Archive for the 'Theologians' Category

John Henry Newman

Published
by
DWM
on August 23, 2007
in Anglicanism, Hooker, Rowan Williams, Theologians and Theology and other
. 3 Comments

I was meeting with my advisor yesterday, and we spoke briefly about JH Newman. The prof asked me where I saw myself fitting in theologically in the Anglican tradition. I didn’t quite know how to respond I remain poorly read in many of the Anglican theologians with whom I would align myself. I guess I could have answered Rowan Williams, but that would have been to evade the obvious question. I think he was asking me if I align myself with a robust (ahem, catholic) theological tradition that looks to Aquinas, etc. for its systematic and philosophical guidance. Seeing as how he is a Newman scholar, I suppose he would have expected something like Newman. Guessing that, I sincerely noted that I hoped to be better read in Newman upon the end of my degree.  Add to that Hooker, Cranmer, Taylor, all the Cambridge Platonists, Farrer, Blake, and Herbert - and those are just the Anglicans!

DJW at ipsumesse has offered two meaty posts on Newman - the first is a brief, but helpful introduction to Newman (the man and theologian) that will help you develop a coat hook, so to speak, upon which you can hang the content of … the 2nd post, on Conscience. His exposition of conscience in Newman leads to an interesting comment on Intelligent Design:

It is interesting to note the contrast between Newman’s view and that of contemporary ‘Intelligent design’ proponents. Newman states flat out that “I believe in design because I believe in God; not in God because I see design”. Perhaps all ‘ID’ theorists should bear in mind that “The Almighty is something infinitely different from a principle, or a centre of action, or a quality, or a generalisation of phenomena”.

I imagine the difficult thing for some of us (Anglicans) with Newman is reconciling our appreciation for his work, and maybe even pursuing it on either academic or personal levels, with his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

TLOU Podcast 1 - von Balthasar in a very small, badly arranged nutshell

Published
by
DWM
on August 8, 2007
in Balthasar, Systematic Theology, Theologians and Theology and other
. 17 Comments

Introducing our very first podcast. <hold the fanfare, please>
We’re trying something new today. Some of you asked me to post the introduction to Balthasar I did earlier this year at St. Marks. So, here it is, although I must first make the following disclaimer: the file is rather large (32.4mb), the sound quality is poor, and I say “um” a lot… really, I can’t believe that I talk like that. The sound quality we can address in the future, but I think I may be doomed as a public speaker. I can only hope that my secondary students have been so enrapt by the content of my lesson plans that they haven’t noticed me stumbling over my ums.

An audio introduction to von Balthasar. Right click to download

For future podcasts and our regular feed please subscribe in your reader and/or iTunes here.

Response to Love Alone

Published
by
Jefe
on August 2, 2007
in Balthasar, Culture, Incarnation, Inner City, Suffering and Theology and other
. 7 Comments

The following is a response by Jefe G, a fellow resident of the DC area, to the series of posts on Balthasar’s Love Alone and Fathers Day. Jefferson agreed to let us share it here as a guest post - hopefully not his last! Thanks, Jefe. - DWM

I didn’t have the best experience with the first Balthasar book I read, so [the recent series of posts on The Land of Unlikeness] convinced me to give him another chance.
I was surprised that when I was about half halfway through Balthasar’s Love Alone is Credible, I started to feel something like a heaviness of suffering in the text. I was flipping to the title page to see the publication date for its proximity to WWII, when I noticed the description of the Auschwitz Sacred Heartcover photograph. The cover of my edition has a picture of an etching from a wall at a cell in Auschwitz of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I was almost relieved that I wasn’t the only one who saw in Balthasar’s slim book something absolutely ludicrous. Because just as scratching Jesus into a Nazi death camp cell wall is ludicrous, so is maintaining a belief that we remain ordered toward love, and that we are welcomed into that love, despite being absolutely aware of the enormity of human suffering today. Continue reading ‘Response to Love Alone’

Neo-scholasticism and Reno, redux

Published
by
DWM
on July 31, 2007
in Balthasar, Education, Fergus Kerr, Systematic Theology, Theologians, Theological Education and Theology and other
. 2 Comments

Fergus Kerr: 20th Century Catholic TheologiansI wanted to draw attention to a comment made last week. Because it pertains to a post made several months ago, I fear many of us might miss it - I would probably miss most comments if I didn’t have them emailed to me - and I would hate to see it forgotten. Go here and here for the original posts. I hope Tony, the author of it, won’t mind me posting a snippet of it here. Oh, and, Welcome and Thanks for the contribution, Tony! Send me your email address if you see this.
Continue reading ‘Neo-scholasticism and Reno, redux’

Love Alone: the marriage of Theology and Aesthetics

Published
by
DWM
on June 8, 2007
in Balthasar, Theologians and Theology and other
. 9 Comments

Sunday I’ll be walking the parishoners of St. Marks’ through some rudimentary tidbits of Balthasar’s scheme, such as the analogia entis and his book Love Alone as a bitesized version of his Herrlichkeit, The Glory of the Lord. I photocopied a couple pages and the conclusion today in preparation for the class. As I did so, I was struck, as so often before, by the sheer volume of Balthasar’s corpus, and briefly by the futility in presenting Balthasar’s project in 45 minutes. But what I like in time and comprehensiveness, I believe I’ll make up in ambition and excitement.

Love Alone itself is nicely structured and lends itself to a quick presentation; although, maybe not 45 minutes-quick… The layout is simple:
I. What is the core, essential aspect of Christianity? “What is specifically Christian about Christianity?”
A. Not its cosmology
B. Not its anthropology
C. Rather, “God’s message is theological, or better theo-pragmatic. It is an act of God on man; an act done for and on behalf of man–and only then to man, and in him. It is of this act that we must say: it is credible only as love–and here we mean God’s own love, the manifestation of which is the manifestation of the glory of God.” (7-8) And so, Balthasar here inextricably links soteriology and aesthetics via Revelation. Continue reading ‘Love Alone: the marriage of Theology and Aesthetics’

As usual, Business

Published
by
DWM
on June 4, 2007
in Balthasar and Theology and other
. 0 Comments

Last week, I posted a photo of Johnny Depp, from his role as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean III. As a result of my inclusion of that photo and the current interest in the movie among the masses, TLOU has received a crazy number of hits this week. So, if you’re new to this blog, and even if you’re just here for the photo of Johnny, welcome. Hopefully you’ll stay for the content, which I’ll admit is not usually along mass-media lines.
AD and I are in the midst of a unit on Theology and Art in the adult education at St. Mark’s. Yesterday, AD presented Auden’s Ars Poetica, The Sea and the Mirror, a continuation of sorts of the Tempest in poem form. AD had originally hoped to record it and post it here, as our first podcast. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, but I think he plans to share an outline and/or some of the more salient points of the discussion - maybe he’ll even share one of his Auden songs with us, so there may yet be a podcast!

I’m up next Sunday with a discussion of Balthasar’s opus proposal, which I was delighted (and somewhat chagrined after reading a heft chunk of the Herrlichkeitto find nicely summed up in Love Alone. Per Caritatem has hosted a cool series on Love Alone, so please visit her. I’m really interested in Balthasar’s turn to the irrational via the concept of Love to explain the core of Christianity and delineate the task of the theologian. So, I hope to share some of that with you all over the next few days (as I come up with it).

Vanhoozer nearly kills monkey

Published
by
DWM
on May 30, 2007
in Vanhoozer
. 3 Comments

For those of you that know me, you’ll remember that I spent three really formative and harrowing years under the tutelage of Kevin Vanhoozer in Deerfield, IL. Well, some of you may also know that during that time I helped KJV in a really small way by reading the first few chapter drafts of his Drama of Doctrine (I even got a thanks in the book for my small part). Anyway, I found this really delightful blog post on the DofD that I thought I’d share with you all. Enjoy

2007 Michael Ramsey Prize for theological writing

Published
by
DWM
on May 22, 2007
in Anglicanism, Rowan Williams and Theologians
. 1 Comment

Rowan Williams has awarded the 2007 Michael Ramsey prize to the master of the worldwide order of Dominican Friars, Timothy Radcliffe for his book What is the Point of Being a Christian?

While I would like to see the award used to highlight excellent Anglican scholarship, since academic theology gets relatively little attention (whether by Anglicans or otherwise), hopefully the award will raise more awarness about Michael Ramsey’s work.

I suggest to you that as the Cross and the resurrection were the spearhead of the gospel’s relevance and potency in the first century, so they can be also for our contemporary world. Ours is a world full of suffering and frustration: of what significance to it is Jesus who lived and died nearly two thousand years ago? The answer is chiefly this: that in the death and resurrection he shows not only the way for human beings, but the true image of God himself. Is there, within or beyond our suffering and frustrated universe, any purpose, way, meaning, sovereignty? We answer, yes, and the death and resurrection of Jesus portray this purpose, way, meaning, and sovereignty as living through dying, as losing self to find self, as the power of sacrificial love.

Thanks to Ben for the link.

Yves Congar discusses Tradition

Published
by
DWM
on May 16, 2007
in Art, Polity, Scripture, Theological Education and Vanhoozer
. 5 Comments

There’s been two recent posts this week that quote at length from Yves Congar’s The Meaning of Tradition. Some of Congar’s ideas in the Intro relate to the recent discussion here re: Milinerd’s and Reno’s comments on Theological Education and Art Discourse, so I thought I would quote a small bit.

Paul Claudel compared tradition with a man walking. In order to move forward he must push off from the ground, with one foot raised and the other on the ground; if he kept both feet on the ground or lifted both in the air, he would be unable to advance. If tradition is a continuity that goes beyond conservatism, it is also a movement and a progress that goes beyond mere continuity, but only on condition that, going beyond conservation for its own sake, it includes and preserves the positive values gained, to allow a progress that is not simply a repetition of the past. Tradition is memory, and memory enriches experience. If we remembered nothing it would be impossible to advance; the same would be true if we were bound to a slavish imitation of the past. True tradition is not servility but fidelity.

This is clear enough in the field of art. Tradition conceived as the handing down of set formulas and the enforced and servile imitation of models learned in the classroom would lead to sterility; even if there were an abundant output of works of art, they would be stillborn. Tradition always implies learning from others, but the academic type of docility and imitation is not the only one possible: there is also the will to learn from the experience of those who have studied and created before us; the aim of this lesson is to receive the vitality of their inspiration and to continue their creative work in its original spirit, which thus, in a new generation, is born again with the freedom, the youthfulness and the promise that it originally possessed.

At last year’s AAR, Hans Boersma gave a paper in response to Vanhoozer’s Drama of Doctrine in which he suggested that Vanhoozer could benefit from appropriating Congar into his overall picture of how doctrine is developed and implemented. I confess that I don’t remember much of his paper and can’t find it in article form online. But I think the salient point is that inherent even to a proposal as generous as Vanhoozer’s is the tension between the Protestant and Catholic relationship to scripture, the (sometimes) radical individualism of sola scriptura and the perceived crustiness and equally rigid rules of tradition. In Congar’s words:

[S]ince the Reformation there is controversy between Christians on “Scripture versus tradition”, a controversy on the rule of faith.

And the dualism goes on…

Three Views of the Eucharist? (Eventual) ruminations on the place of the Eucharist in Anglican theology

Published
by
DWM
on May 13, 2007
in Anglicanism, Dogmatics, Hooker, Polity, Rowan Williams and Systematic Theology
. 1 Comment

Per Caritatem has an interesting 3 part series on a Reformed View of the Eucharist by Mike Vendsel that just ended last thursday. Vendsel reviews Douglas Farrow’s article, “Between the Rock and a Hard Place: In Support of (something like) a Reformed View of the Eucharist”. I must confess, I didn’t know there was such a thing. Just goes to show the state of catechesis when I was growing up. Farrow’s article basically posits two views: 1.is the “traditional” reformed view that attempts to safeguard a notion of Christ’s ontological body, existing in space and time, quite distinct from the sacramental elements. This perspective reminds me of something a youth leader said to me back in high school: “We don’t have sacraments; we have ordinances.” At the time, I took him to be mincing words, but since then I have come to wonder if it really wasn’t just an excuse to not deal with the tensions of being in a rather new tradition that has failed to articulate a metaphysic. Anyway, the problem with this for Farrow is how it radically seperates our materiality from Christ’s, and the Gnostic connotation of the worshipper engaged in some mental/spiritual connection to Christ.

The 2nd view is is the RC perspective, best articulated by Thomas, summarized by Farrow:

“by virtue of His divine omnipresence and omnipotence as the Logos, Jesus is able to provide on earth a eucharistic form of His humanity under the accidents of bread and wine, making present (albeit non-spatially) the actual substance of His exalted body and blood” (p. 171)

Calvin provides the foil to this view. For Calvin, the power of the Eucharist is not in dilluting Christ’s humanity, but rather in transporting us to heaven in union with Christ - a kind of beatific experience, it seems.

I won’t summarize the rest of the posts from Per Caritatem here, but rather direct your attention to the links to each post: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

The series followed a post on an article on the Eucharist by Catherine Pickstock, “Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist.” The post highlights Pickstock’s work with “Desire” and the allegory of the Grail. Here’s an interesting quote from Pickstock that seems to encapsulate most of the summary from Per Caritatem:

“Thus we can see that what the Eucharist is is desire. Although we know via desire, or wanting to know, and this circumstance alone resolves the aporia of learning, beyond this we discover that what there is to know is desire. But not desire as absence, lack and perpetual postponement; rather, desire as the free flow of actualization, perpetually renewed and never foreclosed” (pp. 178-179).

These posts got me thinking about how one might capture the distinctiveness of an Anglican view of the Eucharist. Rowan Williams talks about Hooker’s doctrine of Christology and Sacraments in his book, Anglican Identities. A major theme Williams brings out is Hooker’s emphasis of the incarnation as the redemption (or “restoration”) of humanity via the work of the Holy Spirit, not simply a relationship of solidarity by virtue of his being human: “it is a relation with a humanity itself already transfigured (not annihilated)by the outpouring of a divine gift.” The Holy Spirit can act upon and through us in multiple ways, including by not limited to the Eucharist - however one may theorize the relationship of Christ to the elements.

“Papist error about the Eucharist is less in the doctrine of transubstantiation as such than in the insistence on this as the only legitimate account of how Christ acts… Hooker can say, boldly, ‘there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us (67.2, p. 358); [similarly] Herbert argues that Christ died for humanity, not for bread, so it is the former that needs changing…”

While Hooker doesn’t seem to want to spend a lot of time fleshing out the metaphysics of the Sacraments, the point is clear: Christ acts on us through his gifts. “Receive the gift of divine action and the effects of divine action follow - in Christ’s humanity, in the bread and the wine, in the holy person.”