Here's an audio snippet from this week's class on the Trinity. It's a 20-minute summary of the past few weeks of the course, which have focused on trinitarian theology in the second and third centuries. This summary is pretty sketchy, but I try to identify four general themes in early trinitarian theology:
1. Historical theme (Irenaeus)
2. Psychological theme (Tertullian)
3. Educational theme (Clement)
4. Participatory theme (Origen)
At the end of the clip I try to explain how the two most important themes (1 and 4) can go together, as I think they do in Athanasius.
Incidentally, I also wonder if these four themes might be helpful for explaining Augustine's theology of the Trinity. The significance of Augustine isn't that he represents a monolithic western approach, nor that he is simply a speculative innovator. Instead I think Augustine takes the least significant pre-Nicene theme, the psychological, and synthesises all the other themes around it. Thus Augustine still has a strong salvation-historical emphasis (De Trin. books 2-4) as well as a large preoccupation with the educational and participatory themes (De Trin. books 13-15); but these major pre-Nicene themes are subsumed within the vast architecture of what had until then been only a minor experimental theme, the psychological.
To make room for God: that is the final aim of any public theology. To make room for God in human life and room for God in the public square. All our theological speech is gesturing towards this. In the end it is only life itself, a life reoriented around God, that can convey all that Christian faith means. This kind of public engagement is what Williams has called “taking responsibility for God.” In an essay from the new volume on Faith in the Public Square, Williams describes the public religious life as a life that “takes on the task of ensuring a habitation for God,” a life that “offers hospitality to God, so that this place, this identity, becomes a testimony.” Where this occurs, he suggests, one’s life becomes a sign, a word, a living sacred text. It is here that “we begin to learn how to be a sign inhabited by God’s meanings.” And this is what the public square needs most of all: not just more discussion and debate about God, not just a deeper consideration of Christian ideas, but the visible presence of symbolic lives, lives that mean God.
Sarah Coakley recently presented the 2012 Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, and they are now available online (h/t Kevin). Coakley's lectures are titled Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation, and God. You can get the text and handouts for all six lectures here; and the first four are also available as video:
1. Stories of Evolution, Stories of Sacrifice
2. Cooperation, alias Altruism: Game Theory and Evolution Reconsidered
3. Ethics, Cooperation and Human Motivation: Assessing the Project of Evolutionary Ethics
4. Ethics, Cooperation and the Gender Wars: Prospects for a New Asceticism
5. Teleology Reviewed: A New Ethico-Teleological Argument for God's Existence
6. Reconceiving Natural Theology: Meaning, Sacrifice and God
Last night I had a wonderful time giving a lecture to the Uniting Church's Queensland Synod on "The Aesthetics of Christian Mission". There's an audio recording here (the lecture starts at about 7 minutes – it goes for about 45 minutes, followed by a brief response and some Q&A). The video clip halfway through the lecture is this one:
And here are some suitably deranged snaps from the Synod website:
Over the past several weeks, my class on the trinity has been working through Augustine's De Trinitate – an immense challenge! Today we reached the great finale of Book 15. So I tried to sum up Augustine's theology of the trinity in a final lecture, outlining a series of brief "lessons from Augustine". I had to record the lecture for some of the students, so I thought I'd also post it here. If you're interested, you can listen below – there are six short parts, each about 10 minutes:
Augustine part 1
Augustine part 2
Augustine part 3
Augustine part 4
Augustine part 5
Augustine part 6
This year, Rowan Williams' Holy Week Lectures were devoted to the Narnia stories of C. S. Lewis. The lectures are available online:
Lecture 1: 'Not a tame lion'
Lecture 2: 'I only tell you your own story'
Lecture 3: 'Bigger inside than outside'
When my daughter and I sat down to listen to the first lecture, she turned to me, wide-eyed, and said: 'He even sounds like a character from Narnia!'
Last week, John Milbank gave the first of the 2011 Stanton Lectures at Cambridge. His lectures are titled "Philosophy: A Theological Critique". There are eight lectures in total, and the text of each one will also be posted on the ABC site – here's the first one. The full series is as follows:
Last Monday evening, John Milbank gave a lecture at Swansea University on “The New Atheism and the Return of Religion”. Here is the vote of thanks by Kim Fabricius.
I read the email Nigel sent me in August announcing this lecture while I was eating, aptly, a jalapeno salad. And I wondered: which hot-stuff Professor Milbank were we going to get? The student of Rowan Williams who burst on the scene twenty years ago as the bête noire of theological liberals and apologists of the secular – (joke: Professor Milbank is standing on a cliff with a liberal and a fundamentalist. Who does he push first? The liberal: business before pleasure) – the radical young theologian who said, now famously, “Once, there was no ‘secular’”, and who plotted a declension narrative in the history of ideas that made Duns Scotus the fall guy in the plot? [With a wink to Milbank] Mind, the medievalist Marilyn McCord Adams, when she was here last year, said she was less than impressed by this reading of Duns!
Or perhaps we would get the friend of the cussed American apostle of nonviolence Stanley Hauerwas (three weeks ago the two shared a stage in London), the Milbank who proclaimed “the ontological priority of peace over conflict” – though who, when he became a father, began to reconsider the value of coercion, and who just over a week ago criticised Hauerwas’ Mennonite-inspired pacifism, arguing for the crucial contribution of Gandalf’s military campaign, as well Frodo’s self-sacrifice, for the salvation of Middle-earth. [“Of course Lord of the Rings is fiction”, I was tempted to add, but given the genre of my speech, I felt that I was already being – and was going to be – cheeky enough.]
Or were we going to get the robust churchman who, with no false humility, takes ecclesiology rigorously seriously, though Christology, many say, not nearly seriously enough? Or perhaps the oxymoronic Red Tory (or, as he prefers, Blue Socialist), whose colleague Philip Blond has been called the court theologian of David Cameron? Or the formidable public intellectual who goes head to head with the irrepressible atheist cultural theorist and Marxist media star Slavoj Žižek? Or perhaps the endorser of the pope’s vision of a muscular new European Christianity, not to say Christendom, to counter an aggressive irrational Islam, tacking far too closely, cry his horrified critics, to the winds of Western colonialism?
But what did it matter? Whatever the persona, we were sure to get a force of nature, or, better, super-nature.
As it has turned out, we got something different – but not completely different, because Professor Milbank’s project is nothing if not synoptic and comprehensive. After the cultural, scientific, and theological counter-attacks on the militant New Atheists by Terry Eagleton, Alister McGrath, and John Lennox respectively, some might have thought that Professor Milbank would be beating a rather battered army.
But this army continues to cause mischief, so Professor Milbank has brought his own considerable range of weaponry to the fight, pounding positions often unnoticed in the conventional mappings of the intellectual terrain: the cultural logic of the New Atheism; its politics too, the way the New Atheism would insidiously inform public policy; the relation of the New Atheism to the nihilism of neo-liberalism, the mirror image of the older atheism’s relation to the nihilism of communism; and, finally, the return of the repressed – religion – to fill the vacuum left by the intellectual exhaustion of secular ideologies, and, he argues, the rich potential of a sacramental Christianity, which remarries faith and reason after their modernist divorce, for a constructive and hopeful social agenda that eschews the pathology of fundamentalisms and transcends the reduction of human relations to assertions of power.
Professor Milbank, it is said by fans as well as foes, writes “difficult” prose (as Geoffrey Hill, he approvingly observes, writes difficult poetry). But whether in shock or awe, I think we all understood his lucid lecture tonight. Rumour has it that the prolific professor has written over a thousand pages for the sequel to his seminal Theology and Social Theory. Which might mean he’s just getting started. But whenever he finishes, I think we’d all relish a return visit (by air, I’d suggest) of the Sheriff of Nottingham to this humble, hospitable and once socialist Christian colony of Swansea.
THE PREQUEL
The lecture almost wasn’t. Milbank went to the wrong station in Nottingham, and the train he finally caught was doomed by delays. He finally disembarked at Port Talbot, where, taxi-less, he was driven the final few miles to Swansea by a kindly Welsh woman. Milbank deployed this special providence as a pointer to the existence of God in a nicely improvised overture to his noteless lecture, which began over an hour late. Most of the punters, well over a hundred, stayed (some retiring to the campus bars to kill time). After the announcement of the delay, I encouraged the audience to be patient with the following recycled joke:
On heading to Heathrow at the conclusion of his recent visit to the UK, the pope’s limousine hit a traffic jam, which turned to gridlock. It was imperative that the pope catch his plane, so he said to his driver, “My son, I cannot be late. Could you not drive on the hard shoulder to get me to the airport on time?”
“I’m sorry, your holiness,” said the driver, “but if I am stopped and get a ticket, my boss will sack me, and I have a large family to support. Forgive me, but we must be patient and wait for the traffic to ease.”
Undeterred, the pope said, “Let me drive then.”
The driver reluctantly agreed, and the two changed seats. The pope sped towards Heathrow on the hard shoulder – and sure enough, he was stopped by the police. The officer looked in the window. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, and went back to his car to call his superior.
“I’ve got a problem,” he said. “I’ve just pulled over a limousine speeding along the hard shoulder, and, well, there is a very important person in the car.”
“How important?” replied the superior. “An MP?”
“More important than that, sir.”
“Front bench?”
“More important than that, sir.”
“Not the prime minister!”
“No, even more important than that, sir.”
“Please don’t tell me it’s one of the younger princes – or even Prince Charles.”
“No, sir, I’m afraid even more important than that.”
“Are you telling me it’s the Queen?”
“Sir, even more important than the Queen.”
“Good God, man, who is it?”
“I don’t know, sir. All I can tell you is that the pope is his driver.”
Some of the audience asked me to tell some more jokes, but I couldn’t think of any clean ones.
THE SEQUEL
After the lecture, seven of us went for a meal at a posh restaurant where I was strategically seated next to Milbank. The table-talk ranged from Rowan Williams, particularly his recent political interventions, to J. Kameron Carter and David Bentley Hart (I didn’t want Milbank to throw up on me, so I didn’t mention Adam Kotsko); from (I suggested) his wildly sanguine hopes for the Tory-led government, to the Tea Party and (he suggested, persuasively) the US as a failed state; from Virgil (via a classics professor) to Virginia; from the earthly sports of cricket and rugby to the game of heaven. I would like to have drawn the famous metaphysical Platonist on the New Apocalyptics, and pressed him on his exiguous expository appeal to Jesus and the Bible, but in mixed company – hey, I’m not such a prat! Suffice to say that it was a terrifically enjoyable evening, and that Milbank was a congenial dining companion whose comments, even when quite opinionated, were as agreeably measured as the wine.
Following Milbank’s recent (I too thought, ridiculously impoverishedly Niebuhrian) ABC critique of Hauerwas’ pacifism, one blogger tetchily asked how Stanley could hang out with such an hombre. Perhaps it’s because Hauerwas is somewhat in awe of Milbank’s capacious and resourceful intellect. Perhaps it’s because he can better hone his own views against such a formidable and influential advocatus diaboli. However I suspect it’s simply because Milbank is a good friend.
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In other Milbank-related news, see his latest ABC piece on Stephen Fry, sex, and homosexuality – and the lively dialogical response over at the new Women in Theology blog (see also their follow-up post). The recent King's College discussion between Hauerwas, Milbank, and Luke Bretherton is also now available in audio.
One of my recent conference papers is available in audio (27 minutes). The paper is titled "Discerning Christ in Contemporary Thought: The Christological Basis of Christian Scholarship". It was a conference on the Uniting Church's founding confession, the Basis of Union. I talked about the way Christ's resurrection shapes the way we think about the church, and about the scholarly vocation (and I tried to criticise both liberal and conservative approaches to theological scholarship). Here's an excerpt:
Scholarship is an exercise of obedience to Jesus Christ. It helps prepare the church for fresh words and deeds. Of course, we need not imagine that scholarship will always have an immediate impact on the church’s confession. But scholarship is nevertheless vital for the continuing life of the church. It is one of the places where the church exercises its muscle of discernment – a muscle that otherwise has an alarming tendency to atrophy. Or to change metaphors: when the church grows drowsy, scholarship diffuses its caffeinating influence, helping to keep us ready, watchful and alert. So when Christian scholars engage with contemporary thought, it’s not because the church needs protecting from the world, but because Christ is already in the world and he calls us to meet him there.This is the second paper I've written this year on the Basis of Union (which I would really encourage you to read: it's a remarkable confessional text, deeply shaped by Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the Barmen Declaration). It really surprises me how much I've enjoyed these first excursions into "official" denominational theology, even though I'm always anxious to avoid this sort of thing in my classroom teaching. I'm already planning to do another couple of papers on the Basis of Union, hopefully one on scripture and another on church law.
If there was a prize for the year’s most efficient theology publisher, it would have to go to the hard-working people at WJK. Less than two months ago, Alister McGrath was presenting his 2009 Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen; earlier this week I was surprised to find that the published lectures had already 
landed on my doorstep! The lectures are published as Alister E. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (WJK 2009), 262 pp.
The material here forms a sequel to McGrath’s recent extended essay, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Blackwell 2008), where he argued that a new “natural theology” could provide not a causal explanation for the cosmos but instead an “explanatory unification” which makes sense of various (otherwise very strange) observable phenomena. Nature can thus become a bearer of transcendence – not through any inherent capacity in nature itself (after all, there is no mere uninterpreted nature, but only different constructed “readings” of nature); but when nature is seen through the lens of a Christian trinitarian ontology. This whole approach to natural theology is best summed up in C. S. Lewis’s famous remark: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
A Fine-Tuned Universe develops this approach through a particular case study: the so-called “anthropic principle”, which describes the universe’s peculiar and puzzling friendliness towards life.
McGrath’s argument is that the universe’s fine-tuning is consonant with a Christian picture of the world. At the core of the book is a scientific-theological reading of Augustine. In a series of engagements with contemporary science (the constants of the universe; the origins of life; the chemistry of water; the constraints of evolution; the teleology of evolution; and emergence), McGrath argues that Augustine’s creation theology provides resources for making theological sense of both the origins of the universe and the processes of Darwinian evolution.
I’ll be spending a chilly week down in New Zealand, giving some talks in Dunedin and Wellington. So if you’re in the neighbourhood, you might like to come along and join us. Here’s the schedule:
Wednesday 18 June, University of Otago
11 am: Seminar on Milton and liberal politics with the English and Political Studies departments
2 pm: Seminar on Karl Barth’s interpretation of Paul with the Theology department
Thursday 19 June, National Library, Wellington
6 pm: The 2008 Founder Lecture: “The Invention of Reason: Milton and the Theology of Secular Politics,” held in the National Library auditorium
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).
Earlier this month, Robert W. Jenson delivered the Grider-Winget Holiness Lectures at Nazarene Theological Seminary. He spoke on “the inspiration of scripture,” and Dave Belcher has kindly posted summaries of each of the three lectures: lecture 1, lecture 2, lecture 3. The third lecture looks especially interesting – and apparently this material will later be published by Brazos Press.
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