Bruce McCormack’s TFT lectures (1)
Bruce McCormack’s TF Torrance lectures went under the title ‘The Humility of the Eternal Son: A Reformed Version of Kenotic Christology’. They represent the maturity of a project Bruce announced in an IJST article (‘Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism’ IJST 8 (2006), pp. 243-51), and has developed in my hearing in papers given in a conference on Hebrews in St Andrews (to be published next year in McDonald, Driver, Bauckham, & Hart (eds), The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology (Eerdmans)), and at the 2007 Rutherford House Dogmatics Conference. No doubt the theme has also been worked on in public elsewhere. I published the IJST article, and questioned Bruce after the two earlier presentations. It was clear from the start that he was doing something interesting, but there were serious questions raised. Let me say at the start that in his TFT lectures Bruce has developed his proposal into something weighty and serious—more so than any similar reconstruction that I am aware of in recent English-language theology. The first lecture, ‘Immutable in Impassibility: The Role Played by Classical Theism in Creating the Unresolved Problems in Chalcedonian Orthodoxy,’ covered the development of Christology in the patristic period down to the Lutheran-Reformed controversies of the sixteenth century, with a particular focus on Cyril of Alexandria, the Chalcedonian settlement, and John of Damascus. Bruce argued, essentially, that all Christology in the patristic and Reformation periods was hamstrung by the fact that it was constructed on the assumption of a substance metaphysics. ‘God’ and ‘humanity’ were different sorts of things, that could not be mixed. Something was either one or the other. All patristic Christology was a series of increasingly sophisticated attempts to escape this basic logic, which however proved inescapable. Cyril’s attempt was the most interesting, but relied on an unacceptable Origenist subordinationism (this interpretation of Cyril comes from McGuckin’s St Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy). If I say that this was the weakest of the four lectures, understand that this is rather like talking about the weakest member of Arsenal’s midfield—in four performances, each stunningly good, one is inevitably going to be slightly less good than the others. Bruce was trying to deal with an immense amount of material (the whole development of patristic Christology, and the Reformed-Lutheran debates as well), and he would admit himself that patristics in particular is not his period. It seems to me that Bruce was using this background to demonstrate the necessity of his constructive proposal. That is, as far as I could work out listening to the four lectures, Bruce’s own account of Christology does not depend on anything in his account of this history for its validity; however, the pressure he feels for developing a new account of Christology does. One theme of these lectures is the problem of substance metaphysics. On McCormack’s account, all Christology prior to Hegel has been infected by this: the theologians assumed such metaphysics, and it prevented them from saying the things they wanted/needed to say, or at least from saying them consistently. As a result, classical Christology needs to be re-written for a post-metaphysical...
Read MoreWillow Creek
News from Willow Creek Community Church, an enormously influential and very large church community in Illinois (see the report here): a multi-year study has led them to conclude that they have been doing things wrong. Bill Hybels, the senior pastor, said this: Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for. The church has announced a root-and-branch rethink, based on Scripture and research. What was it that wasn’t working? Greg Hawkins, the ‘executive pastor’ of the church is quoted as saying: ‘Increasing levels of participation in these sets of activities does NOT predict whether someone’s becoming more of a disciple of Christ. It does NOT predict whether they love God more or they love people more.’ That is, they have been working with a ‘if we can get people to participate in this or that church activity, they will grow spiritually’ model, and have discovered it doesn’t work. Fair enough. The chilling part of the tale comes next. What are the things that ‘we didn’t put that much money into’ that their ‘people are crying out for’? In Hybels own words, ‘[w]e should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service[s], how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.’ What does help people grow spiritually? Bible reading, prayer, spiritual disciplines. It would be easy to mock (it would be so easy to mock…), but that would be to miss the plank in my own eye. Willow Creek discovered, rather spectacularly, that they were unconsciously equating commitment to church programmes with commitment to God; how many of us who are, or have been, in church leadership have not made that mistake? We assume people aren’t praying, because they aren’t at the church prayer meeting, measure their spirituality by their regularity at Sunday worship, and so on. The problem is the usual one with all attempts to assess, well, anything: we struggle to measure what actually matters, so we pretend that what we can measure does matter. Perhaps, with all their resources, Willow Creek will find and share ways around their problem and...
Read MoreLiverpool nativity
The ‘Manchester Passion’, which BBC3 showed Easter 2005, was perhaps the best single piece of religious broadcasting I have seen, so news that the channel was to follow it up with a ‘Liverpool Nativity’ tonight excited us. The programme was more professionally constructed than the Manchester one had been, with better cinematography (including aerial shots of the city and the like), but less satisfying. I was going to write that the Manchester music was better, but that is not quite right (the last time Manchester saw someone as adept at writing tunes as Lennon and McCartney was when Elgar attended the premiere of his first symphony at the Free Trade Hall…); rather, the Manchester music had more suggestive lyrics, which were capable of provoking insights into the story (‘Love will tear us apart again…’; ‘All who find themselves ridiculous, sit down next to me…’; Jesus and Pilate throwing back and forth ‘Wonderwall’: ‘Just maybe, you’re going to be the one who saves me … I don’t think anybody feels the way I do about you now…’). ‘All you need is love’ and ‘Imagine’ seemed trite, and their sentiments merely adolescent, in comparison. The one moment that caught me was the nativity tableau itself, with the babe laid in a shopping trolley. I’ve preached often enough at Christmas on the ‘gritty reality’ of the stable, but that image still caught me. This is thoughtful and imaginative religious broadcasting, to be welcomed and...
Read MoreEdinburgh at Christmas
Our annual visit to Edinburgh’s winter celebrations today. That most attractive of cities dresses up specially at this time of year, and the result is genuinely magical. We discovered a free children’s area at the west end of Princes St Gardens. A paddock of reindeer, evidently occasionally fed by Santa, caught our eye. Behind it was a large ‘nordic-style’ tent, in which colouring and craft tables were available, and every so often a storyteller performed in a grotto-like setting with a log fire to warm the audience. We sat through a performance: a couple of songs (‘Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer’ and ‘Jingle Bells’), and three or four stories in similar vein. The storyteller, identified only as ‘Fergus’, was talented, and easily held his audience of 50-60 children aged 4-10 for forty minutes or so. Kudos to Edinburgh for putting on the event, free. It made Christmas shopping a pleasure for our girls, and left us with warm memories of the day, despite a fraught trip home because of signal failures on the railway. Later, we passed a church doing street evangelism. Dressed as Santas and clowns, they gave us sweets for the kids and a tract for the adults; as we walked back past them, one clown was, incongruously, preaching, to a rather-too-obvious rent-a-crowd (if four people can be a crowd). Good for them for doing something, of course, but my idle reflections on the crowded train home went back to the storyteller. Could not the churches have done that, just as it was done by Fergus, only with a sensitive and non-threatening telling of the nativity as the last story, and perhaps (but perhaps not) an invitation to find out more about this story at a church near you this Christmas? Good numbers of people, genuinely pleased to be there, leaving feeling positive about the event–not a bad model for evangelism,...
Read MoreEschatology conference
Russ Rook and I have edited a book which in part serves to resource next year’s Spring Harvest event. SH have kindly put on a conference where they will launch it. Book and Conference are both called ‘What are we waiting for?’, and are an attempt to open up some of the riches of recent academic reflection on eschatology for the SH constituency. More details here.
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