The forthcoming issue of the Canadian theological journal Didaskalia, published by Providence Theological Seminary, includes both a gracious review of my book For the Life of the World: Jesus Christ and the Church in the Theologies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Stanley Hauerwas by Christopher Holmes and an essay of my own entitled, “A Matter of MIssion: Bonhoeffer, the Bible, and Ecclesial Formation.” Continue reading Forthcoming Issue of Didaskalia
Tag Archives: ecclesiology
Bonhoeffer on What it Means “To Believe in the Church”
I taught an intensive intercession course on the “Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer” during the first week of January this year. While the students were responsible for completing some reading prior to our week together in class—including Christianne Tietz’s excellent, new short biography, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—most of the major engagement with the primary sources in the Bonhoeffer corpus has been taking place over the past few weeks following the conclusion of our time together in class. In recent days, the students would have encountered this remarkable passage from Bonhoeffer’s doctoral dissertation in which he addresses the question of what is means “to believe in the church.” The passage is noteworthy not only because it was penned by a theology student who was a mere twenty-one years old at the time, but also because it anticipates in many ways the central themes of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology that will come to the fore throughout his life. Continue reading Bonhoeffer on What it Means “To Believe in the Church”
Robert Jenson: Servant of the Church, Evangelical and Catholic
September 5 marked the passing of the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson. Widely regarded as the leading American theologian of his generation, and perhaps, as some maintain, the greatest American theologian since Jonathan Edwards, Jenson was a leading influence in advocating for a theological renewal of the church that was, at one and the same time, profoundly evangelical and catholic. Continue reading Robert Jenson: Servant of the Church, Evangelical and Catholic
Upcoming Conference Presentation on Canadian Evangelical Ecclesiology
I am going to be presenting a paper engaging with the work of some emerging Canadian evangelical theologians at an upcoming interdisciplinary theology conference in Rochester, NY, hosted by Northeastern Seminary and the Canadian-American Theological Association. The conference, to be held October 20-21, is entitled, “Evangelical Theology: New Challenges, New Opportunities.”
Continue reading Upcoming Conference Presentation on Canadian Evangelical Ecclesiology
Tolkien and the Adventure of Discipleship: Available Online
I recently discovered that my article, “Tolkien and the Adventure of Discipleship: Imaginative Resources for a Missional Ecclesiology,” which appeared a little over a year ago in the Canadian Theological Review, can now be electronically downloaded from the website of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association. The Canadian Evangelical Theological Association is reorganizing in the new year to form the Canadian-American Theological Association, so it’s unclear how long the article will be available online. So, if you’re interested in reading it, download it now. The full article can be accessed here. Continue reading Tolkien and the Adventure of Discipleship: Available Online
Faithful Presence: Hunter, Fitch and Being Church
In his significant, ironically entitled work, To Change the World, James Davison Hunter offers the following diagnosis of the current cultural moment in which the church finds itself in the United States:
“The problem for Christians—to restate the broader issue once more—is not that their faith is weak or inadequate. In contemporary America, Christians have faith in God and, by and large, they believe and hold fast to the central truths of the Christian tradition. But while they have faith, they have also been formed by the larger post-Christian culture, a culture whose habits of life less and less resemble anything like the vision of human flourishing provided by the life of Christ and witness of scripture. The problem, in other words, is that Christians have not been formed ‘in all wisdom’ that they might rise to the demands of faithfulness in such a time as ours, ‘bearing fruit in every good work.’”1 Continue reading Faithful Presence: Hunter, Fitch and Being Church
- James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 227. ↩