Davidson, A Public Faith: A Book Review

I try and read at least one church history book a year.  Every time I do it always amazes me how different the perspective of a different historian can be.  Ivor Davidson is head of St Andrew's divinty school at the moment although he used to be at Otago in NZ.  Davidson's book is part of an 8 part Monarch History of the Church, so this book covers 312-600AD (actually we get well into the 600s by the end of the book) and so is a nice medium between one volume church histories and a more detailed study on one characer or controversy.  I picked this up in the bargain bin at my local Christian bookstore and have been glad I did.  On the strength of this one I'll be looking out for the others in the series. 

Steve Taylor on the Preaching of the Early Church

This is worth checking out if you have an interest in preaching, Steve suggests missionary, apologetic, mystic, theological and homiletical as categories of preaching in the first centuries of the early church, each context and circumstance specific, and challenges us to examine our own preaching and definitions of biblical preaching in light of that.

Vedder on Infant Baptism

No, not Eddie Vedder, Henry Clay Vedder (1853-1935) whose book is currently providing me with some light and entertaining reading.  His arrogance and bombast is really quite charming as long as you remember he is writing over a century ago. He proceeds with the assurance of someone who is preaching to the choir and sometimes makes some painfully half baked remarks.  Sometimes, however, he gets it spot on:

No scholar pretends that the baptism of infants is taught in the Scriptures; they are absolutely silent on the subject; yet from this silence certain inferences have been made.  It is sometimes assumed that a continuity of life unites the Old Dispensation and the New.  As children were by birth heirs of the promises through Abraham, so they are assumed to be by birth heirs of promise through Christ.  In this view the New Dispensation is organically one with the Old; baptism merely replaces circumcision, the church replaces the synagogue and temple, the ministry replaces the priesthood, while the spirit of all continues unchanged.  It appears to Baptists, on the other hand, to be clearly taught in Scripture that the New Dispensation, though a fulfilling and completion of the Old, is radically different from it.  Under the Old Dispensation a child was an heir of promise according to the flesh, but under the New Dispensation natural birth does not make him a member of the kingdom of God; he must be born from above, born of the Spirit.  The church has for its foundation principle a personal relation of each soul to Christ, and not a bond of blood; a child might be born a Jew, but he must be born again to be a Christian.  (Short History, 26)

Just when infant baptism began is uncertain; scholars have disputed long over the question without arriving at any decisive proof . . . It is tolerably certain, however, that by the time of Tertullian the practice was common, though by no means universal.  We know, for example, that Augustine, though the son of the godly Monica, was not baptised in infancy, but on personal profession of faith at age thirty-three.  Gregory of Nazianzum and Chrysostom are two others.  Similar cases were frequent without a doubt, though from this time on they became more rare, untill after the sixth century the practice of infant baptism was universal, or nearly so.  Nothing in the history of the church did so much as this departure from apostolic precedent to prepare  the way for the papacy.  It introduced into the church a multitude whose hearts were unchanged by the Spirit of God, who were worldy in aims and in life, and who sought for the worldy advancement of the church that thus their own power and importance might be magnified.  This consumation was doubtless aided and hastened by the rapid contemporary growth of the church in numbers and its increase in worldly prosperity. (Short History, 50)

There now, wasn't that fun?  :-)

look what the cat dragged in

• John Byron wonders about a paradigm shift in peer review for scholarship
• Jason Goroncy tells a tragic tale about pastoral ministry
• Elizabeth McNamer digs up biblical women (HT Jim West)
• Edinburgh University has a blog on Christian Origins with some very respectable contributors
• James McGrath gives us all some tips on evaluating sources
• Tom Wright pontificates on the humanity of Jesus
• Jim West helps us to be more accurate about Jesus' speed and timing in Revelation
• Marc Cortez is giving away a big book on Romans
• Maggie Dawn shares a video on the 21st century enlightenment
• Someone is cleaning up the streets of Britain (HT Jim West)

Missional Church is not a New Thing

The idea that mission should not just be a ministry of the church, one of its offered services, but actually a fundamental and foundational aspect of its whole life is at the heart of the idea of missional church.  With its new title, and the coining of a new word, "missional," the missional church sounds like something cutting edge and new and trendy.  However, while such an idea and emphasis may seem new to those of us who grew up in a church environment when mission was what was done in some other country by a unique and slightly doubtful class of people known as missionaries, it actually represents the character of the earliest church: 

The single most striking thing about early Christianity is its speed of growth.  In AD 25 there is no such thing as Christianity . . . by AD 125 the Roman emporer has established an official policy in relation to the punishment of Christians; Polycarp has already been a Christian in Smyrna for half a century; Aristides is confronting the emporer Hadrian with the news that there are four races in the world, Barbarians, Greek, Jews and Christians; and a young pagan called Justin is begininng the philisophical quest which will take him through the greatest of the pagan thinkers and lead him, still unsatisfied, to Christ.

(N.T Wright, NTPG, p359)

After pointing out the blindingly obvious but often overlooked fact of the early church's incredible expansion and what this tells us about early Christian praxis, Wright goes on to confront the fallacy that the early church grew so rapidly because the pagan world was such fertile soil for it.  Having established that for both the pagan and the Jew becoming a Christian would be a difficult, dangerous, and counterintuitive thing to do, he then aks,

Why then did early Christianity spread? Because early Chistians believed that what they had found to be true was true for the whole world.  The impetus to mission sprang from the very heart of early Christian conviction.  If we know anything about early Christian praxis . . . it is that the early Chistians engaged in mission, both to Jews and Gentiles . . . This missionary activity was not an addendum to a faith that was basically 'about' something else. 

(N.T Wright, NTPG, p360)

If Wright is right about this (no pun intended), then is a missing ingredient from our churches' conviction that what is true for us is also true for everyone else?  Have we secretly, or perhaps not so secretly, bought into the lie that everyone gets to have their own private version of the truth and that that is OK?  Are the churches in the West not doing mission because they and their constituents no longer believe they know the truth or that the truth is worth knowing?

More good stuff

So much good stuff landing online at the moment, check out:

• NT Wright on CS Lewis
• Gordon Fee on Revelation and understanding scripture
• Ben Witherington on Atonement
• Clayboy's review of a book on "liturgy"
• James McGrath musing and enthusing about education
• Larry Hurtado suggests a reason for Mark's "ommissions"
• Rod points out the contradictions in the way early Christianity is used to bolster people's agendas

Habets, The Anointed Son: Book Review Part 1

Part 1 of the book review covers the first three chapters of Habets' The Anointed Son.

The first thing that needs to be said is that at the beggining of each chapter Habet's has provided a mouth-watering selection of quotes.  The book is probably worth buying just for those selections alone, although maybe they would need to be set over some soft focus photos of inspiring scenery or babies or something (;-)!!). 

The second thing that needs to be said is that Habets probably wouldn't divide his book this way.  The first 4 chapters constitute the prolegomena and chapters 5-8 are the constructive stuff.  But I have only read the first three chapters and I will treat the survey of NT scholarship alongside Habets' own exegesis of the NT in the next part of the review.  Which makes sense to me if only because it is my own area of specialization.  The third part of the review will cover chapters 6-8 which is where all the fun constructive theology will take place.

1 Spirit Christology: Awaiting the Promise

The first chapter sets about phrasing the question.  Habets states that this work will "introduce the doctrine, examine the various mutually exclusive proposals, and offer a constructive Trinitarian proposal." (p7)  He signals that he wants to avoid the traditional polarity between Logos and Spirit Christologies and present a Spirit Christology whitch is interwoven with, rather than seperated from, the traditional Logos Christology encapsulated in the creeds (p9).

2 Understanding Jesus: Approaches to Christology

In the second chapter Habets embarks on an extensive discussion of how function (what Christ does) and ontology (who Christ is) relate within Christology.   The discussion then moves into a defining of Christologies  from "above" and "below."  Habets is especially insistent that not all Christologies from "below" are equal.  Habets wishes to follow Gunton in asserting that while Christology may begin on the ground, it may not remain there and must move upwards (p42).  Habets suggests Kaseman and Pannenberg have helped pave the way in their own treatement of Christology.  He shares their refusal to presupose a "pre-formed Trinity" at the beggining of Christological enquiry and argues that instead the confession of Jesus' divinty (and hence the Trinity) should arise out of Christology (p43). This chapter asserts a methodology "that seeks to bridge the gulf between Jesus' humanity and divinity (the two nature Achilles heel of classical Christology) by means of the Holy Spirit." 

3 Logos and Spirit

The third chapter surveys the Christology of many of the important theologians from the Apolostolic Fathers through to Chalcedon.  Habets observes that in the early church "Spirit Christology was eclipsed by Logos Christology due to the fear of patripassianism [that God the Father suffered in Christ] . . . it enabled Christian faith to be harmonized with the fundamental principles of Greek philosophy." (p63)  This tendency is then tracked through to Chalcedon where Habets concludes, "perhaps the most serious problem with Chalcedonian Christology is that it has encouraged the wrong kind of Christology, exclusively from above.  It has encouraged the church to start with the deity of the Son of God and then to fit (the problem of his) humanity into the divinity.  At all costs the divinity must remain inviolate, while the humanity may be short changed." (pp87-88)  Thus the next task is to return to the biblical witness to uncover the Spirit Christology which has lain hidden by such historical tendencies.

I think Spirit Christology is a fascinating and important area of theological development and I am finding myself, thus far at least, in complete agreement with Habets' conclusions and approach, and, more to the point, excited for what will come next.

Contradictions in the Resurrection Narratives?

Well after ETB's insane gibbering 5 comment flame of my earlier post I thought maybe it was not so obvious to some people why the differing Resurrection accounts in the Gospels do nothing to suggest that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth couldn't have happened, and so I should do a post on the subject. It is important to point out that this is not an argument why any one must believe it did happen, only that the differing accounts are evidence in favour rather than against it. Another blogger, Michael Bird, writes in How Did Christianity Begin?,

According to Paul, again in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, the risen Jesus was seen by individuals and groups . . . This early tradition interlocks with the multiple accounts in the Gospels that narrate persons seeing, hearing and touching the resurrected Jesus. There are clear divergences in the details provided by the Evangelists that do not appear to add up; indeed, we can speak of an excited bewilderment as to exactly where, when and who saw the risen Jesus and in what order, but this only adds to the realism. In the words of E.P Sanders: 'Calculated deception should have produced greater unanimity. Instead there seems to have been competitors: "I saw him first!" "No! I did."' [The Historical Figure of Jesus, 1993, p280] As we investigate the various stories of the appearances at the tomb, in a locked room, on a road out of Jerusalem, in Galilee and by the Lake of Tiberius we are led to the conclusion that several individuals and groups believed that they had genuinely seen Jesus alive in a physical mode of existence after his death.

There is often the idea in people's heads, it seems to me, of a monolithic early Christian group agreeing on a fiction or delusion on which will rest the substance of their faith and then producing or selecting only those documents that seemed to substantiate those claims. But what is evidenced by the narrative in Acts and the composition of the NT itself is that from an early stage the church as a whole was scattered to different localities and although there would have been contact between the different groups (especially through relationships to significant figures) to some extent they evolved independently of each other. This is seen most clearly in the Gospel of John which relates a very different tradition to the other three gospels.

Instead the NT is something of an "ecumenical" document representing a number of different strands of early Christianity (e.g. Matthean, Johanine, Pauline, Petrine, etc). This is why each gospel shows evidence of having access to different sources than the others, although Mathew and Luke both seem to have had access to both Mark and a sayings tradition, "Q". The scattering that took place near the start of Church history meant that no harmonized authoritative version of events could be established. Instead, different communities independently recorded their best version of events. And this is exactly what the "contradictions" in the Resurrection narratives display, competing versions of an event that these different communities are nonetheless absolutely convinced took place. A convincing that was probably the result of hearing eye witness testimony and having it verified in their own personal religious experience. The fact that the gospel Resurrection accounts contradict each other in the details does not stop them all confirming the same event in its essentials.

To conclude: I couldn't give a tinker's fart how many angels were present or who saw him first, but if Jesus of Nazareth really was raised from the dead then that is something worth knowing about!