Thinking After

Category: Reflections

  • 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. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 227.] (more…)

  • Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi and Divine Impassibility

    “Lex orandi, lex credendi” is a Latin theological expression which basically means “the rule of prayer is the rule of belief.”  In more colloquial terms, we might say, “You show me how you worship and I’ll tell you what you believe.”  The rule of prayer has shaped the development of the Christian theological tradition through its existence.  A particularly prominent example is found in the fourth century in Athanasius’s appeal to the worship practices of the Christian community as part of his refutation of the Arian heresy.  Essentially, the Arians were maintaining that the Son was a highly exalted creature, but certainly not God.  One strand of Athanasius’s argument against the Arians consisted of drawing attention to the fact that the Christian community had worshipped Jesus from its earliest days.  If Jesus was only a creature then for the first three centuries of its existence the church was nothing more than a collection of idolaters!  Lex orandi, lex credendi. (more…)

  • The Truth Will Set You Free

    As the dust settles following last Monday’s initial United States Presidential debate, I took the opportunity yesterday to preach on the question of “What does it mean to tell the truth?”  I suggested that for Christians telling the truth is inseparable from becoming truthful people, as we find ourselves caught up by the Spirit in the life of Jesus, who is the Truth.  For this reason, the Christian tradition has held a special place for the martyrs.  The martyrs are those who have borne witness to the truth at the cost of their lives.  Although I didn’t explicitly make the connection, a member of the congregation observed that the sermon implicitly contrasted the richness of the faithful witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maximilian Kolbe with the poverty of the two presidential candidates. (more…)

  • Calvin on “The Wonderful Exchange”

    I’m hoping to return to my series on Lesslie Newbigin’s marks of the missional church in the near future, but in the meantime I thought I’d share an excerpt from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion that I came across this morning.  In the soaring quote that follows we see resonances with the theme of the “blessed” or “happy exchange” which Martin Luther developed in his famous tract, “The Freedom of a Christian.”  In addition, there is also a distinct echoing of the famous Patristic saying affirmed by Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, among others, that “God became man in order that man might become God.”  The apparent presence of the theme of theosis or deification in this passage lends credence to the recent attempt by Rowan Williams’ to read John Calvin as “The Last of the Greek Fathers.” (more…)

  • “What Would Bonhoeffer Do?”: Metaxas’s Misappropriation

    When people discover that I have written a book on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, they often ask me what I think of the popular biography written by Eric Metaxas.  My standard answer runs something like this:  “Well, Metaxas is certainly an engaging writer.  However, he does seem to be in over his head when it comes to understanding the politics of the Church Struggle in Germany and the finer points of Bonhoeffer’s theology.  That being said, he has done a great service for the church in helping to make Dietrich Bonhoeffer more widely known.”  Usually, this is all the person is looking for.  However, if I were to go into more depth I would comment, among other things, upon Metaxas’s failure to understand the centrality of Bonhoeffer’s peace ethic to his theology, his lack of engagement with Bonhoeffer’s prison letters, and his tendency to portray Bonhoeffer in the terms of right-wing American evangelicalism.  Some recent public comments by Eric Metaxas have led me to believe that I have perhaps been far too generous in my assessment of Metaxas’s reading of Bonhoeffer up to this point. (more…)

  • Series: Newbigin on “The Call to the Church” – 3. A Declericalized Theology

    [This post is the fourth in a series of posts on what could be called “Newbigin’s marks of the missional church” as outlined in his book Foolishness to the Greeks.  The previous posts can be found here:  introduction, mark #1, mark #2.]

    “The missionary encounter with our culture for which I am pleading,” Newbigin writes, “will require the energetic fostering of a declericalized, lay theology.”[1. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (W.B. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 142.]  Upon returning to England after years of missionary service in India, Newbigin observed that theology in the modern West had become largely isolated from the lives and concerns of average Christian men and women. (more…)

  • Series: Newbigin on “The Call to the Church” – 2. A Christian Doctrine of Freedom

    Having considered in the previous post Newbigin’s insistence that the church must recover its eschatological imagination, we now turn to the second of what could be called his seven marks of the missional church — a true Christian doctrine of freedom.  Two sets of concerns fall under this heading for Newbigin.  The first set deals with matters that pertain to the relationship between church and state, while the second touches upon issues related to anthropology.[1. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1986), 137-141.] (more…)

  • Series: Newbigin on “The Call to the Church” – 1. Eschatology

    The previous post set the stage for a series of posts on Lesslie Newbigin’s understanding, as presented in Foolishness to the Greeks, of the seven essential conditions that must be recovered if there is to be a genuine missionary encounter between the church and the modern West.  The first of these essential conditions, Newbigin asserts, “must be the recovery and firm grasp of a true doctrine of the last things, of eschatology.”[1. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1986), 134.]  (more…)

  • Series: Newbigin on “The Call to the Church” – Introduction

    This past week marked the start of a course I am teaching at Tyndale Seminary called “Integrative Seminar II.”  Don’t let the nondescript title fool you; this course may very well be the most enthralling course that I’ve had the privilege to be involved with at Tyndale.  There’s a variety of reasons for this, including the fact that the course occurs near the end of the MDiv In-Ministry program and provides an opportunity for the students to bring together what they have learned and the skills they have developed over the course of the entire program.  Probably the biggest factor, though, is the compelling character of the subject matter itself.  “Integrative Seminar II” is shaped around exploring the life and thought of six twentieth century Christian pastor-leader-theologians: Lesslie Newbigin, John Perkins, Vinay Samuel, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (more…)

  • Christopher Wright and the Mission of God

    This past Thursday, Christopher Wright was at Tyndale University College and Seminary to present a lecture entitled, “The Mission of God and the Cape Town Commitment.”  Wright’s contributions to missional hermeneutics, as well as his massive textbook, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, have been hugely influential on the theological curriculum at Tyndale in recent years.  Wright is a consummate “churchman” whose current role as the director of Langham Partnership International has involved him in teaching ministries across the globe.  While chairing the Lausanne Theology Working Group, he was the chief architect of “The Cape Town Commitment: A Confession of Faith and a Call to Action.” (more…)