Happy birthday, Edward Schillebeeckx

A reader informed me that today is the 95th birthday of the great Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx. So in his honour, I'm re-posting a short piece from a couple of years ago:

Among modern Catholic theologians, there’s no one I like better than Edward Schillebeeckx. I pay visits to Rahner and Balthasar and Ratzinger, but I come home to Schillebeeckx.

Why do I love Schillebeeckx? There are many reasons. His whole theology is worked out amidst a momentous wrestling with the biblical texts. He has an extraordinary way of perceiving exactly what Christian faith and practice really mean, what they really demand. In contrast both to unthinking conservatisms and sentimental progressivisms, he forged a profound and unflinching christological revision, issuing in a rigorous and tough-minded theology of liberation.

Besides that, he also has the most delightfully cumbersome name in the whole history of theology – his full name is Edward Cornelis Florentius Alfonsus Schillebeeckx (and, as a novice of the Dominican Order, he added Henricus as an additional name). No one with fewer names could have written so many – or such gigantic – books.

I leave you with this quote from the Birthday Boy himself:

“The crucified but risen Jesus appears in the believing, assembled community of the church. That this sense of the risen, living Jesus has faded in many [churches] can be basically blamed on the fact that our churches are insufficiently ‘communities’ of God…. Where the church of Jesus Christ lives, and lives a liberating life in the footsteps of Jesus, the resurrection faith undergoes no crisis. On the other hand, it is better not to believe in God than to believe in a God who minimizes human beings, holds them under and oppresses them, with a view to a better world to come.”

—Edward Schillebeeckx, The Church with a Human Face: A New and Expanded Theology of Ministry, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1985), p. 34.

Mirabile dictu! (Latin for "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!")

Here's a little song about Martin Luther, from the lectionary blog Rumors. Sung to the tune of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious":

Mirabile dictu!

When I was just ein junger Mann I studied canon law;
While Erfurt was a challenge, it was just to please my Pa.
Then came the storm, the lightning struck, I called upon Saint Anne,
I shaved my head, I took my vows, an Augustinian! Oh...

Chorus:
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation
Speak your mind against them and face excommunication!
Nail your theses to the door, let's start a Reformation!
Papal bulls, indulgences, and transubstantiation!

When Tetzel came near Wittenberg, St Peter's profits soared,
I wrote a little notice for the All Saints' Bull'tin board:
"You cannot purchase merits, for we're justified by grace!
Here's 95 more reasons, Brother Tetzel, in your face!" Oh...

Chorus

They loved my tracts, adored my wit, all were exempleror;
The Pope, however, hauled me up before the Emperor.
"Are these your books? Do you recant?" King Charles did demand,
"I will not change my Diet, Sir, God help me here I stand!" Oh...

Chorus

Duke Frederick took the Wise approach, responding to my words,
By knighting "George" as hostage in the Kingdom of the Birds.
Use Brother Martin's model if the languages you seek,
Stay locked inside a castle with your Hebrew and your Greek! Oh...

Chorus

Let's raise our steins and Concord Books while gathered in this place,
And spread the word that 'catholic' is spelled with lower case;
The Word remains unfettered when the Spirit gets his chance,
So come on, Katy, drop your lute, and join us in our dance! Oh...

Ask Hauerwas a question

Our friend Dan Morehead will soon be interviewing Stanley Hauerwas for a feature in Wunderkammer Magazine. So Dan has invited us to have some input into the interview. What question would you ask Hauerwas? What would you like him to discuss in the interview?

I think my wife's a Calvinist

Today I bring you three fantastic theologico-musical videos:

I Think My Wife's a Calvinist


Calvin Girl


"It's All About Me" – new worship album

Once more with J. Louis Martyn: divine action and the church

OK, since the last post generated so much enthusiasm about Bultmann and my beige jacket, I thought I'd give you another excerpt from my AAR paper, which is now titled "Apocalyptic Gospel: J. Louis Martyn’s Galatians Commentary as a Challenge to Contemporary Theology". (Seriously though, I appreciated the comments on Bultmann, and I revised that section accordingly. But I'm keeping the jacket.) This excerpt is from the paper's conclusion:

Where so much contemporary theology seems hesitant to invoke the category of divine action – or to replace divine action with the church’s own drama of virtue and moral agency – Martyn’s work remains unfashionably committed to the absolute distinction between God’s act in Christ and all other forms of religious or irreligious agency. Here, the fundamental antinomy is not between religion and lack of religion, or between church and world, or even between human works and a human exercise of faith. Instead, it is ‘the cosmic antinomy between religion and apocalypse’. Thus in his essay on Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, Martyn underscores O’Connor’s ‘vision of [the] burning away of virtues and thus a vision of tax collectors and prostitutes preceding you into the Kingdom of the God who rectifies the ungodly’. It is precisely the dissolution of virtue – the dissolution of religion – that the gospel announces, since even virtue itself stands on the wrong side of the apocalyptic antinomy between the way of God and all human ways.

If we take this seriously, the result ought to be a rather humbler, more circumscribed ecclesiology. The church cannot become a new polis, as Nate Kerr has also argued. It cannot become a secure alternative order over against the world. It cannot, Martyn says, ‘stand aloof as a new “us”.’ God’s apocalypse in Christ has already dissolved every distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. God’s power is manifest not in the virtue or cohesiveness of the church, but ‘in the foolishness of a Christ-centred gospel that brings its proclaimers into solidarity with those who are weak and stumbling’.

Apocalyptic gospel: J. Louis Martyn on Galatians

Here's a short excerpt from my aforementioned AAR paper, entitled "Apocalyptic Gospel: J. Louis Martyn's Galatians Commentary as a Critique of Contemporary Theology". The paper focuses on Martyn's commentary on Galatians, and it has three sections: I. The Gospel against Religion; II. Gospel as God's Apocalypse; III. The Truth of the Gospel. This excerpt comes from section II:

Martyn’s Galatians commentary is thus best understood as a sort of speech-act reading of Paul: he emphasises not so much the content of the letter as the performative action of Paul’s address. Paul is doing something to the Galatians; he is proclaiming the gospel, and thus directly situating his Galatian hearers in the unsettling, liberating presence of God. In Paul’s announcement, ‘God himself steps on the scene, addressing the hearers directly’. Paul’s gospel ‘is the active power of God, because in it God himself comes on the scene, speaking his own word-event’. For this reason, Paul underscores the fact that his gospel did not come through any line of tradition; it came to him directly from God, as God’s own self-utterance, ‘the good event that God is causing to happen now’. In the same vein, Martyn suggests that Paul’s use of the word ‘amen!’ – both in the opening and close of the letter – is an attempt ‘to rob the Galatians of the lethal luxury of considering themselves observers.’ They stand before God, and are confronted not merely by Paul’s word, but by the very speech of God.

Martyn’s indebtedness to the Bultmannian tradition is often overlooked. But in this connection the deep Bultmannian undercurrent of his thought becomes evident. For Bultmann, as also for Käsemann (to whom the Galatians commentary is dedicated), Christ is risen into the proclaimed gospel; the risen life of Christ confronts the community only in the word-event. ‘The exalted Christ is present only in Christian proclamation’, as Käsemann says. Here, the content of the proclamation (the ‘what’) is less important than its sheer eventfulness (the ‘that’). The gospel is God’s own liberating act; it is not a subsequent report about the saving event, but it is part of the very fabric of that event. The gospel, we might say, belongs to the divine economy. The proclamation of Christ is part of Christ’s own identity. To put it in Barthian terms, the risen Christ is not only Lord, he is also the living contemporaneous witness to his own lordship.

All this has profound implications for the way Martyn understands the relation between present proclamation and God's apocalypse in Christ. Just as Bultmann refuses any disjunction between Christ’s past historicity (Historie) and present eventfulness (Geschichte), so Martyn insists that Paul has no interest in an ‘objective’ report about a Christ-event of the past. Nor does Paul try to bring out the present ‘relevance’ or ‘significance’ of that past event. The gospel is betrayed if one speaks about it ‘solely in terms of the once-upon-a-time’. Instead, Paul’s theme is ‘the activity of God then and now’; his one question is: ‘What was God doing in Jerusalem that is revealing as to what God is doing now in Galatia?’ Again, the contemporaneity of God’s action is not a mere application of an event that belongs essentially to the past. God is unceasingly active through the apocalypse of the gospel announcement: ‘for Paul, the history of the gospel is what it is because the God who acted in it is the God who is now acting in it’. The saving event happens in the word of the gospel. The proclamation of Christ’s ‘there and then’ is itself the mode of Christ’s redemptive presence ‘here and now’.

As Martyn also puts it in his book on History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, the incarnation of the Word is not an event ‘which transpired only in the past’: the drama of this event unfolds on two levels simultaneously, the level of the unique past and the contemporary level. More than that, Martyn insists that the occurrence of this event on both levels ‘is, to a large extent, the good news itself.’ Thus in his work on both Paul and John, Martyn foregrounds the church’s continuing gospel proclamation as part of the very fabric of the salvation-event, part of Christ’s own identity as the risen one.

NB: Although I won't be at AAR in person, someone sent me this photo from a recent paper I gave in Canberra. So now you've read the text and you've seen me presenting it: my work here is done.

I'm not able, I'm just Cain

A big round-up of links this week...

• My college library has launched its nice new website, with some cool features, including regular news and updates about new theology books (e.g. a feature on the library's 1599 Geneva Bible, and a feature on Australian mission in Korea). The library has also started its own online review: e-Theo: Book Reviews for Mind and Ministry.
  
• What religion should you follow? Here's a handy flowchart to help you decide
• In praise of Bob Dylan's new Christmas album. (I would buy an album of Bob Dylan breathing heavily – so why not a Christmas album too?)
• The power of religion in the public square
• Some visceral responses to "analytic theology". This is a comment on Oliver Crisp's new edited collection, Analytic Theology, which I'm reading at the moment – together with his new book on christology, God Incarnate.
• In New Zealand, there is a new indigenous confession of faith
• Stop calling it a "community of faith", start calling it "church". (I say: Amen!)
• A very informative post about the new German postmodern Christianity
• A forthcoming book event on Goodchild's Theology of Money. (Confession: I still haven't gotten around to reading this one.)
• And a blogged book discussion too: I reckon this is a great idea. Should we do something like this at F&T some time?
• God said it. I interpreted it. That doesn't exactly settle it.
• Reading Bonhoeffer is good for your soul
• Evangelicals and Catholics Together with a statement on Mary
• (Not all) Evangelicals and Catholics together
• Evangelical universalism: a postscript by Kim
• Jaroslav Pelikan audio lecture on the need for creeds
  
• Paul Griffiths: why it would be better for the church to live under an Islamic state than under liberal democracy
• Tom Wright invites Pope Benedict
  
• Tragedy and comedy: a review of Milbank and Žižek
• The full transcript of an interview with Žižek
• Hans Küng on the Vatican's recent ecumenical skullduggery
• A video of James Cone, on "success" in the black church
• James K. A. Smith on the tyranny of email
• Call for papers: mission and ecumenics
• And finally, I leave you with a link to what may be the most fantabulously cool peer-reviewed journal in existence: GOLEM: Journal of Religion and Monsters. Looks like I've finally found a place to submit my essay on the theology of Tom Waits...

Some not-to-miss AAR sessions

I've already mentioned the apocalyptic theology sessions at AAR next week. If you're lucky enough to be in Montreal, here are some other not-to-be-missed sessions:

Sacramental Poetics (chaired by Monica Miller). Like liturgy, sacramental poetry signifies more than it says, through image, sound, and time, in language that takes the hearer beyond each of these elements. Rather than being lost in secularization, this sacramental function survives through poetic evocations of transcendence. Papers by John Milbank, Kevin Hart, Virgil Brower, Hent de Vries, and Regina Schwartz. (I'm also listed in the programme, but unfortunately I had to pull out: especially disappointing since Kevin Hart is my favourite contemporary poet, and I would have loved to meet him.) For more on "sacramental poetics", see Regina Schwartz's new post at the Immanent Frame.

Karl Barth Society: Panel Discussion of Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth, by Bruce L. McCormack. Papers by Nicholas M. Healy and Garrett Green, with a response by Bruce McCormack. (For more on this book, see my review, and the new review by Matthias Gockel.)

Disenchantment and Reenchantment in Political Theology: Diagnosing the Crisis of Liberalism. With the following papers: Benjamin Lazier, "Miracles and the Crisis of Liberalism between the Wars and Beyond"; Kurt Anders Richardson, "Legislation and Affection: On the Anthropological Dimensions of a Political Theology"; Bruce Rosenstock, "Hegel and Modern Political Theology"; Robert Yelle, "Liberalism Has No Charisma: Critiques of the Political Theology of Modernity in Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Philip Rieff"; response by John Milbank.

Creation and Negation: Apophasis and the Theology of Creation (chaired by Denys Turner). This panel advances constructive insights regarding a paradox in the theology of creation — precisely in virtue of being created, every existing being that we encounter flows from an infinite abyss of inexhaustible unknowability. This corollary of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo suggests that on the “other side” of every creature lies sheer nonexistence. And this itself is worthy of elucidation, for it underscores the vulnerability and graciousness inherent in the existence of each creature. But the panel pushes more deeply into the apophasis at the heart of creaturely existence. On the one hand, we develop a theology of the creatures by uncovering their apophatic depths as they flow from the inexhaustible mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation; and we also display the fruitfulness of this apophatic vision by unfolding its significance for our understandings of creaturely being, human flourishing, and the critical understanding of nature today. Papers by Sarah Coakley, Kevin L. Hughes, Mark A. McIntosh and Willemien Otten.

Theological Interventions: Love and Kenosis (chaired by Christine E. Gudorf). With a paper by Dennis King Keenan, "On the Genealogy of Love"; and Jodi Belcher, "Subversion through Subjection: A Feminist Reconsideration of Kenosis in Christology and Christian Discipleship". This one sounds like a terrific paper (h/t AUFS) – here's the abstract:

This paper reformulates Christological kenosis and its implications for Christian discipleship in light of the confusion surrounding “self-emptying” language and the painful ramifications of its prescription in Christianity, particularly for women. The central thesis claims that understanding kenosis in terms of subjection not only subverts the traditional, simplistic construal of self-emptying as loss of self, but also provides a recapitulation of kenosis as a transformative and empowering re-identification in God that feminist theology can plausibly engage and affirm. To develop this argument, the paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, initially giving a constructive critique of Sarah Coakley’s conception of Christ’s kenosis as the concurrence of divine power and human vulnerability. This evaluation of Coakley is then supplemented with Judith Butler’s philosophical account of power and subject formation in the process of subjection. The argument concludes by proposing a constructive contemporary retrieval of kenosis as subversive subjection.

The Promise of Scripture and Phenomenology (chaired by Kevin Hart). How does scripture give itself? What would it mean to treat scripture as a phenomenon? Is anything lost by thinking of scripture as an historical or literary object? This panel will explore the possibility of a phenomenological approach to scripture. Papers by Chris Hackett, Petra Turner Harvey, Adam Wells, H. Peter Kang, Martin Kavka and Nicholas Adams.

The Church in Post-Christian Society. Papers by Thomas Hughson, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, David Anderman, Steffen Lösel and Gilles Routhier. Also this paper by Mark Chapman, which sounds very good:

This paper discusses theological implications for the English churches as they recognise their minority status. By analysing reports from the 1960s to the present on the Church’s response to changing religious demography, I outline two responses to religious decline. The first amounts to a nostalgic longing for establishment. However, the assumption that all people were really Christian, whether they liked it or not, is nothing more than a piece of wishful thinking. The second solution promotes a pluralism which emerges from the recognition of minority status. This model was advocated by a number of more radical writers and theologians including Valerie Pitt and Donald Mackinnon. It has recently been revitalised by Rowan Williams. Becoming a minority is part of obedience to the Gospel: the roughness and complexity of Christian discipleship are hardly likely to appeal to the majority.

Whither the "Death of God": A Continuing Currency? (chaired by Lissa McCullough). Papers by Thomas Altizer and Slavoj Žižek, plus audience discussion.

The Apocalyptic Turn in Theology (chaired by Damon McGraw). Papers by Thomas Altizer, Catherine Keller, Graham Ward and Cyril O'Regan.

OK, I'm sure there'll be other good sessions too – these are the ones that stood out to me. If you know of any other interesting papers or panels, feel free to leave the details in a comment.

Theology and apocalyptic at AAR

Next week at AAR in Montreal, there'll be two sessions on “Explorations in Theology and Apocalyptic” (they have their own website).

The Saturday session is titled “Whither Apocalyptic? Critical Reflections in the Wake of Nathan R. Kerr’s Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission”; it features Douglas Harink, Travis Kroeker and Cyril O’Regan, with a response by Nate.

The Sunday session is on “The Apocalyptic Gospel: Theological Responses to the Work of J. Louis Martyn”. This is chaired by Douglas Harink, with papers by David Belcher, Walter Lowe and Philip G. Ziegler. It also includes my own paper, “God who Acts: The Work of J. Louis Martyn as a Critique of Contemporary Theology”. Sadly, I won't be able to attend in person – Halden Doerge will kindly be presenting my paper.

So if you're in Montreal next week, get along for the apocalyptic action!

Why I (still) confess the filioque

In theology, Eastern Orthodoxy is the new black. These days it's harder and harder to find any serious Protestant commitment to the western confession of filioque. The denomination in which I'm teaching, for instance, omits the filioque from liturgical confessions of the Nicene Creed.

In recent Protestant theology, reluctance to confess the filioque seems to arise mainly from a general ecumenical sentiment on the one hand (as though such a confession would be impolite), and from an ill-informed and stereotyped criticism of Augustine on the other (as one finds everywhere in Colin Gunton's works, for example).

In one of my recent pneumatology classes, I tried to argue for the contemporary importance of the filioque. My argument was roughly as follows: In the preaching and worship of liberal Protestant churches, there is a good deal of emphasis on the autonomy of the Spirit. The Spirit is often invoked without reference to Christ, or to the biblical narrative, or to the events of salvation-history. We have hymns and prayers that celebrate "the Spirit" as a kind of generic Spirit of creation, a benevolent life-force that is universally active and available. The role of this Spirit, presumably, is to grant unmediated religious access to God – a kind of second saviour, an alternative to Christ. I once attended a particularly ghastly eucharist service, where the bread and wine were not once related to Christ, but simply to "the Spirit" who is at work in all the gifts of creation. Such a Spirit clearly could not be said to proceed "from the Son"!

It's precisely here that the filioque could function to safeguard the church's confession of the gospel. The role of the filioque is to tie the Spirit's work indissolubly to God's act in Christ; to confess that the action of the Spirit is part of the story of salvation-history, and not some independent avenue of God's presence in the world. A Spirit who proceeds simply "from the Father" can very easily be understood as a second way of salvation, operating remoto Christo and floating free of the events of salvation-history.

Karl Barth's defence of the filioque was partly motivated by this kind of concern. He wondered whether the Eastern church's refusal of the filioque is "a reflection of the very mystically oriented piety of the East, which, bypassing the revelation in the Son, would relate human beings directly to the original Revealer, the principium or fount of deity" (Göttingen Dogmatics, 1:129-30). (I look forward to learning much more about this when Ashgate releases David Guretzki's new book on Karl Barth and the Filioque – due out next month.)

This week I've also been immersed in Volumes 12 (Berlin, 1932-1933) and 13 (London, 1933-1935) of Bonhoeffer's Works. And I've been struck by the importance of the filioque in the struggle of the Confessing Church against the Deutsche Christen. The 1933 Bethel Confession (Bonhoeffer was one of its main writers) includes a section on the Holy Spirit which foregrounds the filioque:

"The church teaches that the Holy Spirit, true God for all eternity, is not created, not made, but proceeds from the Father and the Son.... We reject the false doctrine that the Holy Spirit can be recognized without Christ in the creation and its orders. For it is always as proceeding from the Son that the Holy Spirit judges this fallen world and establishes the new order, above all nations, of the church as the people of God. Only because the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son does the church receive its mission to all nations" (Bonhoeffer, Berlin, 1932-1933, p. 399).

The notes from a 1933 pastors' conference records a discussion of this confession between Bonhoeffer and others:

In National Socialism, it is "first nature's grace, then Christ's grace. First creation, then redemption. This goes back to liberal theology. What is decisive is that the filioque is missing. The filioque means that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The German Christians want to introduce a nature spirit, a folk [Volk] spirit, into the church, which is not judged by Christ but rather justifies itself." This is "German paganism" (Bonhoeffer, London, 1933-1935, p. 48).

As I've suggested before, liberal Protestant worship can easily degenerate into similar kinds of "paganism". A rediscovery of the theological significance of the filioque may be one way, in our time, of resisting this tendency and of preserving the christological shape of Christian confession of the Trinity.

Eternity: a free Christian newspaper

Some guys here in Sydney decided to create a new independent Christian newspaper, and they've just launched the first issue. It's called Eternity, and it looks very promising. This first issue includes articles on theology, Twitter, church planting, mission, music, books, film, and more. Greg Clarke writes about music, Michael Jensen writes about Calvin's 500th birthday, while Jim Wallace and Angus McLeay debate the question, "Does Australia need a charter of rights?" The paper even includes, with due acknowledgment, Oliver Crisp's painting of the young Calvin. (Which reminds me: I've seen that painting used all over the place, on blogs and websites, without any kind of permission or acknowledgment. For shame.)

The whole paper has a nice contemporary, ecumenical flavour, and it's a great deal more interesting and informative than most of those Australian denominational rags (with their parochial content and retirement-village style).

If you'd like free copies of the paper to be delivered to your church, you can sign up online. And some of us might also like to consider writing something for the paper – the Sydney Anglicans have been very keen contributors to this first issue, but the paper is keen to represent the whole gamut of Australian church life. And the fact that it's also interested in publishing theological content is a very welcome sign!