How Katherine Sonderegger finds delight in a humble God

From Christian Century-

Friends and former students of theologian Katherine Sonderegger combine affectionate diminutives and terms of great forcefulness when describing her. Erika Takacs calls her former teacher at Virginia Theological Seminary “a perfectly darling little leprechaun.” Fleming Rutledge, a fellow Episcopal priest, says Sonde­regger is “almost like a nun in her total devotion to prayer and study,” with “the mind of a steel trap, but the manner of a somewhat shy, retiring, grandmotherly type.”

Former student Benson Shelton describes her as a “Yoda figure,” a professor who would turn up late to class because she’d stopped at a petting zoo or saw a perfect flowering bush. Yet Shelton also remembers how Sonderegger eviscerated a visiting theologian with whom she disagreed: “She might as well have cut his legs off and handed them to him.” Rutledge says she is not sure how to reconcile the darling saintliness and the daring, merciless mind: “She is a curious person.”

More here-

https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/how-katherine-sonderegger-finds-delight-humble-god#disqus_thread

Tom Wright Calls for Theologians and Biblical Exegetes to Work Together

From Kermit Zarley-

Bible scholar and former Anglican Bishop N. T. (Tom) Wright is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St. Mary’s College at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. That can’t be all bad since St. Andrews is the birthplace of golf. However, some crusty ole Dutchmen will argue with that one. Tom is generally recognized by his peers and religious publishers as being at the top of his craft for decades now.

Tom Wright is also a friend of mine. One time we were planning to play golf together, but it didn’t work out.

In this month’s issue of Christianity Today–the premier Christian magazine in the U.S.–Tom Wright calls for Christian theologians, Christian philosophers, and biblical exegetes to work together more closely. Indeed, I’m told that for a long time the academy has recognized somewhat of a disjunct between these disciplines. As Tom explains, “Christian theologians and [Christian] philosophers regularly claim that their thinking is grounded in Scripture. But they seldom pay the text the kind of close attention expected in contemporary biblical studies. . . . Theologians’ engagement with Scripture often lapses into proof-texting with little regard for the authors’ thought-worlds and original intentions.”

More here-

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/kermitzarleyblog/2019/04/tom-wright-calls-theologians-biblical-exegetes-work-together/

Has Academic Theology Lost Its Way?

From Christianity Today-

Something is rotten in the state of academic theology.

That, at least, is the bold claim that Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun advance in their compelling new book, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference. Volf and Croasmun fear that academic theology has lost its way, in part by positioning itself in opposition or even hostility to the church and its ordinary believers. Rigorous research and scholarly writing may not lead inevitably toward an unhealthy detachment, but the reality of that detachment both from church life and the most fundamental questions of human existence is all too common. As a result, regular churchgoers have grown skeptical of academic theology, and non-Christians simply dismiss it as a relic of the past with no legitimate space in the public square. Theology, the authors argue, used to be about the “Big Questions,” but now it contents itself pursuing in-house debates about obscure historical figures and formulations, all while neglecting to make connections with contemporary audiences.

More here-

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/march-web-only/mirolsav-volf-matthew-croasmun-life-world-theology.html?fbclid=IwAR0nL6vHLAekuwb1VTzUrU2Fol9mAW3757le5ZQVqILFPjd15R4QuZQdGP4

Raising Children Without the Concept of Sin

From The New York Times-

We were standing in line for meat pies at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair. The indoor arena south of San Francisco had been transformed into Victorian London; actors wearing top hats and crinolines roamed about wishing fairgoers “Happy Christmas.” As we contemplated the menu — haggis or shepherd’s pie? — a noisy band of temperance advocates marched by hoisting signs that stated, “Gin is Sin!”

As my 9-year-old daughter watched them pass, her forehead knitted, and then she looked up at me with solemn hazel eyes.

“Mama, what is sin?” she asked.

The merriment of the fair receded and I stared at her, my brain spinning with the magnitude of her question. By failing to teach my child the meaning of the word sin, had I somehow failed to give her a moral foundation?

Sin. That tiny word still makes me cringe with residual fear. Fear of being judged unworthy. Fear of the eternal torture of hell. Fear of my father’s belt. 

More here-

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/well/family/raising-children-without-the-concept-of-sin.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR2BlYk-nyaEegsSGA1uV4JH7IrQooNQbyNq-D0qsmzVZiqiVlkAX7ktfUw

The Trinity is not our social program(me)

From Psephizo

There are moments of the year which all preachers dread. Perhaps ‘dread’ is too strong a word; but there is a definite sinking of the shoulders as we, once again, think about finding something new to say on the occasion of the major festivals. Christmas and Easter are, of course, the regular challenges—yet in both biblical stories there is so much rich material that finding a new insight or angle isn’t that hard. Where dread really does descend is as we approach Trinity Sunday.

Fortunately for us, there has been a remarkable revival in Trinitarian thinking in the last 70 years or so—so we no longer need to feel like Robbie Coltrane in Nuns on the Run (‘The Trinity is like a clover.’ ‘What, you mean it is green?’). In the opening chapter of his excellent exploration of The Quest for the Trinity, Stephen Holmes traces the shape of this revival. If the scholasticism of the middle ages had made the doctrine of the Trinity speculative and obscure, the rationalism of the 18th and 19th centuries had (in effect) rejected the doctrine as implausible. Karl Barth rejected this rationalist approach, and aimed to reinstate the Trinity as the centre of Christian theology.

More here-

https://www.psephizo.com/life-ministry/the-trinity-is-not-our-social-programme-2/

What’s So Good About Original Sin?

From The New York Times-

The doctrine of original sin has often been held to be intolerably dark, a counsel of despair. It says we are by nature morally flawed, that we are born in error and live in it irremediably, that each of us deserves punishment and will receive it, unless redeemed by God’s arbitrary grace. It insists that we cannot cure ourselves by our own efforts, and it has led some people to make extraordinarily disturbing claims, such as that children who die in infancy could burn in eternal hellfire.

It’s hard to argue with the fact that inherent depravity is a profoundly pessimistic idea, and one with potentially bad effects. A rejection of the idea of original sin might argue that if we believe we can be good and do good by our own efforts, we are likelier to strive to do so. If we believe we are intrinsically evil, it follows, we will cease trying to make ourselves or the world better. Why not, then, think more positively about ourselves and believe in the possibility of human goodness and our potential for improvement right here in this world?

It would take a book or a shelf of them to examine original sin as a theological doctrine, going back to Augustine’s interpretation of Adam and Eve. Even so, it is not clear that the preachers of original sin have managed to explain why a benevolent God would create such profoundly flawed creatures as they believe us to be. And if you don’t believe in God at all, or not in that sort of God, the whole line of argument is moot.

Despite all of that, I would like to entertain the notion that a secularized conception of original sin is plausible, and that believing it might have good effects. In short, perhaps it’s time for a new Puritanism, though with fewer witch trials this time around.

More here-

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/opinion/original-sin-ethics.html

Study Theology, Even If You Don't Believe in God

From The Atlantic-

When I first told my mother—a liberal, secular New Yorker—that I wanted to cross an ocean to study for a bachelor’s degree in theology, she was equal parts aghast and concerned. Was I going to become a nun, she asked in horror, or else one of “those” wingnuts who picketed outside abortion clinics? Was I going to spend hours in the Bodleian Library agonizing over the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin? Theology, she insisted, was a subject by the devout, for the devout; it had no place in a typical liberal arts education.

Her view of the study of theology is far from uncommon. While elite universities like Harvard and Yale offer vocational courses at their divinity schools, and nearly all universities offer undergraduate majors in the comparative study of religions, few schools (with the exceptions of historically Catholic institutions like Georgetown and Boston College) offer theology as a major, let alone mandate courses in theology alongside other “core” liberal arts subjects like English or history. Indeed, the study of theology has often run afoul of the legal separation of church and state. Thirty-seven U.S. states have laws limiting the spending of public funds on religious training. In 2006, the Supreme Court case Locke v. Davey upheld the decision of a Washington State scholarship program to withhold promised funding from an otherwise qualified student after learning that he had decided to major in theology at a local Bible College.

More here-

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/study-theology-even-if-you-dont-believe-in-god/280999/?utm_source=atlfb

All Flesh Must Once Again Become Fire: Origen’s Untamed Thinking

From Harvard Divinity School-

ORIGEN WAS BORN IN ALEXANDRIA in the late second century to Christian parents who gave him a pagan name: Ôrigenês, “child of Horus,” the falcon-headed sky god of the Egyptian pantheon. His was a life bookended by persecution: his father, killed for his faith when Origen was only sixteen years old, and Origen himself died from tortures suffered under the persecution of the emperor Decius in the year 253 or 254. His tormenters wanted him to yield so that they would have a prominent apostate with which to embarrass the church. That he did not yield, or die in their custody, but expired only later from his wounds meant that he was not, strictly speaking, like his father, a “martyr”—a witness to his faith unto death—but only a “confessor.”

More here-

https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/articles/autumnwinter2017/all-flesh-must-once-again-become-fire

A Difficult Orthodoxy

From Ancient Faith-

The difference between “right glory” and “right doctrine,” noted in my previous article, goes much deeper than services of worship. It is true that the Church has, throughout her history, taken great care with liturgical practice so that what is done gives expression to what is believed. The two should be seamless. This, however, becomes ever more difficult when it extends to our lives. Frequently, we settle for “right doctrine,” and “right glory,” but ignore the right inward life and disposition (technically called “orthopraxis”).

Fr. Georges Florovsky described doctrine as a “verbal icon” of Christ. Anyone can master a system of thought, its rules of speech and patterns of understanding. But to rightly speak and live within the Orthodox faith requires something of a very different sort. The verbal icon is indeed a true icon, and it must be presented rightly in every way. The recitation of the Nicene Creed in the Liturgy is introduced in this manner:

More here-

https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2017/11/24/a-difficult-orthodoxy/

Will Pope Francis remove the Vatican’s ‘warning’ from Teilhard de Chardin’s writings?

From American Magazine-

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the widely influential Jesuit paleontologist and philosopher whose writings were cited with a “warning” by the Vatican in 1962, may finally have that blot removed from his record.

Participants at the recent plenary assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture that discussed “The future of humanity: new challenges to anthropology” unanimously approved a petition to be sent to Pope Francis requesting him to waive the “monitum” issued by the Holy Office in 1962 regarding the writings of Father de Chardin.

The participants, which included top level scientists as well as cardinals and bishops from Europe, Asia, America and Africa, applauded when the text of the petition was read.

More here-

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/11/21/will-pope-francis-remove-vaticans-warning-teilhard-de-chardins-writings

The Real Meaning of Original Sin

From Lions Roar-

Mahayana Buddhist traditions affirm the teaching of buddhanature (tathagatagarbha) — that fundamentally all sentient beings possess the same noble qualities as the Buddha. As a student of Mahayana Buddhism, this has been for me the single most inspiring and trenchant teaching. But as a Christian theologian, I am often disappointed by the way Buddhists contrast the teachings on buddhanature with the Christian doctrine of original sin.

It seems the purpose of drawing this contrast is to highlight how much the teaching on buddhanature differs from the despair about human nature that plagues so many of us, for which the doctrine of original sin is supposedly to blame. I have noticed how deeply the contrast resonates with people, and I have no intention of dismissing anyone’s negative experiences of Christian teachings. One can only regret any harm done under a religious guise.

More here-

https://www.lionsroar.com/the-real-meaning-of-original-sin/

Who Is Satan?

From Biblical Archeology-

From the most comical of cartoons to the most grotesque of gargoyles, the majority of the population today can immediately recognize an image of the devil. But does our modern conception of Satan have any resemblance to the devil in the Bible? Just who is Satan? Is this horned, red-skinned monster with a pitchfork ruling hell truly the great enemy of God envisioned by the writers of the Biblical texts?

The short answer: no, not really.

In the Hebrew Bible, YHWH’s greatest enemies are not fallen angels commanding armies of demons, nor even the gods of other nations, but, rather, human beings. It isn’t the devil that spreads evil across the face of creation—it is mankind. Other than human beings, YHWH has no nemesis, nor are there malevolent spiritual forces not under his authority. YHWH is ultimately a god of justice. He is behind the good and the bad, behind the blessings and the curses. It is within this divine court of justice and retribution that Satan has his origins.

More here-

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/who-is-satan/

An Apology for theology

From The Living Church-

As a discipline, theology is under pressure from just about every direction. Some of those pressures — the most obvious and certainly the most understandable — come from beyond the Christian community. For the majority of nonreligious women and men, theology is an irrelevant, though perhaps otherwise innocuous, preoccupation of the pious. It may have a place in a church or monastery, but it is best left out of public discourse and institutions. Once the “Queen of the Sciences” — locating all the other subjects in relation to their divine origin and final purpose — theology has largely been replaced by a more modest program of religious studies in universities and otherwise sequestered to Sunday schools and seminaries.

For atheists of a more militant persuasion, theology is not only irrelevant but harmful to one’s health. It is the ideological underpinning to humanity’s greatest captivity. By it, human beings rob themselves of their best attributes, ascribing them to some remote deity rather than to themselves. “To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.”[1] The atheist of this school thus recommends a cynical inversion of John the Baptist’s confession (John 3:30); God must decrease that we might increase.

More here-

http://htl.li/HZxg30foNlj

Public Theology in Retreat

From The LA Review of Books-

WHERE IS THE Reinhold Niebuhr for today? What is theology good for? Such questions have become hallmarks in public commentary on the role, past and present, of Christian thought in politics and in the academy. The first has generated a whole subgenre unto itself — call it “O Niebuhr, Where Art Thou?” — marked by an understandable, but usually nostalgic yearning for the halcyon days when serious Christians commanded an audience by dint of their learning, eloquence, and pertinence to the national situation. The second question is less prominent, but no less well meaning: recognizing theology’s profound loss in social and intellectual stature, earnest essays recommend giving it another chance, at least as a sort of instrumental good; it may not be of much value in itself (at least to the unbelieving), but familiarity with theology may help one better understand the history of art, philosophy, and politics in the West, not to mention one’s church-attending neighbors next door.

That such questions must continually be asked, and such essays continually written, tells us all we need to know about the time in which we live. Obituaries, diagnoses, and genealogies have been offered in plenty, the most recent and profound of which is Alan Jacobs’s “The Watchmen” in Harper’s last year. There he chronicles the death of the Christian public intellectual in the United States. Although Jacobs recognizes the manifold external conditions that both gave and took away the possibility for thoughtful religious discourse to have a broad public in the United States, his argument comes at the issue from the inside: what actions on the part of Christians led to their marginalization? It turns out that Christians silenced themselves, at least in part. That is, just as society began to turn its attention away from the Church, the Church turned inward, began to talk primarily to itself; and when it turned outward, moreover, it increasingly and stubbornly used language unfamiliar to an unchurched polis.

More here-

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/public-theology-in-retreat/#!

A STATEMENT FROM CHRISTIAN ETHICISTS WITHOUT BORDERS ON WHITE SUPREMACY AND RACISM

From Daily Theology-

As followers of Jesus Christ and as Christian ethicists representing a range of denominations and schools of thought, we stand in resolute agreement in firmly condemning racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and neo-Nazi ideology as a sin against God that divides the human family created in God’s image.

In January of 2017, white nationalist groups emboldened by the 2016 election planned an armed march against the Jews of Whitefish, Montana. On August 11th and 12th, hundreds of armed neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. As we mourn the deaths of 32-year old counter-protester Heather Heyer and state troopers H. Jay Cullen and Berke Bates from this most recent incident, we unequivocally denounce racist speech and actions against people of any race, religion, or national origin.

White supremacy and racism deny the dignity of each human being revealed through the Incarnation. The evil of white supremacy and racism must be brought face-to-face before the figure of Jesus Christ, who cannot be confined to any one culture or nationality. Through faith we proclaim that God the Creator is the origin of all human persons. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
More here-

https://dailytheology.org/2017/08/14/a-statement-from-christian-ethicists-without-borders-on-white-supremacy-and-racism/

It is time to get past the snobbery against pastoral theologians

From American Magazine-

Over the years, I have often heard pastors and teachers say, apologetically, that they were not theologians or academics or that they did not fully understand a book written by some theologian. Such humility may be commendable, but it is misplaced. Let me explain why.

In today’s big graduate theology programs, one sometimes encounters a status snobbery regarding the various theological subspecialties. Dogmatic or systematic theology is assumed to be for the brightest graduate students, those philosophically inclined and willing to tackle how all the doctrines ought to be connected and understood. Then there are people who are not drawn to “big ideas” but take up scriptural and historical studies; they like to focus on specifics and details. And those who go into ethics want to resolve difficult moral situations, to have an immediate impact by addressing particular contemporary problems.

More here-

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/07/13/it-time-get-past-snobbery-against-pastoral-theologians

What the Ascension is (and isn’t)

From The Living Church-

Among the easiest and most difficult topics in Christian theology is the ascension of Jesus Christ. The description given in Scripture and in most hymns is quite simple: “As they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9) or “God has gone up with a triumphant shout” (Ps 47:5). Any close consideration of this idea, however, raises a number of difficulties. After all, where is this place to which he goes up? Where is heaven? Are we to imagine that Christ shot up into the upper atmosphere and kept on “climbing” the heavens until he reached some unknown location? Is heaven one stop beyond the galaxy? More disturbing, we have to wonder about what happened to Jesus’ material body.

It’s partly due to these absurdities that the idea of Jesus’ ascension is puzzling to many. It’s not made easier by the fact that Jesus speaks of a “departure” to go to the Father and send the Spirit, along with a constant “abiding” with us forever. Similarly, we have to realize that, even in his descent to us in the Incarnation, Christ did not depart from his place with the Father: “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the son of man who is in heaven” (John 3:13). He remained where he was and what he was, even in stooping down to our level, and he did not cease to be among us and be what we are, even in ascending on high. He was ever our God in the heavens and he is ever a human being, remaining with us. The crux remains, though: where is the human body of Jesus?
 
More here-

http://livingchurch.org/covenant/2014/06/07/what-the-ascension-is-and-isnt/?platform=hootsuite

This woman preacher is schooling the Christian boys club on the crucifixion

From Colorado (via RNS)-

If you are embedded in a Catholic or conservative Protestant community, you might assume that theology is a man’s job. After all, most theological books are penned by male authors. Women are prohibited from becoming Catholic priests and are similarly forbidden from pastoring in many evangelical traditions. And most Christian conference rosters are dominated by male speakers.


It’s surprising then that a woman preacher is leading a conversation about the theology of the cross within these male-dominated communities.

Fleming Rutledge, 79, is a theologian and one of the first women ordained in the Episcopal Church. Her book, “The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ,” is a magisterial 669-page tome that has garnered the attention and respect of some unlikely religious leaders.

Exhibit A is the “New Calvinist” movement, which firmly holds that women are barred from the pastorate and are required by God to submit to their husbands. John Piper, who is something of the pope for New Calvinists and once claimed that God had intentionally given Christianity a “masculine feel,” featured a reading from the book on his podcast and called her book “valuable.” Andrew Wilson gave it a glowing review at The Gospel Coalition, a New Calvinist mega-website, where he called it “beautiful scholarship.”

More here-

http://gazette.com/this-woman-preacher-is-schooling-the-christian-boys-club-on-the-crucifixion/article/1603351

UNDERSTANDING OUR EMBODIMENT

From The Living Church-

Review by Rowan Williams

Anything written by Ephraim Radner can be guaranteed to be serious, constructively difficult, spiritually challenging and original, and this book is no exception. It will be hard to classify, though; it is essentially an essay in theological anthropology, but is at the same time an exceptionally wide-ranging essay on our North Atlantic cultural crisis. In a nutshell, what he argues is that our Western society has lived through a “Great Transition” involving altered expectations of life and health, and reduced birth rates. We are less and less capable of seeing our lives as following a God-given trajectory in which birth, generation, and death constitute the way God gives us of being human and growing in our humanity to the point at which we resign our lives into God’s hands for a “Great Transfiguration.” Learning to inhabit this trajectory is the “Great Traversal,” the journey in which we enact and echo God’s traversing of human experience in Jesus Christ, the divine act that has established that the prosaic transitions of our routine experience are the stuff of which the new creation will be made — not by our effort or success, but by God’s mercy.

More here-

http://livingchurch.org/covenant/2017/04/27/understanding-our-embodiment/

A forgotten gem

From Patheos-

One of the greatest Anglican books of the 20th century is about to be republished on this side of the pond.  This is a cause for rejoicing.  Not only because E.L. Mascall was a great (and orthodox) Anglican theologian, but also because this book will help solve numerous theological problems for Christians in this troubled century.  Besides, as a stutterer who has written about famous stutterers, I am sympathetic to theologians who have a speech defect, as Mascall did.

Here is an excerpt from my foreword to this new edition of Christ, the Christian and the Church (Hendrickson, Fall 2017).

Eric Lionel Mascall (1905-93) was one of the best–perhaps the sharpest and most lucid–of orthodox Anglican theologians in the twentieth century.  An Anglican priest who finished his career as Professor of Historical Theology at King’s College in the University of London, Mascall excelled in mathematics at the university, and boasted of never having been formally trained in graduate-level theology.  These two facts might help explain why his theology was hailed for being so wide-ranging, incisive, and elegant.

More here-

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/northamptonseminar/2017/04/01/a-forgotten-gem/