The Witness of God:Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community

Saturday, November 14, 2009 |

John Flett's new book, The Witness of God:Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community, is now available for pre-order, and will be released April 15th, 2010.

Here's the description:

The Witness of God is a constructive revision of Trinitarian missio Dei theology. In it John G. Flett argues that the neglect of mission as a theological locus has harmful consequences both for understanding the nature of God’s connection with world and the corresponding nature of the Christian community.

What Counts as Depth?

Monday, November 02, 2009 |

I wrote the following article for the October edition of the New Wilmington Presbyterian Church Newsletter: What's UP?

What Counts As Depth?
Rev. Hawkins kicked off our Stewardship Season last Sunday with a sermon on Going Deeper Into Scripture. This important theme got me thinking further about how exactly one should go about reading the Bible. In both my church bible studies and in my seminary classes the assumed approach has been to take one book at a time and listen to its particularity. For instance, I’ve been trained to ask questions of a specific biblical text – its literary, historical and theological context, its repetitive images and ideas – and then to ask the question: “What does this text have to say to me?”
This approach is important, but I find that it does not go deep enough on its own steam. In a way, this approach has monopolized our reading to the point that I’m afraid we have mistaken the forest for the trees, so to speak. It begs the question: why is this text bound with these other texts? Who put this thing called Scripture together and on what basis did they do it? Do the many texts of Scripture speak with one voice? What does this voice say?
As we commit to go deeper into Scripture as a community of faith, I believe we should begin by listening for the one thing that all these books and authors have to tell us. This one thing, which unites the prophets and apostles, is the very theme of Advent: Emmanuel, “God With Us.” As Presbyterians, we confess Scripture to be the Word of God because it points us to the One Word of God, which is Jesus Christ. To confess the Bible as the Word of God means that we read Scripture’s many voices in order to hear this Word from our Lord, and to follow after this voice which tells us that we have been redeemed.
No doubt we should lament poor biblical literacy, and seek to remember the stories and teach them to our children. But why should we do so? What makes these stories so important? I would suggest that we have taken for granted (or forgotten altogether) the grand Story of Scripture – the Story of our salvation. The Gospel, it turns out, is spoken in more than just “the gospels.” The Bible is more than the sum of its parts. To go deeper into Scripture requires not just zooming in but zooming out. As the people of God, we are called to know the stories in order that we can know the Story of God’s continual decision to be with us in Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit. It is this Story that gathers, forms, and sends us out together in New Wilmington Presbyterian Church.

Your Fellow Reader,
Chris TerryNelson

John Flett on Hütter and Hoekendijk

Saturday, October 24, 2009 |

John Flett has an article entitled "Communion as propaganda: Reinhard Hütter and the missionary witness of the ‘Church as Public’" in the November 2009 issue of Scottish Journal of Theology (Volume 62, Issue 04). Having taken a class with Flett on the "Church as Public," I can tell you that the argument in this essay with Hütter can be easily extended to much of modern ecclesiology, precisely because it exposes how an ecclesiology is only as good as its Christology, and therefore its doctrine of God.


Here is the abstract:
The Protestant church, for Reinhard Hütter, relinquished its ecclesial public character when it turned from ‘binding doctrine’ as the means for establishing and maintaining its concrete ‘time-space’. Christendom disguised this basic theological flaw, but with its collapse the public basis of the Protestant church fell away. This reduced the church's witness and destroyed its communal structure. His positive proposal re-establishes the church as a public by reference to the communion nature of God, and to church practices as mediate forms of the Spirit's acting. Hütter's account shadows an argument made fifty years before by Johannes C. Hoekendijk, observing an intensified focus on word and sacrament and the promotion of a culture as a solution to the problem of the church's witness. Yet, for Hoekendijk, this logic exemplifies the problem. The institutions of the church come to bear the full evangelistic load. Mission replicates the basic structures of a particular way of life as a necessary precursor to the gospel. The act of witness becomes propaganda because of an insufficient doctrine of the church. This insufficiency is a failing in the doctrine of the Trinity: God's own life is defined without sufficient attention to his act of reconciliation and redemption as itself material to understanding the nature of his in se life.

Rethinking the Mission of Short Term Missions

Thursday, October 22, 2009 |

Brian Howell over at Wheaton College has recently published an article in the October 2009 issue of International Bulletin of Missionary Research that points out how the location of mission is typically decontextualized as an "Other," so that the point of missions is the valor and sacrifice of the missionary effort itself. Despite post-colonial sensitive rhetoric that proclaims "we're not going to mess with the culture," this leads to a refusal to engage the culture and learn from it.


Here's an excerpt:

In this article I focus on four elements of short-term mission
practice that contribute to decontextualization. First, participants
in short-term missions strive rhetorically to present
what they are doing as something distinct from tourism, with
the unintended consequence of losing focus on the context to
which they are going. Second, the language of “missionary call”
as understood in short-term mission practice works against
engagement with the specific realities of a particular location.
Third, the meaning of mission embedded within short-term
mission too often leads to a mission based on plight and need.
Fourth, post-trip pictorial representations of short-term mission
trips meant to connect the sending congregation to the experience
of STM become, paradoxically, a means of distancing the
Other and decontextualizing the place visited. In these ways,
the mode of travel unique to short-term missions can create a
construal of what mission is or means. In my research a valued
quality on the part of potential team members was openness in
regard to the group of which they would be a member, the task
to which they would be assigned, and the destination to which
they would go. The meaning of “mission” came to be a kind of
sacrificial availability for carrying out an assigned task and a lack
of connection to any particular place. Together, sacrificial availability
and nonspecificity of location worked to position every trip
as first and foremost a journey to accomplish a specific task and
to meet needs “out there.” The language used privileged activity
over destination and reinforced seeing a relationship between
the need for missions (both long-term and short-term) and the
necessity of “bringing” something to a place where there was
some demonstrable lack. Because every trip was “mission” and
all missions involved meeting needs or accomplishing projects,
every trip, regardless of destination, became a movement from
plenty to want, from have to have-not, from wealth to poverty.
Mission became, in the words of Native American church leader
Craig Smith, “plight-based ministry.”

Discovering the Work of Kenneth Bailey: Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes

Saturday, October 17, 2009 |

Recently, I've had the pleasure of meeting Ken Bailey, who formerly taught New Testament at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo. He attends New Wilmington Presbyterian Church, where I'm currently working as a pastoral intern for the year. Ken has written a splendid book called Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels.


The book features examinations of the life and ministry of Jesus, specifically the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, Jesus' relationship to women and to the parables. As someone who lived in Middle East for over 40 years, Bailey challenges our muted Western reading, exciting our imagination with what the audience would've heard (and what they were probably thinking!). This brings the gospels to life in a way that will benefit the scholar, the pastor and the layperson.

I'm still working through it, but here are some excerpts from his treatment of Luke 5:1-11, a story in which we, as Western readers, typically focus on "the miraculous catch" as an end in itself.

On the climax of the "great catch," Bailey writes:
"The fine points of the manner in which it unfolds demonstrate its authenticity as a Middle Eastern account. Peter does not call his partners in the other boat. He beckons. Sound carries seven times further over water than it does over land. If Peter calls his mates, his voice will most likely be heard on the shore. Has a new spring suddenly opened on the lake floor? Has a new fishing bank formed under water where fish are currently feeding? If so, there is no need for the entire community to have such information. A sudden flood of competing fishermen converging on that spot is the last thing Peter wants. Financial secrets need to be kept. It is best not to raise one's voice but simply to wave to the other boat! . . . Jesus approaches Peter at the point of Peter's greatest strength: his ability as a fisherman. What shocks Peter most deeply perhaps is not the "miraculous catch' (as it is often called) but the fact that he, Peter, is suddenly faced with a man who had made a real choice between God and mammon. All night, every night, Peter and his team plied their trade in the hope of netting a great catch. Their sleep was punctuated with vivid dreams of that faint possibility. It's akin to winning the lottery, or like a day trader who busy shares every morning hoping against hope for the lucky day when those stocks will jump dramatically in price before nightfall and he will make a windfall. Peter is a fisherman! This net-tearing, boat-swamping catch can greatly enrich him and his team. At last he his the jackpot! ... So why was Jesus, a penniless rabbi without a "real job" wandering around teaching people for nothing? How could God possibly be more important than two boatloads of fresh fish? Evidently Jesus cared more about God and people than he did about acquiring wealth. Who was this man who made such an amazing decision? Jesus found himself face to face with a person who challenged his priorities on the deepest level." (141-2)

Douglas Campbell’s Radical Rhetorical Analyses of Romans 1:18-3:20

Tuesday, August 18, 2009 |

Douglas Campbell, in the last chapter of his book The Quest for Paul’s Gospel , offers an even more radical reinterpretation of Romans 1:18-3:20 in comparison to Tobin’s modest rhetorical account. Campbell wants to place Paul’s own theological commitments further along in the letter, so that 1:18-3:20 contains premises that Paul attacks via “a masterpiece of ironic subversion,” which utilizes “argumentative reductions.” The traditional reading, which Campbell dubs the “JF model” (Justification-by-Faith), assumes that Paul is laying out his own position on justification and needs to craft 1:18-3:20 in order to create “a preparatory phase that will leave ‘everyone’ (‘Jews and Gentiles’) unsaved, and anxious as to how to be saved.” Campbell notes that it is difficult to find interpreters of Romans that break out of this camp, which unfortunately includes the early Barth as well as Käsemann. Seeking to provide a proper context for the gospel’s proclamation that begins in 3:21, 1:18-3:20 is read as an exposition of the pre-Christian state. “Consequently some deployment of general revelation or natural theology is automatically required.” Furthermore, a principle of divine retributive justice is at work in Paul according to the JF model.
1:18-2:8 is deemed to be the first of a three-part phase in the argument of 1:18-3:20, whereby Paul establishes “a necessary, innate, universal perception of the key principle that divine judgment will take place ultimately in accordance with works of the law, a principle based in turn, as we have already noted, on a divine nature defined in terms of retributive justice. Soteriology is strictly meritocratic. It is this principle that will undergird both Paul’s overarching strategy of ‘indictment,’ and his concern to include Jews within this judgment.” In 2:1, Paul then universalizes the point that all will be judged according to their own works. The second phase, Romans 2:9-3:9a, seeks to override any special pleading by Jews in order to escape this principle of judgment on the basis of works alone; “so things like possession of, and instruction in, the law (2.17-24), circumcision (2.25-29), and covenantal privilege (3.1-9a) are brushed aside.” The JF model believes that this move by Paul is an attempt “to level the playing field.” The third phase, Romans 3:9-20, “establishes the sinfulness of all humanity through massed scriptural quotation. A catena drawn from various books solemnly reiterates that ‘there is no-one who is righteous/discerning/a seeker of [etc.]’.” Campbell notes a number of problems with this reading of 1:18-3:20, which includes the use of “general revelation, the justice of God, salvation by desert, and the role of law-observance in relation to the foregoing, which seem inconsistent with Paul’s stated positions elsewhere, and in terms of his broader backdrop of late Second Temple Judaism.”
For our purposes, we will focus on the contradictory usage of natural knowledge of God in Romans 1:19-20. It is clear that for the argument in 1:18-3:20 to work, the Gentiles need to be held accountable to the law, albeit it in a different way. Thus, general revelation is the mode by which accountability for sin is secured. The problem with this is that it seems to contradict what Paul has to say against “the capacity of the wisdom of the world to know anything useful about God” in 1 Corinthians 1:18-29, where Paul speaks of the confounding of wisdom through the “message of the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18).
It seems to me that one could argue that Romans 1:22 (“Claiming to be wise, they became fools”) also uses the language of foolishness and wisdom. In both texts, both Gentile and Jewish wisdom are being confounded, precisely because both have assumed a position of wisdom apart from God. It is true that in 1 Corinthians Paul makes the gospel (the message of the cross) to be the scandal, whereas in Romans Paul already has a scandal up and running through the knowledge of God in creation. But is this really a contradiction? It depends largely on how we read Paul’s anthropology elsewhere. Campbell notes that Paul’s encounter with Jesus makes no use of Paul’s prior commitments, but portrays it as “a divine irruption that cut across his own previous understanding and activity.” Furthermore, human nature in Romans 7:7-25 is “difficult to reconcile with a relatively unobstructed perception of divinity; it seems totally incapacitated – literally, enslaved to the flesh – as against innately informed but prone to idolatry (etc.) and hence merely culpable. (That is, it seems too sinful at times to even know this).” Finally, Paul states in Romans 8:7: “For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed it cannot.”
Campbell elaborates many other points against the JF reading of 1:18-3:20, which establishes universal human culpability at the cost of attributing to Paul a soteriology that is still fundamentally based on justification through works of the law to please a god of retributive justice through highly individualistic law-observance, a redefined Judaism without privilege that contradicts Romans 9-11, a problematic use of the “righteous Gentiles” (2:13-15, 26-29), a relatively weak attack on Jewish sinfulness (2:17-24), and a misrepresentation of Judaism that makes the conclusion in 3:19-20 to be premature and inadequate for what will be said in 3:21 and following. At this point it should be clear why we must at least register Campbell’s view, for if what is said about natural knowledge of God cannot be attributed to Paul based on Campbell’s rhetorical analysis, then we have taken away a key passage used to muster support for natural theology in all its forms. If the JF reading is found wanting, which Campbell believes it is, what alternative reading does he provide?
Campbell argues that we should view 1:18-3:20 in terms of an “ad hominem strategy” against supposed Teachers who are preaching “another Gospel.” This critique begins
by recapitulating the probable elenchic or condemnatory opening of the position that it intends to ultimately undermine. It begins by mimicking its opponent. In this way Paul flushes out a critical soteriological presupposition in the preaching that he is unhappy with, namely desert (which his rivals may not even have been aware that they were strongly committed to). He then drives their subsequent concern onto this principle in a series of devastating reductions. The result of these moves is the discrediting of the entire programme, in its own terms.

Thus, the JF reading remains intact, but Paul is distanced from the position of the text itself, thus getting him “off the hook” from all the problems previously discussed. Instead, in 1:18-32 Paul gets the listener to hear a message which may sound stirring at first but whose consequences are soon revealed to be quite terrible. The teachers have conceded that the Gentiles have “their own innate law,” and so salvation will be through works for everyone. God will judge with strict impartiality, so that neither is the Jew advantaged or the Gentile disadvantaged. The presence of the “righteous Gentiles” is used by Paul as a way to show that “Gentiles who have been saved by this gospel might “actually condemn – and even mock – Jews who have not been saved by desert (and will that category include the Teachers themselves? . . .). It is used to confute the fundamental objective of the Teachers – Gentile conversion – and adds a note of potential humiliation to that irrelevance. The point is simply a strict extrapolation of the basic principles underlying ‘turn or burn’ theology of natural revelation, divine retributive justice, and meritocratic soteriology.” By this extrapolation, Paul concludes in 3:19-20a: “ ‘You, the Teachers, and everybody else, will fail to be saved by works. You will not be declared righteous on the Day of Judgment, and so you will be condemned. In short, your gospel – your good news of salvation – will save no one, not even you, the people who are proclaiming it’ (a pretty crippling reduction, one would have thought).” It is the Teachers who have redefined Judaism. The meritocratic soteriology is countervailed by the scriptures citing universal sinfulness. Thus, while Paul believes in universal sinfulness, his point is not to establish this belief but to undermine the Teachers. The ad hominem strategy is utilized by Paul to reduce their arguments to absurdity.
Campbell finally explores three possible objections to this reading. First regards Greek word gar (γὰρ) in 1:18, which suggest that the ground of the Gospel in 1:16-17 is in the argument for universal sinfulness in 1:18-3:20. While Campbell concedes that this is a possible reading of gar, it is used so many times in Romans (around 145 times!). “And while it can denote causality or reason, it can also signify looser relationship of mere clarification and inference (cp. BDAG: 189-90).” Thus, the best possible reading of 1:18-3:20 should determine its translation, not the other way around. Second, it is objected that Paul is citing obvious antecedents in OT literature in 1:18-32, as well as Intertestamental literature such as Wisdom, so Paul must be using it for his own purposes. However, it is more likely that Paul’s opponents are the ones who are citing this literature. The third and final objection regards how Paul’s readers would recognize the ad hominem strategy. Were they sophisticated enough to understand it? “Ironic, and simply directly satirical textual strategies are evident throughout the extant texts of this general era.” Thus, not only Paul’s hearers but Paul himself was quite well-versed in these strategies, and Paul shows great use of them in passages such as the “fool’s speech” in 2 Corinthians 11:16-12:11, or the play on wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1:17-2:16 which we discussed earlier. How would the audience recognize it? Campbell argues that irony is not supposed to make itself so obvious, and so a faithful performed reading of the text would be expected to confound the listeners of Rome.
Paul and Doug in Conversation:
Overall, I find Campbell’s analysis compelling. While he has shed light on the issues of the JF reading, he has provided a very interesting account that is successful in dealing with the problematic passages. Where I find Campbell’s analysis wanting is in his failure to raise the other obvious objection regarding the parallel of God’s revealing of righteousness and wrath in 1:17 and 1:18 respectively. This is why we treated 1:18 with 1:19-21- to show the interconnection of God’s wrath with the role natural knowledge of God plays for Paul. While Campbell is able to deny natural revelation, he has almost nothing to say at all about the wrath of God – although this is presumably what he calls the “turn or burn” theology of the Teachers. One question that Campbell must deal with is the use of wrath in the rest of Romans, which does not seem to be out of place at all in 1:18. On the one hand, the discussion of wrath comes so suddenly that it does seem to make an awkward transition from 1:16-17, even if we seek to understand it in light of what Paul says about the gospel and God’s righteousness. This awkward transition could bolster Campbell’s account that something new has indeed begun (something that does not belong to Paul’s own thought!).
However, it is wrath and the ungodliness of all that makes the Creator/creature distinction so palpable in the rest of Romans, and while Campbell’s reading wants to focus on our participation in Christ, the apocalyptic wrath against humanity needs to be heard as a faithful witness to the Gospel for the sake of humanity. Campbell seems dead set against 1:18-3:20 because he only conceives of it as a preparation to hear the gospel and thus wants to deny all natural theology. But none of our commentators nor Barth believe this to be the case because they have read 1:18 in light of 1:16-17. Thus, the JF model is a bit more complex than Campbell is willing to admit. Still, it remains to be seen how he will deal with this complexity when his new book, The Deliverance of God, which has only been a suggestive strategy up until this point.

Paul and Karl in Conversation: Romans 1:18-21

In his exegesis of 1:18-21 in his Romans Commentary, Barth has stayed consistent with our own reading and with the major commentaries of Wright, Käsemann, Keck and Jewett. He has rightly sought to capture the connections between 1:16-17 to 1:18 and 1:18 to 1:19-21 by showing the priority of the gospel of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and then connecting wrath to the problems of idolatry in 1:19-21. Furthermore, his attack on natural theology, religion, pietism as projections of human being onto divine being embodies Paul’s attack against ungodliness and unrighteousness. Barth anticipates Paul’s universal scope with regard to both the gospel and wrath, and views Paul’s use of natural knowledge as a way to level the playing field. Like the commentators, there is no way to get around natural knowledge of God in Paul for Barth, and so even as his Romans commentary rails against natural theology, he is still sensitive enough to the text not to undermine or ignore what he sees there. The purpose of natural knowledge is for both Paul and Karl one that applies to all of humanity. It is precisely the fact that Paul does not speak of the Gentiles that the reader or listener would suddenly realize that 1:18-32 is against all ungodliness and not just a rehearsal of the standard Jewish critique of Gentile religion. But because Barth’s scope is already universal at the outset, he does not comment on anything related to the distinctions between Jew and Gentile here. There is no sense of Paul’s rhetorical finesse in Barth. Instead, natural knowledge is simply a given entity. Barth does not engage in historical-critical method at this point, and thus the scandal of universalizing sinfulness not just to the Gentile but also to the Jew is lost.
Karl most importantly seeks to emphasize the Creator-creature distinction, the distance between God and humanity. For Romans, this distinction is fundamental. It is the apocalyptic in-breaking of eternity into time that allows for Barth to speak of the gospel in the form of wrath for the one who rebels against God. The natural knowledge of God is not only a source of universal accountability for sin, but Barth goes beyond Paul back to the creation narrative to show how the search for knowledge is one that seeks superiority over God. The closest thing we get to this selfishness is actually in Romans 1:22 (“Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”). Yet this is precisely what Barth’s account of sinfulness seeks to gravitate towards. Where he becomes less precise is in failing to mark the distinction between ungodliness and unrighteousness, whereby the latter is echoing the righteousness of God in 1:17. Still, this is nit-picking, since Barth has already assumed a divide between time and eternity and between humanity and God.
Overall, then, Karl gets Paul basically right here. Karl is obviously railing against forms of natural theology in his own time, whereby people project themselves into the place of God and then use religion as a means of control over God. It shows great care with the text that he did not ignore the modest use of natural knowledge of God in Paul, but sought to use it himself for a similar purpose – i.e., depicting that the wrath of God is against everyone because all have sinned and rebelled against God. This universal wrath is grounded in the universal gospel in 1:16-17.

Edwin Friedman's A Failure of Nerve


A book that was recommended to me by a pastoral mentor has been very influential in getting me to think about leadership in a new way. Since many of you are involved (or will be involved) in leadership of institutions, I would highly recommend you read "A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix" by Edwin Friedman. Friedman studied Bowen family systems theory and pioneered its application on a macro level towards institutions like the church and even society at large. The main challenge that Friedman puts to us is this: Will we be driven as leaders by our own convictions as well-differentiated individuals, or will we be be driven by the anxiety of others as poorly-differentiated individuals? While there are limits to the way Friedman frames interpersonal relationships (i.e., some of his assertions rely on outdated understandings of evolution and biology, which is an aspect overemphasized), I think his angle is a much-needed one for leaders in the church to consider.

Emails from Crazy People: View Obstruction Part Deux

Saturday, August 15, 2009 |

This is unbelievable and hilarious! (H/T Travis)

Karl Barth Blog Conference 2009 Begins Tomorrow!

The Karl Barth Blog Conference 2009 is convening tomorrow! The tentative schedule should run thus:

  • Introduction (Travis McMaken)

  • Day 1:Calvin and Barth Sitting in a Tree, EX-E-GE-T-I-N-G (Travis McMaken; response by Jason Ingalls)

  • Day 2:St. Paul and the Possibility of Natural Knowledge of God in Romans 1 by Shane Wilkens; Response by Lynn Cohick

  • Day 3: Barth’s Exegesis of Romans 1 in his 2nd Edition of Romans(title tentative: David Congdon; response by Halden Doerge)

  • Day 4: Resurrection in Barth’s Rejection of Natural Theology: Romans 1.4 in Barth’s 2nd Edition of Romans (title tentative: Nathan Hitchcock, University of Edinburgh; Response by John Drury)

  • Day 5: Barth’s Exegesis in the Shorter Commentary on Romans (title tentative: Shannon Smythe, Princeton Theological Seminary)

PTS Updates Website

I can't tell you how relieved I am that Princeton Seminary finally updated its web page. The previous one was very difficult to navigate, but this one is simple, featuring drop-down menus and nice curvature. I'm also glad to see Princeton Profiles have been added, which help personalize the institution a bit more.

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