Alastair's Adversaria

This Lent I would like to try something that I have never tried before on this blog. This may end up falling flat, but I would like to believe that it will work out. Whether it works out or not is really up to you.

Every day during Lent, I would like to have one of my readers post a guest post on this blog. No one else has ever posted on this blog before, so you have the opportunity to be one of the first. To qualify to guest post you don’t have to be a pastor, a theologian, or even a student of theology. Nor do you have to be an existing member of the blogosphere. I would love to have many different voices contributing to this project.

There are a few guidelines for the content and subject of the guest posts.

1. The posts must have as their subject matter a saying, action or event from our Lord’s public ministry, after His Baptism and prior to His entry into Jerusalem. During Holy Week this rule will change.

2. You are invited to present a few personal reflections on the saying, action or event. These reflections can take a number of different forms. Creative and imaginative posts are very welcome. Your reflections could be a word of testimony concerning the way that these verses have helped you at a particular time in your life. They could be more theological in tone. You could post a poem, a piece of art, a musical composition (you could sing a favourite hymn, for instance) or an audio or video clip (any Youtubers out there?). Once a saying, action or event has been posted on, I would prefer that people move onto a new one. However, I am prepared to make exceptions, given the right circumstances. If you have a particular verse that you just have to post on, book early!

3. The season of Lent is designed to lead us through the events of Holy Week into Easter. This fact should be reflected in the content and emphasis of your post. The ideal post will help readers to prepare their hearts, minds and lives for Holy Week and Easter Sunday.

4. You are NOT invited to argue some partisan position. These guest posts are not to be about pushing a NPP or FV position down people’s throats, for example. This does not mean that you cannot give a different perspective on a particular passage. Provided that you present such a position charitably, such a post would be quite welcome. The point is that this is not the appropriate setting for theological dogfights. The goal of this project is to edify and to get to know each other.

5. Please keep your posts to a reasonable length. You are writing a blog post, not a book (yeah, yeah, I know what you are about to say!). A post could be no more than a few sentences in length, or it could be several paragraphs in length. This is largely left to your own discretion.

Entries can be sent to 40bicycles at gmail dot com. I don’t have any post for tomorrow or the rest of the week, so you might find your guest post posted more or less straight away. Others might have to wait for a couple of weeks. If you could give a few details about yourself along with your post, they can be put on top of your guest post. You could give, for example, your name, where you live, the church you attend, where you blog (if your blog), where you work and a short list of things that are very special to you, important events in your life, etc. You are also invited to include a prayer request for yourself or for something or somebody else (you could ask people to give thanks for something with you, for example).

What are you waiting for?

Leithart blogs on the subject of a biblical view of obscenity. Meanwhile, the brouhaha on the Warfield list that started all of this has only just died down. The discussion has made interesting reading and generally reveals an apparent inability to draw the most commonsensical of distinctions. In the process of the discussion Leithart has been called a ‘weirdo’ and ‘an overeducated prurient pig’. The FV has been labelled ‘antithetical to piety’ by fine gentlemen on the list, staunch defenders of the Decalogue’s rule over our speech that they are. Along with Mark Horne I have been accused of ‘glorying the use of the obscenity’ and been described as ‘chronologically immature’; people have shuddered over the spiritual state of any offspring that I (and those who share my views on this matter) might have in the future.

Fortunately, a few of the posters in the thread were able to speak a measure of sense and give some perspective on the issues. One post in particular attempted to rescue the ailing thread by injecting it with a large dose of reason. Unfortunately the transfusion was rejected and the thread finally perished in a pool of its own nonsense sometime last night.

It is hard not to wish, like Mark, that they would just have spoken a little more loudly so that everyone could have heard them.
***Leithart blogs on the subject of Lent:

In Reformed churches, the suppression of Lent has been simultaneous with the suppression of Carnival and other seasons of playful joy. Suppression of Lent did not produce perpetual Easter; it produced a perpetual Lent.

I’m not suggesting a direct cause-and-effect. But I am suggesting that there is wisdom in setting aside a specific period for mourning, self-examination, and fasting. We acknowledge Lent in the same way and for the same reason we have a time of Confession at the beginning of each worship service. There is a time for lament over sins; there is a time for mourning our own depravity. But lament and mourning ought not choke out rejoicing in the goodness of God.

When the Lenten spirit is not given its due, it has threatened to engulf the whole year. The Lenten spirit is part of the church’s life, and if we don’t wear ashes and purple for forty days, we might well end up wearing them for 365.

Leithart blogged some helpful thoughts on Lent three years ago that are worth remembering as we get ready for the season.
***‘How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise’ [HT: Paul Baxter and Mark Horne]. Very perceptive article.
***Kim Fabricius’ Ten Propositions series continues with ‘Ten Propositions on Theodicy’. Whilst I often don’t see eye to eye with Kim’s propositions, they are always thought-provoking. The fact that they are so succinct and to the point is an added bonus.
***I wonder if John Frum (whoever he is) put this on his CV. Cargo cults must be some of the weirdest forms of religion out there.
***Douglas Knight summarizes some of the issues addressed by Oliver O’Donovan’s recent series of web sermons. If you haven’t read O’Donovan’s sermons already, I would recommend that you do. Whatever your position on the issues that he addresses, O’Donovan always makes for stimulating and thought-provoking reading. He is also very cool-headed and even-handed in conversations that are commonly undermined by the failure of the various parties involved to hold the strong feelings that the issues arouse in them in check.

Update: Leithart blogs on Modern Sex-Speak

Leithart continues to post on the FV debates:

A few days ago, I suggested that the Federal Vision controversy in the Reformed churches is a “Presbyterian identity crisis.” But I don’t want to minimize the theological dimension of this debate. The issue is how to express the real theological differences, as opposed to the host of imaginary differences that are often discussed.

Here’s the problem: Those associated with the Federal Vision and their opponents both claim to hold to the doctrinal standards of the PCA and OPC (or the other Reformed denominations). The differences between the two sides often seem miniscule, and that makes the debate seem trivial and often petty. The “identity crisis” dimension provides part of the explanation. But only part. It’s not only theological. But it is theological.

Only it’s not theological in the way that is often suggested.

It’s not theological in the sense that one side teaches salvation by works and another salvation by grace through faith; both teach salvation by grace through faith. It’s not theological in the sense that one side teaches election and reprobation and another denies it. Both sides are high Calvinists. We could tick off any number of doctrines where there would be very close agreement. There are, I admit, some doctrinal differences, but the key differences do not appear at the level of “doctrine.” At that level, the differences are indeed small.

But that doesn’t mean the differences are nothing, or that it’s a debate about nothing. The debate is a debate at a sub-doctrinal or meta-doctrinal level. It’s not a debate about the system, but about the sub-system. Both sides can agree with what confession says, but they do it with a different intonation. Both are running the same doctrinal and Confessional programs, but they have different operating systems that affect the way the doctrinal programs work.

Read the whole post here.

Once again I think that Leithart is on target. It is always reassuring to observe that I am not the only one who sees some of these things. Leithart’s point about time is a particularly important one. In fact, I think that his point can be pushed even further. I believe that the increased sensitivity to the importance of time on the part of the FV leads, not just to an appreciation of the way that various doctrines need to be rethought in a manner that recognizes the importance of the temporal character of creaturely existence, but to a change in the way that we approach the task of theologizing in general.

As FV thinking matures I would be very surprised if we find it sticking with the model of theologizing presented by traditional Reformed systematic theology. I think that we will see a strong movement away from such a form of theologizing and I believe that we are already seeing such a movement taking place. The problem with traditional Reformed systematic theology is that the very way that it does theology downplays the importance of time.

Traditional Reformed theology has generally operated in terms of the spatializing metaphor of the ‘system’. Doctrines have to be put together, like pieces in a puzzle. However, it seems to me that FV theologians increasingly theologize in terms of a quite different metaphor, that of the ‘narrative’. When one theologizes in terms of the metaphor of ‘narrative’, one will notice that doctrines simply do not take the central stage as they do in the ‘system’. Doctrines within a ‘narrative’ approach to theologizing are very different creatures to doctrines encountered within a ‘system’ approach to theologizing. Theologizing about justification in terms of narrative involves a certain way of telling a story, grasping its direction and living it out. Theologizing about justification in terms of a system generally has little time for such story-telling, but approaches the ‘doctrine’ of justification more as something to be abstracted from the story and analyzed as a timeless truth about the numinous thing called salvation works.

The tension that many recognize as existing between biblical and systematic theology in some Reformed quarters is related to the tension between these two different ways of approaching theology. The very metaphor that systematic theology operates in terms of makes it difficult for it to process properly a number of the insights of biblical theology. For example, to what extent could a Reformed systematic theologian really do justice to the importance of maturation in Scripture, without changing the very way that he approaches the task of theology? For the systematician to really take on board the insights of the biblical theologian, he will increasingly have to relax into a more narrative form of theologizing. As long as the systematician persists in trying to construct a panoptic and spatialized system, he will find it impossible to truly appropriate the insights of the biblical theologians.

This is not to deny that there is a distinction between the task of the dogmatician and the biblical theologian, although they are far closer than often presumed. Many of the key influences on the FV movement, people like Peter Leithart, James Jordan and N.T. Wright, are practitioners of a more narrative approach to theology. All of these theologians engage in a sort of theology that unsettles traditional boundaries between systematic and biblical theology. They address many of the same questions that systematic theologians traditionally address, but they tend to theologize about such questions from quite a different angle.

The fact that many of the opponents of the FV find it hard to understand them is not surprising. Such writers are not merely tweaking some of the rules of a game familiar to both parties; they are playing a different sort of game altogether. Narrative theology, for example, is not totalizing like system theology. It is far more open-ended in character. Part of the reason for this is that the narrative theologian, unlike the system theologian, finds himself within the object of his study. The story that we are telling is the story that we find ourselves in. The objectivity and detachment of the system theologian simply does not exist for the consistent narrative theologian.

Leithart lists a number of other sub-systemic issues. It seems clear to me that many of these sub-systemic issues again flow quite naturally from the ‘system’ approach to theologizing. For example, a narrative approach to theologizing is far less likely to favour a ‘substance’ view of human nature and will be far more open to a high view of ritual. The understanding of the relationship between Old and New Covenant will also tend to be quite different in a narrative approach. System approaches, since they tend to abstract from time, cannot really do justice to the reality of maturation. They also tend to sharply distinguish periods from each other, placing them in antithetical relationship, or collapse them into each other, stressing an underlying identity and treating the historical differences as more ‘accidental’ in character. The root problem in this case is that the system approach treats periods of history as if they were objects without any time dimension, to be taken in by the eye in a single glance (vision is the dominant faculty in the system approach; hearing and speaking are more primary in the narrative approach). Within a narrative approach to theologizing relating periods of history is nowhere near as difficult, simply because periods of history can only be properly understood within a narrative.

If the current debate is going to make any progress we will have to begin to talk seriously about the way that we believe that the task of theology should be approached.