Theological Thought

Christian Leaders are Always Having Ethical Failures, Why Would I Want to Be Like Them? – Part II of God as Goodness

    Why do our Christian leaders disappoint us with their ethical failures?  Why is it that we cannot seem to go a month without hearing of a respectable Christian leader who has committed adultery, or abusively berated their children or their employees, or coldly ignored poverty on their doorsteps while putting millions of dollars into their churches?  I believe that the problem and the solution are in the same place – the Christian doctrine of man’s depravity.  I hope you find resources for hope in what follows, as have I, that despite our ethical failures freedom and transformation are possible in the way of God as revealed in Scripture.  This post also responds, I hope charitably, to the Calvinist critiques of Part I of those post, I Try to Be a Good Person, Isn't that Good Enough?

Darfur: The Political is Personal

        Darfur is the genocide of my generation.  When I consider how I can stop the death toll of 400,000 from continuing to climb, I think that I can do nothing, because this is a political crisis, and only a political solution between powerful men whom I don’t know can bring this genocide to a halt.  And, oddly, this thought comforts me, because I’ve done everything I can do.

        For awhile, though, this thought has no longer provided comfort to me.  A friend named Keith emailed me a link to a video of a speech by Bono.  In the speech, Bono asked, “Can we really say that we would allow this to happen if it was happening anywhere else but Africa?”  As I envisioned genocide in Norway, or Japan, or Poland, I suddenly thought of all the additional things I would try to do to bring it to an end.  Sad, but true.  What are these things I would do?

Why Phenomenology Matters to Theology: Part I

Protestant Christian theology is in its second century of schism between liberal and conservative schools. I don’t think schism is too dramatic a term. As Brian McLaren prays, "Please, Lord, bring the day when we no longer think in these terms." Beneath this schism are fundamental differences in epistemology, in how we believe we can know God and God’s will. Nancey Murphy has made a very similar argument in the first half of her Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda.

While the conservative school argues from a foundational realist epistemology, and the liberal school proceeds from a postfoundational anti-realist epistemology (these terms will be fleshed out in later posts in this series), premodern philosophy and theology have lost their power over our convictions. This is because classical and medieval philosophy and theology were predominantly realist yet nonfoundationalist. The problematic introduced by modern philosophy was not realism, which was already a given in premodern thought, but rather foundationalism, which is central to the early modern philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes and Locke. Hence the conflation of foundationalism and realism, and the postmodern reaction against both. Renewing the Center, by Dr Stan Grenz (may he rest in peace), and Reclaiming the Center, by Erickson, Moreland, Carson, Groothius et al, are explicitly animated by these two epistemologies; neither book seriously engages premodern philosophy or theology, because premodern thought doesn’t fit into either school.

Neither does either school ever, ever, ever write about Edmund Husserl. He was one of the top 3 philosophers of the 20th century (by anyone’s count); postmodern thought would not be without Husserl’s concepts of absence and horizons; and Dr Dallas Willard, whose Christian writings are respected across both schools, spends much of his time reading Husserl. Why does Husserl matter? Why does phenomenology (the school of philosophy initiated by Husserl) matter?

Dallas Willard's Real Conspiracy

I have read all of Dallas Willard's books on the Christian life, including Divine Conspiracy, Renovation of the Heart and Hearing God. I taught a year-long book study on the Divine Conspiracy immediately after the study guide to the book was published. Willard's teachings on the Kingdom of God, spiritual formation and discipleship have had an influence among Christian leaders and laypeople over the past decade that is difficult to overstate. When one hears Willard speak at the Renovare conferences of his friend of numerous decades, Richard Foster, one realizes that spiritual formation into a life of discipleship to Jesus within the Kingdom of God isn't just one aspect of Christian living among many for Willard, akin to Christian marriage or service to the poor, for example. Rather, to Willard this is all there is to the Christian life. It is a refreshing message that calls us back to the actual words of Jesus. I cannot encourage you to read these books more strongly.

Dallas Willard is also a professor of philosophy. As a philosophy student myself who (a) has read and been changed by Willard's books and (b) has a deep respect for my elders in the field, I left last weekend's National Faculty Leadership Conference, at which Willard gave 3 keynote addresses, confused. Dr Willard is a gentle figure who lives his message of renovation daily. When I say I was confused, it is not a genteel way of saying I was critical. I was confused.

Ken Gets to the Point

Consider this: The greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century was Karl Barth. The greatest Protestant theologian of the 19th century was Friedrich Schleiermacher. (Any text, liberal or conservative, will affirm this.) To be a Protestant theologian or minister one would need to understand these 2 writers, at a minimum, right? Would a professional in any other field be able to graduate with an advanced degree, much less practice one's discpline, without having a clue what the greatest thinker in their discipline from each of the last 2 centuries thought? That's the case in Protestant Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries, during which seminaries broke from a rich tradition of theological thought that had equipped ministers well for two millenia.