Book Review - The Uncontrolling Love of God, by Thomas Jay Oord

A God of love births love in splendorous ways by granting agency to love from His Being or Essence. Not by decree or coercion but through who He is. Love is, because God is.

So too creational agency. An agency of becoming we might think of as freewill. As God has agency so too His creation has agency. Again, not by decree but because of God's Self, Being, or Essence.

The paradox is evil and how past church creeds and traditions misapplied ideas of God's Sovereignty to human culpability. Though God is sovereign He is sovereign not because He controls creation but because He releases it from His control to become as He is: "A serving God of sacrificial love and care. Of wound binding, healing, nurture and wisdom."

But this also speaks of a very weak form of sovereignty whose weakness is observed by our Lord Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul to be God's greatest power. Again, a paradox. Would a powerful God allow evil? Illness? Suffering? Or be crucified on a cross? No, but a God of love who leads by love, who is love, would. This kind of love allows agency, not control. Though our ideas of God seems to be one of power, strength, absolute determination, and judgment, they are but very pagan forms of God-ness inherited by the much older religions even earlier then the Greeks.

Nor is a loving, giving, guiding God of the bible what God's followers in the bible expected. They wanted protection, deliverance, sustenance. And therein lies the struggle both in the bible narratives as well as in the histories of the church. A powerful God of judgment loses the idea of a loving God of care guiding his creation to become more than it is.

God's agency is certainly not a sovereignty / rule by coercion. Nor peevishness. Nor authoritarianism. No, a God of love shares Himself through His creation that it might become as He is becoming. Where together, both God and creation, may fulfill the bounty of the other in fellowship and communion.

In the end, we pray that God may act in our lives in ways which we may not be understandable but known by its fruit bearing goodness and love. Not only in our lives but in the lives of those around us and very nature itself in earthcare and restoration.

R.E. Slater

March 30, 2020

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The Uncontrolling Love of God:

An Open and Relational Account of Providence

by Thomas Jay Oord

BOOK REVIEW by W. Tyler

March 28, 2020

In this helpful and thought-provoking book, Thomas Jay Oord presents a love-based model of providence (which he calls the "essential kenosis" model) that fits very nicely in the framework of open theism, with special attention to making sense of our lived experiences in a world that is filled with "regularities and randomness, freedom and agency, good and evil". In wrestling with the apparent tension between divine power and divine love (which is ultimately the central locus of any discussion of providence), Oord opts to prioritize love in a logically consistent way, arguing that any account of God's action in the world which allows God absolute power over even the smallest part of creation logically fails to prioritize love. In the negative sense, this is because a God of absolute power exacerbates the problem of evil by adding to it what others have called "the scandal of particularity"; if God can stop events whose overall effects are evil, but chooses not to, then God is culpable for that evil. In the positive sense, this is simply the nature of self-giving love, and this extends all the way to the most fundamental laws of physics: "Regularities of existence—so-called natural laws—emerged in evolutionary history as new kinds of organisms emerged in response to God's love. The consistency of divine love creates regularities as creatures respond, given the nature of their existence and the degree and range of agency they possess. God's eternal nature of love both sets limits and offers possibilities to each creature and context, depending on their complexity. In this, God's love orders the world. And because God's nature is love, God cannot override the order that emerges." Oord takes special care to note that this is not the same as saying that God voluntarily limits his own power in the service of love; rather, God's power derives from his love, and so the power that we often attribute to God simply does not exist whenever it would conflict with love, and in particular whenever it would involve unilaterally overriding the so-called natural order that itself derives from God's love. It is worth mentioning here that even though Oord's proposal focuses a lot of attention on what God cannot do, this is only to clear away the reader's preconceptions, and would perhaps not be necessary were it not for the long theological tradition of depicting God as an absolute sovereign. The constructive part of Oord's proposal is substantial, so his is not a merely negative account of providence.

These basic assertions have surprising implications. One is an apparent solution the problem of evil: "This model of providence says God necessarily gives freedom to all creatures complex enough to receive and express it. Giving freedom is part of God's steadfast love. This means God cannot withdraw, override or fail to provide the freedom a perpetrator of evil expresses. God must give freedom, even to those who use it wrongly. ... Essential kenosis [also] explains why God doesn't prevent evil that simple creatures with agency cause or even simpler entities with mere self-organizing capacities cause. God necessarily gives the gift of agency and self-organization to entities capable of them because doing so is part of divine love. God's other-empowering love extends to the least and simplest of these. God cannot withdraw, override or fail to provide agency and self-organization to any simply organism or entity that causes genuine evil. The kenotic love of God necessarily provides agency and self-organization. God's moment-by-moment gifts are irrevocable. Consequently, God is not culpable for failing to prevent the evil that basic entities, organisms, and simple creatures may cause." An auxiliary claim is that even though God is present to all places at all times, he is not present in a bodily way, so that he must work lovingly and persuasively through and in creation rather than acting unilaterally from outside of creation; God actually needs the free cooperation of creation in order to redeem evil. Another surprising assertion is that God experiences time in a way analogous to our own experience of time, and in particular that God does not know the future. This is motivated partly by the understandable (but not incontestable) claim that God's foreknowledge would render creaturely freedom an illusion. Perhaps more importantly, this claim is motivated by the idea that "Love is an adventure without guaranteed results". While I appreciate the intuition behind this, I find myself skeptical of the idea that God experiences time with us; I find myself asking, "Where in the universe does God experience time?", because according to relativity, time flows differently in different places, and in fact time is wrapped up with the spatial dimensions of reality. Further, no two events taking place in different locations can be said to happen simultaneously. How then should we understand God's experience of time in light of God's omnipresence? This is not necessarily an unsolvable problem, but I find myself in want of a fuller explanation of how this problem might be solved.

Finally, Oord has an incredible exposition on how miracles fit into the essential kenosis model. Essentially, God is always working with and in creation, constantly opening up new possibilities if we cooperate; when our cooperation results in unusual good that appears to fall outside what we would call "natural", then a miracle has occurred. Because both the natural order and miraculous events derive from God's love with the cooperation of creation, there is no clear line between the natural and the miraculous; there is an irreducibly subjective, relational aspect to miracles. This coheres well with much of what the Bible depicts as miraculous; it especially sheds light on Jesus' oft-repeated phrase "Your faith has made you well," as well as his claimed inability to perform miracles for faithless people. It also helps explain why miracles are not always consistent; even for those who have faith, a miracle may not occur if some other aspect of creation is especially resistant to that miracle. My only complaint here is that Oord does not address biblical events attributed to God which are unambiguously harmful and unloving, such as the plague of death in Exodus. On the one hand, such events are not miracles at all by Oord's definition, since they are not good; on the other hand, one can hardly avoid calling such events miracles, since they appear to be the direct result of unusual divine action. The only way forward that I can envision here is to recognize that such events, though attributed to God by the biblical authors, cannot have actually happened as recorded if God is truly the God of love revealed perfectly in Christ. I am quite prepared to take this course, but other readers may not be.

Oord is to be praised for so consistently prioritizing love in a way that upholds the dignity of God and of people. His compelling vision of God working in and with others is compatible in interesting ways with other concepts within the Christian theological tradition, such as panentheism and deification. One particularly challenging but fruitful exercise in this regard is the reconciliation of open theism and universal salvation. Oord does not comment on eschatology in this book, which leaves the door wide open for a variety of views on the final state of created things. The most obvious choice would be to endorse a free will model of salvation and damnation, but I fear that this is too high a price to pray for God's goodness; as David Bentley Hart has pointed out, a God who knowingly creates a world in which the final damnation of any creature is even possible is an evil God, for morally speaking what has been risked has already been surrendered; moreover, in such a picture it would be logically possible to say that God loved all humans to the utmost, even though all humans voluntarily damned themselves. On the other hand, some Christian universalists have suggested that God may occasionally override human freedom in the interest of saving all, and on Oord's account this is too high a price for God's love. Following the lead of Hart, I would suggest that God's love has fashioned us in such a way that we are intrinsically drawn to God, who is our sole and final good; our freedom is ultimately not our ability to do wrong, which arises from deception and slavery to sin, but rather it is our ability to do right, to simply be what we are be design. That is to say, God's love naturally makes us so that we naturally seek God's love; just as God cannot not love us, we who are made in God's image cannot in the end not love God, though for some while we may deceive ourselves into thinking that we do not. So God need not know the future in precise detail to guarantee the ultimate reconciliation of all things (which I think he must do if he is good); and this inexorable return of all things to their source is not coercive on God's part, precisely because it is deeply consonant with the love-fashioned nature of created things.

Again, this is a helpful and thought-provoking read. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in providence, miracles, or open theism. I look forward to reading some of Oord's other books in the future!

Stanley Hawerwas - On Retirement, Citizenship, and the Church of the Future

Learning to Love the Enemy [Stanley Hauerwas]

Published on Jun 7, 2016. Jesus' teaching in Matthew 18 is central for Christians coming

to love the enemy. Particularly important is that we never forget that God is the enemy

we most fear. To be confronted and to confront those that we have wronged and have

wronged us one of the central practices for Christians to practice neighbor love.

Nothing to lose: YDS alum Stanley Hauerwas on retirement, citizenship, and the church of the future

http://divinity.yale.edu/news/nothing-lose-yds-alum-stanley-hauerwas-retirement-citizenship-and-church-future

by Ray Waddle

January 6, 2015

“The work of theology is never done. That is very good news. The work of theology can never be done alone. That is even better news.” - Stanley Hauerwas

Now that Stanley Hauerwas ’65 B.D., ’67 M.A., ’68 M.Phil., ’68 Ph.D. has reached emeritus status at Duke Divinity School, his idea of retirement is to work on three books, preach regularly, and take up a (part-time) post as chair of theological ethics with the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Stanley Hauerwas“I can’t figure out how to be retired,” says Hauerwas, who officially retired at Duke in 2013 after 29 years of teaching there. “If I’m retired, why do I have so many deadlines? The reason is, I can’t say no to people. I need to learn to say no!”

At age 74, Hauerwas is still writing and speaking, still thinking about the meaning of church in contemporary times—still doing the work of a theologian and public intellectual known for far-ranging ideas and a mischievous spirit. One of his forthcoming books, The Work of Theology (Eerdmans), explores matters such as “how to write a theological sentence” and “how to be theologically ironic.” Another is The Difference Christ Makes (Cascade Books), which includes lectures delivered on the occasion of Hauerwas’s 2013 retirement, and his response. The lecturers included YDS’s Gilbert L. Stark professor of Christian Ethics and academic dean, Jennifer Herdt.

The trouble with modern education

“Being a Christian has not, and does not, come naturally or easy for me,” he once wrote in an essay posted at ABC’s Religion and Ethics website. “I take that to be a good thing because I am sure that to be a Christian requires training that lasts a lifetime.”

His thoughts about the state of the faith today continue undeterred. In today’s intellectual and economic climate, it becomes clearer to him that churchgoing and Christian identity are getting harder for millions to sustain. The daily habits of postmodern experience make it more challenging to fit the Christian story into one’s life.

“The growth of churches in the 1950s and 60s looks now like a kind of mirage,” he says. “People thought we were doing OK. Because of the momentum of the civil rights movement, people thought church was providing a good witness here or there. Now people are increasingly aware that we’re in trouble. Charles Taylor had it right in The Secular Age: In earlier times it was virtually impossible for people in the West not to believe in God, but now many find it easy or unavoidable.”

One of the problems is the nature of modern education, he says. In The State of the University (Blackwell, 2007) and elsewhere, Hauerwas has argued that the sidelining of theology in a liberal arts education degrades the liberal arts’ contribution to public life. The pursuit of the knowledge of God should be part of the overall academic pursuit of knowledge. Theological inquiry should take its place as a vital tool in the aims of education—the formation of individuals who bring imagination, skepticism, perspective, humility, and critical thinking to the work of citizenship, democratic reform, and economic justice.

He says the marginalized place of theology in turn domesticates theological conversation, damaging the confidence of educated churchgoers, who now often lack a vigorous idea of why they believe or how their belief can speak to the times.

“It’s not clear to me these days, for instance, what it means to be a citizen,” he says. “It would be helpful to the discussion if Christians worried more about it. I think citizenship ought to be about the obligations we have to each other here in this historical, geographic setting.”

An alternative to our unfaithfulness

Hauerwas believes the church of the future will be a leaner, smaller, but more committed “colony,” and that will be no bad thing. The much-reported decline of Christian influence and power should give churches a new liberation from culture captivity, a freedom to speak the truth.

“Once you’ve got nothing to lose, hell, you’re free! You no longer have to keep your language hidden in your back pocket. I think God is giving us the next step, helping us discover that the secular way isn’t enough. It won’t sustain life.”

The church’s witness and practices remain central. The discipline of prayer, the love of the poor, and the gospel power of friendship with God and others are direct challenges to the spirit of the age, including rationalistic abstractions that lead to violence.

He offered this definition of church in a 2014 interview with “Thinking in Public”: 

“That through Jesus Christ, very God and very man, we gentiles have been made part of the promise to Israel, that we will be witnesses to God’s good care of God’s creation through the creation of a people who once were no people, that the world can see there is an alternative to our violence. There is an alternative to our deceptions. There is an alternative to our unfaithfulness to one another through the creation of something called church. That’s salvation.”

Theology moves in many directions

Retirement finds him reading a customary range of authors and subjects—novelists David Foster Wallace and Marilynn Robinson, theologian Herbert McCabe, a recent book by Timothy Chappell called Knowing What To Do: Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in Ethics.

“My reading has always been gregarious and unplanned – I read what people tell me to read,” he says.

Amazon link

Asked about his YDS days, Hauerwas says he retains a lasting image of professor Robert L. Calhoun standing in class lecturing about the history of doctrine, shortly before Calhoun’s retirement. A much-beloved teacher of historical theology, Calhoun (1896-1983) taught at Yale from 1923 to 1965. Hauerwas has great enthusiasm for Scripture, Creed, Theology: Lectures on the History of Christian Doctrine in the First Centuries (Cascade, 2011), the book that gathers Calhoun’s lectures on the subject.

“George Lindbeck dedicated much energy to compiling his lectures and editing the book, and he wrote a terrific introduction. I think every YDS student should read it,” he says.

Even a brief chat with Stanley Hauerwas on the subject of theology moves in many directions – economics, citizenship, friendship, fiction, imperialism, and the elusive nature of God.

Amazon link

“I love the quote from theologian Robert Jensen: ‘God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.’ The critical word is ‘whoever.’ The identity of God is something we don’t know and can’t know. It’s exciting to me that we can’t know all the things God does or is capable of doing or even what God is. It’s idolatry to think we do know. A lot of people think they do know and a lot of the time the result is violence.”

The author of more than 40 books, Hauerwas addresses his restlessly diverse interests in an essay he wrote for YDS’s Reflections journal in 2013, the Fall issue. Titled, How to (Not) Retire Theologically, the essay won the Associated Church Press’s Award of Excellence for best theological article that year. It will appear in his new book The Work of Theology.

Book Description

A "how-to" book on theology from a world-renowned theologian.

In this book Stanley Hauerwas returns to the basics of "doing" theology. Revisiting some of his earliest philosophical and theological views to better understand and clarify what he has said before, Hauerwas explores how theological reflection can be understood as an exercise in practical reason.

Hauerwas includes chapters on a wide array of topics, including "How I Think I Learned to Think Theologically," "How the Holy Spirit Works," "How to Write a Theological Sentence," and "How to Be Theologically Funny." In a postscript he responds to Nicholas Healy's recent book Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction.

"What we believe as Christians," says Hauerwas, "is quite basic and even simple. But because it is so basic, we can lose any sense of the extraordinary nature of Christian beliefs and practices." In discussing the work of theology, Hauerwas seeks to recover that "sense of the oddness of what we believe as Christians."

In the essay he writes: “That I cannot stop doing theology given the way I have done it also accounts for the range of my work. I confess when I think about the diverse topics I have addressed it not only makes me tired but it elicits in me a sense of embarrassment. I am not smart enough to know what needs to be known in order to address questions that range from the nature of personal identity to the ethics of war. But I have a stake in both of those topics, and many more, if I am to do the work I take to be the work of theology.”

He concludes: “The work of theology is never done. That is very good news. The work of theology can never be done alone. That is even better news.”

Book Reviews: "The Journey of Modern Theology," by Roger Olson

Amazon link here

Product Details

Hardcover: 720 pages

Publisher: IVP Academic (November 1, 2013)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0830840214

ISBN-13: 978-0830840212

Book Description

Modernity has been an age of revolutions—political, scientific, industrial and philosophical. Consequently, it has also been an age of revolutions in theology, as Christians attempt to make sense of their faith in light of the cultural upheavals around them, what Walter Lippman once called the "acids of modernity."Modern theology is the result of this struggle to think responsibly about God within the modern cultural ethos.

In this major revision and expansion of the classic 20th Century Theology (1992), co-authored with Stanley J. Grenz, Roger Olson widens the scope of the story to include a fuller account of modernity, more material on the nineteenth century and an engagement with postmodernity. More importantly, the entire narrative is now recast in terms of how theologians have accommodated or rejected the Enlightenment and scientific revolutions.

With that question in mind, Olson guides us on the epic journey of modern theology, from the liberal "reconstruction" of theology that originated with Friedrich Schleiermacher to the postliberal and postmodern "deconstruction" of modern theology that continues today.

The Journey of Modern Theology is vintage Olson: eminently readable, panoramic in scope, at once original and balanced, and marked throughout by a passionate concern for the church's faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. This will no doubt become another standard text in historical theology.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Great book, though I like the original better

by Clint Walker VINE VOICE

November 27, 2013

Format: Hardcover

Roger Olson is a prolific writer and a passionate theologian. I have followed his work from his [first] days at Bethel College and Seminary in St. Paul, MN, and have followed it with even more interest since he moved to Waco to teach at Truett Seminary at Baylor University.

I also long ago read 20th Century Theology. I had read it not in a seminary classroom, but as a pastor trying to make sense of where I was theologically, especially in relationship to some of the issues raised through postmodern philosophy and the emergent church movement (before it was called that). I loved the book, and its thesis of the development of modern theologies as a dialogue and dialectic between emphases on theology's understanding of the transcendence of God and the immanence of God made sense to me. It helped me become more grounded and able to articulate where I was in the context of modern theology and postmodern philosophy. 20th Century Theology was a game changer for me.

Now, in an update on the book's 20th anniversary, Olson has, in attempting to revise the old text, written a new text with the old text as the foundation. Instead of using a theological construct to tell what has happened in 19th, 20th and 21st century theologies, he has used a historical one in The Journey of Modern Theology.

Since what is happening in both books is a historical theology of sorts, both organizational systems are appropriate. Olson's new construct makes the development of theology come across as a more relational and personal story of people and ideas in a historical context. Which is all well and good. But I think it misses the sense of wrestling with God that the text it has meant to revise had.

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All I Was Looking For--And More

by Amazon Customer

December 16, 2013

Format: Hardcover

I think that the greatest value of Olson's magnum opus--for most people--will be to confirm the best reading of many of these theologians. Given the complexity of these thinkers, it helps to have confirmation that you are reading them correctly

If you have the opportunity to sample only some of their work, which is the case with most of us not teaching this material on a daily basis, you really need a compass to help with the larger corpus you don't have time to read. This book is a great compass. I waited patiently for this book for over a year after hearing from the author that he was working on it. [Now,] after reading it, I can say that my patience has been well rewarded. 

The book performs that rare function that most books don't: It bridges the gap between general summaries and detailed treatments. That's really what most need, but few scholars achieve that goal. Writers either like to keep it general and simple for the lay reader, or they write a 700-page tome on one or [only] a few theologians. Dr. Olson covers the middle of the academic spectrum, and that--I think--is the appeal of this fine work.

The book is also a great complement to the author's previous book, The Story of Christian Theology, adding additional depth to that part of the history of most interest to many of us today. So the book is most definitely a big cut above a survey--in fact, it's much more than that. If clarity, accuracy, and fairness are your highest academic values, as they are for me, Olson is the scholar for you. For me, the chapter on Horace Bushnell was worth the price of the book. This chapter and others have led me to read more of Bushnell and a few others whose contributions are either forgotten, unknown, or under appreciated.

Highly recommended!

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Review of Roger Olson's "The Journey of Modern Theology"

by Bev Mitchell

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2014/05/review-of-the-journey-of-modern-theology-by-roger-e-olson-by-bev-mitchell/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=rogereolson_051914UTC120551_daily&utm_content=&spMailingID=45928570&spUserID=Nzg4MDU4NjI4MjkS1&spJobID=442427976&spReportId=NDQyNDI3OTc2S

by Roger Olson

May 17, 2014

Comments

This book is written to grab you (gently) and introduce you to some of the most interesting people of the last four hundred years. Yes, most of them were philosophers and theologians, but they were people first and always people. Roger Olson knows these people, some personally, but mainly through careful, sympathetic reading of much of their work over a long career. The characters march across the pages almost as if the author is presenting his friends to us. He knows them well, and wants us to know them – not to always agree with them for that would be impossible, but to know them as people who had great ideas, to know what the heart of those ideas was and to know why these particular people had these particular ideas. And to know the human and intellectual context into which these ideas spoke.

In his two page note of required reading at the beginning, Dr. Olson says “This book’s primary intended audience is not scholars of modern theology but students, pastors and interested laypeople……. The goal…. is to inform readers about the lives, careers, major ideas, legacies and possible problems of these thinkers.” This lay person and lifelong student thinks that this mission has been admirably accomplished. All students of theology who love people and their ideas will get much from this volume.

[Those philosophers and theologians who were about] were all chosen for inclusion in this book because they made very significant contributions to Christian theology. Like today, they all worked in a time when how we ask and attempt to answer questions, and even the questions we think we should be asking, was in great ferment. In the century before the first and second world wars, many wanted, and thought they could find, sure answers to all questions. Others were concerned that we should not be so bold as to ask certain questions. Others thought the questions and answers already available should do well enough. Still others were not so sure about certainty and struck out like bold explorers who saw a need to know what lay over that hill or beyond that ocean. Some paid dearly for their audacity, all are heroes to someone. All were very human. Their journeys, taken as a whole, as a package, have much to say about where were are now as Christians trying to understand who we are, who God is and how we should relate to him and to each other.

By the thirties and certainly by the forties (1930s to 1940s), it was clear that some of the theological certainties were nothing more than illusions. Many of the hopes for human improvement were dashed. There had already been warnings from some that humans are not really the masters of their fate but now those voices, mostly long ignored, were being heard again. A strength of Olson’s treatment is how clearly he ties together voices across the great divide created by the two world wars. Thinkers like Kierkegaard, Coleridge, Bushnell, Barth, Niebuhr and Moltmann are linked together across the centuries. All this without leaving out or minimizing other threads from thinkers like Schleiermacher, Troeltsch, Bultmann, Tillich, and Whitehead. The contrasts across these lines of thought are made clear, but Olson does not miss many opportunities to show how important cross currents flowed for those with the good will to see.

The giants - and many of the lesser knowns - walk these pages. Importantly, the lesser knowns come off as significant contributors to a fascinating journey. They are simply lesser known, not necessarily lesser in any other way. Several of these ‘lesser’ lights were mediators. We are also given glimpses of how this sidelining of certain voices can happen. It’s not always a political or academic power process either. There are often fascinating personal and cultural dynamics at work in determining who gets remembered well. One of the mediators that I would highlight is I.A. Dorner because Olson’s presentation of him is a particularly good example of how lesser knowns are honoured in this book. Olson’s presentation of such people is a great strength. [Works by scholars such as Dorner] not only [help to] clarify the extremes (often represented by the big names) but also shows [to us] how much of the very good there is in the extremes, especially when moderated and modulated by rather different views.

In case you think that such a volume must of necessity deal with cut and dried dogmatic statements, systematized thinking that will leave you feeling completely satisfied that the intellect stands supreme, there is romanticism here too. Søren KIerkgaard makes several appearances because he influenced many, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge appears alone and in company with Horace Bushnell. Imagination shines forth not as the devil’s playground but, to borrow from Bushnell, as a “transcendently perceptive, creative, unifying power.” This aspect of theology is well represented throughout these pages.

On the science/faith front, we are shown how some theologians were prepared to let science drive the show, others wanted to build an impermeable barrier between the two while yet others at least envisioned the possibility of building something together that gets closer to the truth than either can alone. Philosophy is not ignored, rather philosophers are revealed as essential to the work of theologians, even for those theologians who wanted to avoid philosophy. The high drama between those, philosophers and theologians, who want to have answers to everything, even speculation anointed as fact, and those more comfortable with mystery, or just not knowing for now, is palpable.

There are liberals, conservatives, progressives and the unclassifiable here. If you read carefully, you may well come away with a much more nuanced appreciation of these often flammable designations. You may even be able to make a case for not paying too much attention to such labelling. There are really very few dividing lines, lines in the sand, when the views of these men (remember the time, they are unfortunately all men) are fully and fairly considered. Leanings, biases, blind spots, egos yes, but clear boundaries are not always so clear, or certainly permeable enough to allow valuable cross fertilization.

Often we are treated to biographical detail, not for its own sake, but integrated into the subject’s concerns, angst, faith and conflicts in such a way that we come to understand the theology or philosophy much better. These are all presented as real people. Great thinkers, yes, but people whose thoughts are not divorced from their life, culture or context. This is a history of real people who had great ideas. Sometimes they worked in an environment congenial to their thoughts, perhaps more often something of the hero was required in them to challenge what they believed to be error or mis-direction. Some were excommunicated, some were ostracized. It’s all here and it all belongs together to tell a great story.

The book is well organized so that it can be easily used as a reference. The sections on major theologians are easily found, and they tend to be grouped in a functional manner. The material on each major figure is also systematically organized making it easy to locate, for example, biography, summary, relation to science and relation to modernity. Sub-headings are provided for each one as well highlighting larger themes in their theology. These will become even more useful as the reader becomes familiar with Olson’s organizational style. All of these features will greatly facilitate comparative study.

A thematic thread runs through the work regarding science and faith. Olson frames it in the hypothesis that “much of modern theology is consciously or unconsciously constructed to avoid conflicts between science and Christianity”. The investigation of this hypothesis does not take up large parts of the text, but each major theologian is asked (via their written work) if this hypothesis makes sense, It’s beyond the scope of this review to summarize the results that Olson assembles, but it would be a good exercise to do so.

Because of the nature of this book, a survey with a bird’s eye view of a significant period of history, we will all miss a favourite or two in its pages. For me, though both are appropriately mentioned, not finding more on T.F. Torrance or C.S. Lewis was a disappointment. Olson covers this kind of unavoidable complaint early on with a quip regarding birds’ eye views “Not every bird’s, of course, but this bird’s.” This reminds me to briefly mention humour and its subtle possibilities. Overt humour is difficult to find in this volume, but there is a lightness, not at all quip-like or tongue-in-cheek, but a kind of joy present throughout. I think Dr. Olson had a lot of fun writing these pages. They represent the distillation of many years work and thinking, they include the sad loss of a friend and colleague who co-authored a previous volume of which this is more than a complete revision, but they show forth an author at the top of his game revelling in his subject.

Interview & Vid Links: Stanley Hauerwas, "Cross-Shattered Christ"

“This is, moreover, as Pilate insisted, the King of the Jews. That kingship is not delayed by crucifixion; rahter, crucifixion is the way this king rules. Crucifixion is kingdom come. This is the long-awaited apocalyptic moment. Here the powers of this world are forever subverted. Time is now redeemed through the raising up of Jesus on the cross. A new age has begun. The kingdom is here aborn, a new regime is inaugurated, creating a new way of life for those who worship and follow Jesus.”

- Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ, Stanley Hauerwas, p. 85

Link to Youtube Vids

'Why Have You Forsaken Me?'

http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2005/03/Why-Have-You-Forsaken-Me.aspx

Interview by Laura Sheahen

Senior Religion Editor at Beliefnet.com

March 2005

Stanley Hauerwas on atonement theology, Mel Gibson's 'Passion,'

and the 'chilling' meaning of Christ's last words

Known for afflicting the comfortable, Duke University professor Stanley Hauerwas "has been a thorn in the side of what he takes to be Christian complacency for more than 30 years," according to his fellow theologian Jean Bethke Elshtain. Whether condemning abortion or the war in Iraq, his views challenge believers to see Jesus' message as a radical one. Hauerwas spoke with Beliefnet about his most recent book, "A Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words."

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In this small but powerful book, renowned theologian Stanley Hauerwas offers a moving reflection on Jesus's final words from the cross. Touching in original and surprising ways on subjects such as praying the Psalms and our need to be remembered by Jesus, Hauerwas emphasizes Christ's humanity as well as the sheer "differentness" of God. Ideal for personal devotion during Lent and throughout the church year, this book offers a transformative reading of Jesus's words that goes directly to the heart of the gospel. Now in paperback. - Amazon.com

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You say in beginning of "A Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words" that you don't want to explain Jesus' seven last words. Are you unsatisfied with past explanations?

Yes. There's an inclination to get on the inside of Jesus' psyche, and I think that's a deep mistake because it assumes that what you have here is someone analogous to us. Of course it is analogous to us-he's fully human-but it oftentimes fails to take into account that this is the Son of God. I tried to exegete the seven last words in a way that does justice to their mystery.

You seem to critique the narcissism of today's Christians, saying "sentimentality is the urge to make the gospel conform to our needs, to make Jesus our 'personal' savior." This seems to echo what happened after the movie 'The Passion.' A lot of people were repeating the well-known profession, "Jesus died for me"-but with quite an emphasis on the 'me.'

That Protestant evangelicals would leave Gibson's movie and say "gee, I didn't know he had to suffer so much for my sins"-quite frankly, that's to make yourself more important than you are. It also underwrites satisfaction theories of the atonement, which fail to do justice to the fact that this is the second person of the Trinity who is suffering.

When you say, "someone had to suffer to reconcile me with an angry Father," you forget: it's not an angry Father who has given the Son to receive our violence. The problem with saying "I didn't know he had to suffer that much for my sins" is it fails to do justice to the Trinitarian character of the Christian faith. What is happening in the cross is a cosmic struggle.

Your book says, "any account that suggests God has to satisfy an abstract theory of justice by sacrificing his Son is clearly wrong."

The problem with those kinds of typologies is they separate the person from the work of Christ. They concentrate on the cross, separate from the life. I think it's a deep mistake. It's one of the problems with Mel Gibson's film.

What did you think of the film?

[It was] an extended exercise in showing how much punishment a human body could take. It didn't help us understand why that punishment was correlative with the kind of life Jesus led. It becomes a kind of sadism that it's not wise to be exposed to.

Can't evangelicals still make an argument that we should think of Jesus as our personal savior, and think of the gospel in terms of how it affects individual people?

I really don't like the word 'personal.' It makes it sound like I have a relationship with Jesus that is unmediated by the church. They have the idea that "I have a personal relationship with Jesus that I go to church to have expressed." But the heart of the gospel is that you don't know Jesus without the witness of the church. It's always mediated.

You quote Bonhoeffer and say Jesus' death and resurrection are not the solution to the problem of death. Many people take it as such.

It's a deep mistake, a pietistic reading of the cross. The idea is that Jesus overcame death through the resurrection. What that does is fail to appreciate the fact that the resurrected Christ is the crucified Christ. It's not like, "Oh, that was just a mistake, now it's over." Jesus continues to suffer from our sins.

I think the assumption is that we all now no longer need to fear death. We no longer need to fear the death that sin perpetrates, but that doesn't mean we're not going to die.

I think some people take the words "Jesus overcame death" to mean they don't have to be afraid of death, as you said.

Well, they certainly have to be afraid of the judgment of God. And that judgment is going to be more frightening than death itself.

Than non-existence would be.

Right.

You also say Jesus' death is not that of a martyr.

A martyr can never cooperate with death, go to death in a way that they're not trying to escape. Jesus obeyed the Father's will to submit himself to the powers and the powers' ability to dominate our lives because of our fear of death. It's important that that kind of struggle be understood as at the very heart of the cross.

One of the most challenging chapters was the one on the words "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" You say the words "shatter our attempts to understand God in human terms."

It shows that Christ does experience the darkness of being completely alienated from the Father.

So one person of the Trinity could feel completely alienated from the other?

Yes. And that means there is a time when we cannot approach God through Christ, because Christ was completely abandoned. That is a chilling, chilling notion: that there is a time when we cannot reach God through Christ. I think that's what that means.

You say it reveals that "our assumption that God must possess the sovereign power to make everything turn out all right for us, at least in the long run," is idolatry.

It's idolatry to think that to be a Christian means this is all going to work out well for me. That's not what God is in the business of being God for. The idea that Jesus' whole project was to make sure my life would be OK is a far too narcissistic account of the crucifixion.

It also touches on the age-old theodicy question: Do you believe God is simultaneously all-powerful and all-good?

I believe that whatever it means for God to be all-powerful and all-good "names" the fact that God could not be other than the Father to the Son, who submits himself entirely to sin. You never start with an abstract notion of omnipotence or all-powerful in a way that those words become self-defining separate from Christology.

So we have to accept God first, and not certain words in the language?

That's right. That was what Karl Barth well understood.

You say we try to explain the "why have you forsaken me?" phrase to "protect God from making a fool out of God." Why do we have such a problem with these words?

Because we want God not to be the God we find in Christ. We want God to be the great all-powerful daddy, who makes sure our lives will not have to be lives of suffering. It's an idolatrous position.

So we shouldn't expect God to do anything about our suffering?

We know God has done something about our suffering-it's called the cross. It gives us the resources to have even our suffering be a service to God and God's kingdom.

Stanley Hauerwas On His Evangelical Audience

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Considering that Evangelicals have produced some of the realities that Dr. Hauerwas has spent a career resisting (pietism, 'personal relationships with Jesus,' church growth, etc.), he discusses his Evangelical audience with Wunderkammer Magazine..

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Wikipedia: Stanley Hauerwas (born July 24, 1940) is a Christian theologian and ethicist. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame and is currently the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law.

The System vs. The Kingdom

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"Being a Christian should scare the hell out of us"

Prayer is part of the training, part of the preparation for the afterlife. As is being together in community on a regular basis. Going to church is a good place to go to. To worship God with other people. It is essential to helping us live as a Christian. It makes us part of an ongoing history that we cannot make up. Christianity is received. It cannot be done alone but only with others. Having a faith cannot be a private thing. It is all public. And must be shared with others. “Jesus as Lord” makes our lives quite dysfunctional. Being a Christian must make us rush together for protection to discover that, “Oh, I’m not crazy! God IS real!” “God in Christ reconciling the world” makes our lives really weird and gathering together on Sunday pulls us back into the reality of God’s Kingdom lest we lose sight of it. Through baptism, through proclamation of the Word, through communion (Eucharistic celebration), through fellowship.

Stanley Hauerwas on Prayer

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Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, a widely acclaimed Christian theologian, discusses his understanding of prayer.

If prayer has taught me anything it has taught me to wait. The world’s sense of time is based upon speed. Efficiency. The ability to get things done quickly. But God’s sense of time is based upon patience. Faithfulness. Dependence. Prayer has also taught me a sense of humor. That it all doesn’t depend on me which is a deep truth that gives to me a perspective that gets around my foibles and frailties. That God is God and I am not. A truth that gives me both humor and patience and allows me to rest in God’s time.

Stanley Hauerwas On His Evangelical Audience

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Considering that Evangelicals have produced some of the realities that Dr. Hauerwas has spent a career resisting (pietism, 'personal relationships with Jesus, church growth, etc.), he discusses his Evangelical audience with Wunderkammer Magazine.

Evangelicals bring to us “Jesus and energy” both of which I admire greatly insofar as Evangelicals keep a high regard of Scripture, a Christological center, and a great desire to tell people of Jesus as the great joy of their lives. However, the church is not a secondary reality to the Christian’s immediate relationship to God. It is a necessary part of a Christian’s reality because the Church’s function in the Christian life is one of mediating God to the world. The Christian faith is not done alone through pietism and a private relationship with Jesus. Church growth does not mean that we make God up, or that we make Christianity up. It is received through the gifts of 2000 years of Church history. Tradition matters. One of the reasons it matters is because it teaches us of error. And one of the ways that we know error is through remembering and studying the Christian tradition through historical event and occurrence.

Stanley Hauerwas: What only the whole church can do

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Theologian Stanley Hauerwas discusses the term leadership and how he prepares his students to provide it. Leadership cannot be abstracted from the communities that make it possible, says Stanley Hauerwas, a Duke Divinity School professor considered to be one of the nations most influential theologians.

What is Leadership? It’s always persuasion. All the time. All the way through. So much of the time real, creative, authority works through articulating to one’s community what needs to be done in a way that defies limits. Their limits. Your limits. The limits of the system. Leadership reframes issues so that we may discover ways of who and where we are in terms that do not reproduce the necessities of the past. That circumvents them and gives newer methods of formation to one’s present.

Sadly, leadership can be perverted and subverted. We know what leadership is abstracted from communities that make leadership possible. Part of the issue is the usage of power. A gift that God has given us for the formation of community. A gift that makes it necessary for us to discuss amongst ourselves those individuals who give can lead ethically, benevolently, fairly. But this is also the language of leadership that can be perverted. These are matters that must be discussed within communities for the correct apprehension and usage of “power” lest it go awry and is misused and abused.

What do you teach students so that they may make a difference in the world? Don’t lie. Be honest. If you do not know what the truth is then discuss it. Don’t make it up and say that you do. Politics is people. Any person who works with people in a leadership position must be involved with people and be honest with people through their involvements.

How do institutions make space for innovation? One of the elements of producing creativity is the process of “habit” in the sense that creativity is carried through habit. Though we think we are doing the same thing over and over again, in reality we are not. We just think we are. Why? Because we change day-to-day. As does the world. As do events in-and-around our lives. As example, the church’s history of liturgy is constantly evolving through innovation to society. But in a way that we recognize continuities through time. “Habits” evolve. They are familiar. They are repetitive. They are helpful in placing us with others in the larger communal sense of event and time participation. This is how institutions make space for innovation.

People who are called to administrative development have to undergo a deep, aesthetical discipline to help you emotionally deal with people who you recognize as having both possibilities and limitations. Each of which can drive you crazy if these are taken personally. This type of personal discipline will then provides space for communities to develop the diversities of their gifts with one another which is the administrator's charge to discover, and encourage, for community utilization. This is part of the responsibility of an administrator - the gift of recognition and encouragement to the goal of community development.

Overall, leadership recognizes how fragile the gift of power is. A quality that you wouldn’t have be otherwise. A quality that gives to the leader a confidence that you do not need to win all the time. It is a true ascetic discipline in that it disciplines the ego to accept, and promote, the occurrence of consensus among others without the necessity of the leader's will injected into all matters of the community at all times. And that when one wins we all win. But it cannot be limited simply to one person in the dictates of their own spirit over others. For it is absolutely necessary that the leader disciplines his will, his determinations, and his guidance. It is a personal quality that is absolutely crucial to allowing any organization to grow within itself, within its dictates and formations, so that once the leader is no longer there the organization may function independently. And continue  to grow in a healthy relationship to itself, its community and to others. This kind of quality, or structure, makes the community want to serve one another with their gifts, their abilities, their contributions and will. It is a quality that can encourage aspirations and goals.

What’s remarkable is not what the community should be, but that there is community at all! This is the remarkability of the organization of men and women to an entity. And in the church’s case, to the Person of the Living Lord Jesus Christ to whom the Church follows after in obedience to His will, His authority, His desires and example. It is definitely a great work of God through the Holy Spirit to form men and women unto the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And into community with one another. A community that serves both one another as well as the world around itself.

Hauerwas on Language and Ethics

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Taken from a Q&A after a lecture at Azusa Pacific University, this clip is Prof. Stanley Hauerwas, renowned ethicist from Duke University, discussing how DESCRIPTIONS are more determinitive than DECISIONS. "You can only act in a world you see...and you learn to see by learning to say."

Stanley Hauerwas Resources from Jesus Radicals.flv

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On Christians and the State

Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School's Bricklaying Theologian

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Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School, on bricklaying, teaching and the satisfaction of completing one's work. Stanley is the author of numerous books, including the recent memoir, "Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir." In 2001 Time magazine named "America's Best Theologian." Stanley responded by saying, "'Best' is not a theological category."

Stanley Hauerwas On Jürgen Moltmann

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Dr. Hauerwas discusses German theologian Jürgen Moltmann with Wunderkammer Magazine. www.wunderkammermag.com.

Insight from Stanley Hauerwas

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Stanley Hauerwas talks about "becoming a friend of time."

The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr and the Future of Christian Realism

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Dr. Hauerwas discusses American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr with Wunderkammer Magazine. www.wunderkammermag.com. January 29, 2009 | This video has been excerpted from the Berkley Center's event Brooks, Dionne, and Tippett Discuss the Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr and the Future of Christian Realism.

Hauerwas on War, American History & the Christian

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Stanley Hauerwas-- the famed ethicist from Duke whom Time magazine called "America's Best Theologian" in 2001-- discusses the confusion between the "American 'We'" and the "Christian 'We'". Included topics are the Christian call to peace-making, the modern context of war and violence, American history, and the need for honesty about our national sins.

Stanley Hauerwas - A Theologian's Memoir

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Exclusive interview with Stanley Hauerwas, named 'America's best theologian' by Time Magazine. Here, he discusses current issues facing Christian communities around the world, along with his new book, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir.

Stanley Hauerwas On Hannah's Child

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Dr. Hauerwas discusses his recently published book Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir with Wunderkammer Magazine. www.wunderkammermag.com.

Burke Lecture: Stanley Martin Hauerwas

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer is well known for his heroic opposition to the Nazis. Martin Hauerwas examines Bonhoeffer's understanding of lying and why it's appropriate to hold politics to a higher standard of truthful speech. This relationship between truth and politics is a particular challenge for democratic regimes. Series: Burke Lectureship on Religion & Society [4/2004] [Humanities] [Show ID: 8498]

Office Hours with Stanley Hauerwas on the Life of a Theologian

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Duke University Professor Stanley Hauerwas discusses his new memoir "Hannah's Child" and answers questions from online viewers in an "Office Hours" webcast interview, May 7, 2010. Learn more at http://www.dukeofficehours.com