The strangeness of the Uniting Church

How might the Uniting Church in Australia be categorised? Within the Australian Christian community, it would conventionally be deemed a 'liberal denomination'. For some, this designation will carry with it an automatic and unambiguous criticism. To be 'liberal' is a bad thing; it's to be captivated by the spirit of the age - at least that's what such critics might say. For others, that same designation might include a possibly wistful, 'I wish my (conservative) church could be a bit more like the UCA'. To be liberal is a good thing; it gives the church some critical leverage against its inherited theologies and practices - at least that's what such friends might say.

Beyond the Christian community - to the extent that anyone out there actually has a view about it - the UCA might be regarded as a champion of social justice and inclusion, a church you can support when you don't actually want to belong to one. Yet even these friends might finally conclude that as an institution it is hindered by its 1970s birth and the cultural and intellectual baggage it carries from that and earlier eras.

As for the UCA's own self-understanding, well, where to start! An Australian church. A multi-cultural church. A scholarly church. A post-denominationalist church (even though deep down we do still hang on to being the third largest denomination!). An ecumenical church. A church in covenant with Australia's First Peoples. A church committed to community service. A democratic, inter-conciliar church. A non-fundamentalist church. A church in the Reformed and Evangelical traditions. A pilgrim people.

None of these categories, however, was where the UCA started. The theological move made by the framers of the church was to direct the new church to the church's only foundation: Jesus Christ. 

It is easy - and not uncommon - to gloss over this as self-evident. 'Of course, the church is built upon Jesus  Christ', we might say. 'What we're really interested in is what the church says about, say, justification by faith, or ministerial order, or the inspiration of Scripture, or theories of atonement, or predestination, or baptism, or any other number of church-dividing issues. Tell us what the Uniting Church believes about these things, then we'll know what kind of a church it is; then we'll be able to categorise it.' The authors of the Basis of Union refused to go down this path. The insistence on Jesus Christ as the starting point was a step out of the divisions and the theological fault lines of Christendom.

Moreover, there was nothing vague or platitudinous about this appeal to Jesus. In pointing to Jesus Christ, the church's framers did so in a quite particular way. In identifying the foundation of the church, they did not point to the creedal affirmations of Jesus' divinity and humanity. They did not point to the Jesus of pietism. Nor did they point to the historical Jesus of the modern academy. Their statement of Jesus Christ's identity, achievement and significance is articulated in an eloquent summary of certain key New Testament claims about him. It's found in the third paragraph of the Basis. Here it is:

3. BUILT UPON THE ONE LORD JESUS CHRIST The Uniting Church acknowledges that the faith and unity of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church are built upon the one Lord Jesus Christ. The Church preaches Christ the risen crucified One and confesses him as Lord to the glory of God the Father. In Jesus Christ “God was reconciling the world to himself ” (2 Corinthians 5:19 RSV). In love for the world, God gave the Son to take away the world’s sin.

Jesus of Nazareth announced the sovereign grace of God whereby the poor in spirit could receive God’s love. Jesus himself, in his life and death, made the response of humility, obedience and trust which God had long sought in vain. In raising him to live and reign, God confirmed and completed the witness which Jesus bore to God on earth, reasserted claim over the whole of creation, pardoned sinners, and made in Jesus a representative beginning of a new order of righteousness and love. To God in Christ all people are called to respond in faith. To this end God has sent forth the Spirit that people may trust God as their Father, and acknowledge Jesus as Lord. The whole work of salvation is effected by the sovereign grace of God alone.

The Church as the fellowship of the Holy Spirit confesses Jesus as Lord over its own life; it also confesses that Jesus is Head over all things, the beginning of a new creation, of a new humanity. God in Christ has given to all people in the Church the Holy Spirit as a pledge and foretaste of that coming reconciliation and renewal which is the end in view for the whole creation. The Church’s call is to serve that end: to be a fellowship of reconciliation, a body within which the diverse gifts of its members are used for the building up of the whole, an instrument through which Christ may work and bear witness to himself. The Church lives between the time of Christ’s death and resurrection and the final consummation of all things which Christ will bring; the Church is a pilgrim people, always on the way towards a promised goal; here the Church does not have a continuing city but seeks one to come. On the way Christ feeds the Church with Word and Sacraments, and it has the gift of the Spirit in order that it may not lose the way.

One UCA biblical scholar has described this paragraph as a faithful 'epitome' or summary of the New Testament witness. Packed into this core paragraph are allusions to Israel's messianic hope, to Jesus' life of witness to God in word and deed, to the centrality of his death and resurrection to Christianity's reconfiguration of Israel's hope, to the sending of the Spirit and the emergence of a novel, boundary-breaking community, to the anticipation of God's reconciliation and renewal of all creation. This is the story the church told and embodied before it surrounded itself (for ill and good) with the doctrines, debates and structures of Christendom.  This paragraph points us to the convictions and commitments which meant there ever was such a thing as Christianity. In fact, the much-quoted remark of former UCA President, D'Arcy Wood, that this paragraph is the 'basis of the Basis' continues with the (usually unquoted) explanation: "for it states how and why the church exists at all". Precisely.

We are directed here to the memories of Jesus, the convictions about him, and the vision of God and God's purposes for the world which energised early Christian preaching and provoked the novel forms of social existence which the first Christian communities became. This was all they had: a strange story of a risen crucified man through whom the God of Israel was renewing the whole world. 

This is a remarkable gift to the contemporary UCA. It is also, I think, the underlying reason the UCA has the critics and friends it does: it unsettles the conventional and formulaic ways of speaking about Jesus. It's a confession of Christian faith that can be made without having first to take our stand on the divisions of Christendom. Of course there is wisdom to be gleaned from the traditions and theologies of Christendom (and I'm in the job I am because I believe that), and the Basis itself is not silent on some of them. But they are all subject to the authority of what is confessed here; they are never where we start. 

It is a confession of faith in Jesus Christ which, in many ways, is strange to the churches of Christendom and the tendency to seek a more secure starting point for ecclesial self-understanding. The banal categories of 'liberal' and 'conservative' can't touch it. It is a confession of faith in Jesus Christ, drawn from the pre-Christendom church which could well yet prove to be a spark for a post-Christendom Christian imagination. Ironically, it is precisely in this 'biblical' account of Jesus and God's work in him that the theological strangeness of the UCA lies. At one level, it's all we've got: a strange story of a risen crucified Jew through whom we dare to believe God was and is renewing the world. Perhaps an ongoing discussion for the UCA is whether we're convinced it's enough.

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• The ideas in this post are explored more fully in a study booklet, Jesus Christ According to the Basis of Union, which I've prepared for the Doctrine Working Group as a resource for the UCA's upcoming Season of Teaching and Learning. It's one of a set of three studies; the others are Christianity in the 21st Century (written by Avril Hannah-Jones) and Living the Christian Life (written by Rod Horsfield). All can be ordered at Mediacom.
• For the discussion of paragraph 3 as an 'epitome' of the New Testament claims about Jesus, see Vicky Balabanski, "The Biblical Fabric of Paragraph 3 of the Basis of Union: How Well Does it Stand Up to Scrutiny", Uniting Church Studies 17.2 (2001), p. 66. 
• The reference to the 'basis of the Basis' comes from D'Arcy Wood, Building on a Solid Basis: A Guide to the Basis of Union (Melbourne: Uniting Chruch Press, 1986), p. 15. 

Yes, theologians make things difficult

Today was the final day of an inter-disciplinary intensive at the UFT, Introduction to Theological Studies. One of the sessions involved the three of us teaching the unit (Sean Winter, Gerry O'Collins and me) speaking briefly about our own theological journeys. Among the things that came to mind when preparing my own contribution were some comments by my own Doktorvater, Nicholas Lash, in his book, Easter in Ordinary. They've stayed with me, perhaps unconsciously, ever since I read them over 20 years ago, but I'm grateful whenever they come back to the surface. I think I'll just let Lash speak for himself:

Theologians are often accused of making things difficult. But the theologian does not invent either the complexity and illegibility of our history or the pain and confusion of contemporary circumstance. I would wish...to go further: part of the theologian's responsibility is to help discipline the propensity of the pious imagination to simplify texts, demands and requirements that are resistant to any such simplification.

Serious theological reflection is always hard work, and its outcome fragmentary, tentative, and (often) quite technical in its quest for appropriate imaginative and conceptual accuracy, not because God is complicated, but because we are - and so is the world in which we live. It is not possible without complexity to indicate, or point the way toward, the deep simplicity of the mystery of God....

Serious theological reflection, in other words, is, and should be made to be, hard work.

To add just one comment which places these remarks in the context of Lash's wider work. Simplistic theology is often an indication of attempts to sum God up comprehensively, or to 'capture' God, or to speak of God in ways that are detached from the 'pain and confusion of contemporary circumstance'. And that, for Lash, would be nothing other than idolatry.

Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on the Human Experience of the Knowledge of God (London: SCM, 1988), p. 290f. 

Beyond Education: a colloqium on the church's theological formation

Next month I'll be participating in this colloquium on theological formation (March 28-29). It's an attempt to explore a theology of theological formation. The presenting issues include the current debates about theological education in the mainline churches, but framing them by some larger questions about the purposes of theology in the church. There will be engagement with some classic theological texts plus the exploration of theological formation in specific contexts. You can register here and see the schedule of papers here.

Guest Post: We're not in Beroea anymore

One of the last things I did before leaving my role in the Queensland Synod last year was attend the Synod's 2013 meeting. My then Faculty colleague, Dr Aaron Ghiloni, led one of the series of Bible Studies with which we commenced each day's business. Below is Aaron's own brief synopsis of the study, as well as a link to the podcast. I think that Aaron puts his finger on several dimensions of the strangeness of the interface between the church and contemporary Australia. His engaging study was still ringing in my ears when I set up this blog.

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“Rendering an account of faith is even more important now, in the present century, when the religious a priori no longer exists and God has become problematical precisely as God.”

This extract from Schillebeeckx was projected on the screen as I began a Bible study given to the Queensland Synod in May.  As leaders of parishes and agencies, rural and urban, sat making crucial decisions for the future of the church, I hoped the quote would illustrate an enormous challenge facing Christians today.  Our primary challenge is not how to manage money, retain youth, or defuse internal controversy. In culture where religious atheism, “non-Christian” religions, and "syrupy dogooderism" simultaneously thrive, the church must be driven back to rudimentary theological categories. 

If as liturgists, theologs, and Sunday school teachers we are doing our work properly, it should be a discomfiting problem: what does it mean to speak of God?

The Bible study was titled “A Debatable Way”. As the Synod gathered around the theme “Disciples on the Way,” I chose the adjective debatable to signal that the Way (a) is not self-evident and (b) must be contended for.  Drawing on Paul’s approach in Athens (Acts 17), the study had three themes:

1.       An Eclectic Social Context

2.       A Curiosity-Inducing Message

3.       A Pagan-Friendly Doctrine

The first theme, social context, seems especially crucial for understanding this text.  Ministry in Athens (vv.15-34) is juxtaposed to ministry in Beroea (vv.10-14).

Beroea is every theologian’s dream!  In Beroea, Paul’s can really play up his Hauerwasian credentials.  It is a “counter-polis” – a “story-formed” “community of character.”  Paul can break-out his classic post-liberal moves, for in Beroea, Scripture is the “native language, the primary medium in which they think, feel, act, and dream” (Lindbeck). The Beroeans are eager to accept the authority of Scripture.  In Beroea, Paul can also play up his Bonhoefferian credentials and give sermons about “single-minded radical obedience.”   Sermons which muse: “Only the believers obey and only the obedient believe.”

But the assumptions Paul can rightfully make (about Scripture, about authority) in Beroea, he cannot get away with in Athens. Perhaps this is true in Australia too. In the study – available by podcast here – I propose that we are not in Beroea anymore.

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Aaron Ghiloni is Director of Studies - Mission, Ministry and Leadership at Trinity Theological College, Brisbane. He is the author of Dewey Among the Theologians (Peter Lang, 2013).

Systematic theology and its strangeness (2)

"Systematic theology has fallen on evil days". 

"There are few phenomena in the theological world which are more striking indeed than the impatience which is exhibited on every hand with the effort to define truth and state with precision the doctrinal presuppositions and contents of Christianity."

Despite the echoes in these remarks of sentiments possibly to be heard from contemporary systematic theologians lamenting all the challenges to their discipline in these postmodern days, these comments are actually over a century old. In fact, they were written in 1897. The first were penned by Edinburgh's Professor James Orr in his Introduction to Benjamin Warfield's The Right of Systematic Theology. The second are from the main body of Warfield's text itself.

It is interesting to read Warfield's summary of the sources of this 'impatience': claims that Christianity is about life, not thought; that it proclaims acts of God, not dogmas; and the concern that doctrine is a (Greek) way of truth-telling alien to the witness of the biblical narratives. Again, it's all very familiar. Less familiar, perhaps, is Warfield's confidence in aspiring towards a "pretty complete systematic theology" and justifying it with the claim that from the beginning Christianity has "ever come to men (sic) as rational religion, making its appeal to the intellect".  It's not that you don't have to scratch too far below the surface to discover the rhetoric of modernity in Warfield's protest, you don't have to scratch at all. 

It is interesting to ponder the history of the discipline in the intervening century, not least the development of the discipline, especially in English-speaking circles in the last two to three decades in particular. The 'impatience' with it has not subsided, but, as a discipline, systematic theology is lively, energetic and developing on multiple fronts. And it needs to be said that it has developed in directions that Warfield himself is unlikely to have approved of. The quest for 'completion' has not been abandoned, but it's surrounded by caution. Claims for the rationality, or perhaps the 'reasonableness', of Christianity are still made, but without the clear definitions of rationality which Warfield assumed.

Both of these developments have been very much shaped by the strange institutional location of the discipline, i.e., at the boundary of the church and the academy. Systematic theology faces some particular challenges in straddling this boundary (challenges which may or may not be shared with other theological disciplines). Some of these challenges were explored by the Catholic scholar, Nicholas Healy, in a 2009 essay, "What is Systematic Theology". Healy argues that systematic theology "must necessarily be a bit of an outsider in both the church and the university". When it shifts too much to the academic side of the boundary, it becomes an outsider to the church because its enquiring and constructive tendencies bring it into critical relationships with the church's ordinary and official theologies. When it shifts its balance back to the church side of the boundary, it becomes an outsider to the academy because its insistence on the transcendent nature of it's subject matter, i.e., God. (Healy argues all this at much greater length and helpfully differentiates between ordinary, official and professional forms of systematic theology.)

Yet claiming a transcendent subject matter is only the beginning of the problem. To say that the discipline's transcendent subject matter is God is not a stand-alone claim. Christianity fleshes out this claim by articulating a comprehensive vision of God and God's relation to the world. Here the claim for comprehensiveness and totality bumps into the claim of the postmodern academics that all such total claims (or meta-narratives) presuppose a totality of vision which no person or community can claim. And  to the extent that such a totality of vision is a truth claim (which it inevitably is), it invites the related criticism that truth claims are simply products of the time, place and circumstance of those who make them. According to that criticism, the 'effort to define truth' is not only misplaced, it is pretentious.

One important response from within systematic theology to these sorts of criticisms, has been articulated very powerfully by the English theologian, Sarah Coakley. She unapologetically pursues what she has coined a théologie totale. Her ideas around this theme have been emerging over recent years, and have now begun to take more formal shape in the recently published first volume of her own systematic theology, God, Sexuality and the Self. She refuses to abandon the making of truth claims, but does so in ways that "reason is stretched and changed beyond its normal, secular reach". This stretching occurs not least because she brings prayer, contemplation and desire into the theological task. 

Upending much of the postmodern concern about total visions, she argues that the pursuit of a total vision of God and God's ways in the world, far from being a strategy for control, is actually a practice of constant critique and renewal. In her own words théologie totale is

an attempt to do justice to every level, and type, of religious apprehension and its appropriate mode of expression. Thus it is devoted precisely to the excavation and evaluation of what has previously been neglected: to theological fieldwork in a variety of illuminating social and political contexts....; to religious cultural products of the arts and the imagination; to neglected or sidelined texts in the tradition; and to examination of the differences made to theology by such factors as gender, class or race. 

Her argument moves towards a proposal for an 'unsystematic systematics':

In short théologie totale makes the bold claim that the more systematic one's intentions, the more necessary the exploration of such dark and neglected corners; and that, precisely as a theology in via, théologie totale continually risks destabilization and redirection. In an important sense, then, this form of systematic theology must always also remain, in principle, unsystematic. 

All this is part of an attempt to "recapture the contemporary imagination for Christ, [and] to reinvite reflection on the perennial mysteries of the gospel". (Some of the ideas around gender and sexuality which emerge in this first volume can be sampled here. And, it will be interesting to see what role she gives to Christ and the biblical witness to him in future volumes of her (unsystematic) systematics.)

I suspect that neither Benjamin Warfield or James Orr would be entirely enamored of an unsystematic systematics. They may even find these days no less 'evil' than those of 1897. Perhaps they were just a little too impatient with the impatience directed at their discipline. That others have constructively engaged that impatience over the last century has refined and renewed systematic theology - albeit in ways which have not necessarily reduced its strangeness. Again to quote Healy, straddling the church and the academy, systematic theology is "a constructively unsettling element in both".

References: 
Benjamin B. Warfield, The Right of Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1897).

Nicholas Healy, "What is Systematic Theology", International Journal of Systematic Theology 11 (2009), pp. 24-39.

Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity (Cambridge: CUP, 2013).

Systematic theology and its strangeness (1)

As indicated in my first post, this blog has been motivated in part by the mandate in my position description to foster an understanding of ‘systematic theology’ in the wider context of the church in which I serve. My hope is that it might become - among other things - a resource for sparking some reflection and perhaps even conversation about systematic theology. So, this will be the first of two related posts about the discipline of systematic theology. Both will also take the up the theme of strangeness included in the blog’s title. Then, in the next couple of weeks, there will be posts (again in line with the blog’s purpose and name) about the Uniting Church in Australia and its strangeness, and then about the strangeness of Jesus and the church's message about him.

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Once upon a time, systematic theology did not exist. Of course, Christian thinkers who reflected and wrote about the faith systematically emerged very early in the Christian story. De Principiis by Origen of Alexandria (c184-c253) is usually taken to be the first instance of such writing. From then on, a tradition of systematic thinkers has been a prominent feature of the church. But a specific discipline which calls itself ‘systematic theology’ is a relatively new development in the church’s history. 

We are so used to the divisions of theological disciplines into, say, biblical studies, church history, pastoral theology, and systematic theology etc., that we can take them for granted and think that they always existed. They didn’t. That they do now owes much to the impact of the structure of theological study proposed by Friedrich Schleiermacher in his 1811 book, Brief Outline of the Study of Theology. Nevertheless, in dividing up the study of theology for academic purposes, ‘systematic theology’ is not, in fact, one of Schleiermacher's formal categories. But under the heading of  'dogmatics', we do see him making the point that dogmatics is sometimes referred to as ‘systematic theology’. So, that would suggest the term ‘systematic theology’ has had some currency for at least two centuries and a bit. A quick check of my own institution’s library indicates that the first volume to include ‘systematic theology’ in its title was published in 1865. Moving the discussion forward to recent decades, the late Colin Gunton once noted that it was only in the 1980s that the University of London changed the names of its courses in Christian Doctrine to those of Systematic Theology.

Is this just a name change? Gunton himself addresses this question in quite some detail. But for the purposes of this blog, let me suggest just two tendencies which are more likely to be explicitly associated with ‘systematic theology’ than they are with ‘dogmatics’ or ‘doctrine’. Rightly or wrongly, 'dogmatics' and 'doctrine' often imply static lists of what the church believes. So understood, to engage with doctrine is to learn and master such lists. To engage in systematic theology, however, entails a greater intentionality to explore, not just a list of discrete topics, but how the different doctrinal topics relate to each other systematically. For instance, a belief in the incarnation, implies something about salvation. A belief in salvation implies something about sin; a belief in sin implies something about creation and its goodness. And so on. So, that’s the first tendency more likely to be associated with systematic theology: it attends to the inter-relatedness  or ‘coherence’ of the faith. It inquires into the ways the Christian faith ‘hangs together’. 

The second tendency is what could be called the 'constructive' impulse of the discipline. If doctrine and/or dogmatics implies merely retrieval or repetition of past teachings, systematic theology goes beyond them and ventures to construct an account of the faith which engages with, and responds to, alternative world views. It does so in the conviction that the broad themes of Christian doctrine are themselves dynamic sources of wisdom generative of fresh articulations of the Christian faith. A good recent example of this would be the twentieth-century developments in the doctrine of the Trinity. These developments were provoked in the midst of Christendom’s collapse by the need for the church again to clarify on multiple intellectual and cultural fronts what it meant by ‘God’. A doctrine long-neglected became the topic of widespread constructive theological activity. 

So, ‘coherence’ and ‘construction’: two important features of systematic theology. To some extent, however, these themes are simply two sides of the one coin. A building whose internal structures don’t cohere with each other is a structure unlikely to survive much stress. This is no less true for intellectual and spiritual constructions. But why should this be a source of strangeness? 

It is strange not least because just as the gospel of Jesus Christ has an impulse towards coherence, it also has an impulse to resist it. To the extent that at least each of the gospels, if not every New Testament document, bears witness to Jesus by presenting him in the context of Israel’s hope for the redemption of itself and all creation, Christian faith confesses a drama which is about the ways of the one God with and for the one world. There is a story to be told. Yet, as again the gospels demonstrate, there is no one way of telling it. The drama of Jesus Christ is just that, a drama. As a drama it is to some extent open-ended and its proclamation is properly susceptible to diverse tellings. No less a systematic thinker than the twentieth-century's Karl Barth (who was famously wary of being overly-systematic) once put it like this: “The good news of Jesus Christ is not a dead commodity handed over to us so that we can ‘have’ it…. The gospel must ever again be explored and sought and inquired into”. 

Some of the strangeness of systematic theology emerges, therefore, as it lives between these two apparently competing impulses. To suggest one way of conceptualising this, I borrow a comment about the book of Isaiah from the biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann. Noting that Isaiah's diverse authors, diverse contexts, and correspondingly diverse themes, Brueggemann nevertheless proposes that it is held together as a unified book by a “suggestive coherence”. I think that’s a helpful way of thinking about the coherence of systematic theology. The coherence to which it aspires is grounded in the gospel it seeks to articulate. But it knows that as an intellectual construction, it is only suggestive. That is not a reason to surrender the quest for coherence, nor even a reason to hesitate in making suggestions. Rather, it is a reminder of the contingency of all systematic theology, and its proper openness to correction and revision.

In the next blog I'll reflect a little on the strangeness of the discipline which is highlighted by its unusual institutional location at the interface of the academy and the church, and it's consequent exposure to postmodern criticism.

References:

Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline for the Study of Theology as a Field of Study 3rd edn (Lousiville: WJKP, 2011), pp. 42, 73.

Colin Gunton, "A Rose by Any Other Name? From 'Christian Doctrine' to 'Systematic Theology', International Journal of Systematic Theology 1 (1999), pp. 1-23.

Karl Barth, Learning Jesus Christ Through the Heidelberg Catechism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), p.19.

Walter Brueggemann, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination (Louisville: WJKP, 2003), p.160

Personal possessive piety

Theologians love to worry about such things as personal possessive pronouns. It's what gets some of us going in the morning. As this post will show, I get particularly animated by whether it's the singular or plural form of the pronoun (or more strictly, the possessive determiner, but that really would be pedantic). I could go on for hours about it. (At this stage, some of my former students will know what's coming, and they are probably just about to hit the close-page button. But wait! There is a twist in the tale.)

A few years ago I got very agitated by the opening line of Shout to the Lord, i.e., 'My Jesus, my Savior...'. The song itself seemed inescapable - it was being sung in just about every worship context I had anything to do with. I still find it odd that so many worship services start with this song - and nobody even blinks that the first words of the gathered congregation are 'My Jesus, my Savior'. Perhaps one day I'll have the courage to turn to the person next to me and say, 'Excuse me, but I think there's been some misunderstanding; Jesus is actually my Savior'. Of course, the issue could arise with any number of songs - both contemporary and traditional. Yet perhaps the immense popularity of Shout to the Lord is no accident in in this age of consumerist religion.

For all that, there is a legitimate question to put to my frustration - and I've had it put to me often enough. Isn't there a place for individual confession of faith in our hymns and songs? Well, of course there is. How, then, can it be articulated? A recent reading of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters has given me a new angle on this.

In Letter 21 to Wormwood, Screwtape celebrates the confusion they have caused by teaching Christians "not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun". Their success has been in obscuring

the finely graded differences that run from 'my boots' through 'my dog', 'my servant', 'my wife', 'my father', 'my master' and 'my country' to 'my God'. ... We have taught men [sic] to say 'my God' in a sense not really very different from 'my boots', meaning 'the God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit.

These remarks penned by Lewis (in a work which at many levels is a quite helpful critique of pietism) helped me to see that simply changing the singular personal possessive pronoun to the plural personal possessive pronoun only shifts the problem - it doesn't solve it. Certainly, shifting to the plural brings the language of piety into greater conformity to the forms of reference to Christ and God which pervade the New Testament, i.e., "Our Lord" and "Our God" and "Our Saviour" etc. (C.F.D. Moule's remarks in an earlier generation on the 'the corporate Christ' in an essay by that name come to mind.)

Yet our use of this corporate language is not immune to the failure to note the 'finely graded differences' in the use of 'our' that run from, for instance, 'our house', 'our nation' to 'our God'. The insidious nature of the conflation of the last two has been manifested often enough. And church history tells us that 'our Church' and 'our God' have often traded on the same sense of the possessive. The challenge, then, is not necessarily to favour 'our' over 'my'. Instead, it is to learn how to use each of these possessive pronouns in ways that reflect a sense that embodies our response to God's claim on us rather than any possessive claim we might make on God.

Perhaps such learning can only occur as we participate in the various practices by which we 'lose our lives'. After all, there is something fundamentally dispossessive about Christianity. I've been struck this Advent by how this theme of dispossession runs as something of a subplot in the gospel texts that are focused on preparation. Mary lets go of the limits of the possible (Luke 1:34-38); Joseph lets go of convention (Matt 1: 18-25); and John the Baptiser challenges Israel to let go of its sense of privilege (Matt 3:9-10). Perhaps Mary, Joseph and John are examples of those who succeeded in making those 'finely graded distinctions' in the use of both 'my' and 'our'.

Bonhoeffer Intensive at UFT, March 2014

Next March 23rd-27th, the UFT will be offering a post-graduate intensive on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A flier for the course is available here and you can access the official unit description here. The following is from the unit description:

This unit is a study in depth of the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as set out in his major writings. Seminars will examine Bonhoeffer's theological formation and develop a critical engagement with his understanding of scripture, the person and work of Jesus Christ, church, discipleship, as well as key themes in Bonhoeffer's ethics, and his later theology, especially the themes of 'religionless Christianity and the 'world come of age'.

The unit will be co-taught by Dr. Stephen Plant and Prof. Mark Lindsay. Stephen is the Dean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall in the University of Cambridge, and a key figure amongst the new generation of Bonhoeffer interpreters. He will be in Australia as a guest of the CTM as a Northey Lecturer. Mark is Director of Research in the University of Divinity. A leading interpreter of Karl Barth, he has recently turned his attention to Bonhoeffer. You can sample Mark's writings on Bonhoeffer via this article on the ABC Religion and Ethics site.

The Intensive is available for credit and audit. All enrolment inquiries should be directed to the UFT office.

On not putting Christ back into Christmas

This is definitely worth a read. Bruce Kaye writes about Christmas on the ABC Religion and Ethics website: "Why Christians should leave Christmas to commercialism: a modest proposal." One of the key themes of Kaye's thesis is that since Christmas started off by Christians colonising a pre-existing pagan festivial, why not let the festival be de-Christianised. A couple of highlights from the article.

I can't help but feel, however, that there is a curious irony about attempts by Christian people and churches to try and "put Christ back into Christmas," when the whole motivation behind the celebration of Christmas was the attempt to take over an existing non-Christian festival in order to serve a Christian purpose.

 My proposal is for Christians to shift their festival focus to the real centre of the Christian year - namely, Easter. Lent could be restored to a observance that marked out the Christian celebration of their faith as a preparation for Easter. Christians and their churches would become known in the public arena as those who observe the Lenten discipline in anticipation of a joyous celebration of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection.

Read the full article here.

Starting a blog

The PD for my position at the CTM includes this in my tasks: “Foster an understanding of systematic theology in the life of the Synod, promoting new initiatives as appropriate.” The measurable outcome for this task is: “Systematic theology has a high profile in the life of the church”. I’m not quite sure what criteria will be used to measure that outcome.  Nor am I entirely sure, at this stage, just how I’ll go about addressing the task. I haven’t been back in this Synod long enough to have any real idea of just how systematic theology is already understood and what contributions I might make to ‘fostering’ that understanding.

Anyway, this seems a good reason to start a blog, and to use it to foster some thinking, provide some resources, and perhaps even spark some discussion about systematic theology (and theology more generally).

And the name? It’s based on Acts 17:20 and the Athenian philosophers’ response to Paul’s strange message about Jesus Christ: “We have heard you say some strange things and we want to know what you mean.” I think this is an appropriate framework for this blog.

Christianity is strange. The proclamation about Jesus Christ was strange in the ancient world. Emerging now from the domesticated pieties of Christendom, Jesus Christ can again address the church and the world with the theological, ethical and spiritual novelty of his way. (I've just recently explored some of these ideas in this short reflection on Christmas.)

Systematic theology is strange. Of all the academic theological disciplines it is arguably the one that sits most uneasily to contemporary academic culture, and it is often treated with suspicion within the church precisely because it is, well, systematic. It is seen to bring too much intellectual organisation to the life of faith. In my view, the more creative exponents of the discipline show how being systematic and being open belong, in their own strange way, to each other.

The Uniting Church is strange. In the very act of union it was called to take a step out of Christendom and its denominationalism. Just how big a step we actually took remains an open question. The Basis of Union presents an account of Jesus which precisely in its orthodoxy subverts the conventional liberal/conservative spectrum we inherited from our mainstream Protestant heritage. I’m not sure that we’ve yet come to terms with that particular Christology. So, in their strangeness, the UCA and its theology are hard to classify.  

These different sources of strangeness will be some of the driving forces of this blog.