British and European theological bloggers

A while back I announced a desire to keep a list of British and European theological blogs; several people made helpful suggestions, and I’ve been meaning to construct the list, but, well, life… I have now put all the suggestions I had or received in the blogroll on the right; if you hover a mouse over them, you should get a bit of description. I’ll get it all up on a page soon. Further suggestions very welcome – there must be more theological blogging than this?

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Theology and Exegesis: an example

To pick up on the theme of my earlier post on the place of theology in exegesis, Justin Taylor has a blog post up today on the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, which serves as an ideal example of what I was talking about. Justin frames the question by asking ‘is [eternal generation] really a Biblical idea?’ He notes that the idea has been seriously challenged in contemporary theology, but suggests that, although he lacks space in the post, a ‘full exegetical defense’ could indeed be offered. (‘Eternal generation’ is the doctrine that the Father’s begetting of the Son is an eternal act; it is a necessary doctrine in classical Trinitarianism.) If ‘biblical idea’ means ‘a doctrine that could be derived by exegesis,’ then I don’t think eternal generation is a Biblical idea – although I have nothing invested in this opinion, and would be happy to be proven wrong. I am fairly sure that no-one in the fourth century thought they could read eternal generation off the pages of Scripture – indeed, it was more often an idea defended in the face of apparently-clear exegesis: Prov. 8:22, a central text in the debates, seemingly teaches a creation in time of Wisdom/the Son (pretty much everyone agreed that Wisdom here is to be understood as the Son – they were apparently less worried about the Bible using feminine pronouns for persons of the godhead than we are). I do, however, think eternal generation is (very close to) a necessary idea, in that we need to believe it (or something extraordinarily similar to it) to have any chance of understanding the Bible. It is one of those ideas that I described in the previous post as ‘imagining what must be the case for everything in the Bible to be true’. (Why the parenthetical hesitations? On the one hand, I feel compelled to assume – for theological reasons; see my Listening to the Past – that the Trinitarian settlement reached at Constantinople was a wholly successful doctrinal development; on the other, as an evangelical, I have to accept the possibility, at least, of a different conceptual development that was similarly adequate to naming the God we meet in Scripture – one based, perhaps, on Chinese or African philosophy rather than Greek. Such a development, though, would have to affirm that the Father-Son relation always is, and that it is a relation of origin, so would have some doctrine very like eternal...

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Further musings on ministerial formation

My previous post attracted a number of comments about the importance of the college community in ministerial formation. My first quick reply, that community formation might happen in an intentional dispersed community, and perhaps should be happening in the local church, seemed not to satisfy anyone. Musing on this on a train, a further thought occurred to me. No-one seems to doubt – certainly not me – that there are important processes of formation that can only happen in an intentional community living closely together. This indeed is central to a Baptist vision of being the church: we watch over each other and walk together, growing into holiness and maturity as a community. (I argue in my Baptist Theology at one point that an authentically Baptist vision of Christian holiness is irreducibly communal: we become saints together or not at all.) In an older Baptist, and broader nonconformist, tradition, most ministerial formation happened similarly within the local church: someone with gifts and a vocation was identified, and then apprenticed (loosely speaking) to an experienced minister, to be a part of his church community and to be formed into a minister there. There was an intentionality about shaping the life of an apprentice pastor, perhaps particularly on the part of the senior minister, but it happened within the local congregation. For reasons that became unavoidable about 1850, but (I argue) are now passing, we moved the community of formation to a college, a community formed of experienced ministers and scholars, together with a shifting and transient body of trainee ministers. Ministers (and ministers-to-be) would form other ministers, rather than that formation happening in the local church. This was my experience of formation, and the experience of most of those who commented on my previous post; I did not say there that it was wrong, but I did suggest that there were convincing reasons why it might be becoming unnecessary, and less workable than it once was. Now, I admit happily that in my own life the process worked, and worked well; I question, however, whether it is a necessary process. If it is, where might that necessity lie? The only conceivable answer, it seems to me – if my imagination has failed me, please suggest others – the only conceivable answer is in some account of ministry as a specialist guild or profession: only those of us called to and gifted for this task have the requisite understanding or insight to help another similarly called and gifted to grow into her calling. The Roman Catholic religious orders, particularly the preaching and missionary orders, perhaps have something of this understanding: their members are people set apart to a particular task, and find their support and accountability in an intentional community of others who all know the particular needs and temptations of that task, because they are all similarly set apart to it. I have to say that I do not find this a convincing argument within Baptist ecclesiology. The local church is, or should be, the place where every ministry – not excluding the ministry of Word and sacrament – is recognised, authorised, supported, and held accountable. If there are things we can only talk about with a fellow minister – and I know that often there are – then that is adequate evidence that the local church is failing to be the community God intends it to be. Our congregations should be adequate to the formation of their ministers – and of their deacons, children’s workers, evangelists, &c.; if they are not, something has gone...

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Translocal ecclesial identities

The theme of the recent – and excellent – Evangelical Alliance Council meeting was ‘It takes a whole church to raise a child’. Amongst the points made, two seem to me to connect interestingly. First, there was emphasis on the increasingly post-Christian, and so alien, nature of our society, which means that churches must become counter-cultural communities successfully modelling different values to the cultures around. Second, further reflection on the fact that young people tend to drop out of church when they move location – and the assumed mobility of many parts of our culture. We listened to testimony from Jesus House, and lots of helpful guidance as to what had worked for them. It struck me, however, that they seemed to be able to assume a fairly continuous process of catechesis and discipleship that began when a child entered the church and continued until she was into her twenties. My own cultural expectations are that it is unusual for a professional white British family not to relocate once or more often during a child’s schooling, and that on completing her schooling, she will attend a university some distance from home, and then relocate again away from both her university and the family home on graduating. The continuous discipleship practiced by Jesus House becomes an seemingly-impossible ideal in that context. Perhaps in a counter-cultural church geographical stability should be taught and modelled to and for families, but at present it isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, and there are obvious issues in thinking that way: most British Baptists seem to expect pastors to move on every seven to twelve years, taking their families with them, for example, and we seem to assume that this is both a right discerning of God’s call, and good for the development of both pastor and congregation. More promising might be a much more denominational outlook(!) The Free Church of Scotland recently agreed to allow the use of hymnody, and not just metrical psalms, in worship; one of the arguments against, as the debate was explained to me, was a serious concern for uniformity: a Free Church member coming from Lerwick to Glasgow should feel ‘at home’ in the service he experienced there, should recognise it as part of the same community; psalmody facilitated that. I think it was right that this argument was rejected, but that nonetheless there is something we can learn from it. Uniformity in style of music in worship is trite and almost irrelevant (at best it might be a part of a symbolic construction that points to what is truly important); what if we succeeded in creating a denominational, or quasi-denominational, network of Christian communities that were united by a deep commitment to owning and exploring the same set of counter-cultural values? Imagine if a teenager, moved by her parents from Stirling to Bournemouth, knew that if a community in the new town branded itself as ‘Baptist’ (or whatever), it would understand and encourage the life of discipleship she had been trying to construct, would support her in ways that she had been supported before, would be an experience of continuing the same journey, albeit in a different place and with different people. Now, as I hinted above, trappings like music or dress styles, shared lectionaries or shared liturgies, or owned symbols, could all contribute helpfully to creating a shared symbolic structure that gestured to the shared ideology that was driving this. And for those who were in the process of relocation – and experiencing dislocation, as inevitably people do – such obviously-familiar symbols might be very important as a reassurance. What matters, though, is a continuation in a process of cultural formation, a coherent set of narratives and values that successfully shape someone into that oddest of things, a ‘Christian’. Networks like this might succeed as Jesus House has succeeded, in growing people up into maturity in Christ. The EA couldn’t of course, but maybe in a mobile society like contemporary Britain we should have met under the slogan, ‘it takes a whole denomination to raise a...

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Baptist Theology

My book on Baptist Theology is now out, or at least I have been sent the preview copies. If you are interested, you can read the first few pages here. Amazon have it available for pre-order. In the introduction I describe the thesis of the book thus: …I begin by suggesting that there are two foci around which Baptist life is lived: the individual believer and the local church. On the one hand, the practice of believers’ baptism demonstrates an intense individualism, a focus on the belief that God deals directly with each particular human person;on the other hand, the Baptist stress on the significance of the local congregation provides a focus on that community as the context in which God has promised to be active.Theologically, God’s work in each of these poles needs to be described Christologically and pneumatologically. Christ alone has the right to command the individual conscience, which means both that every particular person is responsible for their own religious decisions and practices, and that state interference in, or legislation for, religious belief and/ or practice should never be permitted. Faith and regeneration are always a miracle of grace, dependent on the atoning sacrifice of Christ and made actual in each individual life through the present work of the Holy Spirit; believers’ baptism is (at least) a powerful witness to this pneumatological regeneration. Turning to the second pole, the local church, I wish to argue that the particular Baptist vision of the local church depends, theologically, on the belief that Christ’s rule over the church is experienced directly by each local congregation,and not mediated through a translocal hierarchy. Christ is directly present wherever his people are gathered – congregated – in his name, and Christ’s presence guarantees the reality and adequacy of the church. In seeking to know and discover the call of Christ on its life,however, each local church is dependent on the Spirit’s aid and guidance, which is ordinarily experienced in gathered community.This is the church meeting, and the reason for the primacy of the church meeting in Baptist decision-making is that this is the place where the church can expect the Spirit to reveal the mind of Christ. These two poles are not in tension in Baptist theology – or, rather, they can be in particular contexts and instances, but there is no necessary tension – but neither may be lost without losing the heart of the vision. God, through the Son and the Spirit, calls indi- vidual believers into covenanted relationship in the local church, and equips them to build up one another within the local church, and to hear and obey the ongoing missional call to make every other human person a believer.This is Baptist...

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