Monday, October 29, 2018

Christophobia and the Subjectivist Turn: Welker, God the Revealed, review part 3

Welker concludes his opening section with chapters that outline, explore and attack two phenomena he identifies with the Christian West.

First he discusses Jesus Christ as a cultural icon in Western society "present in manifold ways" with the effect that "his presence is desensitizing" (p28). At the same time as Christ's ubiquitous cultrual presence there is a manifest resistance to any sense in which Christ might shape and influence the lives of individuals and societies in any concrete way. Generally this is present in a form of "Christophobia" (a term coined by Joseph Weiler). Even those who speak in terms of "Christian Europe" or "Christian values"  in fact "operate within a not inconsiderable Christological void" as "they are actually harboring culturally chauvinistic ideas only externally associated with Jesus Christ" (p30). He attacks both the western church in its failure to acknowledge the contextualization of its own theology and contextually motivated theology that "functionalizes" Jesus "for moral and political conflict engagement and goals" (p37).

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His chapter on subjectivist faith suggests that the Copernican shift  in knowlege of self and world came about through Descartes and Kant  who advanced the idea that "modern human beings disclose reality by concentrating first on their own consciousness and self-consciousness" (p39). This replaces theocentric and cosmocentric worldviews with anthropocentric ones. Then with the subjectivist faith of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between a person's relationship with their self and the persons relationship with the transcendent divine.  While Welker admits there are advantages to such a view, not least because it enables religious conversation "at every point of individual experience and interpersonal communication" (p42) at the same time it is an "abstract and empty faith" (p43). He concludes, "Although subjectivist faith can be criticized as a conceptually amorphous and theologically irresponsible accommodation of religiosity to modern popular philosophy, one must also recognize that a christologically confused situation made it extremely difficult to make comprehensible theological sense of the message of the imminent God in Jesus Christ." (p46)

To cultural Christophobia and subjectivism Welker promises to apply Pneumatological and Multicontextual turns. This, presumably, will be the constructive work of the rest of the book. He concludes his prolegomenon with a warning that "although the power of the divine Spirit and the reign of the resurrected Christ are indeed enormously expansive and far-reaching, they do nonetheless have clear contours." (p53)

So Welker has laid down his critique of the western world, the church, and the academy! He has certainly raised some fascinating and important issues. The question will be, can he succeed in explaining who Jesus Christ is for us in the world today? I'm also particularly interested in how he draws the contours of Spirit and Kingdom. Rightly or wrongly there are many trying to redefine those contours themselves (on various sides of the theological and political camps). Will Welker have anything new to say, or is this book just a Trojan horse for the same old agendas?



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A number of lectures available free from Regent College, which is an opportunity not to be missed because they normally charge top dollar for them.

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Thursday, October 18, 2018

Polyphonic presence: Welker, God the Revealed, review part 2

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[picture from here, bears no relation to review, but I like it! Listen here if you're into prog rock.]

Welker (MW) begins with Bonhoeffer, and what MW describes as Bonhoeffer's two legacies. First that "only the suffering God can help us" (p16-18) and second that the kingdom of God encompasses all of human life, that Christian life is essentially "multidimensional, polyphonic" in opposition to the "one-track thinking" of those without faith (p24-27).

While the first "legacy" is part of a well worn theology of the cross, dating back at least to Tertullian and continuing after Bonhoeffer with the likes of Heidegger and Moltman (p17), the second legacy has "hardly been discussed" (p23).

However, MW argues that the two legacies taken together provide a solution for Bonhoeffer's perplexing critique of religion. Bonhoeffer, he argues, refers in his critique of religion to the "religious strategy" that tries to maintain a place for God or religion in or against the world and so God becomes "a merely marginal figure, a fringe phenomenon at the boundaries" (p26).

Again MW finishes by raising questions and problems, which hopefully he will solve for us over the course of the book. "How does God encounter us in multidimensional, polyphonic reality–in the suffering Christ and in the inconspicuousness of the coming reign?" (p27).

I feel a little uneasy reading Bonhoeffer's account of the polyphonic life as something uniquely Christian. If Christian faith makes multidimensional life possible, and I think it does, then that doesn't preclude other ways of achieving it. What Bonhoeffer seems to be critiquing is the people around him in extremis and the way they react in survival mode (p24, citing DBWE 8, 404). This seems a little harsh, given the circumstances of wartime Berlin. The ability to have a wider perspective on life than the one thing in front of you is one of emotional maturity, but it isn't dependent on being a Christian. That's not to say I don't think the idea of polyphonic life isn't worth fleshing out from a Christian POV. Or that Christian polyphonic life wouldn't be distinctive. It will be interesting to see where MW goes from here.

My other question, which I'll have to ask someone else for answer to, is if this idea of "polyphonic life " is so significant to B why have so few people explored it? If I find out, I'll let you know.

Let me know what you think :-)

ANZABS 2018 program and abstracts

ANZABS CONFERENCE 2018

6-7 December, 2018

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Venue: Wesley Hall, Trinity Methodist College,

202A St Johns Rd, Meadowbank, Auckland 1072

Thursday 6 December
9.30 am – REGISTRATION
10.00-10.10 – mihi
10.10-11.00 – Keynote speaker: Robert Myles – Fishing for Eyewitnesses in the Fourth Gospel
11.00-11.30 – Morning tea
11.30-12.00 – Lyndon Drake – Economic Capital in the Hebrew Bible
12.00-12.30 – Anne Aalbers – Resurrection and Celibacy: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
12.30-1.00 – Jonathan Robinson – "And he was with the beasts," (Mark 1:13): Ambiguity,
Interpretation and Mark as a Jewish Author
1.00-2.00 – Lunch
2.00-2.30 – Ben Hudson – Ethical Exhortation and the Decalogue in Ephesians
2.30-3.00 – Csilla Saysell – The Servant as 'a covenant of/for people' in Deutero-Isaiah
3.00-3.30 – Afternoon tea
3.30-4.00 – Jacqueline Lloyd – Did Jesus minister in Gaulanitis?
4.00-4.30 – Mark Keown – Jesus as the New Joshua
4.30 – AGM
Friday 7 December
9.30-10.00 – Ben Ong – Pākehā Reading of the New Testament
10.00-10.30 – Jordan Chapman – Nero as “The Destroyer” in Revelation 9:11
10.30-11.00 – Morning tea
11.00-11.30 – Sarah Hart – The Rich–Poor Divide: Seeking Biblical Directives
11.30-12.00 – Paul Trebilco – What does Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, tell us about the
Christians in Ephesus at the close of the second century CE?
12.00-12.30 – Ross Millar – Narrative of the discourses: the introductory settings of Matthew’s
teaching discourses
12.30-1.00 – Deane Galbraith – Jeremiah Wrote an Epilogue, And It Once Had a Mighty Fine
Whine: The Original Prophecy of Unmitigated Doom in Jeremiah 25.1-13Lunch
1.00-2.00 – Lunch
2.00-2.30 – Stephen Gerbault – The Gospel of John, David F. Ford, and Reading in the Spirit
2.30-3.00 – Philip Church – “In Speaking of a New Covenant, God Declares the First Obsolete”
(Heb 8:13): Supersessionism in the Book of Hebrews
3.00-3.30 – Julia van den Brink, “Blessed God”: The use of μακάριος to describe God in 1 Tim
1:11; 6:15
3.30-4.00 – Rikk Watts – The Stronger one and the dove: Revisiting two discarded images.
4.00 – closing words and karakia. Afternoon tea and chat for those who wish to stay.
Registration
To cover catering costs, there will be a registration fee for ANZABS 2018:
Student/lower income presenters - $20
Student/lower income attendees - $40
Everyone else - $80
Please pay this registration fee in cash, on the day.
To sign up for attending the conference, please register here:
https://goo.gl/forms/Cs3yPj8xJQEmWQel1

Full abstracts are below.

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Updated Current Research and Book Reviews

So, my PhD must be going well because I have just spent the morning updating my blog pages for Current Research and brand spanking new Book Reviews page. But it is not just procrastination, it is good to stop and and get an overview.

I had totally forgotten about half the book reviews I had done on this blog, they go back to 2009! I am still working on writing the sort of reviews I really enjoy reading, but now that I'm regularly doing reviews for journals it is great to also review books on this blog where I have stylistic freedom and no space limitations. I had always hoped this blog would be a good source of free books, but while it was a source of free books they were not good ones. Reviewing for journals (as a PhD student) has been much better and is helping me keep my broader education going even as I delve deep into my PhD subject. Looking at my old book reviews helps me realise how far I have come. Hopefully, much growth as a blogger, scholar and human being (perhaps not in that order?) still to come.

Also I should probably let my long suffering blog readers know that I now have two pieces of work (a journal article and a book chapter) "forthcoming", that is scholarspeak for saying they are going to be published, the editors have accepted them, but because the wheels of academic publishing grind exceedingly slow, I really have no idea whether that will be this year or next year or sometime further off. But this blog is now written by a *nearly* PUBLISHED SCHOLAR, so let's have a little more respect around here then, OK?

Let me know what you think :-)

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Michael Welker, God the Revealed: The "Best" Book on Christology? [Review part 1]

So when one of the key note speakers at BNTS, Roland Deines, tells the audience that the best book on Christology is by Michael Welker, and you are (trying) to write a PhD on NT Christology, you better believe I am going to get hold of that book and read it for myself. Here it is folks, freshly arrived from the library interloan.



The book is God the Revealed: Christology (2013), and is a translation of Gottes Offenbarung (2012), which is itself an expansion of his 2004 Gunning Lectures in Edinburgh.

I already like this book, because it is written in short chapters.  I must confess I find the average biblical studies or book chapter too long, and getting through one in one sitting a grind. So my plan is to read a chapter and blog it most working days. That will make a for a long review series but will (hopefully) give you a really good overview of the book.

Welker's (hereafter MW) introduction introduces us to the question of what it means to proclaim "God revealed himself in Jesus Christ!" This central Christian idea, found "from personal testimonies to ecumenical world councils" is yet somewhat "ambiguous" (p11) and raises 5 key problems.

1. The problem of the historical Jesus. MW seeks to set the agenda for a fourth quest for the historical Jesus that will "open up experiential, conceptual, and research spaces that permit us to approach more closely to his life and personality in the search for truth" (p12-13).

2. The problem of the nature of the Resurrection. MW argues both fundamentalists and aggressive critics have misunderstood the Resurrection as "physical revivification" instead "Christology must find new paths for mediating how the reality of the Resurrection is to be comprehended" (p13-14).

3. The problem of reconciling God's suffering (at the cross) with God's glory and victory (p14).

4. The insufficiency of dualist thought to describe the "polyphonic" reality of the Spirit, reign of God, and the risen and exalted Christ (p15).

5. The eschatological problem of the now and not yet, and the ways in which we understand eternal life to be "already anticipated here on earth" (p15).

So, it is a pretty ambitious project, MW certainly has his work cut out for him. But I'm hopeful that this will be a really compelling work of integrative theology. I do wonder, with the focus on the "historical Jesus", whether there will be enough focus on Jesus revealed in scripture. But we'll find out soon enough. I like the way he's posed the problems in a chronological sequence to get us from historical manifestation (God revealed) to present day experience and practice. And as I said, I like the short chapters. Most of them seem to be under 10 pages. Normally you expect about 40 + pages for a chapter so I am just happy as Larry. It almost doesn't matter whether I agree with anything he writes or not. I'm just going to lap up the luscious succinctness. . .

Let me know what you think. :-)





Jesus treats the Syrophoenecian Woman as a Disciple

[This is an extract from my essay "Breaking Bread: The Power of Hospitality in the Gospel of Mark" which you can read in full and ...