Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Monday, August 22, 2011

Profile Story: Bosnian Native Reconstructs His World

Profile: Bosnia native, Grand Rapids go-to guy Haris Alibasic

 E-mail Terri Hamilton: thamilton@grpress.com
Haris Alibasic Profile
Haris Alibasic with uncle Dzelal in 1977

Haris Alibasic, impeccably dressed in a suit, holds his 9-month-old daughter, Lamija, on his lap as she howls.

He jiggles her. Coos at her. Gives her dry cereal to munch and water to sip.

“Yaaaaaaaaaaa!” Lamija shrieks.

Alibasic, who has seemingly at least nine different jobs with the City of Grand Rapids, is good at fixing things, from neighbor disputes to City Hall windows that leak energy to tricky legislative affairs.

“Yaaaaaaaaaa!” Lamija shrieks again.

But dad knows when he’s beat, and hands his yowling baby off to his wife.

“She’s a fighter,” he says proudly of his daughter.

You’ll see where she gets that.

Alibasic, 39, has an office on the sixth floor of Grand Rapids City Hall, right next to the mayor’s.
He’s Mayor George Heartwell’s go-to guy on all sorts of stuff — some things you may not even realize anybody’s doing.

His main job is as director of energy and sustainability for the city, which means he has his hands in everything from the use of solar panels in city buildings to planning installation of charging stations around town for electric cars to a proposal to use wind turbines to create energy at the city’s water filtration plant.

But, as City Manager Greg Sundstrom says, “Few of us here have the luxury of doing one thing,” so Alibasic also solves the stickiest neighborhood problems nobody else could fix. He also was in charge of the city’s 2010 census count. He was instrumental in getting the Kroc Center off the ground, after controversy erupted when Garfield Park neighbors didn’t want it built there, as originally planned.

He wrote the rules that allow city business owners, such as all of those Uptown restaurant and shop owners, to join together and use property taxes the city collects from them to pay for neighborhood improvements, such as turning an old vacant lot into paved parking for customers.

What can’t Alibasic do?

“Haris has an enormous capacity for work,” Heartwell says. “He’s a bit of a magnet for projects and initiatives that I dream up or the city manager dreams up. We’ll say, ‘Who’s there to do the work?’

Haris. He can always take on one more job.”

If it’s volatile, give it to Haris.

“He’s calm and patient,” Heartwell says.

That’s in large part because Alibasic has endured a lot worse than the most ornery city resident can dish up.

Haris Alibasic Profile
Haris Alibasic in 1982 standing outside with his family.


A war torn homeland

He grew up in Bosnia and survived the three-year war there in the 1990s, watching his home and village burn to the ground, tanks rumble through every night, neighbors shot dead by Serbian soldiers in huge swaths of ethnic cleansing.

“When you think about his background, coming from a war-torn nation and the stresses and pressures he’s had,” Heartwell says, “solving some of the city’s most intractable neighborhood problems is a walk in the park.”

When 200 angry Grand Haven residents gathered at a public hearing, riled up about Grand Rapids’ plan to install two wind turbines in Grand Haven Township to power its lakeshore water filtration plant, Heartwell sent Alibasic.

You can tell he feels sort of bad about it.

“The people were angry; they were very disrespectful,” Heartwell says. “Haris said afterward, ‘There was never a time I thought I wouldn’t get out of Bosnia alive. But I thought I’d never get out of Grand Haven Township alive.’”

People call Haris quiet and serious, but he can be pretty funny.

They didn’t get the permits needed for the wind turbines.

“But Haris was able to handle it all,” Heartwell says, “with his usual calm demeanor.

“The courage and endurance one develops coming out of a war setting is useful in peace time,” Heartwell says.

“Haris is unflappable,” Heartwell says. “There’s a quiet demeanor about him that I suspect comes out of his experience.”

Many here have just a fuzzy understanding of the war. Alibasic can explain it — then share poems he wrote during the worst of it, turning horror into a kind of sad beauty.

Before the war, there were six republics in former Yugoslavia. Four republics decided to separate from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s in an attempt to break away from the oppressive Serbian nationalists led by Slobodan Milosevic, he explains.

Slovenia was the first, then Croatia, then Bosnia and, finally, Macedonia. After the referendum on independence passed, the four republics became independent and were internationally recognized. But Milosevic had a plan for a “Greater Serbia,” Alibasic explains, and Serbian nationalists attacked Slovenia, then Croatia, then they turned the entire war effort to Bosnia.

The Serbian army killed more than 100,000 Bosnian civilians, Alibasic says, systematically ridding much of Bosnia and Croatia of all non-Serbs. The war ended in late 1995 with the signing of a peace agreement.

Those are the bare facts, Alibasic says.


Five things to know about Haris Alibasic

• He watches “Bob the Builder” and “Dora the Explorer” cartoons in Bosnian with his son, Jakub, on YouTube.

• He’s president of the Congress of North American Bosnians, representing at least 350,000 Americans and Canadians of Bosnian descent.

• When he eats chicken, he has to follow it with chocolate. Ask for an explanation and he shrugs. “Something about the taste together,” he says.

• He was on a nationally televised quiz show at age 17 in Bosnia.

• “He made recordings for nobody,” his wife, Katie, says. He was the king of mash-ups, experimenting with meshing two different recordings into one new one. He’d mix spiritual and electronic. He fused the “Lord of the Rings” soundtrack with music by the ethereal, neoclassical Australian world music duo Dead Can Dance. He sold his recording equipment when they had their first child, Jakub. “We needed the bedroom for the baby,” he says.


A poet

Now, he shares a poem he wrote in 1994 about the fires of war that claimed his home in June 1992, when he was 20.
Flame
Tongues overpower the sky
Touching the horizon high
I hardly breathe
Face into two pieces
Falls apart
First part salvation seeks
The second part
Stands still
Watching around
Looking outside and inside
Flames getting higher
Insane flaming beasts
Abandoned horses
Rearing up
I stand, no armor
Engulfed by the flame
That burned the house down
Burned the past
Memories erased
“I witnessed my home burning,” he says, sitting at the dining room table in his home on the city’s Northeast Side. “My whole village was burned. Five hundred homes, all burning at once.

“The infrastructure in Bosnia was completely obliterated,” he says. “Everything was destroyed. Roads. Schools. Everything.

“Every night, the tanks could shoot right at you,” he says. “I witnessed people shot by mortars. I saw dead bodies covered up.

“They would just shoot you ... 100,000 civilians were killed. Our home and village were burned for no other reason than the fact that we were not Serbs.”

He slides a photo across the table of 50 simple wood coffins lined up at a funeral for 50 civilians killed in his village.

“They just burned them alive,” he says. “I can’t even tell you about the horrors.”

His dad spent 18 months in a concentration camp, where he was threatened and beaten.

“We didn’t know if he was alive for six months,” he says.

“One day, you can have your home, your life. Then ...”

His voice trails off.

After the horror, Alibasic knew without a doubt what truth would guide him.

“What really matters is not your house or your car,” he says quietly. “It’s the people. Your family, your closest friends. I was blessed my immediate family wasn’t killed or captured.

“It’s a great testament to human survival,” he says. “There was a great sense of unity. We used car batteries to run the radio. You learn to live with less. As long as there was flour and oil and salt to make bread ...”


Learning to survive

There was no normalcy, but he did the best he could.

He hosted a radio show three times a week. He took college classes. He passed time translating Pink Floyd songs into Bosnian. (A music lover, he now loves the Vertigo Music store downtown and collects vinyl records.)

“It was a challenge that tested human spirit,” he says of the war. “People learn how to survive. It made me stronger.”

After the war, Alibasic got a government job as a business specialist. He worked as a translator for the United Nations for a while. He worked for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other international organizations as a business and economic development specialist.

He came to Grand Rapids in 2000 with his family — mom Emira, dad Dzevad, brothers Venso, 38, and Emir, 29 — after his dad was granted immigration status through refugee resettlement.

Haris Alibasic Profile
Haris Alibasic meets with the president of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Zeljko Komsic, last month.

But he didn’t leave Bosnia behind. Alibasic is president of the Congress of North American Bosnians, representing at least 350,000 Americans and Canadians of Bosnian descent.

He meets with the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zeljko Komsic. He writes for Bosnian magazines and newspapers, tracks legislative issues and works to strengthen the relationship between Bosnia and the United States.

He’s been elected to the position three years in a row. Everybody likes Alibasic.

His friend and colleague William Crawley at Grand Valley State University, where Alibasic teaches, has seen his intense commitment in action.

The two traveled with a local group to Turkey last month, an interfaith trip sponsored by the Niagara Foundation, a Chicago-based organization that promotes peace and understanding.

“People in Turkey asked me about the Grand Rapids lip dub,” Alibasic says with a grin. “They said that was so cool.”

There’s a significant population of Bosnians in Turkey, Crawley says, and Alibasic connected with them wherever they went, asking about their lives, getting political updates.

When Crawley boarded his plane for home, Alibasic got on a different plane to Sarajevo, to meet with the Bosnian president.


‘Both worlds’

Back home at GVSU, where Alibasic teaches graduate-level classes in city politics and policy, Crawley says Alibasic is great at taking the textbook theory his students study and relating it to the real world of government, where he works every day.

“He has a foot in both worlds,” Crawley says. “He shares the realities that aren’t always captured in their textbooks. It makes for a really strong voice in the classroom.”

Plus, his students can sometimes read about his City Hall exploits in the newspaper, Crawley says, which they think is pretty cool.

Alibasic’s experiences in war-torn Bosnia bring another layer of depth to his teaching, Crawley says.
“He teaches citizenship as a serious obligation,” Crawley says. “And beyond local or state government. He talks to his students as global citizens.”

Haris Alibasic Profile
Haris Alibasic, left, with his family: his wife, Katie;
2-year-old son, Jakub, named after Alibasic's grandfather;
and 9-month-old daughter, Lamija.


A sentimental husband

Alibasic’s wife, Katie, says living through war has made her husband careful and sentimental.

“He’s very cautious about security,” she says. “He’s always checking all the doors and windows.

“He wants to save everything,” Katie says. “Pictures are so important to him.”

“There are hardly any pictures from my childhood,” he points out. “They burned in the fire.”

As baby Lamija — her name means “brilliant” in Bosnian — naps and 2-year-old Jakub — named for Haris’ grandfather — happily munches cinnamon coffee cake between his parents, Katie looks tenderly at her husband.

“I think you’re indestructible,” she says. “Nobody can put you down.”

Haris Alibasic Profile
Haris Alibasic of the Office of Energy and Sustainability
addresses the concerns about the Wind Turbines project
as the audience at Grand Haven Township Hall listens.
(T.J. Hamilton | The Grand Rapids Press)
He smiles.

“My wife says I’m a survivor,” he says.

The two met at GVSU, both studying public administration. Katie, who grew up all over the world as an Army kid, learned to speak Bosnian from Alibasic and from children’s books. They speak to their kids in English and Bosnian so they’ll grow up knowing both.

She learned how to cook Bosnian food, such as burek, a meat or cheese pie made with flaky phyllo dough.

“You roll it up like a snake,” she explains, “coil it up in a round pan and bake it.”

Alibasic smiles at her.

“I have the best wife in the world,” he says. “She puts up with me staying up until 1 a.m.”


He stays busy

Among all of his other activities, he’s working on his doctorate in public policy.

His work, he says, “is never done. I have my iPhone on all the time.”

Heartwell calls him “my personal Bloomberg News,” always forwarding articles about the latest in sustainability issues. He has all kinds of followers on Twitter, and he has no idea who most of them are.

“I’m never bored,” Alibasic says. “Really. Never bored. I’m always meeting new people, implementing new ideas.”

And Lamija eventually will wake up from her nap.



What does the Christian term Atonement Mean?

This article addresses what Christ's atonement is, but not its extent (whether unlimited or limited). That idea has been dealt with in other areas of this blog. Please refer to articles on Calvinism and Arminianism to understand discussions related to the "extent of Christ's atonement" upon humanity.

- skinhead

**********

Did I kill Jesus? Part three of a series on atonement

by Roger Olson
on August 21, 2011

Returning to my discussion of good books about atonement.

Now I turn to what I consider one of the best recent books on atonement: Scot McKnight’s, A Community Called Atonement.

I suggest to anyone reading this book that they turn first to Chapter Eighteen: Atonement as Missional Praxis: Living the Story of the Word. It might have been good for Scot to put some of this chapter’s material first because it lays his cards on the table with regard to theological methodology and especially the role of the Bible in Christian theory and practice. I could not agree with Scot more about the TENDENCY of many conservative Christians to put the Bible first–even before God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit–in their hierarchy of loyalties. Scot labels many conservative Christians (I think he is talking mainly to and about evangelicals) “Cognitive Behavioristswho think that knowing more about the Bible automatically makes them better Christians.

Scot views the Bible as the communication of an overarching narrative about God. (I would add with Hans Frei that the Bible’s main purpose is to identify God for us–meaning God’s character.) “Scripture is more than information revealed for our knowledge so that, in knowing more, we will be more.” (145) In brief, Scot’s point is that our loyalty as Christians is to God as revealed in Jesus and to the Holy Spirit dwelling in us and in the church and the Bible is the God-ordained and inspired instrument of strengthening that loyalty and our praxis growing out of it.

Let me add something here that I think is consistent with what Scot says and MAY make his point even clearer. (I don’t know that Scot would agree, but I think he probably would.) Too many conservative evangelicals view the Bible as a NOT-YET-SYSTEMATIZED SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY such that once the correct doctrinal system is drawn out of it and correctly organized and expressed (e.g., in a massive one volume systematic theology seen on the shelves of every Christian bookstore in America!) the Bible is dispensable.

Scot’s point (I think) is that God’s self-revelation (including Scripture) is for the purpose of relationship-community. This happens through the medium of story: “Jesus’ story is to become our story as we identify with him and we are incorporated into him.” (147) The purpose of Scripture, then is “identity-shaping” (146) more than information-giving.

So what about atonement? A major point of the book is expressed on page 147: “Central to my understanding of atonement is the notion of identification for incorporation.” Throughout the book the overarching theme is that “atonement” is not just about what Christ accomplished on the cross but about the entire process of restoring to wholeness we “cracked Eikons” of God through being incorporated into God’s community. Scot rightly points out that the English word “atonement” literally means “at-one-ment”–reconcilation or restored relationship.

(He doesn’t mention this, but my study of the word leads me to believe it was invented by Tyndale for his English translation of the Bible. (Side bar: I remember years ago reading The Kingdom of the Cults by Walter Martin. There Martin took Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science to task for defining “atonement” as “at-one-ment” as if that was her invention and heretical interpretation of the word. While I agreed with Martin that the CS interpretation, being monistic, is heretical, I now chuckle when I think about how wrong Martin was about the origins and meaning of the term!)

So, for Scot, “atonement” is an umbrella term for salvation (although he never says it quite that way) and his view of salvation is holistic. It includes not just forensic justification or personal conversion. For him salvation, atonement, is incorporation into Christ so that our brokenness is healed and we are restored to what we are meant to be–whole persons in community with God and others through Jesus Christ. Thus, Jesus’ atoning work includes incarnation, temptation and victory over it (Scot loves Irenaeus as do I), death, resurrection, outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the church at Pentecost and the Spirit’s inclusion of us into the church, the continuation of God’s people.

One of my favorite quotes from this book is on page 132: “A thoroughly biblical understanding of atonement, then, is earthy: It is about restored relations with God and with self, but also with others and with the world–in the here and now.” Consistent with that, Scot ends his book with a call for Christians to do justice in the world as part of their participation in the mission of God. I can’t resist offering here another great quote from the book: “God’s redemptive intent is to restore and rehabilitate humans in their relationship with God, self, others, and the world, and when that happens justice is present and established. The followers of Jesus both proclaim and embody atoning justice by fighting injustice and establishing just that kind of justice. Their forward guard is surrounded with the banner of grace and forgiveness.” (133)

But what about the classical atonement theories? Which one does Scot finally embrace? He embraces them all: Christus victor, recapitulation, moral influence, satisfaction/penal substitution, etc. All of these, he argues, are metaphors for something ultimately mysterious–God’s work through Jesus Christ on our behalf for restoring relationship.

In order to understand Scot’s meaning here, and its significance for his account of Christ’s atonement, you have to pay close attention to Chapter Five: Atonement as Metaphor: Metaphor and Mechanics.” On pages 38-39 Scot lays out a view of theology consistent with (if not influenced by) 19th century American theologian Horace Bushnell. Bushnell famously argued, much to the chagrin of his critics mired in Protestant scholasticism (Turretin and all that) that all theological language is metaphorical. But he also argued that ALL HUMAN LANGUAGE is metaphorical. Many conservative evangelicals will balk at Scot’s agreement with Bushnell (whether Scot meant to agree with Bushnell or not, I don’t know): “…we are bound to our metaphors. This is where a moderate postmodern theology or a robust critical realist theology will simply fall down and admit that, to one degree or another, theology is metaphorical. We cannot unpack the metaphors to find the core, reified truth in a proposition that can be stated for all time in a particular formula. We have the metaphors and they will lead us there, but they are what we have. Yes, what we have is metaphors, but the Christian claim is that metaphors do work: they get us there.” [sic, all human interaction (including language, conscience, mental thoughts and visualizations, sociological/psysiological/psychological relationships, etc) is symbolic - and therefore metaphorical - because human beings are primarily and essentially visual beings. - skinhead]

(Again, let me say in a sidebar that these programmatic moves by Scot make him one of my postconservative evangelicals whether he likes that label or not. I won’t apply the label to him if he doesn’t want it, but I will say his overall approach to theology, the Bible, doctrine, theological language, cautious openness to revision, etc., is typical of what I mean by “postconservative evangelicalism.”)

Back to Scot’s reflections on the theories of the atonement. They are all metaphorical; none matches exactly what God has done for us in Jesus and continues to do for us and in us through the Holy Spirit. They all find roots and justification in Scripture and tradition. Each has its place and value.

Scot uses his own metaphor of a bag of golf clubs to make his point. A good golfer uses all the clubs in his bag and not just one. Similarly, the church needs all the biblical metaphors and historical theories of the atonement and not just one. BUT, all the metaphors and theories come UNDER the umbrella of the wider, more holistic metaphor of reconciliation and restoration of cracked Eikons (us).

So let’s get right to it: what about penal substitution? That seems to be the ONLY atonement theory that is controversial right now. Fortunately, Scot does not simply discard it as some tend to do. But his critique is that TOO MANY of its advocates have treated it mechanically rather than relationally. He rightly says “This theory of penal substitution has come in for hard times in current theological discussion, much of the hard times being gross caricature and political posturing.” (40) Let’s stop there and dwell on that for a moment. (Another sidebar coming….)

I’ve already commented in this series of posts about the gross caricatures of the penal substitution theory–depicted as “divine child abuse” and so forth. But what does Scot mean by “political posturing?” He doesn’t explain and the context isn’t very helpful. The only ideology he mentions is radical feminism and he decries SOME feminists’ caricaturing of penal substitution as divine child abuse that justifies abuse of children and women. But he also mentions some very conservative evangelical theologians who treat penal substitution as if it were THE ONE AND ONLY legitimate theory (and not really a theory at all!) of atonement. I THINK Scot means that SOME people on both ends of the spectrum of critics are using their rhetoric against or for penal substitution to score points with their constituents and do harm to others within their theological contexts.

(For example (I’m departing somewhat from Scot here, but I think he might agree) SOME conservative evangelical critics of Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (by Mark Baker and Joel Green) have simply flown off the handle with their criticisms and have depicted the book as cavalierly tossing aside penal substitution in favor of, say, Abelard’s moral example or moral influence theory. (Read: Baker and Green are liberals!) SOME of the accusations aimed at the book and its authors sound more like diatribes meant to marginalize the authors (and positive reviewers) within the evangelical movement than like careful, scholarly examinations of the books argument.)

Back to Scot and his book. Let me quote Scot about critics of penal substitution here. “…it is irresponsible for critics to depict penal substitution as ‘divine child abuse’ because all it takes is love-of-neighbor readings of major theologians–and I will mention here Leon Morris, John Stott, and J. I. Packer–and one will readily discover that for each of them penal substitution is contextualized into a Trinitarian context wherein it is not the Father being ‘ticked off’ at humans and venting his rage on the Son. Instead, atonement for penal substitutionists is prompted by the loving grace of the Father.” (41) And, I would add, ” of the Son.”

Lest anyone get defensive, Scot adds “But advocates of penal substitution should listen to their critics.” (41) “…I am persuaded,” he says, “that penal substitution theorists could help us all out if they would baptize their theory into the larger redemptive grace of God more adequately.” (43) So how does Scot himself do this?

Scot’s actual treatment of the theory comes on page 113 of the book–wrapped into a larger and more holistic treatment of atonement metaphors. And he attempts to shift the focus from the “mechanics” of substitutionary atonement to Christ’s mysterious identification with us in his death that plays ONE ROLE (not every role) in reconciliation and restored community. Here is how Scot expresses it: “He [Jesus] identifies with us, all the way down into death (so, Phil. 2:5-11), so that we can be incorporated into him and find life–both here and now and then and there.” (113)

Scot argues that the Bible “often” teaches that Jesus suffered death “on our part.” (113) And he means, instead of us. That is, “Jesus identified with us so far ‘all the way down’ that he died our death, so that we, being incorporated into him, might partake in his glorious, life-giving resurrection to new life. He died instead of us (substitution); he died a death that was the consequence of sin (penal).” (113) But completely missing from Scot’s account of penal substitution is any thought of God the Father having to have his pound of flesh and taking out his vengeful wrath on Jesus instead of on us.

Here is how I interpret Scot’s “take” on penal substitution. In order express it I have to talk briefly about another theory of atonement–the “ransom theory” that was so popular among fourth century Christians including the Cappadocian fathers. It as, in fact, the reigning theory up until Anselm. The ransom theory picked up on the biblical metaphor of ransom–that Christ was the ransom paid by God to free us from sin, death and the devil. But some early church fathers and most people throughout the middle ages INTERPRETED this to mean that God the Father gave his Son Jesus over to Satan as a ransom in a transaction that included Satan handing over humanity to the Father. Of course, nowhere does the Bible say that! And it makes God crafty and deceptive (because he knew the devil did not know that he could not keep the Son of God). It portrays the atonement as a transaction between God and Satan and depicts them as almost on the same level–as if God has to enter into a bargaining agreement with Satan.

I THINK what Scot is suggesting is that too many explanations of the penal substitution theory of the atonement pick up on substitutionary imagery and metaphor in the Bible and run with it too far–implying (if not saying) that Christ’s death was a kind of mechanical transaction between God and humanity (with Christ representing humanity) involving strict, juridical justice and a kind of impersonal law that even God has to obey. Scot apparently wants to keep the biblical metaphor of substitutionary death without all the baggage the whole penal substitution theory has accumulated throughout the years especially among Reformed fundamentalists. I applaud the effort and largely agree with him about this. Penal substitution is a biblical image I cannot escape. The correlation between Isaiah 53 and numerous New Testament passages that seem to echo this, applying it to Jesus and his death, convince me that, biblically, we cannot escape penal substitution as one metaphor for what Jesus’ death was.

A Community Called Atonement is much more than what I have described here. Overall, the book is a ringing call for Christians to BE THE CHURCH that God intended his people to be–a reconciling, restoring, healing, justice-establishing community that extends Christ’s holistic saving work into the world.

1 One mild criticism I have of the book is that it stretches the word “atonement” almost to the breaking point. Scot uses it for everything God does and we enter into with him that works to restore the damaged goods (cracked Eikons) that we humans are. Most people understand “atonement” much more narrowly–as having to do with Christ’s death and its salvific effects. I’m always a little leery of stretching terms to mean too much.

2 Another mild criticism I have is that nowhere does Scot (like Boersma) deal with the crucial issue of the extent of the atonement. Is Christ’s atoning work FOR ALL or only for the elect. In this day and age when so many voices are being raised on behalf of limited atonement I hope ANY book on the subject will deal with that horrendous, nearly heretical idea that one cannot find even in Calvin himself! Theodore Beza invented it out of whole cloth because it was logically necessary for the Calvinist system. I agree it is necessary for the Calvinist system, but take it away and the system falls. Beza saw that which is why he added it in. (Please don’t remind me that an obscure monk named Gottschalk was held in prison most of his adult life for teaching limited atonement; I know that. But he had no influence in terms of injecting that idea into the stream of theology. Beza is its source if we are talking about a continuity of doctrine beginning today and stemming backwards in time.)



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A Note from Karl Barth on Collecting Books


Collecting books? A note from Karl Barth
http://www.faith-theology.com/2007/09/collecting-books-note-from-karl-barth.html


by Ben Myers
September 15, 2007

Kurt Johanson kindly sent me a copy of his delightful new volume, The Word in This World: Two Sermons by Karl Barth. And he included a facsimile of an inscription which Barth wrote in Klaus Bockmuehl’s copy of Against the Stream, back in 1954.

It’s such a nice inscription that I thought I’d reproduce it here – a timely reminder to all of us who like collecting books!



Meaning of life?
Collecting books? No, read them!
Reading them? No, think about!
Thinking about? No, do something for God and for your neighbour!
- Karl Barth, Basle, 2.11.195


The Best and Worst Books Ever Written About Karl Barth


by Ben Myers
posted on July 20, 2005


The books about Karl Barth could fill an entire library. And on the whole the quality of all this scholarship is extraordinary. Many of the twentieth century’s leading theologians started out by writing brilliant books or dissertations on Barth’s theology. So it’s particularly difficult to choose the very best books. Still, here is my own list (in chronological order) of the Top Eight—if I had to save just eight from my library, these would be the ones:


Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992 [1951])

G. C. Berkouwer, The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth (London: Paternoster, 1956 [1954])

Hans Küng, Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection (London: Burns & Oates, 1964 [1957])

Robert W. Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1963)

Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth: A Paraphrase (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001 [1965])

Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (London: SCM Press, 1976 [1975])

George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909-1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)

**********

The worst book ever written on Karl Barth
http://www.faith-theology.com/2005/07/worst-book-ever-written-on-karl-barth.html

While it’s hard to choose the best books ever written on Karl Barth, fortunately it’s very easy to name the worst book ever written on Barth. It is—of course—

Cornelius Van Til, The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner (London: James Clarke, 1946)

This book presents a comically grotesque misreading of Barth—it would be hard to imagine a more drastic and more wilful misunderstanding of Barth’s theology. Unfortunately, this same book influenced the popular American writer Francis A. Schaeffer, and through Schaeffer it influenced a whole generation of evangelical students and ministers in the United States. And so even today you will occasionally meet someone who, without ever having laid so much as a finger on one of Barth’s books, is nonetheless bitterly and adamantly hostile to Barth’s theology.

**********
 Collecting books? A note from Karl Barth
http://www.faith-theology.com/2007/09/collecting-books-note-from-karl-barth.html
by Ben Myer

September 15, 2007

Kurt Johanson kindly sent me a copy of his delightful new volume, The Word in This World: Two Sermons by Karl Barth. And he included a facsimile of an inscription which Barth wrote in Klaus Bockmuehl’s copy of Against the Stream, back in 1954.

It’s such a nice inscription that I thought I’d reproduce it here – a timely reminder to all of us who like collecting books!


Meaning of life?
Collecting books? No, read them!
Reading them? No, think about!
Thinking about? No, do something for God and for your neighbour!
- Karl Barth, Basle, 2.11.1954




Sunday, August 21, 2011

Review Bruce McCormack - Studies on Karl Barth's Theology


Bruce McCormack: Barth in response to Open Theism

by David W. Congdon
on July 3, 2008

Bruce McCormack recently edited a volume of essays by Protestant theologians on the doctrine of God, entitled, Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives. The volume is well worth reading, in part because of the range of perspectives represented in its pages—including everyone from D. A. Carson to John Webster. But the book is worth the price just for McCormack’s essay. His article, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” is a 57-page exploration of the claims made by open theism over against classical theism as well as the alternative which Barth provides to both of those metaphysical positions. As a way to whet your appetite for more, here is the opening of McCormack’s essay:

For nearly two decades now, the evangelical churches in America have been the scene of a polarizing debate between defenders of classical theism and the proponents of what is typically referred to as “open theism.” After reading through the growing literature generated by both sides, my own conclusion is that each has something important to say; each has “theological values” which would need to be preserved in any truly adequate doctrine of God. The trouble is that both sides are actually occupying a shared ground on which no resolution of the debate is thinkable. It is clearly time for some fresh thinking.

As the subtitle of this essay makes clear, the goal here is to bring Karl Barth into conversation with the open theists. The decision to treat Barth in relation to open theism rather than classical theism is not based upon a belief that he stood closer to the former than the latter. Far from it. As I have already suggested, both sides to the current debate stand finally upon the same ground—a ground which would have to be abandoned if the values now contained in each model were to be brought into a single, unified conception. Barth occupies a very different ground, and as we shall see, it is because he does so that he is able to take up and preserve the values set forth in each of the other two models.

In any event, Barth does not stand closer to the open theists than he does to the classical theists. The decision to bring Barth into conversation with open theism is based simply upon the perception that open theism is attracting a great deal of attention—to the point of disturbing the peace of the churches—and the belief that it is not dealt with adequately where it is met by power plays (e.g., attempts to exclude its proponents from membership in the Evangelical Theological Society). The only adequate response is to provide an alternative which is demonstrably superior to it—something today’s defenders of classical theism have consistently failed to do.

- Bruce L. McCormack, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2008), 185-86.



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Bruce McCormack:
Orthodox and modern: studies in the theology of Karl Barth
http://www.faith-theology.com/2008/09/bruce-mccormack-orthodox-and-modern.html

Friday, August 19, 2011

Of Calvin, Barth and Poetry

David Congdon issued a challenge to write of Calvin in Barthian terms earlier this year (http://fireandrose.blogspot.com/2007/05/as-barth-poetic-challenge.html). Here are some of the better entries below:


As Calvin
Make of me no Calvinist,
God of Calvin and of me,
Cause me not to follow him
Who would follow only Thee.

Make of me no Calvinist,
Swallowing each word he penned,
Make of me a thinker, God,
As was he, Thy intimate friend!

Make me, God, as Calvin was,
Now, while yet in days of youth,
Delving from the Depths of Thine,
Sovereign, soul-exalting truth.

Make me like the Christ, O God,
Give me not a Calvin's ire,
But withhold from me the spark
For a new Servetus-fire.

Make me like a Calvin, God,
Just as humble, just as brave,
Like a Calvin who refused
E'en a stone upon his grave.

 - Albert Piersma
published in The Calvin Forum II:2 (1936), p. 39



Barth & Rumi Advise the Theologian

"We and our existences are really non-existence;
thou art the absolute Being which manifests the perishable."

You can’t find Him in there, go ahead, look hard,
with all the commentaries you may buy - or write yourself.

His domain we cannot discover,
and this shore has no port.
Does one arrive only by shipwreck?
“Come and dwell with me and be my Beloved,” is His call.
His love gives birth to hurricanes,
takes everything,
and gives more than all things back in Him alone.

(You have caused this shipwreck.
My secret stores of comfort,
hidden rafts of self-reliance,
hidden even from myself,
you have utterly destroyed, dashed against
the rocky shore of your desire for me.)

"But when the eye is turned toward the Light of God
What thing could remain hidden under such a Light?"

- Ann Chapin, July 2011http://www.iconsexplained.com/iec/byz_ann_chapin.htm
Quotes at the beginning and end of the poem are from the Persian philosopher, Rumi



Bonhoeffer Argues with Barth Over Heaven and its Songs

Not the angels who skim across pins,
en familie to Mozart and his lighted love of the air

Not the robed wonders who trade their antiphonal orders,
the patterns of Palestrina from, first, the East, then West, the home of human sins

Nor the simplest common chorales, broken off
as the Psalters of Geneva, of Plymouth, of Jerusalem and its steps

We believe in the prison and its concrete, impermanent walls,
in the sermon for all those held captive

We revel in the God become flesh and the old world
of tangential dust gathered to touch, though not touch, the new

Bach rewrote the world from the ground, bowed down
where the back can receive a blessing or thrashing, God knows

When our mist burns away in the sun we will know
Deus non est in genere,

Praise will be made from the fugue of the earth,
all its broken voices silent at first

Then circling to intone Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit,
Amen, amen, erhore mich


- David Wright, July 2011

David teaches literature and writing at Wheaton College, and is an advocate for arts in the Mennonite church. He has two volumes of published poetry: A Liturgy for Stones (2003) and Lines from the Provinces (2000). He also has three poems in the most recent issue of the Princeton Theological Review.



Four Limericks on Karl Barth

A scholar of God who was Swiss,
whom some sods like me think is sheer bliss,
drives conservatives nuts
and burns liberals’ butts,
while God thinks, “Karl, they’re taking the piss!”

There once was a gourmet named Barth,
who had tasted Rousseau and Descartes,
and though Hegel bar none
was his haute cuisine Hun,
he dogmatically dined à la carte.

To Wilhelm Karl lifted his stein,
and old Søren was fine vintage wine,
but what Rudolf would brew,
made him hack, heave, and spew,
while to Emil he roared and cried, “Nein!

Now what was Karl’s favourite sweet
(as I end my poor prandial conceit)?
He thought Jürgen too tart,
while too stale was Wolfhart,
Eberhard, though, now there was a treat!

- Kim Fabricius, July 2011

Kim is a minister at Bethel United Reformed Church in Swansea, Wales, and also serves as a chaplain with the United Reformed Church at the University of Wales, Swansea. While Kim does not have a blog of his own, he hovers around the theo-blogosphere and is most well known for his always insightful and often brilliant series of ten propositions.



For Additional References

John Calvin - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin
Karl Barth - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Barth
Emil Brunner - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Brunner
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonhoeffer



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