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New Books for 2008 | Colin Gunton on Revelation and Reason

Revelation and Reason: Prolegomena to Systematic Theology (T & T Clark, October 2008) - Colin Gunton, edited by Paul Brazier, foreword by Stephen Holmes and introduction by Christoph Schwoebel

"Revelation and Reason" brings together a collection of Colin Gunton's lectures, in a volume that highlights the creative thought of a widely read theologian and philosopher.Colin Gunton was a world renowned scholar, systematic theologian and Reformed Church minister. "Revelation and Reason" is an in-depth analysis, derived from the annual lecture/seminar course he gave to MA students at King's College London. Approximately one-third of the work is a direct transcript, and analysis of the three two-hour lectures Colin Gunton gave at a break-neck speed: 'From Reason and Revelation to Revelation And Reason'; 'The Modern Problem in an Historical Context'; and, 'Aspects of Karl Barth on Faith And Reason'. These lectures were a history, analysis and critique of Revelation and Reason in Systematic Theology and Philosophy, culminating with Karl Barth. The remainder is a transcript of the unrehearsed, unscripted, extemporary responses Colin Gunton gave to MA student's papers on set topics in the "Revelation and Reason" course, seamlessly integrated, where relevant, with detail from the main three lectures.Colin was a creative lecturer and widely read theologian and philosopher.
These extemporary responses show the breadth of his learning, and his genius spontaneously to bring to mind relevant ideas from a wealth of theologians and philosophers, whilst incisively and piercingly exposing the flaws as well as the strengths under consideration. From this wealth of reading, Colin gave space to the free rein of his mind particularly when fielding questions or trying to analyze a particular strand of a theologian's thought."Revelation and Reason" is a complementary volume to Colin Gunton's posthumously published "The Barth Lectures" (Continuum 2007) and to the first volume of his unfinished "Systematic Theology", also forthcoming from T&T Clark.

Reviews of The Barth Lectures

Reviews of The Barth Lectures by Colin Gunton are appearing all other the place. The latest being by Jason. I've added another one below.

Kim Fabricius

Jason Goroncy

Jim Gordon

Andy Goodliff

Here's another one written by Paul Goodliff, which first appeared in The Baptist Times

The Baptist Times is not an academic journal, and so the inclusion of this book for review might seem odd to many of its readers, for this is an unashamedly academic book by one the most significant British theologians of recent years on the last century’s most significant protestant theologian: Colin Gunton on Karl Barth.

However,  it deserves a place in this newspaper because this is simply one of the best introductions to theology that I have read. Not that it is easy, nor without its idiosyncracies, but if Barth’s towering contribution to Western theological thought is unavoidable if we are to properly grapple with the current state of dogmatic theology, then Colin Gunton’s Barth Lectures are as good a way into that theology as any I know.

I must confess some personal bias here: Colin Gunton taught me twentieth century systematic theology at Kings in the early 1990s when I took a postgraduate degree there. I counted him a friend, who kindly wrote the forward to my first book, and his sudden and untimely death in 2003 affected me greatly. I say this to point out that I have an enormous admiration for Colin Gunton’s work. He always intended to write ‘the book on Barth’ as Barth’s influence on Gunton’s own theology is all-pervasive from start to finish, from his doctorate at Oxford on the being of God in Barth and Hartshorne, to his last writings. It was something I suspect he would have done in retirement from his post as Professor of Christian Doctrine at Kings College, a retirement that his death prevented. So the book on Barth remained unwritten. What has been written in its place is a transcript of the lecture series that Gunton gave each year to an assorted group of keen undergraduates, doctoral students and others. In this case,  those delivered in Lent 1999, Michaelmas 2000 and Lent 2001, thirty lectures in all. They were recorded and transcribed by Paul Brazier who has edited them into this series of lectures, and Colin Gunton had read and approved of them before his death, observing that they would provide the basis for the book on Barth he intended to write.

They are clearly lectures, and not the book Gunton would have finally published. That would have been more polished, more considered in some of its more whimsical moments, and Gunton’s first-draft readers would have helped to moderate some of the opinions. It would have been a more elegant book, but in so doing it would have lost the most moving aspect to this lecture series: you hear Colin Gunton’s voice, his way of doing theology, his way of expressing things. Colin would lecture with a nervous energy, at break-neck speed, ideas piling on one another, and this is captured somehow in this book. That is not to say it is any way unreadable, (I found it hard to put down!) but it is what it is, and all the more fascinating for that.

It covers the whole range of Barth’s work, from his background and early theology to Der Romerbrief, his groundbreaking commentary on Romans that was written when he was a pastor, and the book on Anselm. The bulk of the lectures present Gunton’s reading of Church Dogmatics, the magisterial four volumes of dogmatics embracing millions of words and expressing Barth’s evolving and mature theological thought. Gunton is not uncritical of Barth, especially the poverty of Barth’s doctrine of the Spirit, and even if he was a reformed theologian (he was an ordained minister of the United Reformed Church,) Gunton was never ‘a Barthian’ in the sense of an uncritical disciple. Where Gunton quotes Barth, he does so with his own translation, (often better than the published translations,) and those other voices that Gunton knew so well make their appearances: Edward Irving, P T Forsyth and the Cappadocian Fathers, (although not Coleridge!) There is a Foreword by Gunton’s former colleague at Kings, Christoph Schwöbel, and an introduction by another, younger, colleague, Stephen Holmes, both making astute observations on Colin Gunton’s theological method, style and prejudices, together with a full bibliography of Gunton’s published works. This is, then, not just a book on Barth, but equally, a book about Colin Gunton.

What more can I say? It is one of the best books published this year, and deserves a very wide readership by those who want to really engage with the Christian faith and the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Word of God.

PhDs on Gunton's Theology

I know of two completed, and one almost completed, doctoral dissertations on Colin Gunton's theology. Are there any others out there?

1. Brad Green (Assistant Professor of Christian Studies, Union University, , “Colin Gunton and the failure of Augustine: An exposition and analysis of the theology of Colin Gunton in light of Augustine's 'De Trinitate'” (PhD, Baylor University, 2000). Part of which has been published in the July 2007 edition of IJST.

2. David Hohne (Lecturer in Theology and Philosophy, Moore College, Sydney) ‘The Spirit and Sonship: Colin Gunton’s Theology of Particularity.’ (PhD thesis. University of Cambridge, 2007). Supervised by David Ford.

3. Nathaniel Suda, 'The Difference the Trininty Makes: A Critical Examination of the Theology of Colin Gunton', (University of Aberdeen, not yet submitted). Supervised by John Webster.

Colin Gunton: List of Posts

Introducing Colin Gunton

Biographical page

Gunton on Barth page

Reading Gunton

Gunton's Theological Friends

Gunton's Theological Heroes

Gunton on... (different topics)

'I owe this point to ...' : theology in the community

Gunton on (ix) on whether God Suffers

Gunton on (viii) the One, the Three and the Many

Gunton on (vii) Pnuematology

Gunton on (vi) Atonemment

Gunton on (v) Christology

Gunton on (iv) Imago Dei

Gunton on (iii) Revelation

Gunton on (ii) Creation

Gunton on (i) the Trinity

Gunton's Major Works

Gunton (ix) on whether God suffers

Colin Gunton was a constant critic of what he called the fashion to reject the doctrine of impassibility. On more than one occasion he argues against the line of thought in Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God. In a paper on atonement and creation he writes

According to John Thompson ... it is the conviction of Eberhard Jungel, along with Moltmann, von Balthasar and Barth, that the cross is the key to the Trinitarian nature of God. But is it? Can it not equally be argued that it is a weakness of Western theology that it has tended to treat the significance of the cross in relative abstraction from the incarnation, resurrection, or, for that matter, creation, so that it has appeared to teach strange doctrines in which the cross is a kind of punitive exercise rather than centre of the whole justifying action of God?

…to concentrate on the suffering of God raises problems. On the one hand, it tends to reduce atonement to theodicy: as if the problem is not human offence and sin, but the evil for which God is in some sense responsible. There is a problem of theodicy in a world of suffering, but it is not the same as atonement, and if it supplants the later, it undermines the gospel of the grace of God in face of human enmity towards him. On the other hand, it calls attention away from the fact that atonement is also a human act, an act, that is, of the incarnate Son whose life, death and resurrection realise, in the Spirit, a human conquest of evil which those who come to God through him may subsequently share. To place the weight on a suffering God deprives the incarnate Son of his proper work, as Andrew Walker has argued.

(‘Atonement and the Project of Creation’, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, pp. 178-192, 2nd ed., T & T Clark, 1997)

In the epilogue to the 2nd edition of Becoming and Being he writes

The perils of the current fashion are various: that suffering will be affirmed, rather than rejected as a blot on God’s creation; that history, and not the sovereign Lord, will appear to have the last word on our worldl that the cross of Jesus will be proclaimed as a sign that God cares for us rather than overcomes and  judges our evil in what is at least as truly a victorious action as something suffered…

…as Andrew Walker has argued in an unpublished paper, it is the particular calling of the Son to suffer as man, and unless that is strictly maintained a generalized and often sentimentalized divine suffering results.

(‘Epilogue’, Becoming and Being, 2nd ed., SCM, 2001, pp.225-245)

In one of his last books Act and Being in section discussing the doctrine of impassibility he writes

...We need here to maintain two Trinitarian principles in harness. The first is that there is no separation between what the Father and the Son achieve; this is something not suffered so much as achieved through suffering. The second, equally important, principle is that there is at the same time a distinction between the acts of the Father and the Son. It is the particular calling of the Son to suffer, in obedience to the Father’s will. He performs the work of God precisely by being the Son, the suffering servant…

...What do we mean by ‘suffering’? In the case of the Son, that is fairly clear: he actively allowed himself to be passively subject to the principalities and powers, but only as the mediator of the Father’s act, indeed, as his own sovereign act also… What then of the Father’s suffering? Is there a difference between being swayed by emotion and accepting that, once there is a creation, God can be affected by its ill? Such suffering as we speak of must come from within rather than being something imposed as foreign to the being of God…

...Indeed, simply to leave the matter with a statement that God shares our suffering runs the risk of affirming suffering, making it in some way the will of God. The point of the exercise, rather, is to remove suffering from the creation, not to affirm it or establish it as in some way a necessity for God or man. This priority of redemption is undermined, if not actively subverted, by any breach of perichoresis; any suggestion that there is a rift in God. It seems therefore that the so-called cry of dereliction should not be seen in such terms, but as the final episode in the incarnate Son’s total identification of himself, through the Spirit, with the lost human condition. Most simply, it is the cry of an Israelite expressing the self-distancing of that people from God as the result of their sin, the completion of Jesus identification with Israel in his baptism.

(Act and Being, SCM, 2002, pp.125-132)

See also Colin's paper on 'Being and Attributes in Eberhard Jungel' (published in Theology Through the Theologians, 1996 and Possibilities of Theology, edited by  John Webster, 1994) and a few pages in Christ and Creation (1992, 86-89)

See here for more posts on Colin Gunton.

Colin Gunton Conference: Douglas Knight's Paper

Douglas Knight has made available his paper Father, Son and Holy Spirit - Colin Gunton and the doctrine of God from last week's Colin Gunton Conference.

The trinitarian turn in Colin Gunton's theology

Steve Holmes' paper at the Colin Gunton conference argued for a shift in Gunton's thinking in the early 1990s with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity. In the first half of his career the doctrine of the Trinity mattered in Gunton's theology, but only because it helped with other parts of theology. The One, the Three and the Many (published in 1993 based on his 1992 Bampton Lectures) is regarded widely as Gunton's best work, but Colin himself believed it didn't contain enough theology. For Colin it wasn't trinitarian enough. Holmes argued that this book marks the end of one approach to the doctrine of the Trinity, to which the rest of the 90s and early 2000s saw Gunton go in a different direction. The subtitle to Enlightenment and Alienation (1985, although finished in 1982) is 'An Essay toward a Trinitarian Theology' and his collection of essays published in 1991 is called The Promise of Trinitarian Theology. These titles perhaps reveal that Gunton was looking for a way to do theology in a more trinitarian manner.

What we detect in the early 1990s (as Holmes showed) was the introduction of Irenaeus notion of the Son and the Spirit as God's two hands (the first time it is referenced is in Christ and Creation. The 1990 Didsbury Lectures published in 1992). From this point onwards Irenaeus' two hands is in constant use and Colin begins to develop a trinitarian theology of mediation. In A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (1995), The preface to the second edition of The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (1997), The Triune Creator (1998), Intellect and Action (2000), The Christian Faith (2002), Act and Being (2003) and Father, Son and Spirit (2003) (which is interestingly subtitled 'Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology') references to meditation and Christ as mediator can be found frequently. A trinitarian theology of mediation enabled Colin to articulate a trinitarian theology, which would have witness most fully in his projected dogmatics.

The first part of Colin's dogmatics (which was finished in draft) is still to be published, but Jenson said he hoped it wouldn't be too long before the editing is finished.

New Pages (update)

Selected Modern Theologians

Colin E. Gunton
John Zizioulas
Robert Jenson
Jurgen Moltmann
Christoph Schwoebel
John Webster
Wolfhart Pannenberg
David Ford
Daniel W. Hardy
James B. Torrance
TF Torrance
Miroslav Volf
Stanley Hauerwas
Oliver O'Donovan
Nigel Biggar

Books on Karl Barth

Best of IJST
British Centres of Theology
Theology Book Series

Colin Gunton

Colin Gunton on Barth
Criticism of Colin Gunton
KCL PhDs completed under Colin Gunton

Stanley Hauerwas: Criticism

Notes from Colin Gunton One-Day Conference

(L to R: Douglas Knight, Robert Jenson, John Colwell, Steve Holmes)

Today was a great day, with four good papers on Colin Gunton's theology, lots of good conversation and memories of Colin. Robert Jenson talked us through some of the theological choices Colin made. Right from Becoming and Being (1978) Colin said no to classic theism (supernatural, timelessness, chain of being) and no to Hartshorne in favour of Barth. Colin chose the Cappadocians over Augustine and also Barth. Colin chose to say that the eternal Son is always Jesus of Nazareth. Colin chose to define his christology through his doctrine of the Spirit (learnt from John Owen). Jenson suggested that although perhaps Colin's critique of Augustine ultimately was over-done, Colin was still right to make it.

John Colwell's paper took us a journey through Colin's references to and paper on ecclesiology. Colwell argued for a ecclesiological hesitation in Colin's theology which ultimately ended up as pneumatological occasionalism, by which Colwell means that Colin did not want to claim to much for the church. So from 'time to time' the church is the body of Christ when the Spirit, but not always. Colwell argued that a theology of promise (like that which he develops in his own work) can allow us not to fall into ecclesiastical nestorianism (the belief that Christ and the church are unrelated).

Steve Holmes' paper traced Colin's trinitarian development showing how early on the doctrine of the Trinity did not play a major part in Colin's thought. However from his inaugural lecture as Professor of Christian Doctrine in 1985 onwards we see an increasing trinitarianism to Colin's theology (the inaugural lecture can be found in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology). The inaugural lecture introduces the words 'person' and particularity', which became very important concepts in his theology, in addition to the concept of mediation, which first appears in the 1990 Didsbury Lectures and then the 1993 Warfield Lectures, from which point onwards it is a major dimension to Colin's theological work. Steve argued that Colin's theology sought to answer two questions: how do we speak of God? to which he answered, God is triune, which led to the second question, what difference does the Trinity make? Steve ended by commenting that Colin had taught him how to do theology, although he was increasingly finding himself taking different positions to Colin, especially with regard to Augustine and Aquinas.

Douglas Knight's paper argued for the importance of theology - Christian doctrine - in the church witnessing to the world and the university and how Colin was the kind of theologian who did precisely that. Colin's theology can be described as a sustained treatise on the doctrine of God for God's sake. Douglas argued that the theology of the kind that Colin was doing, i.e Christian doctrine, remains vital (for the sake of the church's witness) and we need to find more places for it to happen.

It was good to see the likes of Brian Brock (University of Aberdeen), Nigel Wright (Spurgeon's), Neil Macdonald (University of Roehampton), Terry Wright (Spurgeon's), Simon Perry (Bloomsbury Central Baptist) Tom Kraft (T & T Clark), Lincoln Harvey (KCL), Alan Spence and Tom Smail as well as others.

The Triune God in the Theology of Colin E Gunton

Monday 10 September 2007
Spurgeon's College, London

PROGRAMME

Professor Robert W Jenson
Some Choices Made by Colin Gunton

Dr John E Colwell
Provisionality and Promise: Avoiding Ecclesiastical Nestorianism?

Dr Stephen R Holmes
What’s in a Name?  The Concept of ‘Person’ in Gunton, Zizioulas and the Cappadocians

Dr Douglas H Knight
Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Colin Gunton on the Doctrine of God