Radical Theology: A Quick Primer

I’m in no way an expert on this field (radical theology). I’ve only just recently been exposed to its existence (thanks, Homebrewed Christianity!), and I’m not sure I fully understand it myself. All the same, let me try to explain what I’m encountering as I read through John Caputo’s book The Weakness of God.

Radical theology is a movement in theological academia associated closely with continental and postmodern philosophy. Radical theologians (such as the aforementioned Caputo and Peter Rollins) draw heavily from philosophical traditions such as deconstruction and apply them to current institutions within theology (in Caputo’s case, the idea that God is an overwhelming and metaphysical force that directly affects creation), while articulating new ways of understanding what postmodern philosophers like Jacques Derrida call “manifestations of the undeconstructable.” For Caputo, God is not an omnipotent being who directly impacts creation, but rather a “weak force” that is invoked in the very name of God, acting through beckoning and calling humanity to a better way of living.

No doubt my more conservative readers will attempt to apply a very systematic critique to Caputo’s thought (as I tend to as I’m reading his book), but before they do, I need to point out one of the hallmarks of radical theology, and that is a summary rejection of all metaphysics. For men like Caputo and other postmodern philosophers and theologians, metaphysics are completely deconstructible, not articulating actual aspects of the character and nature of God, but only betraying ones own presuppositions about God. Because of this, systematic attempts to explain God really carry no merit to a radical theologian, as they’re only articulations of an institutions own bias (Peter Rollins demonstrates this in many of his writings, most recently his book The Idolatry of God, which I haven’t read yet).

Instead, what many radical theologians prefer to use is theopoetics, which is a more poetic attempt to articulate one’s experience of the manifestation of the undeconstructible. From what I can tell, the event of “God” is not deconstructible because it is something that does indeed occur; what is deconstrucible is the name attached to those events. Radical theologians (and other postmodern theologians associated with theopoetics) keep this understanding when they listen to theopoetic dialogue, making for a more fluent tradition in the way that human beings understand God.

I’m intrigued by this movement for two reasons:

1. For its critiques of the existing church, particularly its accusations of idolatry. I’ve probably talked about making God in my image on here before (though I can’t remember when), and that’s what I’m primarily drawing from this movement (more so Rollins than Caputo).  Christians are apt to make God conform to their image, their ideas, and their prejudices, and radical theology is quick to call them out.
2. The idea of God as a name for an event is rather intriguing to me.  I’m a pretty dyed-in-the-wool evangelical; God is trinitarian, Jesus is fully God and fully man, etc., but Caputo is articulating aspects of God often left ignored in evangelical circles.  We like to think of God as all-powerful, all knowing, and everywhere at once, and when He’s there (we also still feel the need to assign God a gender), it’s powerful.  What’s become apparent to me even prior to picking up Caputo’s book is how often God operates in silence and secret, seductively (yay, alliteration!) beckoning us to God’s love and beauty.  True to his tradition, Caputo is very poetic in his descriptions of the event occuring in God.

You’re welcome to make critiques and objections to this thinking, but do remember that this is a 600-word blog post describing a movement in theology, not an original treatise defending it.  To get the full articulation, go buy Caputo’s book.

Anyway, see you guys Friday!

Back in the Saddle

So, after a long hiatus, it’s time to ease back into this blogging business.

On that note, what have I been doing/reading lately?

Well, I Just rocked a sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount (with the help of a friend). My friend Ian asked me if I could teach about one thing, what would it be?  I told him it would be the Sermon on the Mount.  Next thing I knew, I was teaching about it. It’s my favorite section of scripture, and it’s been fun walking through it with our community.  I’m glad to be stepping away from it now, because that means I can get back to blogging, but I look forward to doing more in the future.

I’m in the third week of a copy writing course.  I keep hearing good things about the freelance copy writing market, so I thought I’d try my hand at it, and it’s been pretty interesting and fun so far. The professor seems to like what I submit, and I have fun doing the assignments she posts, so hopefully something can come out of my taking this course.

Now, what have I been reading lately?

The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event by John Caputo. This has been particularly fascinating for me as it operates within a theological tradition birthed in the 20th and 21st centuries and based on the idea that there was an actual death of God that took place in the crucifixion. I have no intention of expounding on the implications of that viewpoint, but what Caputo is doing is looking at theology and Christianity through a postmodern philosophical lens, drawing from Derrida, Heidegger, and process theologian Catherine Keller.  Caputo is also a big contributor to the field of theopoetics, which attempts to talk about God through poetic articulations of personal experience, rather than a scientific explanation (such as systematic theology). I’m only about 70 pages in, and it’s pretty compelling.  

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.  This was his famous pop-science book that he published in 1988, and it deals with Hawking’s view of cosmology.  As the cover says, it attempts to explain a wide range of subjects, from the Big Bang to black holes.  This is another point of interest to me because I never paid enough attention to this stuff in high school (and I wish I had).  It’s pretty high level for  a pop-science book, but he reads more easily than some science authors do. 

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. I read this book in high school, and I’m happy to see that much of what I learned from it then has managed to stick. It’s a great book for anyone who’s interested in cultivating writing even as a personal craft, whether you choose to write fiction or non-fiction. I find myself gravitating toward this book more often than the other two, as King’s voice is a little easier for me to follow than the high-brow academic talk of Hawking, and the fluent postmodern language that Caputo uses.

 

So that’s what I’ve been up to the last few weeks.  I plan to ease myself back into the saddle of blogging, and I hope that while I do so I’ll find some new direction for this little blog of mine.  There’s a purpose in all the stuff I read and do; I just don’t fully know how to communicate it in a way that you, my reader, can apply it as well.  Here’s to finding that purpose!

See you Wednesday!

Jack Squat

Well, I’ve at least written THAT…

Yeah, I’ve been reading, sermoning, and taking a copywriting course for the last two weeks. Blogging’s chilling out in the back seat for now. It’s nice to see people are still checking in from time to time, though.

I’ll come back around to this at some point. Too much going on with life right now. See ya around, guys.

Top Ten Books I Want My Kids to Read

As I drove to work this morning, I started thinking about the different books I’d read since I was a kid for whatever reason.  There were quite a few of them; I remember always having some form of personal reading with me whenever I walked from class to class in high school, and my room has been full of books ever since I was old enough to read on my own.  It occurred to me that I would like to pass on these books to my kids whenever I get around to having them (no rush right now). Here’s the ones I can think of I’d want them to read, in no particular order…

1. The Chronicles of Narnia. I actually never read these as a kid, but when the movies came out, it made me wish I had. That, and CS Lewis is brilliant.  I definitely want to have a set of these for my kids.
2. The Lord of the Rings.  Can’t have Lewis without his fellow inkling Tolkien.  Though I’d probably wait until they hit eleven or twelve to give them the Trilogy, I’d definitely read them the Hobbit before bed when they hit seven or eight.
3. Watership Down by Richard Adams. Although this book is used for political and religious commentary in a lot of academic circles, Adams wrote it based on stories he told his kids.  I thought the book was exciting and something I would have loved to have read as a kid.
4. Tumble Tower by Anne Tyler. I remember my mom reading this to me when I was little.  It’s about a royal family living on an island somewhere.  All of the family members are very clean and tidy, except for the princess, who keeps her room incredibly messy.  One day, the waters rise and flood their castle, and the whole family takes refuge in “tumble tower” to escape the floods.  The family winds up surviving because of her untidiness, basically.  I think I liked this because i saw it as an excuse to not clean my room (But mom, if I don’t clean my room, I could save us from a flood!).
5. Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss.  This book made me want to see the world as a kid, and though we didn’t travel much when I was young, we still went places and saw things whenever we could.  I’ve heard of other people doing this thing where they buy a copy of this book and have every teacher a child has sign it as they go through school, then present it to them after graduation.  Definitely something I’d do for my kids.
6. Any of the Cross Section books.  These were really big books that had detailed, fold out pictures to show you the interiors of things like The Titanic, or the Empire State Building.  They even had Star Wars versions of these, and they were awesome.
7. Danger Guys. This was a series about two kids who often found themselves on different adventures (usually by accident). It’s not exactly original, but being a young boy and wanting exciting things to happen in my life made me love these books.
8. The Harry Potter series.  Started reading these in high school and I still think they’re awesome. However, given that they get to be pretty mature reading as you progress through the series, they’ll probably get them one at a time as they get older.
9. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Don’t remember reading this one as a kid, but definitely one I plan to own for them.
10. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  This blew both films out of the water.  I remember my dad getting it for me after I watched the Gene Wilder version, reading it, then asking him, “Dad, where’s all the good stuff from the book?” Roald Dahl’s a little weird sometimes in his writing, but I definitely want to pass him on.

There’s definitely more I’d save for them, but these books take the cake, and as much as I want to hand them Moltmann’s Theology of Hope or Barth’s Church Dogmatics, it might be better to start them with something a little easier. They can read Barth when they’re in high school.

What about you?  What books do you have in store for your kids?

Review: Thoughts on GK Beale’s The Erosion of Inerrancy In Evangelicalism

Though this book isn’t in my personal collection, I am very grateful to my friend Angelo for having lent it to me as a counterpoint to Enn’s Inspiration and Incarnation.

Responding to each other’s writings is something all theologians do whether in a positive or negative way. Having knowledge of the controversy surrounding Inspiration and Incarnation, it is of no surprise to me that harsh reviews such as Beale’s (or at least of heightened concerned, if harsh is too strong a word) exist. What saddens me about Beale’s response to Enns, however, is the attitude with which he writes, and his needless jump to the defense of a high view of Scripture.

Beale pokes a number of holes in Enn’s book, but here’s the predominate ones:

1. Ambiguity on Enn’s part.  He claims that Enns seems to be unclear about what he thinks about the evidence he’s presenting, and that the reader is left to simply trust Enns at his word that he’s still showing them a high view of Scripture. I found this to be pretty inaccurate, as I felt like I grasped what Enns was saying: there’s a lot of external influence on the Old Testament writings that comes from other existing civilizations, and God can (and did) work through that to teach us theological truths.  Pretty cut and dry to me.
2. Not presenting the other side of the argument (that being the evangelical view of inerrancy).  Enns responded to this objection by pointing out that his aim was at a popular audience, not a scholarly one, and he was not attempting to write an introductory book to biblical interpretation; rather, he was trying to start a conversation amongst evangelicals (who, no doubt, know what inerrancy is) about archaeological findings that have been published.  Again, I think Enns accomplished this task just fine, and while every scholar wants their work to be so much more than what it is, Enns decided that where he had left it was good enough.  Why judge a scholar’s work by what’s not there?
3. Enn’s argument is inconsistent with a high view of scripture (read: inerrancy and infallibility), which Beale stresses as critical to the Evangelical faith.  What bothered me here was that Beale never made a real defense as to WHY such a view was critical, he really only stated that it was crucial, and proceeded to show how certain viewpoints of Enns (and other scholars) weren’t consistent with a high view of Scripture.

Now, here’s the thing with Beale: he states from the get-go that he is going to be basing his definition of a high view of Scripture around the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, a document drafted by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI) and signed back in 1978 by over 300 noted evangelical scholars (I don’t know if he was one of them, but among the signers are Francis Schaeffer, Norman Geisler, RC Sproul, and JI Packer).   Beale is therefore stating that, if it doesn’t line up with the CSBI, then it’s not conducive to a high view of Scripture.  I want to admire his boldness for setting forth his presuppositions in this area from the  start…but his doing so ultimately shuts down any hope of actual dialogue regarding the issues in question.  It’s basically saying, “Here’s what I think, and if what your saying doesn’t look like what I think, then forget about it.”  No doubt Beale’s predecessors at Westminster (such as Cornelius Van Til) would have been fine with such a position (theologians call it “presuppositional apologetics), but I, frankly, am not.

There were times in this book that I felt like I was learning from Beale; he presented legitimate evidence contrary to Enns’ evidence used to support his view, and he did give SOME consideration to the views and language Enns used (he noted that he liked the use of “Christotelic” over “Christocentric” to describe how NT authors interpreted the OT).  I can bet that I would learn a lot from a class from him.  What I didn’t care for was what felt like less of an interest in dialogue so much as an interest in defending the CSBI against a perceived challenge (the very title of this book invokes a defensive posture).   There was no conversation (what Enns wanted), and there was even some inconsistency with his own views, such as defending seemingly cosmological statements in Scripture as “theological” in nature, not “scientific,” as though there were no way the ancient authors would have viewed the Earth as the center of the universe.  He took what Enns was trying to do and used it to support his own views while still knocking down what Enns had already accomplished!

In my opinion, though there was some good in this book, Beale had the chance to dialogue with Enns, and instead decided to get defensive. His presuppositional framework isn’t conducive to good theological dialogue at all.  If you’re looking for a good book defending inerrancy, I can’t say I’d tell you to look here, or to anyone who begins with the idea that the Bible HAS to be inerrant.  From what I’m told, BB Warfield has a good defense of inerrancy from an evidential viewpoint, so I would recommend looking there first.

Another Vacation and Reimagining

As my public service announcement last week stated, posts are going to be sporadic for a time because I’m devoting so much work to my sermon series. What I’m announcing today is that I’m scrapping this project. Why?

1) I’m not learning much, if anything at all. Seriously, when you’re reading books for speed, you get nothing out of them, and I hate it. When I have all the time in the world to read something, I learn and gain so much more.

2) I need to put back books I’m not ready to read, and this project doesn’t allow for that.

3) It’s me trying to look smart again. Granted, every blogger does this. If you blog, admit it. That’s the whole point of blogging; you have a perspective you think warrants merit and you want to put it out there for complete strangers to hear.

Now, the blog itself isn’t going anywhere yet. I’m not sure what I want to do or how I’d do it, but it may go the way of the buffalo in favor of a different themed blog here on WordPress or one I host myself. I’d like to stick to my guns and just write about theology, but I read about so much outside of theology that there’s no room to talk about that other stuff, and that kind of makes me sad. I don’t know. There’s a lot of ideas in my head, and I just want to find the one I want to stick with most.

So, today, the list and game plan pages come down. I’ll still have my own copy of the list and read through most of the stuff on it, but some of the books I put on there were more for filler than actual desire to read, so I’ll get around to them when I want to. Thoughts on the books I read will still get posted; they’ll just be more theology oriented for the time being.

Know this: this isn’t a matter of depression or sorrow that I’m leaving this behind. Believe it or not, I’m actually doing well right now. I’m learning to like my job, my wife and I are doing great, and God is opening doors for me in places I never expected him to do. Big changes are coming for me, like moving to Middletown at the end of June and getting to preach at my church (my first time in four years starts tonight!). Things are great; I just need to take time to see how this blog will change with me.

Have fun guys! I’ll be seeing you soon!

Public Service Announcement

Blog posts will be sporadic in the next couple weeks (at best once a week).  I’m doing a teaching series on the Sermon on the Mount at my church for the next few weeks, so my time reading anything that doesn’t involve the Sermon on the Mount simply is going to be incredibly limited.  Now, if someone wants to pay me full time to do what I’m doing here (so I can quit my day job) then there won’t be any problem, but until that magical day comes, posts will be sporadic!

 

Thanks for understanding!