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Around the web

Here's a few things that have caught my attention on the internet lately:

I discovered that there is a Yahoo! group exclusively for discussing the theology of Jürgen Moltmann (here) which needless to say I have joined. Through this I came across this excellent lecture given by Moltmann last year on the themes of trust, God, and reconciliation which you can watch for free (requires Windows Media or Real Player). There's also this article on 9/11 and the End of the World which contained this great quote:

"For the Christian faith, the power for new beginning is central, not coercion to perfect world history or the apocalyptic command to destroy this world. The goal of Christian hope is the beginning of life, not the end of the world. The foundation of this hope are Christ's resurrection and Christians' ability to begin new projects in history."

Good stuff. Jon's Journal seems to be up and running again, P G Epps has an interesting post on penal substitution that is worth reading and Parableman has a few thoughts on the New Perspective on Paul. There's also a couple of new blogs (or new to me at least) that are worth adding to your list of regular reads; firstly is Deep Soil and also Sean Doherty's blog. Sean is a big League of Gentlemen fan, so you know he's got his head screwed on right. Lastly, Less Travelled offers a sensible response to some of the criticism of the Emergent Church that has been going on over at Emergent No.

I'm also in the process of adding a whole load more links to theology blogs etc and they should appear in the sidebar soon. If you want to be added or you know of a good site that I should link to then pop the details in the comments section.

Book review: What The Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge to Fundamentalists by Keith Ward

 

Author: Keith Ward (former Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford)

Themes: The Bible, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, doctrine

Length: 182 pages

Content: 8/10

Readability: 9/10

Price: £9.99 Amazon and SPCK, £6.81 Book Depository

"I have tried to set out what the Bible teaches on a number of issues that fundamentalists get wrong…On all of these subjects the Bible actually teaches the opposite of what fundamentalists say...They impose an authoritarian interpretation of the Bible that is as dogmatic as any medieval Catholic theology, and usually less informed. They make their faith even more exclusive than that of those Catholics who claimed that there is no salvation outside of the church. And they make intellectual assent to ‘sound’ doctrines a more important test of Christian faith than life by the Spirit…The greatest tragedy of fundamentalism is that it gets the Bible wrong.”

Read the full review below:

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Theologians quiz explained

I’ve already done some explanatory notes for the eschatology quiz, so by request here’s some blurb on some of the theologians that were in the quiz. They are a fairly eclectic bunch, but all (with perhaps the exception of Finney) are outstanding Christian thinkers. Here’s a little about each one, in chronological order.

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An evening quote

From Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written during his imprisonment by the Nazis in 1944:

"God allows himself to be pushed out of the world on to the cross. God is powerless and weak in the world and only as such and in such a way is he with us and helps us. According to Matthew 8:17 it is clear that Christ does not help us because of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness, his suffering! Here is the decisive difference to other religions.... only the suffering God can help us. "

So burn me at the stake then

I'm getting really tired and discouraged with biblicism. I mean where the idea of a theological discussion is simply a matter of hurling Bible verses around, as though a Bible verse never requires any further explanation and is self-interpreting. I mean this kind of thing:

"Jesus said that he was the absolute truth and the only way to the Father (John 14). Thus postmodern Christianity is wrong." What?

"The Emergent Church is just influenced by culture. They need to get back to the Bible." Please tell us how you have somehow managed to interpret the Bible apart from your culture? We're all ears.

I've never so much as set foot in an Emergent Church meeting, yet I've found myself becoming a bit of an apologist for them on various other blogs. I just get so downhearted by the cynicism and negativity ('biblical discernment') with which other Christians are trying to stifle and slander ('correct') the emergent movement. Worse still, no one outside the movement seems to have offered a better way to engage with postmodernism except to perhaps bury their heads in the sand. Perhaps why they talk out of their backsides so much.

Theology Quizzes

I haven't managed to write all that I wanted this week so rather lazily I'm going to submit these three quizzes to the Christian Carnival over at Reformed Politics. Take the quizzes and let me know what your answers are!

Quiz #1: What's your theological standpoint? Are you a postmodern type, or perhaps Catholic? You know you're evangelical - but are you Reformed or Wesleyan? Do miracles still happen today? Take this test and see how you score.

Quiz #2: Which famous theologian are you most like? Calvin? Augustine? Tillich? Moltmann? A shorter quiz you can take and see whose theology most closely matches yours.

Quiz #3: What's your eschatology? Are you a pre-, a-, or post- millenialist? Maybe you think that the Left Behind books are closest to the truth? What about preterism? Take this quiz and find out. Be sure to check out the explanatory notes here.

Some explanations for the quizzes part 1

It seems that from the comments and e-mails I've had on the quizzes that I should do a little explaining. For each quiz there are a number of possible outcomes. For example in the theologians quiz there were 10 different outcomes, and each theologian there were three quotes/statements about them. For instance Jonathan Edwards' statements were:


Sinners will be tormented in a literal lake of burning fire forever and ever (from his famous sermon 'Sinners in the hands of an angry God')

Sin is an infinite offence against an infinitely Holy God and so requires infinite punishment (an idea from which he derived his doctrine of the atonement)

The best way of expressing our love for and unity with God is music (I didn't know he'd said this, but you learn something new every day)

So for each statement, you rate the statement on a scale of 1-6, where 1 = strongly disagree and 6 = strongly agree. So to score 100% for Jonathan Edwards you would have to answer 6 6 6 (no joke intended) on all three of his statements. The process is repeated for each theologian, and they are ranked according to the statements to which you gave the most approval. So if like me you only scored 33% on Charles Finney, you would have disagreed with the three statements about him, whereas I agreed strongly with the three statements to do with Calvin, and so I scored 100%.

So that's how it works. It is by no means an exact science as you can hardly summarise each theologian in 3 statements, and there are many other theologians I could have added but space is limited. It seems from the comments here and at the Thinklings Weblog that a little explanation about eschatology is called for. So here goes:

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One last quiz...

This will be the last quiz for now. It takes 3 key doctrines from each of the theologians and you rate them accordingly. They're a fairly mixed bunch but probably the theologians I know best. Take the test here. I came out as Calvin, which I was surprised by. That said, a lot of what is called Calvinism (with which I have some strong disagreements) originated with his followers rather than Calvin himself. Here's my results:

You scored as John Calvin. Much of what is now called Calvinism had more to do with his followers than Calvin himself, and so you may or may not be committed to TULIP, though God's sovereignty is all important. John Calvin 100% Anselm 80% Karl Barth 80% Jürgen Moltmann 73% Martin Luther 67% Augustine 60% Paul Tillich 47% Jonathan Edwards 40% Friedrich Schleiermacher 40% Charles Finney 33% Which theologian are you? created with QuizFarm.com

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More quiz fun

Quizzes are fast replacing buttons as the new rock and roll. I've been following the discussions on eschatology over at the Thinklings Weblog in the last few weeks and I've devised a quiz to help people decide which side of the eschatological bread they are buttered on. Take the quiz here if you fancy it. Here's my results, no surprise to me whatsoever ;) :

You scored as Moltmannian Eschatology. Jürgen Moltmann is one of the key eschatological thinkers of the 20th Century. Eschatology is not only about heaven and hell, but God's plan to make all things new. This should spur us on to political and social action in the present. Moltmannian Eschatology 100% Amillenialist 95% Preterist 90% Postmillenialist 60% Premillenialist 55% Dispensationalist 30% Left Behind 20% What's your eschatology? created with QuizFarm.com

What's your theological worldview?

Here's a quiz I created for a bit of fun/thought. Take the quiz here and let me know what answer you came up with! (Apologies to the Orthodox Church, who I missed out.)

You scored as Neo orthodox. You are neo-orthodox. You reject the human-centredness and scepticism of liberal theology, but neither do you go to the other extreme and make the Bible the central issue for faith. You believe that Christ is God's most important revelation to humanity, and the Trinity is hugely important in your theology. The Bible is also important because it points us to the revelation of Christ. You are influenced by Karl Barth and P T Forsyth. Neo orthodox 93% Emergent/Postmodern 82% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 82% Charismatic/Pentecostal 64% Roman Catholic 57% Reformed Evangelical 46% Classical Liberal 21% Modern Liberal 18% Fundamentalist 14% What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

Enjoy, and let me know how you get on!

Mcleod Campbell on the Atonement

Richard has been urging me to read The Nature of the Atonement by John Mcleod Campbell for a long time, and finally it arrived through my letterbox last week. The book looks at the atoning work of Christ and disagrees with the penal substitutionary view of the atonement because in Mcleod Campbell's view this required that one also hold to the doctrine of limited atonement i.e. that Christ died for the elect only, not for all the world.

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N T Wright on Evangelicalism and Biblical Authority

This blog isn't just supposed to be about N T Wright, honest.

That said I found this transcript of a lecture Wright gave in 1989 on Biblical authority. He outlines the different ways in which we consider the Bible to be authoritative, but he argues that the Bible is not 'inerrant' in the sense that Evangelicals often think it is. Rather, all authority belongs to God only, and the Bible too is dependent on God for it to be authoritative. Here's a couple of interesting quotes:

"Most heirs of the Reformation, not least evangelicals, take if for granted that we are to give scripture the primary place and that everything else has to be lined up in relation to scripture.  There is, indeed, an evangelical assumption, common in some circles, that evangelicals do not have any tradition.  We simply open the scripture, read what it says, and take it as applying to ourselves: there the matter ends, and we do not have any ‘tradition’...I still find two things to be the case, both of which give me some cause for concern.  First, there is an implied, and quite unwarranted, positivism: we imagine that we are ‘reading the text, straight’, and that if somebody disagrees with us it must be because they, unlike we ourselves, are secretly using ‘presuppositions’ of this or that sort.  This is simply naïve, and actually astonishingly arrogant and dangerous.  It fuels the second point, which is that evangelicals often use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ when they mean the authority of evangelical, or Protestant, theology, since the assumption is made that we (evangelicals, or Protestants) are the ones who know and believe what the Bible is saying.  And, though there is more than a grain of truth in such claims, they are by no means the whole truth, and to imagine that they are is to move from theology to ideology. "

"It seems to be the case that the more that you insist that you are based on the Bible, the more fissiparous you become; the church splits up into more and more little groups, each thinking that they have got biblical truth right.  And in my experience of teaching theological students I find that very often those from a conservative evangelical background opt for one such view as the safe one, the one with which they will privately stick, from which they will criticize the others.  Failing that, they lapse into the regrettable (though sometimes comprehensible) attitude of temporary book-learning followed by regained positivism: we will learn for a while the sort of things that the scholars write about, then we shall get back to using the Bible straight."


"My conclusion, then, is this: that the regular views of scripture and its authority which we find not only outside but also inside evangelicalism fail to do justice to what the Bible actually is—a book, an ancient book, an ancient narrative book.  They function by tuning that book into something else, and by implying thereby that God has, after all, given us the wrong sort of book.  This is a low doctrine of inspiration, whatever heights are claimed for it and whatever words beginning with ‘in-’ are used to label it.  I propose that what we need to do is to re-examine the concept of authority itself and see if we cannot do a bit better."

It's an excellent article and well worth reading. Anyone have any thoughts?