Prawn sandwiches and preaching
Roy Keane, one of the greatest footballers (‘soccer players’ if you must) of his generation, current manager of Sunderland, and former captain of Manchester United, may not be everybody’s idea of a model for church members. Foul-mouthed, angry, and sometimes violent, his unquestionable talent and passion was too often eclipsed by all-too-public rants at almost anybody. He belittled his team-mates, the fans, his national team, and most of his managers (although never, at least publicly, Sir Alex Ferguson). But I’ve preached in several dozen churches over the past few years, and not met one that would not benefit immensely from listening to Keane’s views on prawn sandwiches. And I can tell you that, as an Arsenal fan from childhood, it costs me something to say that! It was in 2000. United were playing Dynamo Kiev in a big European game. They were 1-0 up, and the atmosphere in the stadium was dead-not unusually, in Keane’s view. He announced ‘At the end of the day they need to get behind the team. Away from home our fans are fantastic, I’d call them the hardcore fans. But at home they have a few drinks and probably the prawn sandwiches, and they don’t realise what’s going on out on the pitch.’ (quoted from The Guardian, 24/8/06). A week tomorrow, I will preach again in St Salvator’s, the University Chapel here in St Andrews. The pulpit there, removed from the town church, claims to be the one from which John Knox delivered his Reformation sermon; it maintains aspects of the traditional pulpit furniture of Scotland: an hourglass, turned as the preacher began, with the instruction that he should not stop before the sands ran out; and a lock on the outside, so that the congregation may confine the preacher to the pulpit until he has adequately preached the Word. This was a land where people were more eager to hear the Word of God than their ministers were to declare it. No longer, except in odd places (I pay public tribute to the congregation of St Andrews Baptist Church, who do still value the preaching of the Word). My suspicion is that, almost regardless of the gifts or efforts of their ministers, the people heard better preaching as a result. As a preacher, you know when people care about the Word–you can feel it as you stand up to preach. And where the people are excited, eager, expecting to hear from God through the Word, you preach better. And where they have been praying for you through the week, taking their part in the corporate ministry of the Word, there is a chance of a miracle. And where they are more interested in the prawn sandwiches, or the after-church coffee, they will get the preaching they...
Read MoreBodies and the Body
Yesterday we managed to divert both Cyril O’Regan, Huisking Professor of Theology at Notre Dame, and Matthew Levering of Ave Maria University to St Andrews to give us papers. In the morning Prof O’Regan explored von Balthasar’s apocalyptic trinitarianism, which helped me to understand why Halden has thought McCormack’s ideas echo Balthasar. In the afternoon, Dr Levering gave us a paper soon to be published in Pro Ecclesia on the theological interpretation of Scripture, a topic we talk a lot about in St Andrews. Levering explored proposals from O’Collins and from the Princeton Scripture Project before giving us his own account of what theological interpretation ought to look like. It was good stuff. One point got me thinking, however. He suggested that theological interpretation should be ’embodied’, which he glossed by saying that the lives of the Saints (and, perhaps, saints) should be read as privileged interpretations of Scripture. I don’t disagree with the point (I’ve explored something similar in passing in chapter 2 of my Listening to the Past, indeed), but when elevated to the status of a normative principle for hermeneutics, it made me pause. My instinctive, Baptist/Congregationalist, reaction was to resist locating the normative performance of Scripture in individual lives, and instead to locate it in the lives of Christian communities. ‘Is not the visible church of the New Testament with all the ordinances thereof the chief and principal part of the Gospel?’ asked John Smyth as the Baptists began. I actually believe that the answer is...
Read MoreOn Christian ‘belief’
Various folks commented in response to the two posts I managed to put up during Christmas travels, suggesting that a properly Christian account of ‘belief’ implied rather more than I had implied or allowed for. I am aware of this, of course, but probably should have been clearer that I was. The best analysis (as almost always…) comes from the scholastics: ‘belief’ is to be divided into three parts: notitia (‘knowledge’); assensus (‘agreement’); and fiducia (‘commitment’ or ‘trust’). To ‘believe’ in the gospel is, simultaneously, to know the claims of the gospel, to agree that they are true, and to stake one’s life upon them. My problem is that I don’t think that anyone asking the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ in modern Britain has any of that analysis even subconsciously in mind. They are asking for an affirmation or denial of the factual veracity of a hazily-formed and unanalyzed proposition–in scholastic terms, assensus without notitia or fiducia. And I think that, in sheerly missional terms, this is a problem for us. Take a look at this, rather heart-warming, press comment; the writer records an entirely positive (for her…) experience of church-attendance, and even implies a certain wistfulness that she feels excluded from more active and regular involvement in her local Christian community, on the basis that she ‘doesn’t believe in God’. This is not uncommon, in my experience. (I acknowledge that it may be rather peculiarly British, or even English: unlike the French in particular, our atheism was always tinged with regret, as Mathew Arnold discovered looking at Dover Beach.) If we could get away from the ill-formed and unhelpful ‘Do you believe in God?’ question, people like Vikki Woods might be given the chance to discover in Christian community what Christian ‘belief’ really...
Read MoreBruce McCormack’s TFT Lectures (5): Evaluation
How to evaluate McCormack’s novel account of kenosis? I want to make two comments. The first is that I think it is at least potentially defensible when judged according to the canons of classical (Reformed) orthodoxy. I do not think there is any major doctrinal decision that it offends against, although on one point I was left with the feeling that more work was needed to establish the defence. The second comment is that I was not convinced by Bruce’s account of the pressure towards a revision of doctrine in this area. Very simply, I think his account of kenosis can be held, but it need not be: it remains open, in my view, to hold to the classical formulations of Christology without the need to revise them, and, personally, this would be my preferred position. This all needs much elaboration. Let me first address my assertion of the orthodoxy of Bruce’s proposal. It seems to me that the most obvious criticisms, and certainly the ones Bruce indicated had been most prevalent, concern the doctrine of the Trinity. However, it seems to me that with a clear-headed grasp of the contours of Trinitarian dogma we can see how Bruce’s proposals are, not just orthodox within those contours, but significantly more so than many other recent accounts of Trinitarian doctrine. The essential patristic claim about the Trinity is that all properties are held in common, save only the personal properties of begetting, being-begotten, and proceeding. If we read McCormack’s account of kenosis as an account of what it is to be begotten, i.e., as the personal property of the Son, then it meets this canon with ease. Dorner’s great criticism, which destroyed nineteenth-century kenoticism, insisted that either the Son gives up divine properties and so ceases to be divine, or we are forced to confess a kenotic Father alongside a kenotic Son, but if kenosis is a—the—personal property of the Son, then neither claim obtains. Self-emptying is the personal mode of the Son’s divine omnipotence, and so on. There are some details down the road that need dealing with, but it seems to me that the basic position is securely orthodox, certainly much more so than all of the recent theology that, misled by the word ‘Person’, insists on finding three instances of many or most divine properties (will; operation; knowledge; …) within the Godhead. What about the criticism that McCormack makes trinity dependent on election, or somesuch phrase? I confess to finding it a difficult criticism to parse theologically. God’s act is unitary, and identical with His being; if what God is is trinity, and what God does is election, then it is necessary to assert a fairly strict identity between trinity and election. Bruce does this convincingly, as far as I can see. (Personally, I would want to work harder at the ‘what God does is election’ premise—I am more and more convinced that Barth is at least unhelpful on this point, although one of my doctoral students has just convinced me that probably he doesn’t fall into any of the traps he opens up himself.) Only if we assume that God’s act is somehow an accidental accretion to His being can any form of this criticism stand—but that would be to depart completely, albeit fashionably, from the traditional Christian doctrine of God. If there is a criticism which is in danger of sticking, I think it is to do with creation. We often, and misleadingly, tell our undergraduates that the distinction between the begetting of the Son and creatio ex nihilo is that one is a necessary act and the other a free act. If that were at all an adequate account of the situation, then Bruce’s proposal would have serious problems. However, as I pointed out in the previous post, the affirmation that God’s being is His act is basic to all classical theology, and so such shorthand accounts are deeply misleading. Hence we find throughout the tradition attempts to specify in a more sophisticated way the underlying distinction. The most popular form of such attempts in a Reformed tradition is to press at distinctions between different sorts of necessity, as Barth himself does. In conversation with Bruce, I became convinced that he could offer an adequate defence along these lines that was no more problematic than many others; I did not think that defence was yet in place in the lectures as delivered, though. Thus I believe that McCormack’s account of kenosis is, or at least could easily be rendered, orthodox. Is it, however, compelling? Alongside the constructive work in these lectures was a line of critique of classical Christology...
Read MoreBruce McCormack’s TFT Lectures (4)
A note on the nature of these posts: I am not typing up notes of the lectures (I tend to take none, other than a few scribbled phrases intended to aid in the formulation of a question or comment at the end of the presentation). Instead, I am working from my memory of them, and my reflections following them. My intention has not been to give an exhaustive account of the arguments deployed, so much as to make clear what I took to be the main thread of argument running through the presentations, and my evaluation of it. In turning to Bruce’s final lecture, I am going to depart completely from the structure of the lecture as it was given, which was split into three (unequal) sections: reflections on the proper exegesis of Phil. 2:5-11; an outline of the constructive proposal towards which the lecture series had been building; and a series of responses to criticisms that had been made earlier. On reflection, particularly following some helpful comments from George Hunsinger and Paul Molnar, I suspect that I erred in the previous post in moving too rapidly from lecture 3 to lecture 4; that is, in ascribing certain theses to McCormack’s interpretation of Barth rather than to the constructive material, intended as an advance on Barth. In particular, the notion that kenosis (as opposed to obedience, say) is simply what it is to be the second person of the Trinity, is something that I think is Bruce’s own, not something he found in Barth. What, then, is Bruce’s proposal? Let me approach it like this: it is a standard thesis of classical theology that God’s being is His act; further, God’s act is single, and simple. This is, of course, already a problem, at least if one wants to continue to maintain that God’s existence is independent of the created order: St Thomas devotes considerable ingenuity to explaining how God’s act of creation can happen without any change in God (1a q.45 arts 2 &3). When Barth brings the doctrine of election into the doctrine of God (it is treated in the second part-volume of vol. II, not the first of vol. III), and links election closely to incarnation, the problem becomes acute. However, the gains of Barth’s novel doctrine of election are sufficiently obvious that almost every serious (Protestant) theological proposal of the second half of the twentieth century chose to face the problems, rather than lose the gains. In general, and in one way or another, the problems were eliminated in the later twentieth century by the simple expedient of losing the axiom of impassibility, properly understood: if God’s life is allowed to be dependent on creation, there is no problem. The single greatest merit of Bruce’s proposal, it seems to me, is that he is not prepared to play this game. Instead, he develops a novel account of kenosis. Barth learnt from Harrmann that generic metaphysical accounts of deity should not be accepted. This allowed him to conceive of an account of Trinity that reflected the gospel story: a prior and a posterior, a sender and a sent, a commanding and an obedience—and of course a unity of the Spirit holding the two ‘poles’ together. Bruce’s proposal is at heart as simple as a radicalisation of this one point: kenosis, self-surrender, is simply and precisely what it is to be the Son. ‘Kenosis’ here implies incarnation, so incarnation, or a directedness toward incarnation, is precisely what it is to be the Son. God’s life as Father, Son and Spirit is directed towards the gospel history. The Son gives up no part of His deity in obedience, incarnation, kenosis, death, because these things are simply what it is to be the second Person of the Trinity. Further, what it is to be the third Person of the Trinity is to eternally hold together the sending and commanding Father and the sent and obedient Son in the unity of the Godhead. In a paragraph, this is what I take Bruce to be...
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