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advent blog coming soon ...

The hopefulimagination community advent blog is getting ready to begin again in a few weeks feel free to sign up if you want to participate and get involved. And don't forget to get a copy of Maggi Dawn's Beginnings and Endings

Jesse Jackson coming to Regent's Park

In a full programme in Oxford, Jesse Jackson will be the guest of Regent's Park College, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary year as a permanent private hall of Oxford University. His visit to the college will mark and celebrate this anniversary, and Regent's will, in a special ceremony, honour Jesse Jackson by making him an honorary fellow of the college. Among other engagements, Mr Jackson will launch ASPIRE, a major research and empowerment initiative of Regent's Park College in collaboration with Canterbury Christ Church University, and CTBI's racial justice team.
 
ASPIRE will carry out research into the reasons behind today's under-representation of black young people in higher education in Britain, and investigate and promote ways to improve access to universities for this group of people. This project stands firmly in the tradition of Regent's Park College, which was founded in the 18th century to enable Protestant dissenters enter higher education. At the time, and until 1854, nonconformist Christians were denied entrance to England's only two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which accepted only members of the Church of England. ASPIRE will also develop links with young black people, take practical steps to inspire them with the vision of higher education, and encourage their application to higher education institutions.
  
On Tuesday 13 November, at 6pm, Jesse Jackson will preach at a celebration service at New Road Baptist Church, Bonn Square, Oxford, OX1 1LQ.

ASBO Jesus continues to amuse

ASBO Jesus continues to be fantastic. The only problem is the amount of cartoons, that its difficult to keep up with the output .... Here's two recent ones I enjoyed ...

 

Book Review: The Justifying Judgement of God

Justyn Terry, The Justifying Judgement of God: A Reassessment of the Place of Judgement in the Saving Work of Christ (Paternoster, 2007), 228pp (with thanks to Paternoster for a review copy)

How to preach the doctrine of atonement?  This is the big question which Justyn Terry begins with. Terry presents a crisis in preaching about the atonement.  Surveying a number of recent sermons and books from  courses on Christian basics he finds often that atonement is mention in passing and where dealt with usually with problematic trivial illustrations. What does emerge are four key images: sacrifice, victory, redemption and justice. These are presented as independent of one another liked the facets of a diamond.

Having provided a limited overview of preaching on the atonement, Terry explores six different books by British theologians (save one) from the 20th century of the doctrine of atonement: Hastings Rashdall, Gustaf Aulen, F. W. Dillistone, Frances Young, Paul Fiddes and Colin Gunton. For the reader looking for how theologies of atonement developed in the last hundred years this is really useful. Terry outlines the strengths and weaknesses of each. He is most favourable towards the work of Colin Gunton (perhaps not surprising as Colin was Terry's teacher and at one point supervisor) and wants to build on Gunton's argument, showing how the metaphors of victory, justice and sacrifice relate to one another. Terry's problem with too many theologies of atonement is that he finds in each the 'underlying assumption that these are essentially independent interpretations of atonement with minimal interconnection' (p.17) and so these multiple images or metaphors make it appear 'that humankind needs deliverance from many different and apparently unrelated problems’ (p.43). Terry wants to find one paradigmatic metaphor to which the others relate. (Incidentally, Steve Holmes' recent book on penal substitution, The Wondrous Cross, introduces the term 'stories of salvation', which 'paint pictures of what God has done that illuminate one or another facet of that great work' (Paternoster, 2007, 121) which I guess Terry would also want to challenge.)

In order to find this one paradigmatic metaphor first refers to PT Forsyth's suggestion of the perfect obedience of Christ and then secondly to Karl Barth's argument for the judgement of Christ (found in Church Dogmatics IV/1). Again because the book is based on a PhD these are excellent chapters on both Forsyth and Barth for the reader who wants to get to grips with these important theologians.

Through his reading of Barth, Terry makes the case for judgement being 'the paradigmatic metaphor for atonement, with victory, redemption and sacrifice as subordinate metaphors to it' (p.171).  The implications for preaching is that a sermon which considers the atonement in terms of the judgement of God. Terry argues that 'such an emphasis on judgement promises to restore iron to the anaemic blood of much contemporary

gospel preaching. An account of atonement centering on the justifying judgement of God is able to face with due seriousness the world as it is, with all its potential for good and all its propensity towards evil. It can provide the vocabulary to describe how the ever urgent need to root out corruption and establish righteousness, to bring down the proud and raise up the humble, is met in Jesus Christ' (p.212)

Terry builds a convincing argument and there is no doubt in my mind that too much preaching on the atonement is unsatisfactory. However, I'm not sure we can speak of one biblical paradigmatic metaphor for atonement, although Terry makes a powerful theological argument for judgement. My questions are does Terry give enough weight to the role of the Spirit (a criticism that is often asked of Barth) and how do we understand Paul's 'in Christ' language? How does Christ's atonement affect us? Here I think, judgement is helpful, but I would want to include the language of participation, we participate, by the Spirit, in the death and resurrection of Christ (I find Douglas Campbell's description of atonement in Paul very helpful [see the relevant chapters in A Quest for Paul's Gospel]).

This is an important book, that at its heart is concerned for coherent and faithful preaching, that goes beyond the trivial, the sentimental and emotive so often found within the church. This is a useful book which examines recent theologies of atonement, presenting their strengths and weakness, that serves as a good introduction to issues of atonement. This is a challenging book which recovers the importance of judgement and argues for its central place in the doctrine of atonement. It deserves to be widely read.

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

New Books for end of 2007 from Paternoster

Between now and the end of the year some good titles from Paternoster are coming out. Highlights include:

Public Theology in Cultural Engagement, ed. by Steve Holmes, with essays by Colin Gunton, Luke Bretherton, Robert Jenson, Colin Greene and Brian Horne

God According to the Gospel: Biblical Narrative and the Identity of God in the Theology of Robert Jenson by Scott Swain (Paternoster Theological Monographs series)

Reinventing English Evangelicalism 1965-2000: A Theological and Sociological Study by Rob Warner (Studies in Evangelical History and Thought Series)

Tradition and the Baptist Academy, eds. by Roger Ward and Philip Thompson (Studies in Baptist History and Thought Series)

SJT, November 2007

Apophaticism in Thomas Aquinas: a re-reformulation and recommendation - Kevin Hector

Redemptive suffering: Christ's alone - Mary VandenBerg

I don't get it: humour and hermeneutics - Peter J. Leithart

Can a theology student be an evil genius? On the concept of habitus in theological education - Christopher Craig Brittain

Hidden damage and current needs: pulpit and pew in Lutheran Australia - Elizabeth Koepping

Article Review: Wright on the resurrection - Michael Welker

Book reviews include Christopher Seitz on Joseph Blenkinsopp's Anchor Bible commentary on Isaiah 56-66, Telford Work on John Webster's Holy Scripture and Paul Molnar on the late Stanley Grenz's Rediscovering the Triune God

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.