Thursday, November 27, 2008

Jesus the God who speaks

The high christology of 1 Peter has God not only speaking about or through Jesus, but in Christ we see the God who speaks. 1 Peter speaks of the ‘Spirit of Christ’ in the prophets making predictions of his own suffering and consequent glories.(1:11) The predictions of the prophets are then connected to the preaching of the gospel by the Holy Spirit.(1:12) While these verses are not a full exploration of the pre-existent nature of Christ and his involvement in creation 11, along with 1:20 they touch on some temporal existence of Christ before his earthly life . The concept of pre-existence is not developed further, possibly because the writer of 1 Peter has no interest in it. Of far more importance to the question of high christology is the association of Jesus with the Holy spirit in God’s word. In this passage Jesus is seen not only as the object of God’s proclamation (1:12), nor simply
the indirect object through whom the word of God comes. In 1 Peter 1:11 Christ is shown as the divine power behind the proclamation. Through association with Jesus Christ, even the readers speech may be considered the word of God (4:10-11)
‘Reference to the Spirit further serves to show that the announcement that the events had taken place had the same divine power behind it as did the foretelling of those events, with the implication that as a result, those events not only are securely in divine hands and reflect the divine intention but also reflect the activity of the pre incarnate Christ.(Paul Achtemeier
The high christology of 1 Peter presents Jesus not only as an object of God’s word and action, or an agent through whom God works, but as God himself speaking through the prophets and living that which he predicts.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Karl Barth and Capitalism

Fundamentally, the command of God … is self-evidently and in all circumstances a call for counter-movements on behalf of humanity and against its denial in any form – and therefore a call for the championing of the weak against every kind of encroachment on the part of the strong. The Christian community has undoubtedly been too late in seeing this in face of the modern capitalistic development of the labour process, and it cannot escape some measure of responsibility for the injustice characteristic of this development…. The main task of Christianity in the West is … to assert the command of God in face of [capitalism], and to keep to the ‘left’ in opposition to its champions, i.e., to confess that it is fundamentally on the side of the victims of this disorder and to espouse their cause.”

—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4, p. 544 (KD III/4, pp. 624-25).
H/T Ben Myers

Monday, November 24, 2008

Prayer Mondays: Barth

"Lord our God, you wanted to live not only in heaven, but also with us, here on earth; not only to be high and great, but also to be small and lowly, as we are; not only to rule, but also to serve us; not only to be God in eternity, but also to be born as a person, to live, and to die.
In your dear Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, you have given us none other than yourself, that we may wholly belong to you. This affects all of us, and none of us has deserved this. What remains for us to do but to wonder, to rejoice, to be thankful, and to hold fast to what you have done for us?
We ask you to let this be the case in this hour, among us and in all of us! Let us become a proper Christmas community in an honest, open and willing praying and singing, speaking and hearing, and let us in great hunger be a proper Communion community. Amen.

Karl Barth 9 in "Fifty Prayers"

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Ben Myers: November 2006

Blogs like this make me ashamed. They are just soooo good! This is one of the biggest months I've seen to date.
What a month for Ben, there is too much here to mention, notice particularly

Pannenbergs eschatological ontology

Barth on Capitalism

Kim Fabricious ten Fab propositions on being human and Karl Barth

Snippets of Robert Jensons "Conversations with Poppi about God"

David Bentley Hart

Paul J DeHart's critique of post liberal theology, including a great quote from Hans Frei on the necessity of the resurrection, basically along the lines of, you beleive Jesus is risen, or that he was a fictional character, since the resurrection permeates his presentation and identity throughout the gospels.

Woo

Ben needs to get out more

Hauerwas and success

How do we assess the activity of our churches in a post-christendom environment?
How do we go about motivating the church for mission?
What do we call a successfu church and what do we call an unsuccessful church?
How do we think of being a parish church, for everyone in the parish, when so many have no interest in the church?

In "Remembering as a moral task", Hauerwas opposes simple universalism based on a common humanity

"Our Universalism is not based on assumed commonalities of humankind; rather, it is based on the belief that the God who made us his own through Jesus Christ is the God of all people." 'Hauerwas Reader' 344

"What does it mean for the church to be an eschatological community whose primary task is not to make the world the kingdom, but rather to witness to the power of God to transform our lives more nearly appropriate to the service of that kingdom....." 346

"The task of the church is not to survive, but to be faithful to its eschatological mission. The "success" of that mission is not measured by whether the church survives or not, but whether her survival or nonsurvival serves the ends of that kingdom. Any time Christians presume that the "success" of God's kingdom depends on the "success" of the Church they have already betrayed their beleif in God's lordship of history" 346

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Jesus is LORD

1 Peter uses passages of scripture that speak of YHWH to describe Jesus Christ.( In doing so he includes Jesus in God’s unique divine identity. This is described by Richard Bauckham as ‘the highest christology of all’. YHWH was the name by which the God of Israel, who alone was God, was known. 1 Peter twice quotes Isaiah 8, a passage explicitly speaking of YHWH, to speak of Jesus. In Isaiah 8 the prophet is given a message about impending judgement and suffering at the hands of the Assyrians. The prophet Isaiah is told by YHWH ‘do not fear what they fear and do not dread it. The LORD almighty (YHWH) is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear.’ (Isaiah 8:12-13) and to trust him as a sanctuary, even though YHWH will be the stone that causes people to fall. 1 Peter 3:14b-15 tells the christians facing suffering ‘Do not fear what they fear: do not be frightened. But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord’ . Here the extremely high christology of identifying Christ with YHWH is useful to 1 Peter’s purpose. For the suffering christians addressed in 1 Peter, it is the Christ who is now to be regarded holy and should be viewed as a sanctuary. It is not that the Christ has replaced God, the readers are also told to fear God in 2:17, but that Christ is somehow included in YHWH.
This uniting of Christ and YHWH is also seen in 1 Peter 2:4-8. Christ is the living stone, rejected but chosen, in verse 4. The writer then uses three passages about stones to interpret one another and Jesus Christ. Psalm 118:22, quoted in 1 Peter 2:7, seems to be speaking of a messianic figure, or possibly of the whole of Israel. Isaiah 28:16, quoted in verse 6, also speaks of a servant of YHWH, again possibly YHWH himself in Isaiah 28:21. The quote from Isaiah 8:14 speaks explicitly of YHWH as the stumbling stone. Yet the writer is comfortable to use all three passages to speak of Jesus as both Christ and God. While some uses of kyrios for Jesus in the New Testament may be ambiguous, in
these quotes the septuagint ‘kyrios’ for YHWH in Isaiah is directly applied to Jesus. This calls into question Davies assertion that ‘There is no transference of divine standing or prerogatives’. It applies not only God’s ‘divine action in Jesus Christ’ , but to his divine identity. The many statements about God in 1 Peter that refer to the Father or God, and not Jesus, only show that Jesus was included in the identity of God and did not replace God. A reading of the entire epistle, (rather than just the ‘hymnic material’ that Earl Richard focuses on ) does not allow us to restrict the high christology to that of an exalted human, as both Richard and Davies do. This in turn calls into question Davies entire theory of a long Christological development from an early low to a late high . As noted by Hengel, ‘This development in christology progressed in a very short time’ . That 1 Peter can use such explicit connections between YHWH and Jesus without argument or explanation implies that an extremely high christology was already present for both the writer and audience of the epistle. 1 Peter displays an extremely high christology that includes Jesus in the identity of YHWH by using that name of Jesus.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Exam Prayers

On the topic of prayers I'm running a campaign to change the way we pray about exams.

Most prayers I have heard and formerly prayed for people who are about to sit exams is: that they remember what they have studied and God gives them a just mark.

My campaign is for gospel prayers: that the God of Daniel reveal to people what they haven't studied, and that the God of the gospel gives people marks they don't deserve.

I've been criticized that this is encouraging people not to study and allows for people to, how shall I say? 'sin more that grace may increase?' Paul's answer is fitting: 'Don't be stupid!'

Prayer Monday: Patrick

Permit us not, O Lord, to hear your word in vain. Convince us of it's truth, cause us to feel its power and bind us to yourself with cords of faith and hope and love that shall never be broken. We bind to ourselves today, you our God: your power to hold us, your hand to guide us, your eye to watch us, your ear to hear us, your wisdom to teach us, your word to give us speech, your presence to defend us, this day and every day; in the name of the blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom be the kingdom, and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

Patrick in "Ancient Christian Devotional: a year of weekly readings"

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Is there high Christology in 1 Peter?

1 Peter is not a treatise on the divine nature of Jesus. Its primary concern is addressing the suffering of christians in Asia Minor. Much is made of the encouragement for the reader to identify with Jesus in his suffering and exaltation. However, within this addressing of suffering, 1 Peter also includes an extremely high christology that includes Jesus in the God of Israel’s unique divine identity. 1 Peter identifies Jesus with the unique divine name, has Christ speaking God’s eternal word, includes Christ in God’s eschatological role and assigns him divine sovereignty, with the corresponding sovereignty over God’s people.

New Essay for Wednesdays

Back in first year, I ripped off Richard Bauckham massively. MASSIVELY! in an essay (footnoted of course)

It is our new wednesday rehash

"High Christology in 1 Peter"

Monday, November 10, 2008

Prayers Monday

Thought I'd post some prayers on Mondays. Yep. No particular reason. Just want to.

We are all in hock


Christ is risen!
You have come into a world of debt where we are all in hock.
We pray daily that you forgive our debts.
We boldly qualify our prayer by the condition of how we treat our neighbors.
So we pray for the cancellation of our debts
and the debts of the poor
of the weak
of the imprisoned
of the abused.
Your Easter Jubilee has broken our old patterns of debt and credit,
and made us rich beyond our acknowledgement.
You are the one who was rich and became Friday poor,
that by being made poor,
you would make many rich.
We are among those who have been made rich.....
along with our neighbors.
For your Sunday wealth that is our new beginning,
we give you deep and exuberant thanks.
Amen.


Walter Brueggeman "Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: prayers of Walter Brueggemann"

Friday, November 7, 2008

Post Chrisendom Fathers

Continuing the ancient and venerable tradition of raiding the blogging Fathers archive for free content, this week we come to Chrisendom. This blog, published by Chris Tilling Really Very Holy Ministries, is one of the best mixes of Pauline scholarship and utterly hilarious baloney around.

Back in November 2006, Chris was reviewing Richard Bauckhams important work, "Jesus and the eyewitnesses".


At thirty posts, you almost might as well just read Bauckhams book, but then you'de miss Tilling's take and his humour.


ps. If you are cramming for 2nd year New Testament exam on Monday, there are far worse ways you could prepare for the Historical Jesus section. Then again, ther are probably better ways, such as the first few chapters of NT Wrights "Jesus and the Victory of God"

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Spirit of Hope

“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you” Romans 8:11
The Spirit of holiness is the power by which God raised Jesus from the dead and declared him Son of God.(1:4) The presence of that same Spirit then, guarantees , as a first fruit offering from God, the redemption of the believers bodies and their adoption as Sons(8:23) . This is an anticipation of an eschatological event The covenant blessing of an inheritance will be provided in the liberation of the entire creation from decay.(8:18-23)
“Paul seems intent to tie together both the work of the Spirit with that of Christ, as well as the ethical life of righteousness effected by Christ and the Spirit with the final eschatological inheritance gained through the resurrection of the ‘mortal’ body “Gordo D Fee again)
Until that day, the Spirit remains, groaning with creation and believers, and interceding for them as they, in their weakness find hope incomprehensible. Paul himself groans with the Spirit for the incomprehensible restoration of national Israel(9:1, 11:33) . After exhorting the Romans to seemingly impossible standards of love(13:8-10) and difficult welcoming of each other, even in times of disagreement(15:7, 14:1), which still today seems hopeless, Paul's prays that the God of hope would give the Roman church peace and joy, that they might abound in hope, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul’s teaching on the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit of life, encourages the faith of the readers of the letter to the Romans. In it, they find themselves united to the risen Messiah, the goal of the law who brings in covenant blessing. By the presence of the Spirit, the Roman believers are assured, even in times of suffering and hardship, of eschatological life that the Law was intended to bring, the restoration of all creation and the restoration of Jewish and Gentile relationships.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Burn me now

Just to heat it up a little

I hope that my church will be full of ikons, I use them for worship, I see God working in and through them, in fact I think true worship is pretty difficult without at least two of them. (Romans 8:29)

For that matter, and in the same vein, I believe in the real presence of the body of Christ in communion too. (1 Corinthians 12:27)


*Edit*
Just to round off my popish insolence, I also request saints to interceed to God on my behalf, everyday. Even more now that I am at college

**Edit 2**
I also believe in the second blessing of the Holy Spirit....
and the third, fourth, fifteenth and three thousand millionth

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Psalms and revolution

" The Metrical Psalm was the perfect vehicle for turning the Protestant message into a mass movement capable of embracing the illiterate alongside the literate. What better than the very words of the Bible as sung by the hero-King David? The Psalms were easily memorized, so that an incriminating printed text could rapidly be dispensed with. They were customarily sung in unison to a large range of dedicated tunes...The words of a particular Psalm could be associated with a particular melody; even to hum the tune spoke of the words behind it, and was an act of Protestant subversion. A mood could be summoned up in an instant: Psalm 68 led a crowd into battle, Psalm 124 led to victory, Psalm 115 scorned dumb and blind idols and made the perfect accompaniment for smashing up church interiors. The psalms could be sung in worship or in the market place; instantly they marked out the singer as a Protestant, and equally instantly united a Protestant crowd in ecstatic companionship just as the football chant does today on the stadium terraces. They were the common property of all, both men and women: women could not preach or rarely even lead in prayer, but they could sing alongside their menfolk. To sing a psalm was liberation- to break away from the mediation of priest or minister and to become a king alongside King David, talking directly to his God. It was perhaps significant that one of the distinctive features of French Catholic persecution in the 1540's had been that those who were about to be burned had their tongues cut out first"
Diarmaid MacCulloch "Reformation" 308


While I can think of some church tunes that make ME want to cut out people's tongues, I wonder what Psalms would be considered subversive today? I wonder where you could find church that knew their Psalms well enough to be roused by them?

Rowan Williams on Theological Integrity

As the sociologists and cultural critics of the last hundred years have made us aware, most speech, to varying degrees, is political. Whether we are aware of it or not, our speech often aims for or upholds particular power structures. Rowan Williams adresses this issue in his essay “Theological Integrity”. He defines integrity in discourse as “whether such a discourse is really talking about what it SAYS it is talking about”. Speech that avoids talking about the genuine issues, lacks integrity, as there is no possibility of response or conversation on the real issues. The underlying assumptions are never revealed and hence not up for question.
Speech with integrity, however, shows its working with critical self perception, displaying the axioms to which it beleives itself to be accountable, making it clear that there are ways in which it may be criticized and questioned.

Williams notes that religious talk is in a strange position on this analysis. On the one hand, it wants to make large, cosmic and authoritative claims, yet on the other hand these claims should lead to the recognition that the speaker is not God, and does not have a total perspective on everything. How can we speak of a God over the whole cosmos without simply using that speech for our own power claims?
The answer, according to Williams, is not to dismiss the observations of sociologists as post-modern guff, but neither is the answer to capitulate to them in secular scepticism. Rather, Williams looks for a theological response from theology and christian practice.
Firstly, he notes that Christian theology is often not an attempt to map the moral significance of every event in the universe. Not everything is open to definitive interpretation. Rather, it is an attempt to act consistently, even faithfully in a complex world.
“To say that a religious discouse is ‘about’ the whole moral universe may simply be to say that it offers a sufficient imaginative resource for confronting the entire range of human complexity without evasion or untruthfullness”.
For christians, this imaginative resource is the stories of imperfect response to God found in the narrative of Israel, and the narrative of the perfect response of Jesus. On top of this talking ‘about’ God found in the scriptures, there is also mingled a history of speaking ‘to’ God. While address to God can be as starkly ideologically driven as speech about God, Williams draws out three aspects of Christian worship that mitigate against this.
Firstly is repentance. The christian propensity to admit failure before God shows that its speech is as much under the judgement of God as the listeners. Williams encourages us to look closely at the history of the church and theology to become aware of where our speech has been used to justify this or that system of power, rather than being utterly transparent to the power of God, or to the giving of power and liberation to those who are addressed. This self critique and repentance applies both to the content of our speech, and its style. How much do we limit approved talk of God to the pulpit or the college, and exclude songs and stories (blogs?)? How much do we opt for precise language at the expense of evocative imagery? The Bible itself, with its multiple voices and styles, should move us toward repentance in this regard.
The second useful Christian practice is praise. To praise God is to say that there is something worth speaking about outside of my own need for power/ security. It is essentially a decentering activity. This is seen in glossolalia and in Job, as God is praised regardless of his usefulness to humanity, for his sheer otherness as creator.
But more specifically, God is praised for his saving presence in his revelatory acts in history.
Central in this praise for Christians is the Eucharist. Here we praise God by remembering and recapitulating the death and resurrection of his Son, the ultimate revelatory event.
“Here the action of praise necessarily involves evoking a moment of dispossesion, of death, in order to bring the novum of God into focus”.
Here we identify with the unfaithful apostles at table with Jesus, here we identify with a God who was broken for us, recognising our utter need and powerlessness, we worship a God who displays his power in weakness.
In this kind of praise, of this kind of God, we learn to speak about the world in a certain way, and about ourselves in a certain way, that is shaped by the movement from loss and disorder to life.
With repentance and praise come prayer. At the heart of prayer for Williams is contemplation: the realisation that God will never be definitively defined, there is always more of this person to know, so shutting up is always a valuable exercise. Williams notes the strategies of dispossesion of the Carmelites and early Jesuits. Theirs is a process that BEGINS with disruption to the everday patterns of life and speech (sometimes pathologically), but the “fruition of the process is the discovery that one’s selfhood and value simply lie in the abiding faithful presence of God, not in any moral or conceptual performance”. This leaning on the presence, grace and power of God, strengthened through prayer, goes a long way to uniting the outward forms of our speech and our inward reality, as our inward reality is less and less about securing our own position. A theology with integrity then, will be one that presents itself to God in penitence, praise and prayer, but more than that, one that is about supporting and serving the penitent, praising and prayerful people of God. Thus a theology of integrity isn’t about explaining why we have everything right (at least, more right than that church down the road), but constantly probing our assumption we that we have everthing right, and bringing the church to a decentered repentance, praise and dependence on God. “It will understand doctrinal definitions as the attempt to make sure we are still speaking about GOD in our narratives, not about the transactions of mythological subjects or about the administration of religious power”

“And to do this it needs to know when it has said what it can say and when it is time to shut up”

On that note...


ps. for those who were in the class, this is the article that was used to accuse Williams of outright apophaticism. It is worth reading for yourself to make your own judgement. It can be found in "On Christian Theology" by Rowan Williams

Monday, November 3, 2008

Prayer Mondays: Jungel

Almighty God, dear heavenly Father,
You are worthy of praise, you who so wonderfully created the world,
crowning it with human beings. You preserve the heaven and the
earth. Every morning you give into our hands the work of your
hands—though we shamefully misuse it.
You entrust to us the world that we might live on earth in peace and
joy. Not we, eternal Creator and fatherly Preserver—not we, but you
are worthy of praise. We praise you!
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God and Light from eternal Light,
You are to be praised by all the world, for you have borne and broken
through the darkness of our sins. Your death took away the power of
death. Raised from the dead, you broke through the darkness with
which we so often and so furtively darken our own lives and those of
others. You are and remain the Light of Life: the light that illumines,
the light that warms, the light that guides our way—highly to be
praised in time and eternity!
God, Holy Spirit,
You glorious bond of unbreakable love between heaven and earth!
You come to people who are unable to praise. You open closed ears
and touch embittered hearts. You renew what we make old. Come,
Holy Spirit, you unsettling Spirit, move and free our hearts so that we
heartily praise you, so that all of us, in thanks and prayer, entrust
ourselves to you, the Spirit, the Son, and the Father: our God.
Amen


Ebhard Jungel "Trinitarian Prayers
for Christian Worship" in Word And World Vol 43

Posting Nice Father- Hebel

Matt introduced me to blogs, and for this I am ever grateful.
After dabbling around with an eu blog, posting our silly conversations, Matt forged ahead with Hebel in October 2006.
By November it was clear that this was a 'blog worth watching' ; )
Firstly, it hadn't died in the first few posts
Secondly, it was full of quality posts, driven by Matt's insatiable desire to read
Thirdly...it no longer reflected our silly conversations.

Back in November 2006, Matt was working through a Biblical theology of the sea, introducing me to Barth, Gunton and Schweitzer; and telling us why All Saints Day is good, but All Souls was a recapitulation to wooly medieval theology. (Though strangely he has never used this as a joke at the expense of my current church).

But most of all he served us by giving us large and fascinating slabs of NT Wright on subjects other than justification (well, also some stuff on justification too).

So, next All Souls day, when you remember this great blogging saint.. light a candle, say a few hail Marys, and pray for the release of his soul from that purgatory that is particularly reserved for lovers of Bishop Tom.
(please, please see the multiple tongues in multiple cheeks)