Guest Speaker in Class: Dr. Andy McCoy

This week in class we will have a guest speaker. His lecture will be the first of three lectures that he will give at the school this week on text.soul.culture.

Andy is a graduate of mhgs, with a MACP. He then went on to do a Ph.D. in Theology at the University of St. Andrews, where I did my post-graduate work. We overlapped a year in that little town on the shores of the North Sea. I look forward to hearing Andy this week. I hope you will enjoy his take on the integration of theology and psychology. He is the first of our alumni lectures series speakers. Very exciting!

Description of Lecture:

MHGS believes that Christian faith is a call to transforming worship of God amidst the interplay of text, soul and culture. But what does it truly mean to worship God in a suffering world and how does that affect the work of all who would be activists for the Gospel of Christ? This lecture series will offer theological reflection on each of the three MHGS themes in light of biblical lament as both a human response to suffering and a human response of worship. I will propose that lament shapes our relationship with God and others by bringing honest expression of pain into the context of our expectations about God's redemption of creation through Christ.

A Great Quote from LaCugna

Here is an important quote from Cathrine LaCugna's book, God For Us. (Did you know that she was a graduate of Seattle University?) I have mentioned this quote a number of times in class but I have never had it in front of me. I recently found it again, so here it is. In this passage, LaCugna is looking at the doctrine of the Trinity from an Eastern Orthodox position. She points out that Orthodox theologians emphasize that the Trinity is a communion of equals with no subordination, yet maintaining a relational structure. As she is highlighting the benefits of this understanding of equality in relationality, she simultaneously critiques the lack of ethical follow-up within the Orthodox tradition.

"Orthodox theolgoians seem entirely unaware of the ideological abuses of personhood with respect to women, or the poor, or other marginalized groups. There is no critique of heirarchical social or ecclesial structures. Much feminist literature has been devoted to exposing the oppressive 'doublespeak' contained in the reasoning that 'men and women are equal but different; God has endowed them with different places in the economy of redemption; every household needs a head and this role properly belongs to the man; this does not make the woman inferior.'"

And here is the key sentence:

"The strongest possible defense against sexism is indeed to argue ontologically, as feminist and liberation theologians have done, that the being of God is utterly antithetical to every kind of subordination and subservience." (God For Us, 287)

She continues by saying that eschatological hope and transformation are no excuse for allowing injustice to remain, because their theology calls for a different ordered structure for the church and society: that their trinitarian theology "calls for the transformation of persons and institutions in the present, precisely because unjust structures or practices obstruct grace and delay the reign of God." (288)

And here we see the heart of LaCugna's theological vision, that God's very being calls for justice, mercy and equality on every level of society, family and culture.

Unfortunately, LaCugna died of cancer at a fairly young age. We will never know the theology of her mature years, and for that we are theologically impoverished.

Peace,
Chelle

My New Book, Or Shameless Self Promotion

I have a book. Well, I am one of 5 authors. We are a diverse crowd: gender, race, theological passion, denomination, doctrine, etc. What unifies us is a love for the church and a love/hate relationship with the movement called E/evangelicalism.

Most of the authors met at the Lausanne Conference in Malaysia. (I'm the only one that didn't go...) On the way home from the conference a few of them asked the question, "Do I want to be an evangelical?" Out of this came a set of articles in The Other Journal dedicated to this question: Earth to Christians. Mark Russell, one of the original crowd, thought that this conversation would be a good book, so voila! here is the fruit of this original question.

I guess we all want to remain evangelical, in one way or another, because we spent the time writing this book. We even got together for a writing a few summers ago in order to all talk face to face about our chapters and our visions for the future of evangelicalism. It was a good time, though very tiring. We laughed a lot, cried a bit and, from time to time, fought passionately about our ideas. We, for the most part, agreed about the need for more conversation and flexibility within the tradition. We also agreed that the church needs a more robust understanding of God as Trinity and we need to live in the world in an attitude of humility and love of neighbor. What we disagreed about were the specifics of how this happens within the community of the people of God. But conversation is a very good place to start. Conversation about our passions, our difference and our commonalities (especially our love for God and God's love for us) is a vital key for creating community. If evangelicalism it going to not only survive but also thrive and flourish, then broader and more open conversation is needed to establish trust in the ranks. I tend to think that God is really the answer to all the questions but we are a diverse and creative people. Because of this, we are all called to take part in the formation of the church, the 'how' of this call on our lives to be the people of God.

The authors are Allen Yeh (he teaches at Biola), Michelle Sanchez (she is a pastor in Boston), Mark Russell (a missiologist, who writes and teaches about micro-finance in the two-thirds world and how business and missions can work together to help two-thirds world economies), our own Dwight Friesen (who teaches here at Mars Hill Graduate School) and me, Chelle.

What did I write about in my two chapters? Worship and the Holy Spirit. Ahhh, for a really robust doctrine of the Holy Spirit within our understanding of the workings of the church!

So, look out for Routes and Radishes: and other things to talk about at the evangelical crossroads, Zondervan, 2010.

I for one benefited from conversing with this small group of theologians and pastors. Who are you talking to about these issues?

Peace,
Chelle

Christopher Hitchens

Since we watched a video last week with Richard Dawkins, I thought (via Sonny M.) that you might be interested in hearing from the author of God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens. He has some interesting things to say.

• Christopher Hitchens interview with Charlie Rose

Let me know what you think!

-Chelle

PS Thanks Sonny for the link.

Citation Information and An Inspirational Quote

It has been brought to my attention that there is not adequate information given for two lectures in the 'suggested readings' folder. As some of you are using the Jensen lectures (by the way, his last name is Jenson, not Jensen...sorry about that. Not sure how that happened.), here is how you should cite the lectures:

• Matt Jenson, "Humanity" or "Sin", Unpublished lecture delivered at MHGS on October 18th, 2008.

If you liked his lectures, check out his book, The Gravity of Sin. There is a copy in the library.



Now, a little inspiration for all you writers, from Henri Nouwen's Theological Ideas in Education:

Most students...feel that they must first have something to say before they can put it down on paper. For them writing is little more than recording a preexistent thought. But...writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive.

In another place he writes:

The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know....Writing is like giving away the few loaves and fishes one has, in trust that they will multiply in the giving. Once we dare to "give away" on paper the few thoughts that come to us, we start discovering how much is hidden underneath...and gradually come in touch with our own riches.

Hope your writing is going well! And may you indeed come in touch with your own riches!!

-Chelle

Due Dates

Just a reminder that Research Papers (and Creative Papers/Projects) are due on Monday November 29th by 4:30PM.

If you want to do a presentation of your creative project, you will need to come and talk with me. You may need to turn it in a week earlier...

Alvin Plantinga

While I was attending the University of St. Andrews, Alvin Plantinga came to deliver the Gifford lectures. The Gifford lectures are meant to explore issues around science, faith and natural theology.

In his lectures, Plantinga argued that evolution and Christianity are not necessarily contradictory. Instead, it is natural philosophy that is antithetical to the Christian narrative of creation. Natural philosophy, or evolutionary naturalism, holds that there is nothing 'supernatural' because there is only the material world, nothing else exists.

His central argument was about how naturalism's statement of evolution actually undermines itself. Evolution, in Plantinga's logic, is an 'epistemic defeater' for naturalism. Naturalism holds that our basic tendency as developing animals is geared toward survival ('feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing'). Our human faculties are part of this development. If we really are surviving animals rather than believing or truth seeking animals, then, he argues, that those same faculties cannot be relied upon for any kind of truth claim, including naturalism or evolution. To believe in the reliability of our faculties would be a 'metaphysical add-on' to the evolutionary naturalism position. On the other hand, if we are creatures created by God (in God's image), even if by an evolutionary process, we would have warrant to trust our faculties with regard to belief in God and other broader truth claims (even those of science).

Since I am not a philosopher of religion, I will not explain this further, if I have really explained Plantinga's arguments with any clarity at all! I just wanted you to know that people of faith are thinking about these things, even if we intellectual peons do not really understand it all...

Cosmologies and Creation

I want to take a moment to articulate a few various worldviews or cosmologies:

First we will look to Plato. Plato assumed three eternal categories. The first is ‘form’, or the ‘model’. This category is typically referred to as ‘the forms’ or the ‘ideas’. Plato’s second eternal category is the ‘receptacle’, or unformed, shapeless and chaotic ‘matter’. The third category is the demiurge or the divinity “who does not create but shapes that which is of equal eternity with him.”[1] Thus, in the platonic worldview, the demiurge takes the shapeless and chaotic matter and creates the world according to the eternal forms. Everything is eternal. Creation (or the world we live in) is a reproduction or a representation of the eternal forms or ideas. Everything around us, including ourselves, is categorically lower or even denigrated in comparison with the eternal forms. All we have to do is think about his allegory of the cave to understand this separation of ourselves from the forms. (We can only see the shadows, not the forms/ideas themselves.) From this comes a dualism that prioritizes the non-material (or ‘spiritual’) over the material.

In a Christian worldview, God alone is eternal: always was and always will be. God creates ex nihilo (i.e., out of nothing). There is nothing co-existent with God and creation comes about from nothing outside of God’s abundant and loving creative activity. The duality set up in this worldview is that of Creator and created. There are no beings that mediate between the Creator God and the created order. As Basil puts it, there is an ontological homogeneity of the creation, for all things are, on an equal footing, created by God. There is distinction and variety of being rather than a hierarchy of being in this way of thinking. There is God’s reality and there is created reality; and these exist simultaneously without competition.

There is one more worldview that should be mentioned in this context, that of Plotinus or neoplatonism. In this worldview, there is one eternal category: the One, which is the source of all being. From the One flows all life, much like a fountain overflowing downwards. The farther “up” the fountain one was in this flow of being, the more divine, the farther down, the less divine. A number of heretical formulations of Christology, such as Gnosticism and Arianism, are really just variations of this hierarchical worldview. Gunton asserts that

Neoplatonism…held that reality formed a hierarchy or ladder, by climbing which it was possible to ascend to divinity. Thus one ascends through matter via higher forms of being like mind to the divine. This doctrine presupposed a fundamental dualism between the material or sensible and the spiritual or intellectual. It also presupposed the inferiority of matter to mind.[2]

This way of thinking has a huge impact on the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. How can God really come into space and time if the material world is inherently worthless or even evil? As Gunton argues:

If God in his Son takes to himself the reality of human flesh, then nothing created, and certainly nothing material, can be downgraded to unreality, semi-reality or treated as fundamentally evil.[3]

Also, how we construe the reality of the world around us shapes, in significant ways, our philosophy of the material of the world. If matter is necessarily imperfect or evil, why should we invest our lives and talents in the material world? Why should we work for peace or the good of all? If ‘spirit’, the ‘intellect’ or the ‘mind’ are really more ‘divine’, then, we can assume, we should spend our energies developing those human characteristics. Or, if this life and its materiality are really inherently flawed, then we should spend our energies evangelizing so that we can have a good afterlife somewhere else (i.e., heaven).

Instead, we are searching for a worldview that upholds the goodness of creation. God makes good. God declared the material order ‘good’. Thus, we are brought back to a more helpful duality that we want to develop: that of Creator and created. And, we want to somehow leave behind a hierarchical construal of reality; although this duality lies heavily within our language.

---

[1] Gunton, Triune Creator [TC], 3 & 31. See Plato’s Timaeus.
[2] Obviously, this is a much more complicated concept. I am thinking about musical space here as a model for distinct yet simultaneous space. The triune Creator is not in competition with the creation. God is in relation, and does not have to be either completely immersed within the created order (immanentism; pantheism; panentheism) or absolutely other (deism). It is very difficult to hold together the concepts of particularity and oneness (unity); or of individuation and universality. Unity and diversity are concepts that are often construed as mutually exclusive rather than as mutually constitutive.
[3] Gunton, TC, 71.
[4] Gunton, TC, 52.