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Gunton (vii) on Pnuematology

I am nearing the end of my series of posts on the theology of Colin Gunton.  Gunton's doctrine of the Holy Spirit is perhaps one of the most distinctive features of his theology and is Colin at his best.  Certainly his later work is heavily shaped by a strong doctrine of the Spirit. This was one of the areas, he felt Western theology, from Augustince to Karl Barth, was not properly weighted. In a number of essays Gunton's pneumatology provides a more complete trinitarian theology, which recognises both the unity of the divine Persons and their particularity. Two essays in Theology through the Theologians, demonstrate the importance of the Spirit to Gunton.  In the first, he begins by stating that a 'theology of the Holy Spirit is by no means easy to define' (105).  This is because, to quote from elsewhere, 'the Spirit is the self-effacing person of the Trinity: the one whose function is to point away from himself  to Jesus' (A Brief Theology of Revelation, 1995, 121). However, this does not mean we can say nothing about the person and work of the Holy Spirit. According to Gunton,

'Against the widespread assumption that Holy Spirit is to be understood as the immanence of God - in the believer, the creation or the human being in general - it must be argued that the Spirit is better identified in terms of transcedence than of immanence. The Spirit may be active within the world, but he does not become identical with any part of the world' ('God the Holy Spirit', 1996, 108)

Gunton contrasts his doctrine of the Spirit with that often found in traditional Western theology and in the more recent charismatic movement and the kind of theology which identifies the Spirit as some being or force in the world (as found most plainly in the Star Wars films).  Against this, Gunton argues the Spirit is present and active as the transcendent Lord within the world: 'the Spirit is neither an individual power nor a subjective feeling, but a person sent by the Father through his ascended Son' (Act and Being, 2002, 144)  For Gunton the main roots of the problem lie with Augustine (see also his early important essay reprinted in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology referenced below), whose doctrine of Spirit is not properly controlled by the economic work of the Spirit in creation and salvation.  Gunton, then, seeks to establish a doctrine of the Spirit that 'is not separable from [God's] action in Christ, but not reducible to it either', what amounts to, a'more comprehensive articulation of the Spirit's action than has been customary in the tradition' (112).

Gunton begins with the incarnation and concludes that 'it is in the incarnation and particularity in relation to the humanity of Christ in general that we can discern the activity of the Spirit as the life-giving power of God in and towards his creation.'  For Gunton, when we do christology we quickly find we need to do pneumatology as well - 'the Spirit is ... not so much an endowment as the one sent from the Father who ... enables the incarnate Son to be himself' (116).  Elsewhere he writes, 'we may explore the theology of the Spirit only through the lens provided by Jesus Christ' (2003, 113).  Both the Son and the Spirit are dependent on the other.  From this, we are able to say that the Spirit is the Lord and Giver of life, who is 'the Father's agent enabling the created order in all its material concreteness to be and do that for which it was created' (118).

Gunton also argues that we see the Spirit as the 'perfecting cause of the whole creation' (120) and so also 'the eschatological person of the Trinity: the one who directs the creatures to where the creator wishes them to go, to their destiny as creatures' (2003, 81).  It is the role of the Spirit - his agency - to bring all things into relation to the Father through Christ.

The second, and not unrelated essay in Theology through the Theologians is Gunton at his very best.  (The essay is a reprint of his 1988 Congregational Lecture: 'The Transcendent Lord. The Spirit and the Church in Calvinist and Cappadocian'.) The essay opens with: 'It would be possible, as an exercise in cynicism, to write a history of the Church as the story of the misappropriation of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit' (187).  The essay seeks to articulate 'how we may conceive the action of the Spirit  ... in relation to the Church' (190) in conversation with the work of John Owen (a Gunton favourite) and John Zizioulas (another Gunton favourite).  Like the other essay, Gunton is clear that "the Spirit is not some inner fuel, compulsion or qualification - in fact he is nothing impersonal at all - but the free Lord who as our other liberates us for community' (197).

'The Spirit, then, liberates by calling us into relation with Christ through the medium of the community of his body. He liberates us, that is to say, by bringing us into community: by enabling us to be with and for the brothers and sisters whom we ourselves did not choose' (201).

This is the key argument, that the Spirit is 'the electing God', who enables us personally and freely to be joined to the community of God. To say we are 'in Christ' is to say that the Spirit has united us with Christ.  So Gunton states:

'The Spirit is not some force or possession operating causally within the believer or the institution, although sometimes our language suggests that way of thinking. As the Spirit of the Father who comes to us through the Son and lifts us up into the life of God, he is a person, and so acts personally, both respecting and granting freedom by his very otherness' (203-204).

Further Reading

'Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West' in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (1991, 1997)

The One, the Three and the Many. God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity (1993)

'God the Holy Spirit: Augustine and his successors'; 'The Church: John Owen and John Zizoulas on the Church' in Theology through the Theologians (1996)

The Christian Faith, chapters 7, 8 & 9 (2002)

'The Holy Spirit who with the Father and the Son together is Worshipped and Glorified'; 'Creation: The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters. The Holy Spirit and the Created Order'; 'The Spirit and Jesus (1) Martin Kahler revisited. Variatians on Hebrews 4.15'; 'The Spirit and Jesus (2) 'One Mediator ... the Man Jesus Christ.' Reconciliation, Mediation and Life in the Community' in Father, Son & Holy Spirit (2003)

God is bread

Just read Jonny's latest worship trick, it's simple and brilliant.

Word becomes flesh
flesh becomes bread
bread becomes body
body becomes word

God is bread
bread is broken
pain becomes wine
wine becomes joy

Wine bursts the wineskins
God bursts the tomb
bread bursts into song

Holy, holy, holy. . . .

Gunton (vi) on Atonement

The Actuality of Atonement (1988) was Colin's major work on the particular doctrine. The book in summary is an exploration of the usefulness of metaphor and especially the traditional atonement metaphors - victory, justice, sacrifice. He writes, '... are they, in effect, dead metaphors, dead not only because they have been domesticated but because they no longer speak, no longer create space for human living?'(50).  Gunton then looks at 'three ways in which the story of Jesus can - or must - be understood to create ways of both speaking of God and of realising his action in each world. In each case, we shall ask whether they are viable ways of speaking about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as redemption, atonement' (52).

Murray Rae, in an essay where he argues that the metaphor travail might be another useful way of speaking about the atonement, provides the following summary of Gunton's argument:

In The Actuality of Atonement ... Colin Gunton shows that in directing us to behold the death of Christ, the metaphors of atonement (here, victory, justice and sacrifice) invite us to a new understanding of what victory, justice and sacrifice mean. In light of the cross victory is shown to be won, not by annihilating one's opponents, but by suffering through the violence that they do and thus robbing it of its power. Victory here means to overcome evil with love. Or in the metaphor of justice, the cross reveals that justice is done, not when a suitable punishment has been imposed upon the offender but when the judge takes upon himself the consequences of the offence and thus reconciles the offender to himself. Justice, understood in light of the cross, while properly understand still as the means of dealing with offence, is not what we thought it was, or is not the same thing, at least, that we normally see going on in our law courts and prison cells. The judge judged in our place, throws new light on what justice truly is. Its proper conern is not punishment but setting things right, as the Greek word dikaiosune better succeds in making clear. And finally sacrifice: here the primary referent of the metaphor is a religious context, the ritual means of dealing with sin, but also in this case, the metaphor, when used of Christ's death, invites us to a new way of understanding how sacirfice accomplishes reconciliation between humanity and God. [Sacrifice] is not accomplished by heaping our sins upon a scapegoat as a symbol of our own repentance, but rather by God's giving up his own life as the outworking of his love. The redundancy of the old sacrificial system is made clear in Hebrews where it is claimed that it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins (Heb. 10:4). The old meaning of sacrifice has also to be left aside in favour of a new understanding brought about when, through the metaphor, we are invited to apprehend the cross' (Rae, Murray, 'The Travail of God', International Journal of Systematic Theology, 2003, Vol 5, pp. 50-51).

Gunton follows his three chapters on victory, justice and sacrifice, with a discussion of how this plays out as in a doctrine of atonement. He begins by arguing that all three metaphors are relational, that is, they 'taking their meaning, when understood in depth, from relationships' (143). His next point is that these metaphors are not isolated from creation and eschatology, rather they 'express something of the work of the triune God through, in and with his creation' (154).  That is, 'the metaphors enable us to conceive the career of Jesus as the victory, sacrifice and justice of God, and so to write that particular story into a determinative place in the narrative of the ways of God with the world' (154-155). The chapter continues with a discussion of the objective/subjective dimensions of the doctrine and whether we should understood Jesus as our representative or our substitute. He rejects a merely subjective or exemplarist theology because it fails to recognise that Jesus is the incarnate Son, whose 'particular humanity is what it is because it is his who is sent by the Father who is sent to save lost mankind' (158); it fails to recognise that 'the death and resurrection of Jesus [are] the pivot of  the events in which the reconciling  action takes place' (158), that is, 'the death of Jesus is first of all to be understood as the divine purpose of redemption' (159), not as a mere example to follow; and thirdly, it fails to take evil seriously enough - sin is 'not abolished by appeals to follow a good example. What is required is a setting free, an act of recreation, of redemption' (160). What does Gunton say with regard to the representative/substitute debate? He says that 'substitution and representation are correlative, not opposed concepts' (166), that they 'are two sides of the one relationship, with Jesus taking our place before God so that we ourselves  may come, reconciled, before God' (167). By substitute, Gunton argues that it should not be controlled 'by the necessity of punishment so much as by the gracious initiative of God' (164-165). He says 'we have to say that Jesus is our substitute because he does for us what we cannot do for ourselves' (165). Elsewhere Gunton writes:

'The heart of the doctrine of substitution is not God as God simpliciter standing in his own dock ... but God the Son bearing as man the weight of the Father's holy wrath against sin. One inch from that path, and we are the objectionable realms of either penal subsitution or a mere exemplarism. But the dangerous path must be trodden, for unless we tread it, as Calvin did, we shall fail to articulate either the depth of the human plight or the divine and human cost of our redemption' ('Aspects of Salvation: Some Unscholastic Themes from Calvin's Institutes' in Intellect and Action, 2000, 137-138).

Gunton here recognises the difficulty and problems of a doctrine of penal subsitution, but seems to suggest a doctrine of atonement must come near to saying it, if we are 'to do justice to the implications of the decisive events with which we are concerned' (AA, 166).

Gunton's account of the doctrine of atonement is thought-provoking and challenging. Re-reading it again as I have over the last two weeks, I have on many occasions been helped in its description of victory, justice and sacrifice. I remain unsure of whether justice is still a helpful metaphor and a right reading of Paul - here I am in more agreement with Douglas Campbell and Tom Wright.

Further Reading:

'Atonement and the Project of Creation: An Interpretation of Colossians 1:15-23' in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (1997, 2nd ed.)
'The Atonement: R. W. Dale on the Centrality of the Cross' in Theology Through the Theologians (1996)
'Aspects of Salvation: Some Unscholastic Themes from Calvin's Institutes' in Intellect and Action (2000)
The Christian Faith, chapter 4 (2002)
'Atonement: The Sacrifice and and the Sacrifices. From Metaphor to Transcendental' in Father, Son and Holy Spirit (2003)

Friendship and Aging

Last night our youth group, The Lounge spilt into 3 groups and we went a visiting.  Each group went to visit someone in the church, a more mature member of our congregation, someone they probably didn't know they well. It is something I had been wanting to facilitate ever since I read an essay by Stanley Hauerwas (with Laura Yordy) called Captured in Time: Friendship and Aging (you can find it in A Better Hope or in Growing Old In Christ). In this essay he argues that the church needs 'to find ways to avoid isolating the young, not so young, and the elderly from one another.'  For Hauerwas, friendship is vital to church life and especially cross-generational friendship - both young and old have much to learn from one another, particularly the young from the old.

It was a great time last night, each group I think experienced something special. We all had to do a lot of listening, which for a youth group is a hard thing. The group I took walked round to see Nita Green. Nita is in her 80s and has lived a full life. She is an extraordinary lady, who is such a witness to the truthfulness of the gospel. We need to recognize and learn from these kind of people. Nita shows us how to live, which is so important to those of younger years, whose only examples are the lives of the "celebrity". As Nita prayed at the end of our time, I believe we saw that despite the cultural gaps and the different kind of lives that the young lead, there is, in Christ, a oneness that bridges these gaps and tensions between us. This is what the church should be like. This is the kind of church I think God wants us to work at being.

This week I'm feeling stretched, I've blogged since last last Monday, because I've not had the space to think.  I am half-way through completing a blog on Gunton's understanding of the doctrine of atonement, which has been good because it's a book I've not read for a few years. I'm interested in reading Alan Mann's new book, Atonement for a Sinless Society. (As far as I can tell Alan wrote most of  The Lost Message of Jesus). Things have hijacked my time, but I hope to find some on Thursday or Friday.

I liked this short post from Maggi: Priests, not the doctrine police: Don't imagine us leaders to be something we aren't. We are servants of Christ, not his masters. We are guides into God's most sublime secrets, not security guards posted to protect them.

I've also enjoyed watching the BBC2 documentary 'The Monastry (see Mark's posts here and here). There's one more next Tuesday 9pm.

More later.

The Last Word and the Word After That

About 10 days ago I received a email out of the blue asking whether I would like a free review copy of Brian McLaren's new book: The Last Word and the Word After That to which I replied 'yes please'. (Please note: if anyone else would like to send me free books to review I am more than happy to oblige). Today it arrived.

I didn't plan to read it today, but started 2pm and 3 hours later have made my way through most of it. I read fast and skim to find the most important bits. What can I say? Firstly, this is the 1st book by McLaren that I've read. McLaren is someone I've heard a lot about over the last year and have been meaning to get hold of one of his books, but never seem to have got round to it. Secondly, I thought I wouldn't like the fiction style of the book - McLaren does his theology through the conversations of characters (think Sophie's World) - but actually found it refreshing and helped me grasp his arguments more clearly (as an aside, some writers always leave you wanting him or her to explain themselves a little more, McLaren writes with clarity and interest).  Thirdly, this book as been described as very controversial, it's McLaren view on hell, but I didn't find a lot which I disagreed with.  In the chapters on the New Testament you feel the recognise the influence of Tom Wright (which McLaren admits to heavily depending on). I think a lot of Christians are unhappy with the traditional evangelical doctrine of (heaven and) hell - it seems out-of-sink with other doctrines.

So what does McLaren say? Most importantly I think is the statement 'that hell itself isn't the point' (p.80). McLaren's book  is a deconstructing of hell - a clearing away of the muddle and mess and a sensible look at the data. We've given hell too big a place in our theology.  As McLaren points out, by quoting Wright, that although hell 'has been lavishly described by thousands of theologians, preachers and poets ... The New Testament, interestingly, doesn't have nearly as much to say about it ...' (Wright, For All the Saints?, 2003, 17, cited in McLaren, p.98). Talk of hell is surprisingly small - in the gospels, Matthew is the only gospel where it really features: John never mentions it, Mark very rarely and Luke is a toned-down version of Matthew (see p.114).  McLaren's argument is we need to re-understand  what Jesus was on about when he talked about hell, was he doing something different than what we think. He argues that the Pharisess used the idea of hell to motivate sinners to stop sinning (p.62), it was a tactic and an example of 'persuasive rhetoric'.  When Jesus mentions it, its not sinners who are going to hell, but the Pharisees themselves: 'The Pharisees used hell to threaten sinners and other undesirables and mark them as the excluded out-group, hated by God ... Jesus turns their rhetoric upside down and inside out and used hell to threaten those who excluded sinners and other undesirables, showing that God's righteousness was compassionate and merciful ...' (74).  Jesus uses the language or hell to 'point out what really matters to God,' (121), that is, the kingdom of God.  Our doctrine of hell misses the point because we make it the point! 

Conclusions: talk of hell in scripture is not as clear-cut as we are led to believe or like to think; Jesus uses talk of hell to make a different point than is often made today; "it's not up to us to say who's in and who's out" (Wright, 2003, 45); "the good news [is] that God is even better than we thought, that the gospel is even better than we realized. That [the exclusivist's] thoughts of God have been too small, too unworthy ... that the truly good news is bigger and better and more powerful than the conventional news they've been believing and preaching' (68).  You come away from reading this book not with exact answers, but with a feeling that the wool's been lifted from your eyes, and that those unresolved feelings about the doctrine of hell were right. McLaren ends by saying that the reader should 'feel free to ignore whatever does not seem right to you and profit from whatever does' (199), which neatly sums up McLaren's attitude and belief that doctrines are not what should unite us.

There is much more I could say about this book, I've already found it very helpful, and will over the next weeks and months, revisit it's pages, especially the latter half, which explores more McLaren's new kind of Christianity. If you can get a copy.

A Blog Tour featuring Brian D. McLaren, author of "The Last Word and The Word After That" started today at the following blogs:
   Tall Skinny Kiwi http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com
   Prairie Fusion http://www.jordoncooper.com
   Jen Lemen's Blog http://www.jenlemen.com
   Dwight Friesen's Blog http://dwightfriesen.blog.com

Celebrating Differentness

One of the best chapters in Sam Wells' Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics is about the ethics of chronic disability and illness.  He uses testimonies of two different parents who parent children with profound mental disabilities. This I think is not unrelated, as hopefully will become evident, to the question of the relationship between children and church.

He begins by discussing the 'forming of habits'.  The 'struggles' of parenting a child with disabilities 'must find a place within the central reality of worship' (171).  By this, I think Wells is making the point that act and context of worship must provide meaning or a grounding in the context of  day-to-day act of being a parent.  He quotes Frances Young:  '... Just as male needs female, rich needs poor, white needs black, so intellectuals need the simple ... The church is itself when it bridges all these gaps and tensions between people of different kinds.'  He then writes, 'What she has described here is the way worship forms character, and how a community that worships faithfully together learns to take the right things granted' (172).  That is, I think, the act of worshipping allows or enables parents or members of the church body to be the kind of parents or the kind of members they are: those persons who bridge the gap between people who are different. The church is a celebration of different-ness, where every member is celebrated for the different kinds of people they are.  There is no elite, no normal, no standard: 'all are one and the same in Christ Jesus' (Gal 3:28b). By coming to worship and worshipping week after week we establish habits and develop skills, through the work of the Spirit, which (trans)form us in the image of Christ, in whom humanity is created and reconciled.

In a society that cannot cope with difference, which is only interested in the achiever, or the person who is successful and independent, worship trains us - the church - to be different in that it allows us to cope with difference, and moreover, trains us to celebrate it.  The church accepts difference and does not block it or assume it doesn't exist. Wells writes 'Young goes on to point out that people like Arthur (Frances Young's son) are not failed versions of somebody else: they can be something that no one else can be' (177).  This is a powerful point, which we would do well to learn. Read it again - hear its truth. If only we had the grace to recognise that those with disability are 'not failed versions of somebody else,' but the  unique and particular person God created.  Mike Yaconelli writes in Messy Spirituality that 'Christ doesn;t make us the same. What he does is affirm our differentness' (88). The child or adult with disability is a concrete test of morality of the church: does it accept without reservation and celebrate this different-ness or does it make excuses or try and pretend there is no difference? Do we consider the gift that this person gives to the church - are we capable of receiving something from them? And picking up on my previous post, does the church accept and celebrate all children or do we create ways of keeping them in their own space. Do we allow the child to infringe on our space, to participate in our worship of God?

One of the interesting ideas Wells takes from the practice of theatrical improvisation is that of 'status' and 'assessing status' - are we 'high-status' players or 'low-status' players?  In the context of being a parent of a disabled child, whose story is it? Who is the story about - the parent, the child, the community, the marginalization of the weak and different by the strong and normal? If the story is the parents or of the 'normal', the child is without power, they have no say in how the story is told.   Wells says the Christian community is not about those in the centre assisting those on the margins, but instead, it is about finding itself on the periphery and making friends with those others it finds there (176).  We need to turn status on its head, and look at how the story is being told from the child's perspective, are they passive persons, or active participants, do they have a role in how the story of their life is told? 

Young points out that "there is a sense in which we are all handicapped" (177).  How do we interpret this or perhaps how does Young mean us to interpret it?  I don't think she means we're all sinners, it is more that we are all dependent on others, we are all need to receive care from another, no person is immune.  In this way, those who have any kind of disability have high-status because they teach us that we are not meant to live completely independent lives, but, as those in the church, we are part of a body, which is dependent upon its part to live: 'severly mentally disabled people show the church the character of human neediness; they are "a prophetic sign of our true nature as creatures destined to need God and, thus, one another"' (182).  And so Wells says, 'Thus the most needy have come from the fringes of the story to the centre' (178).  Our children then should not be seen and treated as potential adults, but instead should be seen and treated as children.  We should welcome childhood as being exactly child-hood, to quickly it seems we're in a rush for our children to act and be adults. Rowan Williams argues, according to Mike Higton (in Different Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams), that we should concerned with 'the integrity of childhood - of play, of imagination, of experimentation,' which 'involves our refusal to allow childhood to be 'colonized' by adulthood' (108).

Wells quotes from Young again: "Those of us who are privileged in society think we ought to give to the less privileged, but so easily that becomes charity at arm's length ... What we need to do is receive ... To receive from someone is to accord them a deeper respect, and to do them far more good than to give them our charity" (181).  This takes a renewing of the mind, because we constantly think its about what we can do to make a disabled child's life more 'normal,' rather than developing a reciprocal relationship where both persons give and receive, where we make each other's lives 'normal'.  To receive something from another person, is to give them space and the status as givers.  It is to recognize that God is the ultimate Giver, and he gives us many gifts from people of all different kinds.   So often we  looked for the most 'gifted' or  'able,' rather than allowing  each and every person  to be  someone who brings a gift to share.