Scattered Thoughts on Theology and Ministry…
George Marsden delivers the Current Read lecture at Reformed Theological Seminary (Orlando, FL) in November of 2014, based on his book, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (Basic Books, 2014).
(HT: Justin Taylor)
It is fairly common for Americans to believe that the West is the major exporter of new ideas and trends around the world. For instance, Mark Noll believes that “understanding American patterns provides insight for what has been happening elsewhere in the world.”[1] Although he does not believe this is due to direct causation, he does believe it is a correlative effect. However, this way of thinking ignores that what has mostly been a one-way street of ideas, missionaries, and movements coming to Latin America is actually a stream which flows both ways.[2] Because of this we must understand how Latin American emigration is changing the shape of Christianity in the United States.
According to Philip Jenkins “by 2050 Latinos will make up about a quarter of the national population,” with the vast majority of these Latinos coming from a Christian background.[3] Currently in the United States there are 37.5 million Latinos (not including undocumented immigrants and Puerto Ricans).[4] If we begin to study immigration trends we see that immigration to the U.S. has been predominantly Christian[5] with many of these immigrants coming from the “new centers of faith”: Africa and Latin America[6]. These immigrants are impacting how American Christians understand their faith. For instance we might look at the American Catholic Church which is currently importing priests from Latin America and Spain due to shortages in priests.[7] This has led to the Virgin Mary, which was seldom seen in the North American Catholic church up until the 1980’s, to be venerated throughout the United States.[8] If we look at the Protestant church we see the difference Latinos have made as well. In many places throughout the U.S. it was fairly common to see abandoned American churches, however now those churches have been put to use again by Latino Christians who have moved into the area. In addition to this many American churches are seeing church growth due to growth in their Hispanic congregations.[9]
If Christianity from Latin America is becoming influential in the United States we need to understand the major theological themes that the Latin American church is dealing with at home. These two issues are 1-poverty and oppression and 2-charismatic Christianity.
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[1] Mark A. Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009), 189.
[2] Odina E. González and Justo González, Christianity in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 302.
[3] Philip Jenkins, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 284.
[4] González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 304.
[5] Jenkins, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis, 284.
[6] Jehu Hanciles, “God’s Mission through Migration: African Initiatives in Globalizing Mission,” in Evangelical, Ecumenical, and Anabaptist Missiologies in Conversation, ed James Krabill, Walter Sawatsky, and Charles Van Engen (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2006), 59.
[7] González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 305.
[8] González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 304-5.
[9] González and González, Christianity in Latin America, 307.
The issue is of considerable contemporary relevance. A very large number of colleges and universities in the United States were founded by denominations of the Christian church. Some of the most famous — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — retain selected elements of this foundation — an architecturally distinguished college chapel, for instance, or prayers at graduation ceremonies. But to all intents and purposes, these great schools have long since relinquished their Christian connection, and would not want to try to revive it in an academic world that prides itself on its multiculturalism. And the same observation could be made about hundreds more.
At the same time, this separation of church and academy is not universal. There are still a great many colleges that continue to profess their Christian allegiance. There are even new Christian colleges being established. Such institutions, however, whether newly formed or long established, tend to be regarded with suspicion by the secular academy. How can religious affiliation be compatible with academic integrity? Must it not put limits on the intellectual freedom essential to the life of the mind? It is not so very long, some will say, since the Pope suspended professors who taught contrary to the official doctrine of the Catholic church. Is this not inevitable, and no different from a far more famous case when the Inquisition sought to silence Galileo in 1632?
On the other side, of course, avowedly Christian colleges see a need to combat the corrosive effects of the secular academy, which is marked by a failure to engage in debate and discussion about some of the most fundamental human choices. Under the protestation of “neutrality,” such choices are declared to be a matter of personal “values” rather than the objectively ascertainable facts with which academic inquiry is concerned.
-Gordon Graham (HT: EerdWord)
Just a few weeks ago, the third volume of the Journal of Analytic Theology was released…
We are very pleased to bring you the third volume of the Journal of Analytic Theology. As with the previous issues, this volume continues to engage in three tasks core to the development of analytic theology (not in any particular order). First, there is the task of bringing analytic thinking—clarity of definition and argumentative rigor as much as the subject matter allows—to matters of theology with ever more “thick” content and historical interaction, yet with an eye to the ever-expanding circle of theological understanding. This issue does this well in a number of contributions. Senior editor Oliver Crisp’s annual Analytic Theology Lecture “Is Ransom Enough” and Josh Thurow’s “Communal Substitutionary Atonement” (which originated as a Logos conference presentation at Notre Dame) do this excellently with respect the doctrine of the atonement. This objective is also met in a set of three essays on free will by Kittle, Mullins, and Byerly. These three essays are exercises in holding philosophical reflection on Scripture accountable to Tradition (Kittle and Mullins) and to not giving it a pass on the hard issues (Byerly). A third set of essays achieve this objective with respect to epistemology. Brandon Dahm’s “The Certainty of Faith: A Problem for Christian Fallibilisits” investigates the traditional notion of religious certitude, especially to be found in Newman, and more modern fallibilisms. Finally, few issues in epistemology have proved more intractable than the Gettier Problem, yet Ian Church urges us to see in it some possible lessons and new directions for religious epistemology. – Trent Dougherty and Kevin Diller
Here are a few articles that caught my eye:
So go ahead take a look at the journal and feel free to download your favorite articles – they are all free!
Trevin Wax on Preaching to Non-Believers….
There is one thing Stanley and Keller agree on: preachers ought to be mindful of the unbelievers in their congregation.
Different Reasons for the Same Practice
Stanley and Keller may be worlds apart in terms of their theological vision for ministry, but they both maintain that a preacher should consider the unsaved, unchurched people in attendance.
This doesn’t mean we can’t find differences even in this area. For example, Stanley uses the terminology of “churched” and “unchurched” (which makes sense in the South), whereas Keller’s context leads him to terms like “believers” and “non-believers.”
Likewise, Stanley and Keller engage in similar practices from different vantage points. Stanley’s purpose for the weekend service is to create an atmosphere unchurched people love to attend. Keller believes evangelism and edification go together because believers and unbelievers alike need the gospel. He writes:
“Don’t just preach to your congregation for spiritual growth, assuming that everyone in attendance is a Christian; and don’t just preach the gospel evangelistically, thinking that Christians cannot grow from it. Evangelize as you edify, and edify as you evangelize.”
Whether you are closer to Stanley’s paradigm for ministry or Keller’s, you can benefit from a few suggestions for how to engage the lost people listening to you preach.
You can read the rest of the blog here.
However, if you don’t like links – here are the main points:
1. Acknowledge and welcome the non-believers in attendance.
2. Assume the non-believers in attendance need help in approaching the Bible.
3. Challenge non-believers to engage the Bible by acknowledging the oddity of Christian belief and practice.
4. Use cultural commonalities to point out worldview inconsistencies.
Today, theology finds itself facing an identify crisis. Who are theologians, and what are they doing? Are they historians with a special focus on Christian Church history? Are they analytical philosophers of religion? Or are they simply linguists with a special focus on Greek and Hebrew languages? Theology is in an identity crisis and common sense tells us that having a crisis makes one vulnerable. In the academy, theology is thus increasingly sidelined and marginalized. This is reflected by the global phenomenon where the theological faculty is simply swallowed by the – perhaps more pluralist – religious studies department… (Michael Brauitgam)
In your opinion, what is a theologian? And where does theology fit in to the academy? Does it? Should it?
The earliest discovered Star Wars Manuscript…
#MayThe4thBeWithYou
(HT: @Evandeneykel)
In 2012 a group of scholars gathered at Princeton Theological Seminary for a conference titled, “Calvinism and Democracy.” The purpose of this conference was to reflect upon the neo-Calvinist legacy, to explore its theological roots, and to assess in what ways this tradition might provide resources for democratic criticism and renewal. The Kuyper Center Review (Volume Four): Calvinism and Democracy represents the published proceedings of this conference.
Although this collection covers a wide range of topics, there are two themes that tie all eleven essays together: (1) the notion that democracy today is facing a crisis. and (2) the fact that neo-Calvinism has always had a complicated relationship with democracy. Despite these unifying themes this variegated compilation of essays lacks coherence. Since there does not seem to be a strong organizing principle behind their arrangement, for the sake of the review I will divide them into three categories: historical essays on Abraham Kuyper, prescriptive essays based upon Kuyper’s theology, and essays examining other theologians.
You can read the rest of my review of The Kuyper Center Review (Volume 4): Calvinism and Democracy in the Journal Themelios.
A few days ago I got word that a paper I wrote on Jonathan Edwards, the Trinity, and violence is going to be published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological society. Honestly I was quite surprised, I thought the paper was a longshot, but I figured that I might as well turn it in and see what happens – expecting a rejection letter in the mail. I sort of have the tendency to think that everything I write is crap. I guess not though.
Anyway in this paper I talk a bit about how due to his hellfire and brimstone sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Jonathan Edwards has gained a reputation for portraying God as angry and violent. In recent literature there has been a flury of accusations against evangelicals as portraying God as a violent God. Most accusations of these accusations about divine violence have been leveled against penal substitution, these accusations could also be made against what Edwards calls “The Covenant of Redemption.”
In this paper examine these accusations and answer the question: “Is the Covenant of Redemption in Jonathan Edwards’s Trinitarian theology a form of violence by the Father against the Son?” I argue that the Covenant of Redemption does not meet the necessary and sufficient conditions for a violent act (I take a look at definitions of violence in the work of several theologians and philosophers), thus accusations of divine violence cannot be leveled against Edwards’ conception of the Covenant of Redemption.
I set out the necessary and sufficient conditions for a violent act, namely coercion and harm, and put these into conversation with feminist theology which has been one of the most outspoken opponents about violence in Christian theology. Then I turn to Edwards’s primary treatise on the Trinity and the Covenant of Redemption: “Observations Concerning the Scripture Economy of the Trinity and the Covenant of Redemption.” By examining Edwards’s understanding of 1) the ontological relations between the persons of the Trinity, 2) the economy of the immanent Trinity, and 3) the economy of the Trinity in the Covenant of Redemption it becomes clear that this covenant does not meet the necessary and sufficient conditions for violence. Thus I prove that Edwards is not guilty of placing the son in the hands of a violent God.
In his new book Reading Barth With Charity, George Hunsinger gives us a rather succinct summary of the Trinity-Election debate within Barth scholarship. I appreciate how (in the particular paragraph in mind) he frames the debate within two doctrines: the doctrine of antecedence & the doctrine of subsequence.
In short, whereas the traditionalists uphold Barth’s doctrine of antecedence, the revisionists want to flip it over into a doctrine of subsequence. For the revisionists, God’s trinitarian being is subsequent to God’s relationship to the world. Election has the logical and ontological priority, apart from which the Trinity is merely potential or at least indeterminate. For the traditionalists, on the other hand, God’s being in relation to the world is grounded in God’s being and for himself. The Trinity is always logically and ontologically antecedent. This, then is the disputed question: Is God’s eternal trinitarian being – for the later Barth – subsequent or antecedent to election? (10)
CWoznicki Think Out Loud 