Call for Papers: Princeton Theological Review, Fall 2008

A Tribute to Thomas Forsyth Torrance

You are invited to submit an article, reflection, or book review for publication in the Fall 2008 issue of the Princeton Theological Review. This issue’s theme will be on the life and work of T.F. Torrance.

T.F. Torrance was born to missionary parents in 1913 and grew up in West China and in Lanarkshire, Scotland. Profoundly influenced by his teacher, Karl Barth, he would later supervise the translation of Barth’s thirteen-volume Church Dogmatics and become a leading exponent of his mentor’s work. Torrance served for ten years as a parish minister and taught church history and dogmatic theology at New College, University of Edinburgh from 1950 to 1979. In the last decades of his life he produced an extensive scholarly output on topics ranging from theology and science to Trinitarian theology and the person and work of Jesus Christ. He died in December 2007, leaving a legacy for Reformed theologians and the church at large.

If you would like to submit an article, reflection, or book review that is pertinent to the PTR’s Fall 2008 theme, please see the submissions guidelines for more information. Articles are typically between 5000-7000 words. Reflections are between 1200-2000 words. All submissions are due by September 15, 2008. Please send them by email attachment to ptr-at-ptsem-dot-edu, or you may contact me through the email link in my profile.

Bruce McCormack: Barth in response to open theism

Bruce McCormack recently edited a volume of essays by Protestant theologians on the doctrine of God, entitled, Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives. The volume is well worth reading, in part because of the range of perspectives represented in its pages—including everyone from D. A. Carson to John Webster. But the book is worth the price just for McCormack’s essay. His article, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” is a 57-page exploration of the claims made by open theism over against classical theism as well as the alternative which Barth provides to both of those metaphysical positions. As a way to whet your appetite for more, here is the opening of McCormack’s essay:

For nearly two decades now, the evangelical churches in America have been the scene of a polarizing debate between defenders of classical theism and the proponents of what is typically referred to as “open theism.” After reading through the growing literature generated by both sides, my own conclusion is that each has something important to say; each has “theological values” which would need to be preserved in any truly adequate doctrine of God. The trouble is that both sides are actually occupying a shared ground on which no resolution of the debate is thinkable. It is clearly time for some fresh thinking.

As the subtitle of this essay makes clear, the goal here is to bring Karl Barth into conversation with the open theists. The decision to treat Barth in relation to open theism rather than classical theism is not based upon a belief that he stood closer to the former than the latter. Far from it. As I have already suggested, both sides to the current debate stand finally upon the same ground—a ground which would have to be abandoned if the values now contained in each model were to be brought into a single, unified conception. Barth occupies a very different ground, and as we shall see, it is because he does so that he is able to take up and preserve the values set forth in each of the other two models. In any event, Barth does not stand closer to the open theists than he does to the classical theists. The decision to bring Barth into conversation with open theism is based simply upon the perception that open theism is attracting a great deal of attention—to the point of disturbing the peace of the churches—and the belief that it is not dealt with adequately where it is met by power plays (e.g., attempts to exclude its proponents from membership in the Evangelical Theological Society). The only adequate response is to provide an alternative which is demonstrably superior to it—something today’s defenders of classical theism have consistently failed to do.

—Bruce L. McCormack, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2008), 185-86.

Ebeling: the church needs historical criticism

Halden has asked whether the historical critical method has a positive role in the task of theology today. I responded by suggesting that indeed it does have a positive role. While I did not flesh out the full extent of how historical criticism enables the theological enterprise, I referred Halden and others to the great essay by Gerhard Ebeling in Word and Faith on the significance of the critical historical method for Protestant theology. Here is a selection from the end of that essay:

Systematic theology must therefore be required not only to respect the results of critical historical research—even on that point there is still much to be desired—but also to take up fully and completely into its own approach the outlook of the critical historical method. . . . If systematic theology takes up into its own approach the whole outlook of the critical historical method, then the result will be not only that it will achieve the critical destruction of all supposed assurances, but above all that it will be kept strictly to its proper concern—namely, the historic revelation in Jesus Christ—in full awareness of the historicalness of its own systematic theological labours.

And finally, the proclamation of the church . . . must be required to take the work of historical criticism seriously. It is a real question whether the widespread frightful lameness and staleness of the church’s message, her powerlessness to speak to the men of today, and likewise the lack of credibility that attaches to the church as such are not very largely connected with its fear of letting the work of critical historical theology bear fruit in the proper way and its failure to take sufficient account of the nature of the hermeneutic problem, which is acutely concentrated in the act of preaching. For critical historical theology is not identical with liberal theology. It is, however, the indispensable means of reminding the church of the freedom rooted in the iustificatio impii.

—Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963), 17-61, here 59-60.

I want this T-shirt

If you don’t get the movie reference, I’m sorry.

“Red Toryism”: Milbank’s hope for a new politics

John Milbank’s “Letter to the Editor” in the Guardian—in response to this article—has made its way around the theo-blogosphere, and for good reasons. He calls for a “red Toryism” or a “traditionalist socialism”—something that remains progressive, but on the basis of core values and virtues. Here is his letter in full:

Jackie Ashley (This fight really matters, May 19) reveals the bizarre bankruptcy of the current British left. By every traditional radical criterion New Labour has failed: it has presided over a large increase in economic inequality and an entrenchment of poverty, while it has actively promoted the destruction of civil rights, authoritarian interference in education and medicine, and an excessively punitive approach to crime. But never mind all that, says Jackie Ashley and her ilk: on what crucially matters - the extending of supposed biosexual freedom and the licensing of Faustian excesses of science - it is on the side of "progress".

Yet it is arguably just this construal of left versus right which is most novel and questionable. Is it really so obvious that permitting children to be born without fathers is progressive, or even liberal and feminist? Behind the media facade, more subtle debates over these sorts of issue do not necessarily follow obvious political or religious versus secular divides. The reality is that, after the sell-out to extreme capitalism, the left seeks ideological alibis in the shape of hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites.

An older left had more sense of the qualified goods of these things and the way they can work to allow a greater economic equality and the democratisation of excellence. Now many of us are beginning to realise that old socialists should talk with traditionalist Tories. In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a "traditionalist socialism" or a "red Toryism". After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.

We see the call for something very similar in contemporary American evangelicalism, it seems to me. Events like the Envision ’08 conference and the rise of voices like Jim Wallis testify to our interest in a kind of politics analogous to Milbank’s “red Toryism.” This is why Barack Obama is so interesting to evangelicals, because he is able to speak about Christian values and virtues more fluently than the Republicans. His liberalism is hardly the turn-off that it once was, primarily because of its union with Christian values.

Milbank’s final line is excellent: “what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.” That’s a political message I can get behind. But there’s an implicit criticism in this statement of any political party’s claim to solve our world’s problems. A “new” president is not necessarily going to bring radical change. Such change will only take place in correspondence to the Good, that is, to Jesus Christ. We might translate Milbank’s statement in this way: what counts as radical is not the new president, but the gospel—i.e., Jesus himself.

Bonhoeffer Blog Conference: call for papers

Halden has put out a call for papers for his upcoming Bonhoeffer Blog Conference, scheduled for sometime in November, “just following AAR.” The topic of the conference will be “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Contemporary Theology.” The conference will seek to engage Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics or his ethical writings in general, and place him in conversation with trends and issues in theology today. Submissions should explore the implications of Bonhoeffer’s work for our contemporary theological, ecclesial, social, and political contexts. Submissions should be emailed to Halden, and should be between 1500 and 2500 words.

Holy Scripture, the ANE, and Biblical Criticism

Arthur Boulet has written an interesting post on the relation between Psalm 74 and Ancient Near Eastern literature and how that relationship impinges upon our interpretation of the Westminster Confession of Faith. He argues that the ANE lit sheds important light on Ps. 74, and that we need to rethink what the WCF means by Scripture being self-interpretive. He concludes:

[P]erhaps we need to rethink how we are interpreting the words of WCF 1.9 in our current discussions. Could it have been the case that when the WCF was penned, the issue was not extra-biblical literature such as ANE creation myths, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and second Temple literature, but, instead, the traditions of the Catholic Church? Could it be that the Westminster Divines were aiming their cross hairs at the Church of Rome and their literature/traditions, which sought to determine the meaning of Scripture, and not ancient texts, such as ANE creation myths, the DSS, and second Temple literature, which can shed great light on determining the meaning of Scripture?

I think it is more than likely the case.

Art’s conclusion is on target, it seems to me. Of course, we have to remember that WCF and the other confessions of the Reformation all precede the rise of historical criticism. We live on the other side of that development in Christian history, just as we live on the other side of modernity. To ignore such developments would be equivalent to ignoring Copernicus and accepting the geocentric worldview of the Bible.

(Unlike Art, however, I am not bound to the WCF, which is a deeply problematic document in my opinion. It is a product of Reformed Orthodoxy, and thus one’s acceptance of its authority requires accepting that Protestant Orthodoxy was a legitimate development of the theology of the Reformers. I also find it interesting that those who are in positions of leadership, say, at Westminster Theological Seminary, are making themselves the authoritative interpreters of the WCF over against Enns. Is this not simply to create a new Magisterium? Is this not precisely what the Reformation was seeking to reject?)

The question all of this raises for us today is the relationship between Scripture and modern biblical criticism. From the perspective of some (such as those who question the orthodoxy of Peter Enns), critical scholarship on the Bible undermines the self-interpretive nature of Scripture. While Art makes a good point about the historical and polemical context for the WCF’s statement, the fact of the matter is that contemporary adherents to this document assert that WCF 1.9 excludes historical criticism and the input of extra-biblical material. Others who are schooled in Reformed Orthodoxy and the WCF are more qualified than I to comment on this confession’s ability to embrace modern scholarship.

I merely wish to note that there should be no conflict between Scripture being self-interpretive and the use of historical criticism. The Bible was not written in an historical vacuum. It has a particular location in time and space. Hence, to be self-interpretive cannot exclude the historical and cultural context of the text. The “self” of Scripture is a self situated in history. Those who wish to exclude historical-cultural concerns from the act of interpretation are actually lifting Scripture out of history altogether. Theirs is a docetic bibliology, corresponding—I would argue—to a docetic christology. Interestingly, the same problem of docetism can be said about Roman Catholicism as well. They only add a docetic ecclesiology to the mix. This allows them to conflate Scripture with their Tradition, which is simply a consequence of conflating Christ with the Church. Whereas Reformed Orthodoxy confuses (a docetic) Christ and Scripture, Catholicism confuses (a docetic) Christ and the Church. Either way, there is a dehistoricization of the central elements of the Christian faith—whether Jesus Christ, Scripture, or the Church.

Finally, I just want to point out that there is a new book by Kenton Sparks, professor at Eastern University, entitled, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship. After skimming through its pages, I have to say that this book seems very promising. I hope to have more to say about this work later.