Some Theological Summaries

From the professional to the personal, and yet this and the pieces that will follow leading into the summer are of significant public import as well. I have been writing some "two-pagers" but I have a small stack of one-pagers that serve as an intro for something that has struck me as of highest current urgency.

The long version of the thoughts that led to this urgence are not easy to fit into this format, nor would the time required to compose them fit very well into the ways my life is organized. But here is an intro to some pieces I have called a parade of follies, as much as anything because I do not measure up to the scholar that the first half is summarizing, yet I deign to put my notions up beside his here, in the imitation that only a devoted but incompetent fan would dare to put out.

Tom Wright Names Our Theological Follies

This series of eight one page (or-less) pieces cover, first, N. T. Wright’s pithiest critiques of western Christian theology.

While there’s nothing here that corresponds exactly, for instance, to C. Baxter Kruger’s and Wm. Paul Young’s thoughts on “union” versus “separation” (which in one point is almost as important, as a single thought, as Tom’s three points are taken together) these are three of the biggest problems, the deepest ways in which the Zeitgeist has infected how we think about God, about Jesus, about our relation to them and how this present period in the story of salvation is likely to come to conclusion.

Briefly:

We have reduced our interest in who or what people are by being so concerned about moral standing and position in light of eternal things as to set the value of most of what any man or woman is or does to approximately nought. (moralized our anthropology)

We have espoused theories of what Jesus’ death meant which when pared down to their logical minimums make Good Friday look like a case of cosmic child abuse (to which Baxter and Paul would say, “Amen!” and “just exactly as we have been telling you”). (paganized our soteriology)

And we have clung to understandings of our destiny beyond the grave that short-change the hope that the Jews had in speaking of resurrection and painted a picture that bears little resemblance to what must be the secret in the Father’s heart when he had one of his prophets say what Paul quotes in I Corinthians 2:9 (eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of any man the things which God has prepared for those who love him), a verse which strikes me as Papa saying to us, “Guess! Whatever you can imagine, it’ll be better – not like ‘vegetables’, but like a holiday at a beach – on the other side of the world!”. Instead, under the weight of a memory of “sacred tradition”, we have been settling for the best that the Greeks could imagine. (platonized our eschatology)

In the following single pages, I first summarize each of these ideas, as I understand them, in one page, in a form that should be easier to consume than a 40 page chapter in a monograph might do, yet more transparently than the summarizing three word phrases can. (like in number alone to the silly phrases a Canadian politician has been using to raise his profile)

I follow up with three items of my own that Tom’s items called forth out of my heart – not that he needed (or wanted) an answer from this quarter, but that’s the way his words worked on me.

So here you go: Wright’s Quick Critiques explained, then Arthur’s Add-Ons (also numbering three) as chasers. Truly, a parade of follies (where the folly is all mine)

And I’m going to follow that with another thought about the intersection of religious convictions and how we western Christians are moving in the world that I consider of paramount and general importance.