Thanks to Halden for linking to this.

Seeing this picture and reading a recent article by a Princeton trained theologian prompted me to reflect…

If one stops to think about the past 50 years of theological scholarship, a lot has happened over the years. Just to list a few things that have impacted the scope of modern theology: Karl Barth passes away, the Second Vatican Council, and the Civil Rights Movement, etc. I’m sure the list could go on and on.

In the article, Dr. Cottrell gives a very telling portrayal of what he’s learned in the past 50 years of being a theologian. So it was with eagerness that I sat down to read this article by a veteran evangelical theologian to see how he sees the landscape. However, as I read, I became more and more disappointed. Basically, after receiving a PhD from Princeton and teaching theology for nearly 50 years, Dr. Cottrell says he has learned two things: 1) to distinguish what is a fad from what is fundamental and 2) the difference between right doctrine and wrong doctrine. More explicitly, Cottrell says,

“Both in my writing and in the classroom, I have never hesitated to take a position on any crucial issue, to defend it from Scripture, to declare opposing views to be false, and to identify those who teach falsely. But one thing I have learned in 50 years of “doing theology” in this way is that it makes one very unpopular in certain circles! It puts me in conflict with what some regard as a more sophisticated and scholarly teaching methodology, namely, that a teacher should simply present the various major views on any issue without stating and defending his own personal view. To do the latter is regarded as “spoon-feeding” the students, and is characterized as a sign of anti-intellectual fundamentalism.

I will not attempt to defend my methodology here. I will simply affirm that my teaching and writing will continue to be based on the presuppositions that truth is real and that it can be known. I cannot do otherwise without going against what I believe Scripture teaches about God, about itself, about the nature of human beings, about truth, about sound doctrine, and about false doctrine.”

He then goes on to list 13 of those “sound doctrines” with a “(to be continued)” tacked on at the end. How many more could he add? The list could go on forever…

But the list, as problematic as it is, was not what bothered me. What bothered me about his article was that after 50 years of teaching, the major thing he took away from this experience is that basically, he’s right and everyone else is wrong. I don’t think you can call this “theology”. I think it’s more appropriately labelled “ideology”.

I think that when someone studies theology, there are certain virtues that are fostered in the process. Thomas Aquinas was pretty big on this. He names the theological virtues as being faith, hope, and love. Before him, Augustine talked about how humility is such a key facet of moving towards God and understanding.

What was bothering me about Cottrell’s article was that after I finished reading it, he did not convey to me that these kinds of virtues were valued or fostered at the end of 50 years. Now, folks who may know this guy personally, may stick up for him and say he is a man of virtue. I’ll grant this and give Jack the benefit of the doubt.

However, I don’t think that the churches that mimic his stance can survive another 50 years in his footsteps. To be clear, if a church produces theologians that insulate themselves off from self-criticism, then that said church is in real trouble. It’s in trouble because it will continue to become more difficult to discern self-deception and self-absorption.

Michael Pollan talks about his new book Food Rules: an Eater’s Manual. Take about four minutes to watch how food marketers respond to his criticism here

Also, make sure and check out the second episode of BBC’s program, Our Man in the Vatican. At about the 6 minute mark, the BBC comes to Durham and you might see some familiar faces. The rumour is still unconfirmed as to whether or not the Pope will make his way up here to Durham for a visit.

In a recent issue of The Christian Century, Amy Frykholm interviews Rick Steves. Here are some interesting excerpts:

“Frankly, many Christians are embarrassingly ethnocentric. They wear their Christianity on their sleeves and think everybody should be like them. I wish I could be their tour guide. I’d put them in a lousy hotel, make them talk to people who don’t speak their language, give them some history to read and hope they can recognize that other people have dreams other than theirs. They might have the Bulgarian dream or the Sri Lankan dream or the Pakistani dream. Many Americans think that everybody should have the American dream.”

“If I were planning a mission trip, I would make a point of tackling people’s ethnocentrism. There are a few books that can be helpful. Reading the Bible Through Third World Eyes is one I would recommend. War Against the Poor is another that I have purchased by the hundreds. We’ve got to acknowledge that we in the First World downplay Jesus’ preferential option for the poor. We play up the notion that we should be industrious; we think, “Blessed are those who invest smartly.” When you venture to the developing world you are challenged to interpret the Bible from other people’s perspectives.

Too often, when Christians visit a place where the people are poor, they bring along quilts that members of their congregation have sewn to help the poor stay warm, but they don’t ask, “Why are these people in such squalor?” Mother Teresa was a loving person motivated by her Christian faith, but I think she was so beloved in part because she never asked “why?” When you ask why, that’s when things get really interesting.

Archbishop Oscar Romero saw structural poverty and economic injustice in El Salvador and asked why. And he was assassinated. Thirty years after his death, the power of Romero in El Salvador is just mind-blowing.

Our goal as thoughtful travelers is to see things from an economic-justice point of view. Economic justice is the hard issue. You can travel and then come home and consume with impunity in a way that keeps poor people poor. Or you can travel as a political act and come home inspired to live your life in empathy and solidarity with all of God’s people.

Recently I was one of the judges for a video contest sponsored by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. “God’s Work, Our Hands” was the theme. All the videos showing mission efforts were commendable, but they were mostly about acts of charity, with not much edginess. Nobody was willing to ask about economic justice. Poverty is structural. It is a matter of people’s buying power.”

Lisa Miller, author of the upcoming book Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, wrote an article in Newsweek last week called, Harvard’s Crisis of Faith. In this article Miller tries to make sense of why Harvard stopped making religion a requirement for their students. Here are some excerpts:

“My colleagues fear that taking religion seriously would undermine everything a great university stands for,” the Rev. Peter Gomes, Harvard’s chaplain and a professor of Christian history, told me. “I think that’s ungrounded, but there it is.”

“Steven Pinker says his main objection to the 2006 proposal that students be required to take a course in a Reason and Faith category was that it seemed to make reason and faith equal paths to truth. “I very, very, very much do not want to go on the record as suggesting that people should not know about religion,” he told me. “But reason and faith are not yin and yang. Faith is a phenomenon. Reason is what the university should be in the business of fostering.” … “Faith,” he said, “is believing in something without good reasons to do so. It has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these.”

“This year’s freshmen, the class of 2013, are the first to benefit from the new General Education requirements that passed, finally, in 2007. During their tenure at Harvard, undergraduates now have to take one course in each of eight categories, including two in science and one in math. They have to take one course in a loose category called Culture and Belief, which includes religion courses but also classes in photography, mythology, and the literature of the quest. A student, in other words, can graduate from Harvard without having to grapple directly with questions about a world in which people define themselves and their histories according to their views of God.”

In the January issue of New Blackfriars from this year, Alasdair MacIntyre has a good article on “The Very Idea of a University.” MacIntyre critiques contemporary universities for the very kind of thing that Harvard is undergoing. My friend Marika has a good summary of this article on her post entitled: How to stop clever people being stupid.

My wife, April is helping Stephen Sykes with typing up his autobiography. In the section she was working on last night, Bishop Sykes talks about his experience at Harvard during the Cuban missile crisis. The two things that struck me from April’s reading it to me was that 1) it wasn’t until he went to Harvard that he realised not everyone reads the same theology books and 2) he and his wife Joy decided to go to a park if the atomic bomb sirens alerted them to take shelter.

I think Bishop Sykes’ observations were fitting to include in light of Lisa Miller’s article. Also, keep an eye out for her book because, if I’m not mistaken, N.T. Wright makes an appearance or two.

“But after a few days on the subcontinent, I came to the unshakable belief that we will have decent enough healthcare reform, and soon. What’s going to help America rebound from Bush/Cheney is what saved and saves India — love, nonviolence, a lot of help, radical playfulness and perspective. I saw Indians living in spaces the size of my bathtub, giddily colorful amid the squalor and deprivation, making themselves beautiful and focusing on what they do have.”

On an unrelated note, The Guardian just published some stats on religious studies and theology degrees from the UK. What is interesting to me is the category within which I find myself: percentage of students from outside the UK. In my experience, it seems that this category is reserved mostly for the Americans and very few Australians. I thought that surely Durham would come at the top of the list because we have so many in the department. I was way wrong. St. Andrews comes to the top of the list with 53% followed closely by Edinburgh with 52%. This may sound like a ’so what’ kind of fact, but if you glance over to the difference in cost for tuition for those unfortunate non-UK passport holders, you may see how a school can benefit economically from this phenomenon.

food for thought…

Great Sabbath

Unwatched, the seventh dawn spreads,
Light smoothing out the sky, firm hands
Smearing a damp clay horizon-wide.
They wake, then lie unsurely side by side,
Knowing the ache and pull of novel bands,
The night’s new memories grinding in their heads,

Not understood, their bodies newly strange.
Outside, the new light soaks the ground;
They chill, turn in towards each other’s heat,
Then roll apart to test uncertain feet
On unknown earth. The dripping dawn around
Confirms the unformed fear. The world can change.

Outside an absence. While they learned and slept,
It had drawn off behind the sky’s stone face.
The world between their bodies and their palms
Is left to turn. The silence calms.
The morning’s news is plain; the centre space
Is empty. Under the trees where he once stepped

It is for you to go. Under the gaping sky
You wake, he sleeps, you make, he lies at rest.
He will not come again; last night you made
A future he will not invade.
Today the sun is buried, unexpressed;
You shall shape how to live and how to die.

You shall make change. He leaves no room
For his own hand; you shall be history,
You shall build heaven, you shall quarry hell.
No one shall say you have (or not) made well.
And, bored and pious, talk of mystery,
When weeds are choking up his tomb.

We make, he sleeps. Only his bloody dreams
Tell him the works of freedom on earth
Your liberty his flight, your future and his death.
He dreams your hell for you to draw your breath,
Out of his emptiness he lets your birth,
It is his silence echoes back the screams.

For they have not forgotten everything;
They wake and lie unsurely side by side
And listen to a laboured, steady breath,
Insistent, unconsoled, remembered death.
A small-hours passing on the turning tide,
Alone and never taught what key to sing.

He will not come again, not in the form
He walked on your first earth. But will you know
Him when he slips, a dosser, through your door?
Oh yes. Who else will touch the raw
Salt, unhealed memory of worlds ago,
Whispering, once you knew, once you were warm.

Listen for promises, fantasize for care,
And you will fill the neutral sky with lead,
Make chains to stop the quiet flow of chance,
Sell all your working for a stripper’s dance.
He chose his death; why can he not be dead,
And leave the bloody dreams at home elsewhere?

Drink up your tears; you can no longer need
The luxury of an old, cheap compassion.
To bury him may be a heavy cost,
But buys our future when today is lost,
Buys the clean stone from which we can refashion
Our image soiled by his remembered greed.

He asks his present back; the clay-daubed hands
Are picking at the dyke. Weep and you will unmix
The mortar, and the salt black sea will run
And catch and trip and drown us, one by one.
For walls are weaker than their strongest bricks.
Behind our stone, the moon-fed tide expands

To flood our fens. We walk with desperate care,
The locks are fragile and the wind is swelling,
Windows will rattle us awake, eyes wide,
To stare, lying unsurely side by side,
Quiet and fearful; there is no telling
What dreams will flesh out of the noisy air.

The stones had fallen down. We woke too late.
He has unlatched the house, smashed through the pains,
While we slept out our sixth and darkest night,
And taken back his gross seigneurial right.
Today he swills the cultivated plains,
Salting our clay; reclaiming our estate.
Rowan Williams, The Poems of Rowan Williams

Read more about Niebuhr here.

So, it’s one thing if theology has influenced a particular politician. But one has to also ask, what is theology for? Ben Myers has some great thoughts for us about that:

“the whole purpose of theological education: not simply to make students cleverer, but to help them learn better ways to speak to God in prayer, and to one another in witness.

Who is this God who comes to us and meets us in Jesus Christ? That is the basic theological question. Answering this question requires broad knowledge, sharp thinking, scholarly discipline, and a good dose of intellectual creativity. But it also demands much more than that: if we’re really to grapple with the significance of God’s self-witness in Christ, we’ll also need to respond to that witness.”

CONFERENCE THEME
The Irish School of Ecumenics and the theological journal Concilium are pleased to announce a call to papers for the international conference: ‘From World Mission to Interreligious Witness: Visioning Ecumenics in the 21st Century’ (cf. Programme Description).
The conference seeks to explore and examine the following three-fold trajectory:
1) From World Mission to World Christianity and Beyond
2) Cultures of Faith and Public Theology: Ecumenical Witness
3) Religious Pluralism and Interreligious Witness

ABSTRACTS FORMAT
Titled abstracts of 200-300 words should address the following—and related— conference themes: interreligious witness and religious pluralism; ecumenical witness in the 21st century; the hopes and limits of public theology; theological dissent, freedom and creativity; mission and the ‘other’; intercultural theology and religious identity(ies); ‘mission’ in a secular context; local and global contexts of World Christianity and other faiths; and the next 100 years of ecumenism.
The format of the parallel paper sessions will be 20 minute presentations followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Parallel sessions will take place on Thursday, June 17th from 16:30-18:00. Co-authored papers are welcome.
Send your abstracts by February 1, 2010 to:
Dr. Peter Admirand at Dublinecumenics2010@tcd.ie (Irish School of Ecumenics, Dublin) or to
Pramila Rajan at: concilium.madras@gmail.com (Concilium, Madras).

LOCATION, CONFERENCE FEES, AND OTHER PRACTICALITIES
The conference will take place in the Arts building of Trinity College Dublin, ideally located in the city centre of Dublin, Ireland. In addition to accommodation and meal possibilities at Trinity College, the many cultural attractions, restaurants, pubs, and hotels of Dublin are all in walking distance.
Conference Fee: 100 Euro [50 Euro for students / unwaged] by April 1, 2010. 120/60 Euro after.
Questions can be directed to Dr. Peter Admirand (ISE) at Dublinecumenics2010@tcd.ie.

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
For further information on the Conference Organizers, please visit:
Academic Staff, ISE Ecumenics Programme http://www.tcd.ie/ise/
Steering Committee Concilium Board http://www.concilium.in/

For more info: website

Byron makes some interesting points:

“Notice that the much maligned NHS in the UK spends about 40% of what the US does per person and yet the UK has a higher average life-expectancy by more than a year. Portugal spends less than 30% of the US level and also has a higher life-expectancy. The country with the greatest longevity, Japan, spends about 35% per person of what the US spends. And this massive US spending is not just absolute, but also relative to GDP. The other salient feature of this graph is noting that the only industrialised nation without universal health care is the US.”

It would be nice if we could get on the ball. But before you’re tempted to get overly optimistic about tides of change, watch the Republicans in action as they try and sink the ’socialist’ flagship that is the Obama administration:

Lewis Ayres has just posted his take on The Centre for Catholic Studies’ colloquium about the future of Trinitarian theology. It was a great day and also a great opportunity to hear both David Burrell and David Tracy.

Have a look at the blog and see if you can recognize any familiar faces.

Hopefully they will be posting the audio for this session soon.