like lawsuits and fire-ants. 

McFarland is aware of the critiques of ex nihilo, and addresses them by looking at the history of the doctrine. Our first written expression of ex nihilo seems to appear in Theophilus’ letter to Autolycus. “While the gnostics used the doctrine of creation as a theodicy, for Theophilus it no longer plays this role. Evil cannot be explained as a natural consequence of creation… Theophilus turns [the doctrine of creation] to the service of soteriology”. Theophilus saw that salvation of the material world hinges on God’s transcendence of the same.

This little history uncovers the principal theme of the book: it is because God transcends the world that God has an interest in the future of the world. Without transcendence, God would be subject the fate of the world, but the transcendent God is the subject of the fate of the world. The affirmation that God creates from nothing is simply another way of saying that “nothing limits God”. God’s creative activity is not conditioned by any environment or matter or circumstance. The Gnostics share with the process theists a disappointingly timid notion of divine transcendence. A truly transcendent God doesn’t need a demiurge. “God’s transcendence does not imply distance from creatures but is rather the ground for God’s engagement with them”.

Unlike this blog post, McFarland’s book does not degenerate into doctrinal polemics. Instead, he puts the doctrine of creation to use—he reveals its problems and promises. When examining an ancient doctrine such as this, one can be either an archaeologist or an engineer. The archaeologist attempts to uncover the ancient use of the doctrine, and perhaps argue for its continuity up until today. The engineer, on the other hand, attempts to build something on the doctrine. McFarland plays the engineer. The strongest case for the doctrine is made, he argues, when one can “identify its dogmatic function” rather than merely establishing “its grounding in Scripture or tradition”. McFarland builds his case upon topics such as evil and providence, glory and light, Christ and icons. McFarland is a fine engineer. He understands how the structure works, and shows that divine transcendence and creatio ex nihilo support and strengthen each other.

It might be possible to compare this book to Kathryn Tanner's God and Creation in Christian Theology, but I cannot think of another volume that treats the topic of creatio ex nihilo as well as McFarland does here. McFarland shows that when theologians talk about God, they talk about nothing. They just need to find a way to do it that allows God to be everything before there is anything else.

Animals in the Index: A review of David Clough

A guest-review by Steve Wright. David Clough, On Animals. Volume 1: Systematic Theology (T&T Clark) 

Like most academics, I rarely find it necessary to read a book cover to cover in order to ridicule or praise it. I have far too little time and far too many books on my shelves to go about reading them all. Fortunately, within the world of theology, reading is optional. For the index is a perfectly succinct list-form summary of a book’s argument. All one has to do is cross-check the number of entries listed under “Barth, Karl” with “election, the doctrine of” and you know what kind of book you have in your hands. Similarly, any book with entries under “language, the poverty of” spills all its secrets out into the open without the need of perusing a single apophatic line from within its chapters.

A good index, however, is like a good waiter: it not only tells you what you will get for dinner, but invites you to sit down and enjoy the aromas of the kitchen while you make your selection. David Clough has written an index like this. Or, rather, I should say that his theology has spilled into his index, for when one peruses the index of his persuasively written book, On Animals, one finds that it has been invaded by animals. “Bacon, Francis” sits just beneath “baboons”; and “Crisp, Oliver” is sandwiched between “creeping things” and “crocodiles”. Just as naturally as most theological books will list “Balthasar, Hans Urs von”, “Barth Karl”, and “Bultmann, Rudolf” in neat alphabetical order, Clough lines up “cats”, “caterpillars”, “cattle”, and “cauliflower” in his index. All of this to say that Clough has produced an index of creatures – critters and all.

In this book, Clough tests one of the core teachings of Christian orthodoxy that goes back at least as far as Basil: when it comes to being, one is either the Creator of all, or one is a creature. Humanity does not occupy an ontologically ambiguous place between the two, Clough observes, but sits firmly on the creaturely side of the divide. Sticking with the core doctrines of the faith, Clough also notes that the significance of the incarnation is not so much that the eternal Word became a human, as that the eternal Word mysteriously crossed the fundamental divide to become a creature. When God takes on flesh, God takes on creatureliness. A manger was the perfect place for the incarnate God to rest.

Despite the focus on animals, Clough has produced a very human book. His reasoning liberates us from the burden of construing the human as anything other than what it is: an animal among fellows. There are always creatures in the index, but we often separate the “Persons” from the “Subjects”. I might even go as far as to claim that separating humans into their own index is a theological move, betraying at least some relative anthropocentrism. Clough favours a “General Index” filled with all the glorious creatures of God’s creation, from red pandas to onions to John Wesley. It is the best kind of index: one that invites you to read the book.

Review of Robert Clark, Mr White's Confession

The next in my spate of Amazon reviews is a short review of Robert Clark's Augustinian-noir detective novel, Mr White's Confession.

Review of Simon Chan, Grassroots Asian Theology

Another Amazon review, this time of Simon Chan's smashing new book on Grassroots Asian Theology (IVP, 2014). Simon Chan teaches systematic theology at Trinity Theological College in Singapore.

Review of Plato's complete works

And another one! Here's my Amazon review of the beautiful big Hackett edition of Plato's complete works.

Review: Early Arabic Contributions to Trinitarian Theology

There comes a time in every man's life when he decides to post his first review on Amazon. Here's mine – a review of Thomas W. Ricks, Early Arabic Contributions to Trinitarian Theology, from the new dissertation series by Fortress Press. It's such a good book, I've even decided to add a lecture to my Trinity class based on this material. It'll be a nice change from all those Cappadocians and North Africans and whatnot.

Review: Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (2nd edition)

A guest-review by Jeff Aernie

Joel B. Green, Jeannine K. Brown, and Nicholas Perrin, eds. Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. 2nd edition. IVP 2013. xxxi + 1088 pp.

For over two decades lecturers, students, and pastors have benefited greatly from the IVP Dictionary series. The first edition of the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (DJG) proved to be a wealth of information, becoming an instant success for its breadth and quality.

Given the widespread acclaim of the first edition it may seem odd that a second edition was needed. Many of the articles in the first edition continue to provide relevant introductions to the various aspects of Gospel studies which they represent. And yet, in light of the increasing speed at which Gospel studies has advanced, the second edition of DJG is a welcome contribution.

Most of those who are familiar with the first edition of DJG will simply want to know what is different between the two editions. One might be inclined to say: everything. It would be unfair and inaccurate to refer to this second edition as a mere revision – it represents a substantial update. Although there is significant overlap in terms of the entries, most of the articles are original contributions composed by new authors. Those few articles that have the same author in both editions have been substantially edited, with updates to both content and bibliography.

In terms of actual entries, there are 24 new headings, and 14 others that reflect either revised terminology (e.g., “Dreams” becomes “Dreams and Visions” and “Temple Clearing” becomes “Temple Act”) or a combination of previous articles (e.g., the songs of Mary, Simeon, and Zechariah are now combined into the more systematic “Songs and Hymns”). Several of the new entries revolve around more contemporary forms of criticism (i.e., “African American Criticism”; “Canonical Criticism”; “Feminist and Womanist Criticisms”; “Latino/Latina Criticism”; “Narrative Criticism”; “Postcolonial Criticism”). The other major area of study that sees increased attention in this edition is social-historical material, with contributions on “Cynics and Cynicism”; “Economics”; “Essenes”; “Gods, Greek and Roman”; “Judaism, Common”; “Orality and Oral Transmission”; “Sadducees”; “Slave, Servant.”

Three new contributions in particular represent significant advances. Richard Bauckham’s new article on “Christology” provides a systematic summary of the Christological emphasis of each Gospel, as well as tracing common characteristics across the fourfold Gospel. Given the focus of the volume, this type of synthetic treatment was a welcome addition. Joel Green, the only contributor to serve as an editor for both volumes, offers an important contribution on “Historicisms and Historiography.” While the relationship between history and the study of the Gospels has remained important since the publication of the first edition, questions of methodology have shifted. Green’s concise treatment of criteria-based historicism, critical-realist-based historicism, and social memory theory will provide a clear introduction for the next generation of Gospel students. It is also worth mentioning the addition of a constructive article on the “Theological Interpretation of the Gospels.” Andy Johnson here provides a clear description of a burgeoning area of study that should be mandatory reading for all theological students.

Most of the articles that were omitted from the second edition reflect a process of streamlining. For example, the older articles on “Benefactor” and “Taxes” are now helpfully subsumed under the more constructive essay on “Economics.” Two omissions, however, were particularly unfortunate. Most noticeably, the loss of Sidney Greidanus’ article on “Preaching from the Gospels” constitutes a significant deficiency. Students and pastors will want to return to Greidanus’ insights in the first edition of DJG. Perhaps less significant, given its widespread influence on other articles, is the omission of an article on “Rhetorical criticism.” Given the inclusion of a number of new articles on methodology in this edition it seems unusual that this would be removed as a separate entry.

Those minor complaints aside, one need neither be a prophet nor the son of one in order to assert that this edition of DJG will stand alongside its predecessor as an essential tool for New Testament studies. The editorial team is to be commended for creating a reference tool that will undoubtedly contribute to the future shape of the discipline.

Christ the Stranger: around the traps

My Rowan Williams book, Christ the Stranger, has been getting a lot of generous attention over the past week or two. I was astounded to see it listed as one of the Guardian's books of the year for 2012 (selected by the travel writer Colin Thubron). Even my wife decided to read it when she saw that it came recommended by the Guardian!

It was also listed today in the Christian Century's year-end list of top books in theology and philosophy. Wesley Hill gave it an extended review last week in Books & Culture, and that was picked up by über-blogger Andrew Sullivan in a post on theology for dark times. Simon Perry gave it a generous review in Oxford's Regent Reviews [pdf], and Philip Harvey from the Carmelite Library in Melbourne reviewed it with some thoughtful criticisms about the importance of Williams' Anglicanism.

I'm very flattered by all the attention! It says a lot more about Rowan Williams than it does about me – but I'm thankful all the same. And I'm glad so many people are reading about Rowan Williams: he's well worth the trouble, that's what I've found.

On other writing fronts, I recently turned in the manuscript of Salvation in My Pocket: Fragments of Faith and Theology, to be published by Cascade Books. It's a collection of the best short pieces from this blog, together with a bunch of new pieces that I've written lately (which explains why I haven't been blogging much!). The book has new pieces on childhood, saints, silence, time, the cross, the death of Thomas Merton and Karl Barth, travel notes on Illinois, and who knows what else. 

And I'm back at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena for the next month, where I hope to finish a draft of Dear Mister Herbert, my letters to George Herbert on the Christian life.

Psalms for all seasons: a contemporary psalter

At the opening worship service of the Romans conference, it was a joy to use the wonderful new psalter, Psalms for All Seasons: A Complete Psalter for Worship (Brazos Press 2012). It has multiple versions of each of the 150 psalms (sometimes as many as ten versions of a single psalm), with musical styles ranging from chant and classical hymnody to African American spirituals and contemporary urban music. There are also spoken word and responsorial settings for each psalm. In our service, there was a psalm reading with part of a Wesleyan hymn for the response – it was very well done, and I've been singing it in my head all week. The book also includes brief theological-practical notes on how each psalm can be used in Christian worship.

I sometimes worry that our hymnbooks – where you have a more or less arbitrary selection of songs, arranged by various doctrinal and liturgical themes – create the impression that worship is a matter of human choice. You choose your Sunday hymns as you might choose a dessert from the menu at a restaurant; and you choose them on the basis of thematic relevance (this week, let's sing about love; this week, let's sing about forgiveness), so that entire dimensions of human experience might never once enter into the singing of a congregation.

But with psalmody as an overarching structure, the congregation is invited to share in experiences that might seem quite remote from their own everyday concerns. That is why we find some of the psalms so offensive: we simply cannot conceive of such experiences, even though they are – manifestly – genuine human possibilities. Instead of criticising such psalms, we need to learn how to sing them.

Our own private griefs are, often enough, quite paltry: but we are invited to join in the gigantic earth-shaking laments of the psalms. Our own criteria for happiness are selfish and small: but we are allowed to share in the magnificent heaven-rending joys of the psalmist. Our own love for God is so feeble that we might forget all about God for days at a time: but our hearts are torn wide open as we join our voices to the enormous lovesick longing of the psalmist's praise. We are safe, affluent, protected, untroubled by enemies or oppression: but we learn to join our voices to the psalmist's indignant cries for the catastrophic appearance of justice on the earth.

If your congregation sings only Hillsong choruses, then their emotional repertoire will be limited to about two different feelings (God-you-make-me-happy, and God-I'm-infatuated-with-you) – considerably less even than the emotional range of a normal adult person. It is why entire congregations sometimes seem strangely adolescent, or even infantile: they lack a proper emotional range, as well as a suitable adult vocabulary. But in the psalter one finds the entire range of human emotion and experience – a range that is vastly wider than the emotional capacity of any single human life.

Just to stick with Hillsong as an example: for a congregation to go from singing Hillsong to singing the psalter would be like seeing Shakespeare's plays after you've only ever watched sitcoms – it would be a shock to discover that human beings can be so large, and that they come in so many different varieties. Nobody has ever felt the way Hamlet feels, or felt so much: that's exactly what makes Hamlet important.

To enter into the singing of the psalms is to participate in a pattern of worship that transcends any private experience. As though worship were really worship, not just the expression of private thoughts and feelings. As though the voice that really sings in the psalms were a universal voice, the voice of fallen and redeemed humanity gathered together in one lump – which is to say, Christ's voice.

When the church's singing is structured around Israel's psalms, there is a constant reminder that worship is not primarily a matter of personal choice; that the experience of worship is not primarily my own private experience; that the voice in worship is not even primarily my voice, but the voice of Israel, the voice of Christ, the voice of Christ's people gathered across time and space, learning together how to transmute all the varied raw materials of human experience into the praise of God through the alchemy of Jesus Christ.

Robert W. Jenson, Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse

A guest-review by Steve Wright

This year I spent Reformation Day with Robert Jenson’s latest book: Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse (sample chapter here). At only eighty pages, I had expected to spend an hour with it. But like his previous publication with the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau, A Large Catechism, it took me longer to read than expected because of the urgent need to pray or giggle.

My wife commented that these ten slogans sound like “Protestant slogans”. She may be right. The exception is finitum capax infiniti, which is “exclusively Lutheran... because nobody else has agreed with it” (p. 55).

The subtitle is misleading. Jenson frequently gestures to the ambiguity or confusion of certain slogans, not simply to their “use” or “abuse”. This ambiguity is sometimes terminal (as seems to be the case for sola Scriptura). Slogans, we are told, are a necessary shorthand that emerges over time to signify a complex of propositions and practises. Despite the word’s stigma, slogans have a positive function. The problem with slogans is that they tend to develop a certain independence as they age, becoming untethered and paddling to foreign shores.

An example of this untethering is the frequent attempts by some Lutheran theologians to categorise all reality under the rubrics “law” or “gospel”. Jenson argues that it should be clear that this use of “gospel” has drifted from the story of Jesus. What was a history is now a generalised concept. Reframing the dialectic as “death” and “resurrection” does not help. Death and resurrection are not a dialectical pair, but moments in the history of Christ’s life (pp. 35-36).

This book is delightful for many reasons. Jenson takes almost every opportunity afforded him to disagree with Melanchthon. Although on one occasion he finds himself required begrudgingly to give Melanchthon his “partial due” for identifying the Spirit with the gift the Spirit brings (p. 46).

Jenson has been described as the perfecter of the footnote; clearly this was a reference to the dynamic perfection of the East. Like our Lord’s wine, he has brought out his finest well after the guests have gotten a little tipsy from his systematics. Whether he is confessing his enduring awe for Augustine, comparing the proliferation of trendy religion in the second century with California, or denying that Lutherans have ever taught anything that could be called consubstantiation, his footnotes always delight. He even works in a reference to a theology blog (sorry Ben, not this one).

Throughout Jenson maintains his career-long argument that the object of theology must be “God himself in his own visibility and disgrace” (p.39). That is, Christ destroyed on the cross and raised again. Though internalised through faith, we will always encounter this God through an external Word. So much for subjective faith. Faith is “a strange kind of knowledge, more like a dark cloud around its object than a bright transparency.” If we look inward to find Christ “we will only enter a cloud of unknowing” (p. 20).

What then, must we do to keep theological slogans moored? If the only legitimate use of slogans is when they are tethered to God in Christ, then the imperative is clear. We must immerse ourselves in the narrative of the triune God. We are to “fill the church with Scripture” (p. 80). 

Will hell be empty? Rob Bell's Love Wins

Here's a piece I wrote for this week's edition of the Christian newspaper, Eternity:

Love Wins is a book about God. It raises the question: what kind of God do Christians believe in? That's an important question in a world where so many of us – both within the church and without – have been hurt by bad theology. Perhaps we were taught that God has two different personalities: God can switch back and forth between vengeance and mercy, so that we never quite know what to expect. Or perhaps we were taught to think of God as a watchful policeman, always ready to hand out infringement notices whenever we step out of line. Or maybe we grew up feeling that God is more ‘pure’ than ordinary human experience, so that parts of our lives – especially those non-spiritual, bodily parts – are disgusting and offensive to God.

There’s nothing trivial about bad theology. A diseased picture of God will inevitably produce symptoms in our thoughts and feelings, in the way we live and relate to each other, in our whole way of looking at the world. Family life, sexual life, friendship, work, leisure, creativity: all these parts of our experience are deeply shaped by the way we think about God. I often meet people who are still nursing wounds from the theology they imbibed as young children, people who are recovering from the worship of a bad god.

Rob Bell is writing for people like that. And his point is simple: Jesus shows us what God is like; Jesus shows us the triumph of God’s love for the whole human race. 

Thus Bell raises the question whether human rejection of God might finally be overcome by God’s love; whether hell might turn out to be empty; whether all, in the end, will be saved. The easy assumption that salvation is only for ‘us’, he thinks, is an evasion of the universal significance of the gospel. If Christ’s resurrection doesn’t somehow affect every single human being, then we haven’t really grasped the meaning of resurrection. You might compare it to a legal system: it applies either to everybody or to nobody – it’s not the sort of thing that applies to just some members of a society. In a similar way, Christ’s resurrection is significant either for everyone, or for no one. As Bell puts it, Jesus is ‘as narrow as himself and as wide as the universe’. He is the exclusive way to salvation, yet he includes all humanity within himself.

Some critics have questioned Bell’s orthodoxy – especially his emphasis on the universality of salvation. But the most striking thing about his approach is its deep indebtedness to Eastern Orthodox tradition. The Orthodox churches have always emphasised the universality of Christ’s work – not only his death and resurrection, but also his descent into hell. The Orthodox liturgy proclaims that hell was emptied by Christ: ‘Hell’s gatekeepers trembled before you; you raised with you the dead from every age.’ In another part of the liturgy, Orthodox Christians sing: ‘Rising from the tomb, you broke the bonds of Hades and destroyed the sentence of death, O Lord, delivering all from the snares of the enemy.’ 

The leading contemporary Russian theologian, Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, explores all this in his recent book, Christ the Conqueror of Hell (2009). He shows that, in Orthodox tradition, Christ’s descent into hell has a universal significance. Christ breaks the power of hell and releases all its captives: ‘Christ’s saving of the dead and the exodus from Hades were not one-time events that occurred in the past without significance for the present. These are events that transcend time, whose fruits were reaped not only by those who were imprisoned in hell before Christ’s descent but also by future generations.’ 

Rob Bell seems to be referring to this Orthodox tradition when he argues that ‘at the centre of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins.’ Once you see Christ’s death, descent and resurrection from an Orthodox perspective – as something universal, even cosmic in scope; as something that reaches every human being without exception – then the real question becomes: How could anyone ultimately escape the reach of God’s love? 

As Archbishop Hilarion argues, the universal scope of Christ’s work doesn’t necessarily mean that all will be saved. But it means that even hell itself is no longer a place of separation from God. Christ has penetrated into the depths of hell, flooding its darkness with the light of love. Hell has become a site of divine activity, a venue of divine love. ‘If I make my bed in Hades, you are there’ (Psalm 139:8). Thus the torment of hell can only be understood as the torment of love. Hell’s power is abolished – but someone might still reject God to such an extent that even love becomes a torment, an unbearable ‘scourge’.

This Orthodox tradition is conveniently ignored by those critics who accuse Rob Bell of heresy. As though Eastern Orthodoxy is not sufficiently ‘orthodox’! As though the Christian creed confesses anything positive about hell – except that Christ ‘descended’ there before rising again!

From the perspective of Christian tradition, I don’t think there are any grounds for questioning the orthodoxy of Love Wins. As far as I can tell, Rob Bell really just presents the gospel: he tells of God’s victorious love, a love revealed in Jesus Christ, a love that is deeper than vengeance and stronger than death. 

The hostile reaction to Bell among North American evangelicals reminds me of the way some people responded to the great Reformed theologian, Karl Barth. Barth placed so much emphasis on God’s grace that his critics called him a universalist. But in Barth's view, both universalism and its denial are errors. The important thing is to uphold the absolute freedom of grace: if grace is free, then we should neither deny nor affirm universal salvation. It’s not our decision to make – ‘salvation belongs to the Lord!’ (Psalm 3:8). Yet Barth thought the ferocious condemnation of universalism exposed something pathological in the Christian mindset. When he was accused of promoting universalism, he once replied: ‘Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free …, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might prove to be empty!’

If that is our greatest anxiety – that God might turn out to be too gracious – then perhaps we ought to heed Rob Bell’s celebration of triumphant love, universal love, a love ‘as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart that no one else knows about.’

Or to quote one of the great theologians of the Orthodox tradition, St Isaac the Syrian: ‘Like a handful of dust thrown into the sea are the sins of all humankind compared with the mercy and providence of God.’ 

If that’s true, then we can be sure of one thing: in the end, love wins.

Off the Shelf: three more types of reading

As a sequel to six types of reading, here are another three types. I had also planned to mention Secret Reading, Stolen Reading, Restless Reading, Abortive Reading, Fetishistic Reading, and Travel Reading – but I got frightfully distracted by all the little pressed flowers inside the pages of Dr Johnson. So I might discuss a few more types of reading next time.



Books mentioned in this video:

• Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets [1779]
• Anne Hunt, The Trinity: Insights from the Mystics (Liturgical Press 2010)
• Edward Morgan, Incarnation of the Word: The Theology of Language of Augustine of Hippo (T&T Clark 2010)
• Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books (Rowman & Littlefield 2006)