John Webster appointed to chair in St Andrews
The School of Divinity in St Andrews has just announced that John Webster, presently Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Aberdeen, will be joining our faculty this summer. In my estimation, John is one of the most able and interesting theologians working in the world today; he has also been a good friend and mentor to me down the years. I am utterly delighted that he is joining us. The full press release is here
Read MoreMore on God as Father: thinking about adoption
I’ve been mulling over a question Krish Kandiah asked me in relation to the excellent Home for Good project: why do we make so little theologically of our adoption as children of God? Krish pointed out the lack in worship songs, originally, but it strikes me that it is just not a big theme in any recent discussion of soteriology I know, and that this seems odd given its Biblical roots and the fact that it is just wonderful good news. Yesterday, driving between snowy mountains on my way to a ministers’ conference, I suddenly realised I had a plausible answer. There is a significant debate, or perhaps better a linked series of debates, over what it means to name God ‘Father’ in English-speaking Protestantism in the second half of the nineteenth century. My best guess as to why the issue came to prominence then is that the influence of the missionary movement brought the fact that not all, or even most, people where (even nominally) Christian to acute consciousness, and so a theological distinction that had been latent became live again. The debates circled around the question, is God properly named the Father of all human beings – as various scriptures, perhaps most clearly Acts 17:28-9, seem to teach – or is God only Father to believers, those adopted by the Father because incorporated into Christ by the Holy Spirit? We might, with conscious dependence, call these different positions ‘general paternity’ and ‘particular paternity’. (Obviously, in the context of an unreflective Christendom assumption that most people are believers, even if not always very good ones, this question is of academic interest only. For the mission-minded theologian, however, it is absolutely live. As I say, I suspect that this is why it suddenly flared up in a series of debates in the nineteenth century.) Nineteenth-century universalists (or near-universalists) generally made much of general paternity, the universal Fatherhood of God, for obvious reasons; often their Calvinistic opponents denied general paternity and insisted on particular paternity only (so, e.g., George Gilfillan’s Grand Discovery (1854)); a generation later, broad church writers were interested in general paternity (e.g., Bishop Wescott’s Victory of the Cross (1888)), with similar responses. The debate died down in the early years of the twentieth century; I can see two plausible reasons for this. First, there was actually a good, convincing answer on the table, offered by James Orr – more on this in a moment – second, the theological mood seemed to have moved to a place where doubting what I have called general paternity was unacceptable, at least outside of the sort of very narrow Calvinistic enclaves that I tend to be embarrassed about liking… Of course, if one believes in general paternity, and has no account of particular paternity, the doctrine of adoption can only be meaningless. God, who is antecedently the father of all human beings, adopts believers to be children? What can that mean? I suppose most of our loss of interest in the doctrine of adoption came from this sort of assumption, although of course it would never be articulated as such. (This is supposition; an examination of commentaries and sermons on the classic NT passages on adoption would be the place to go for evidence.) Can we do better? Yes, but not by denying general paternity: there is Biblical basis for that doctrine, and giving it up invites us into the worst excesses of hyper-calvinism – a ‘god’ who loves only the elect, and so on. James Orr distinguished carefully between God’s ‘fatherhood’ of all human beings, resulting from his creating them, and God’s particular ‘fatherhood’ of believers, who are adopted as children through incorporation into Christ by the Holy Spirit. This seems to me just right, and to be a derivation of some of the theology of the divine names and the Trinity I’ve been outlining in the previous few posts here. I work it out as follows (this is me, not Orr, and this gets specific and speculative …): 1. God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creates, loves, and cares for all human beings, regardless of their moral failure. Because of this, and because of Biblical texts, it is appropriate to speak of God as the ‘father’ (or indeed ‘mother’, but the Biblical data there is slightly sparser) of all human people without exception. 2. God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, calls Abraham and Sarah, and from their descendants elects the Israel to be the Holy Nation, God’s own people. God shows particular care for Israel, which is expressed both in particular blessing and in particular correction; in Scripture (e.g., Hos. 11) God narrates this in...
Read MoreOnline objects of spiritual significance
Tomorrow I am heading down to London to take part in the (so far excellent – tomorrow might pull the average down) Westminster Faith Debates series. One of the organisers contacted me and the other speakers to introduce us to an artist, a photographer, who is working on a series of portraits of people holding an object that is of spiritual significance to them. Would we like to take part? Yes, I said, and then today thought about what to take… What objects matter to me, spiritually? My initial thoughts could not get very far beyond a Bible. This seemed rather cliched, and I wondered whether just to pull out. I did what every good digital native would do, and crowd-sourced the question on Twitter. A rapid and fascinating exchange ensued with – as is common in at least that corner of Twitter I inhabit – much humour (WWJD bracelet; plain chocolate digestives); much wisdom (‘take one of your daughters’ – YES! but impractical…; ‘the Bible doesn’t matter as an object, it is the teaching it transmits’…); and some surprising realisations (‘take a cross’ // ‘you know what – I don’t actually own a cross, and I’d never consciously noticed that before …’) Helped by friends, I began to think more deeply. A book that has influenced me? Yes – but my good copies of Brother Lawrence and Mother Julian are in the wrong office for me to take either tomorrow now, and actually today I’d pick Phoebe Palmer’s Promise of the Father over either, which I’ve only ever read online – I have no physical copy to take. There is music – Matt Redman’s You Never Let Go was the track Heather and I both had on repeat the weekend she was hospitalised by blood loss following the birth of our third daughter, and I was hearing of the death of my father. But I don’t think I own the CD – I listen to it on iPlayer. Alongside that there are places – I think of several, but one in particular, a place where I have only ever prayed with deep seriousness, on the seashore, always at dawn or dusk. There, echoing Jacob’s own liminal encounter, I have from time to time wrestled with God – and never yet found my prayers unanswered. But I cannot take chunks of Fife coastline with me to a photoshoot in London! I reflected. I threw an idea out, with an explicit hesitation: what about my iPhone? On that screen I read Scripture, more often than not; follow the daily office that structures my prayers; listen to the music that means most to me; and connect to the very friends who were encouraging, entertaining, and challenging me right then. But the phone itself is not a spiritual object for me – it is, in my eyes, beautifully designed, but to lose it would be a financial issue, but not a spiritual one. And so I realised, with the help of friends: the things I value most spiritually are actually virtual objects. They are texts, or even meanings of texts, regardless of the format they come in – I have a beautiful leather-bound Bible, delightful to stroke, but the words are not more – or less – powerful there than read off a screen. They are recorded tunes, but the physical medium of the recording means nothing to me – I can play You Never Let Go from a dozen different devices, or hear/sing it ‘live’ in a congregation, and the personal impact does not change. And they are relationships: does the screen I skype my family on when away from home matter? No – it is replaceable; but the fact of being able to skype my family matters enormously. I value the Bible, not any particular Bible. And ‘the Bible’ is a virtual object: it is a set of data and meta-data, that can be expressed in various physical forms. My smartphone is profoundly important to me spiritually, because by carrying that one object I have access to the virtual objects necessary or helpful for my own practices of devotion; I have contact with friends who I can pray for, or who will pray for me; and I have access to a wealth of resources, audio, video, text, many of which are profoundly meaningful for stages in my journey so far. I am not sure I can explain all that in a one-line caption, and so I am not sure whether a smart phone is the right object. The Bible still says something clearly and powerfully, something that does matter to me profoundly. I will probably take several things with me...
Read MoreJob vacancies at St Andrews
St Mary’s College, the School of Divinity of the University of St Andrews (where I work…) has this week advertised two permanent mid-range positions: a Senior Lecturer/Reader in Systematic and Historical Theology and a Senior Lecturer/Reader in New Testament Studies. (SL/Reader is about equivalent ot ‘Associate Lecturer’ in the US.) These are both new posts, made possible largely (I assume; I was not in the negotiations…) by the recent expansion of our postgraduate programmes. Details are here (click on ‘external candidate’ and scroll around until you see them). This is, genuinely, a great place to work, with colleagues who are both world-class scholars and very collegial friends. NE Fife is also a great place to live and bring up a family. Although I am not involved in the appointment process, it would be great to see some really good applicants. Please spread the news...
Read MoreOnce more: congregationalism, authority, and gender
As a very young scholar, I was involved in organising a conference in honour of Colin Gunton’s sixtieth birthday. I commented to Colin over a meal in his favourite Italian restaurant after that conference that we worked in an odd field, where we assumed that the way to honour a colleague was to gather all his closest friends to tell him where he was wrong in public… I sort-of-knew then, of course, and know much better now, that there is no higher honour anyone can give to our writing than to take it seriously, and critical engagement is the way we take each other most seriously. I have had cause this week to be grateful for a couple of deeply serious interactions with my work: Fred Sanders and Matt Jenson have begun a blog conversation about my Trinity book which is extremely generous in its appreciation (thus far…) and careful and serious in its engagement; I look forward to learning much from their readings and reflections. Fred and I also both feature in the latest edition of Credo Magazine, which is on the doctrine of the Trinity, and which also includes a lengthy article review of my Baptist Theology book by Bobby Jamieson of Nine Marks Ministries – an engagement for which I am equally grateful. Jamieson is extremely kind in his appreciation of the book, and offers some helpful challenges (He cites statistics on open membership positions amongst SBC churches which are news to me, and which I must follow up; on the other hand, I’m sure I’m right about Spurgeon, but the point does need further defence; …). About a half of his review, however, is taken up with an extensive engagement of my suggestion in the book that Baptists – or other congregationalists – cannot, logically, accept the currently-popular version of ‘gender complementarianism’, because it relies on an account of the location of authority which congregationalism necessarily denies. I am enormously grateful for the engagement, and find his development of a version of congregationalism which is not susceptible to the charge I make fascinating and very helpful; my instinctive suspicion is that it is something of a departure from Baptist traditions, but we would need to have that argument with recourse to many specific texts, taking each of the manifold varieties of Baptists one by one – I am certainly open to the claim that congregationalism developed differently in North America and Europe, and that I have missed that, for instance. This is real, substantive, critical work, which helps me to see the limitations of my knowledge and imagination and to have a larger view of what is possible in our shared tradition at the end. I am, genuinely, very grateful. That said, the discussion of gender and ministry in my book ran to less than three pages – of 160pp in the book – and Jamieson is far from the first to highlight it. I will not pretend that it is not a subject I am passionate about – readers of this blog may have noticed – but the point borders on the incidental in this particular text. I knew when I wrote those few paragraphs that they would attract attention out of proportion to their length, of course; I left them there because the point is the best illustration I know of a broader theme of the book. As Jamieson notices, I try to sketch a ‘middle way’ between maximalist and minimalist accounts of Baptist distinctiveness. The core of that ‘middle way’ is to insist that Baptists are distinctive only in our ecclesiology, but then to suggest that our ecclesiology is sufficiently different that it echoes around the whole of theology, imposing itself in surprising ways in a whole host of places. I suggested that one of those places was the currently popular defence of ‘gender complementarianism,’ which turns extensively on notions of authority. Baptists have different ideas about where authority is found, and how it operates, in the church, I suggested, and so many of these recent arguments, which work perfectly well in presbyterian and episcopal polities, cannot work for congregationalists like Baptists. In this I assumed a piece of work I have begun to do, but not yet published, concerning shifting evangelical justifications for ‘complementarian’ positions. the ‘headship-authority’ defence is, I think, actually very new – a couple of decades or so old. There were several identifiable waves of previous defences, which all worked much better within a Baptist ecclesiology. So my point, and I hope I made it clear, was never that Baptists could not be ‘complementarians’ – I think we should not, but that is a different argument...
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