Tim Dearborn, who is the founder of the Seattle Association for Theological Studies (its name was changed to the Pacific Association for Theological Studies and KOINOS is the name currently used to describe its ministry), one day described me as a walking seminary. What he meant by this is that I have a huge interest in all of the dimensions of what happens in a seminary, from biblical studies to theological studies to pastoral counseling to church history, and I attempt to integrate them at all times.
I love surveys; I love getting the big picture and then being able to drill down deep later. Some people would call that being a generalist.
My father-in-law began the Family Medicine program for the University of Washington in Spokane. In Spokane they needed generalists who would go out to communities and understand all that was going on, and if necessary to send them to Seattle where specialists are trained. Specialists often aren’t as aware of all that is out there, but they’re the best within the area of their focus.
So, I lean towards being a generalist. I lean towards being somebody who wants to see all the different parts of theological training integrated into all the parts of a person’s life, so to be a counselor who is a theologian is just one of the ways that I bring together that whole sense. And when I train people at Washington Seminary, my concern is that they would end up as those who have a general education that integrates all of these pieces together, but preparing every step of the way to minister in a specialty that brings together the generalities to bear on specific questions. So I don’t think it’s an “either – or” type thing. I think we need generalists who are able to specialize and that we will be best served because those people will be able to go anywhere and to draw on all the fields of thought that need to be drawn on to be equipped to minister. And communities of faith, the families of faith if you will, that are part of the world shaped by God that we currently live in needs leaders who are theologically informed and practically able to strategically make a difference.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
on being a bridge person
I consider myself a bridge person. You may ask, “From what to what?”
One of my primary concerns over the years has been to be a bridge between the church and the academy. I spent almost 20 years in higher education; at the same time I was also working in churches -- on staff at four churches during those years, plus volunteer work, as well as working with Young Life. My concern is that the church needs to get its questions to the academy, and the church needs to help the academy to understand that its ultimate value is in finding answers to how the gospel is lived, incarnated, and comes alongside to help the world that God wants to reach.
Being in the church has helped raise those issues for me. I’ve worked in adult ed, youth ministry, and children’s education, and each one has its own value. I think the academy is hugely valuable in finding answers and digging deeply into things, and that the church desperately needs those resources. I’m reminded that in the world of dentistry, for example, there are people who work on people’s teeth every day, and there are also people in the academy who are constantly researching better materials and procedures and techniques, and that the academy doesn’t operate outside of asking how this is ultimately going to shape the world of dental practice. And I would like to see more of that between the church and the academy. So I attempt to bridge the gulf between those. Washington Seminary, where I am the chancellor, is embedded in a church and is also embedding itself in the world of academic discussion. So we are attempting to have a seminary that embodies both of those worlds as well and serves as a bridge.
I also see myself as a bridge between the conservative side of Christianity and the liberal. I think everyone has a general concern to ask, “What does love look like? And what does it mean to be the body of Christ?” There are varying degrees as to how we achieve that. During several school terms I have taught both at Northwest University, which is an Assemblies of God school and to the conservative side, and at Seattle University, which is more to the liberal side. I teach pretty much the same kinds of things -- largely about the Trinity and the life of relationship, and what it means to know others personally and not merely as objects. And I find that people are very open to the idea of relational thinking as a core to where it is that we’re all going, whether from the right or from the left. Both the liberal and the conservative have seemed to be void of trinitarian thinking, so there is a need for someone to come in and see the possibilities of going back to the affirmations of the early church and how those thoughts shape the way that we do ministry in the modern world, and the way we talk about who God is -- that God is a relational community of Father, Son, Spirit that continues in the world in a relational manner that we are invited to share. So again, to be a bridge in theological thinking by providing trinitarian thinking is another dimension of who I am as a bridge person, the way I want to be involved in bridge activities and to see the divergent components within our current contemporary institutions somehow be brought together by persons who embody being bridges.
One of my primary concerns over the years has been to be a bridge between the church and the academy. I spent almost 20 years in higher education; at the same time I was also working in churches -- on staff at four churches during those years, plus volunteer work, as well as working with Young Life. My concern is that the church needs to get its questions to the academy, and the church needs to help the academy to understand that its ultimate value is in finding answers to how the gospel is lived, incarnated, and comes alongside to help the world that God wants to reach.
Being in the church has helped raise those issues for me. I’ve worked in adult ed, youth ministry, and children’s education, and each one has its own value. I think the academy is hugely valuable in finding answers and digging deeply into things, and that the church desperately needs those resources. I’m reminded that in the world of dentistry, for example, there are people who work on people’s teeth every day, and there are also people in the academy who are constantly researching better materials and procedures and techniques, and that the academy doesn’t operate outside of asking how this is ultimately going to shape the world of dental practice. And I would like to see more of that between the church and the academy. So I attempt to bridge the gulf between those. Washington Seminary, where I am the chancellor, is embedded in a church and is also embedding itself in the world of academic discussion. So we are attempting to have a seminary that embodies both of those worlds as well and serves as a bridge.
I also see myself as a bridge between the conservative side of Christianity and the liberal. I think everyone has a general concern to ask, “What does love look like? And what does it mean to be the body of Christ?” There are varying degrees as to how we achieve that. During several school terms I have taught both at Northwest University, which is an Assemblies of God school and to the conservative side, and at Seattle University, which is more to the liberal side. I teach pretty much the same kinds of things -- largely about the Trinity and the life of relationship, and what it means to know others personally and not merely as objects. And I find that people are very open to the idea of relational thinking as a core to where it is that we’re all going, whether from the right or from the left. Both the liberal and the conservative have seemed to be void of trinitarian thinking, so there is a need for someone to come in and see the possibilities of going back to the affirmations of the early church and how those thoughts shape the way that we do ministry in the modern world, and the way we talk about who God is -- that God is a relational community of Father, Son, Spirit that continues in the world in a relational manner that we are invited to share. So again, to be a bridge in theological thinking by providing trinitarian thinking is another dimension of who I am as a bridge person, the way I want to be involved in bridge activities and to see the divergent components within our current contemporary institutions somehow be brought together by persons who embody being bridges.
Monday, March 24, 2008
reflections on the new conspirators conference
The New Conspirators Conference, hosted earlier this month by Tom and Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates, was a great success in asking questions about whether or not the future has a church and if so, what some of its distinctive missions might be. Reflecting on who I am and what Washington Seminary is about, I think the word missional is a significant word with which we connect. We are not merely attractional, hoping that people come to us, but are preparing students to go out into the world. I still have a sense that there is value in offering options like Under the Green Roof that attract people to come, but the whole idea of raising up students to go out and serve the community is a significant opportunity that I think expresses what we are about. I believe that God is missional, and so my theology is missional -- that God always goes where people are -- and so should the seminary, which is partly why we’re connected with the church.
Secondly, the idea of mosaic, the idea that we have multi cultures within our church, is certainly true at Washington Cathedral, which has an Esperanza service. Washington Seminary is hoping in the future to offer Spanish-speaking students the opportunity to complete a Spanish only degree. More and more Spanish language resources are becoming available, including books, but also other resources (Logos Bible software is now available in a Spanish edition), so we are hoping to be a place that increasingly embraces other cultures and other language streams, and so that is part of the future, and is very much a part of the mosaic of who we want Washington Seminary to be.
The monastic component, intentionally practicing prayer and spirituality while living in a busy world, is also something we are about in that at some level, the learning mode, where people spend time listening and reading, and then come for a conversation as the mentored part of what it is we do I think lives somewhat within the monastic tradition, and one could say that the mentors, in a sense, are the abbots, those who are the overseers, the spiritual companions along the way, so I have a great interest in the monastic tradition as something that nurtures the life of Washington Seminary.
And emerging, which is of course a broad term, has something to do with the church not holding to traditional modes, but asking authentic questions about how we engage culture in significant ways that are postmodern. Dwight Friesen, my good friend, spoke to what it was that we are doing at Washington Seminary as innovative, which is one of the words that I think is significant about who we are: we are trying to innovate and do things differently. Another word I heard at the conference about our seminary was from Mark Scandrette, who introduced Washington Seminary as alternative, which I think is also a helpful adjective, to say we’re not just trying to do it the same as we’ve always done it, but we’re trying to think how we can be more person-centered, how we can have more diversity within the programs, by allowing each person to have a sense that they are important rather than the program being of primary importance, so we want to be person-centered rather than program-centered.
And so, the conference I think as a whole for me was an enriching conversation in examining Washington Seminary in the light of those things that were the three clear goals of the conference. We want to communicate creative models of what New Conspirators are trying to address. We are certainly trying to engage in new modes of communication, and even when we look at biblical hermeneutics, it’s about learning how that affects our communication in all parts of life. We want to connect leaders from all four streams; connection is certainly something that Washington Seminary is about as a network organization which connects through personal conversations, through connecting with books and programs, all of those different ways that our students might be out and connected to others, we want to be about all of those things. And lastly, we want to create new ways to advance God’s new order in our world. Creative is one of those other adjectives that I really want to embrace, that we are attempting to be creative in new ways, new modes, new personal connections that really honor and respect the dignity of each person within God’s broader mission.
So this was a great conference to reflect on all those things and to discover that Washington Seminary is not mostly stuck in just one of these models, but that we are really caught up in some way in furthering all of them. All of these speak to us, and hopefully we will speak for them and to them and with them in the future.
Secondly, the idea of mosaic, the idea that we have multi cultures within our church, is certainly true at Washington Cathedral, which has an Esperanza service. Washington Seminary is hoping in the future to offer Spanish-speaking students the opportunity to complete a Spanish only degree. More and more Spanish language resources are becoming available, including books, but also other resources (Logos Bible software is now available in a Spanish edition), so we are hoping to be a place that increasingly embraces other cultures and other language streams, and so that is part of the future, and is very much a part of the mosaic of who we want Washington Seminary to be.
The monastic component, intentionally practicing prayer and spirituality while living in a busy world, is also something we are about in that at some level, the learning mode, where people spend time listening and reading, and then come for a conversation as the mentored part of what it is we do I think lives somewhat within the monastic tradition, and one could say that the mentors, in a sense, are the abbots, those who are the overseers, the spiritual companions along the way, so I have a great interest in the monastic tradition as something that nurtures the life of Washington Seminary.
And emerging, which is of course a broad term, has something to do with the church not holding to traditional modes, but asking authentic questions about how we engage culture in significant ways that are postmodern. Dwight Friesen, my good friend, spoke to what it was that we are doing at Washington Seminary as innovative, which is one of the words that I think is significant about who we are: we are trying to innovate and do things differently. Another word I heard at the conference about our seminary was from Mark Scandrette, who introduced Washington Seminary as alternative, which I think is also a helpful adjective, to say we’re not just trying to do it the same as we’ve always done it, but we’re trying to think how we can be more person-centered, how we can have more diversity within the programs, by allowing each person to have a sense that they are important rather than the program being of primary importance, so we want to be person-centered rather than program-centered.
And so, the conference I think as a whole for me was an enriching conversation in examining Washington Seminary in the light of those things that were the three clear goals of the conference. We want to communicate creative models of what New Conspirators are trying to address. We are certainly trying to engage in new modes of communication, and even when we look at biblical hermeneutics, it’s about learning how that affects our communication in all parts of life. We want to connect leaders from all four streams; connection is certainly something that Washington Seminary is about as a network organization which connects through personal conversations, through connecting with books and programs, all of those different ways that our students might be out and connected to others, we want to be about all of those things. And lastly, we want to create new ways to advance God’s new order in our world. Creative is one of those other adjectives that I really want to embrace, that we are attempting to be creative in new ways, new modes, new personal connections that really honor and respect the dignity of each person within God’s broader mission.
So this was a great conference to reflect on all those things and to discover that Washington Seminary is not mostly stuck in just one of these models, but that we are really caught up in some way in furthering all of them. All of these speak to us, and hopefully we will speak for them and to them and with them in the future.
Monday, March 3, 2008
about washington seminary
I am excited to be the Chancellor of a seminary in Redmond, WA, called Washington Seminary. This is a seminary that’s attempting to think and function differently from traditional forms of education because of a couple of things. One is we live in a very busy world where it’s difficult for people to fit theological education into their busy lives, and so we offer flexible education. Students listen to recorded lectures from Regent College and to short tutorials that I record, and they read several books and articles to give a broad perspective of reading around the subjects of the course.
We offer four masters degrees: Master of Theological Arts, Master of Ministry, Master of Marketplace Ministry, and Master of Christian Counseling. These really play out some of my delights in life, to think about how the arts play out theology in ways that mere books and mere words cannot. The nature of ministry – I’ve been involved on staff in four churches in my life, and so I’m very concerned with the life of the church as it goes forth to live out the missional life of God in the world.
Regarding marketplace ministry, I have worked as the manager of a bakery espresso, and I’ve worked as a custodian and, well, quite a number of jobs out there in the “real world,” meaning not the world that is just Christian, and I have a great desire to discover how to help people to think about working in those areas as ministry, not merely as the support for what one does with ministry in the church, but that our jobs are our ministry. I am a Christian counselor as well, and I think I have some different ways of thinking about Christian counseling than what most of the literature that I read in Christian counseling is working from, so that is another area of great interest to me. So these four degrees shape the masters programs.
On Wednesday evenings we also offer Under the Green Roof, where I get to play out art and scripture. We’ve gone through the book of Genesis and are now going through the book of John. Every week we discuss a different kind of art form as it plays out a different chapter or two from the Bible and then have conversations with those who come as a way of really learning to live, and shaping the culture of Washington Seminary as something that is both deeply rooted in the biblical traditions but also has wings to fly in what it means to speak artistically in a world where the artist seems to have become the truth bearer of the day. Musicians, movie makers -- all those are where people are looking for their truth statements, I think, and so believing we need to be involved in that, we are studying art, talking about art, as a way of living the missional life of God. It’s amazing. People can even talk about the art when they go back to work the next day in a way that they might have a hard time talking about scripture or principles or anything like that. And we offer weekend seminaries where we bring in people like Tom and Christine Sine for extended periods of time, and quarterly Conversations, which are idea jam sessions based on the idea of a jam session in jazz where a variety of people come together and don’t preplan, but begin by setting a theme and playing out of that theme.
We are developing other ideas as well, but that just gives you a little bit of insight that my concerns as a relational theologian are not merely academic, but that they are really concerned about bridging between the life of the academy and the church, believing that the questions of the church really need to inform the questions of the academy, and that the vast amounts of information that the academy has need to be translated and brought into the life of the church to enrich its future and to live within the purposes of God and to see the people of God equipped to articulate and act out of the very life of God.
We offer four masters degrees: Master of Theological Arts, Master of Ministry, Master of Marketplace Ministry, and Master of Christian Counseling. These really play out some of my delights in life, to think about how the arts play out theology in ways that mere books and mere words cannot. The nature of ministry – I’ve been involved on staff in four churches in my life, and so I’m very concerned with the life of the church as it goes forth to live out the missional life of God in the world.
Regarding marketplace ministry, I have worked as the manager of a bakery espresso, and I’ve worked as a custodian and, well, quite a number of jobs out there in the “real world,” meaning not the world that is just Christian, and I have a great desire to discover how to help people to think about working in those areas as ministry, not merely as the support for what one does with ministry in the church, but that our jobs are our ministry. I am a Christian counselor as well, and I think I have some different ways of thinking about Christian counseling than what most of the literature that I read in Christian counseling is working from, so that is another area of great interest to me. So these four degrees shape the masters programs.
On Wednesday evenings we also offer Under the Green Roof, where I get to play out art and scripture. We’ve gone through the book of Genesis and are now going through the book of John. Every week we discuss a different kind of art form as it plays out a different chapter or two from the Bible and then have conversations with those who come as a way of really learning to live, and shaping the culture of Washington Seminary as something that is both deeply rooted in the biblical traditions but also has wings to fly in what it means to speak artistically in a world where the artist seems to have become the truth bearer of the day. Musicians, movie makers -- all those are where people are looking for their truth statements, I think, and so believing we need to be involved in that, we are studying art, talking about art, as a way of living the missional life of God. It’s amazing. People can even talk about the art when they go back to work the next day in a way that they might have a hard time talking about scripture or principles or anything like that. And we offer weekend seminaries where we bring in people like Tom and Christine Sine for extended periods of time, and quarterly Conversations, which are idea jam sessions based on the idea of a jam session in jazz where a variety of people come together and don’t preplan, but begin by setting a theme and playing out of that theme.
We are developing other ideas as well, but that just gives you a little bit of insight that my concerns as a relational theologian are not merely academic, but that they are really concerned about bridging between the life of the academy and the church, believing that the questions of the church really need to inform the questions of the academy, and that the vast amounts of information that the academy has need to be translated and brought into the life of the church to enrich its future and to live within the purposes of God and to see the people of God equipped to articulate and act out of the very life of God.
Monday, February 25, 2008
integration vs contextualization
As a Christian who counsels, I often distinguish between integration and contextualization. The nature of integration, I think, starts with two systems of thought and attempts to take the best of the two of them and to come up with a third something. My problem with this is that one is likely to lose the integrity of both and come up with something that’s a bit Frankensteinish. So if one takes family systems thinking and theology, at what level does one really lose the whole sense of a living, active God, if one’s theology just looks at the human part of the family system? As humans, our choice of what we take and what we leave behind has a great potential to go awry, so when we select from, it causes me some concern that we end up with a mythology (meaning “my theology”) where we end up having from both of the systems only what we choose, and we call that our integrated system.
But I prefer to use the word contextualization, because there’s a sense in which context says that one system is left entirely intact and the other is put within it to ask how the meaning of one is changed by it being in the context of the other. So when one calls one’s self a Christian, one says, “I will no longer see my life story as a life story separate from the life story of God, but I will see the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the context for my story. His story trumps my story.” It’s not that we’re going to try and work out some mutually acceptable terms. What Jesus has done is the entire foundation for my love and acceptance being a reality because of the gift of God, which we call grace.
So I want the nature of theology in my counseling to always precede the use of therapeutic terms, but it doesn’t exclude me from using therapeutic terms, so that when I use the term “family,” there’s something about God’s life as Father, Son, and Spirit, and the whole election of Abraham and all those that follow after Abraham, that shapes something about a family that is connected, that covenants together, that when I come and talk about family systems and what it means to trace out a genogram and to see where triangling is going on, it’s providing language that articulates what I already see in the nature and life of God. When Bowen talks about fight and flight as being responses to fear, we see that fear is foundational. We see in the Bible that perfect love casts out fear, and the nature of fear causing fighting and flight is certainly evident in the lives of all those people who were around Jesus and the way they responded to Him. And so there is an insight that can be seen within the context of Scripture where therapy plays out, gives language for, what’s going on in a way that is not forcing something onto the text, but is an insight that we’ve come to have that they may not have had at that time, but now we have the capacity to see that something’s going on, and it is not alien to what is there; it is further articulating the nature of what is there.
I do think that we have to be careful about always making sure that we’re not foisting onto the whole understanding of God revealed in Scripture from our therapeutic notions, but to recognize that the very purpose of Scripture is to explain the nature of the God-human relationship by first of all revealing who God is and what God is committed to, and then to see how that understanding of God shapes the ways we function in our communities of faith and in our families and in the ways that we engage our neighbors. And so we need to both critique and also employ the articulation of contemporary languages of therapy and leadership to further those biblical agendas once the biblical agenda is given precedence.
That is how I also function in thinking about marketplace as well as counseling as well as everything else -- that the theology sets the agenda, and that one might think of these others merely as languages that we’re translating into, just like translating from Greek and Hebrew into German for Luther or English for us. There is always the tension when you cross over from one language to the other that you may miss something. But if we’re going to keep it ever closer to the people who are supposed to hear the message, we have to act beyond our fears and be involved in that work of translation, or we won’t, as my friend Harry MacDonald says, “We won’t get the hay out of the hay loft down where the animals can eat it.” I think that the Bible wants us to get there, and that contextualized, contemporary modes of thought can be helpful in that journey, but they cannot set the agenda; that must be done theologically by the living God -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
But I prefer to use the word contextualization, because there’s a sense in which context says that one system is left entirely intact and the other is put within it to ask how the meaning of one is changed by it being in the context of the other. So when one calls one’s self a Christian, one says, “I will no longer see my life story as a life story separate from the life story of God, but I will see the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the context for my story. His story trumps my story.” It’s not that we’re going to try and work out some mutually acceptable terms. What Jesus has done is the entire foundation for my love and acceptance being a reality because of the gift of God, which we call grace.
So I want the nature of theology in my counseling to always precede the use of therapeutic terms, but it doesn’t exclude me from using therapeutic terms, so that when I use the term “family,” there’s something about God’s life as Father, Son, and Spirit, and the whole election of Abraham and all those that follow after Abraham, that shapes something about a family that is connected, that covenants together, that when I come and talk about family systems and what it means to trace out a genogram and to see where triangling is going on, it’s providing language that articulates what I already see in the nature and life of God. When Bowen talks about fight and flight as being responses to fear, we see that fear is foundational. We see in the Bible that perfect love casts out fear, and the nature of fear causing fighting and flight is certainly evident in the lives of all those people who were around Jesus and the way they responded to Him. And so there is an insight that can be seen within the context of Scripture where therapy plays out, gives language for, what’s going on in a way that is not forcing something onto the text, but is an insight that we’ve come to have that they may not have had at that time, but now we have the capacity to see that something’s going on, and it is not alien to what is there; it is further articulating the nature of what is there.
I do think that we have to be careful about always making sure that we’re not foisting onto the whole understanding of God revealed in Scripture from our therapeutic notions, but to recognize that the very purpose of Scripture is to explain the nature of the God-human relationship by first of all revealing who God is and what God is committed to, and then to see how that understanding of God shapes the ways we function in our communities of faith and in our families and in the ways that we engage our neighbors. And so we need to both critique and also employ the articulation of contemporary languages of therapy and leadership to further those biblical agendas once the biblical agenda is given precedence.
That is how I also function in thinking about marketplace as well as counseling as well as everything else -- that the theology sets the agenda, and that one might think of these others merely as languages that we’re translating into, just like translating from Greek and Hebrew into German for Luther or English for us. There is always the tension when you cross over from one language to the other that you may miss something. But if we’re going to keep it ever closer to the people who are supposed to hear the message, we have to act beyond our fears and be involved in that work of translation, or we won’t, as my friend Harry MacDonald says, “We won’t get the hay out of the hay loft down where the animals can eat it.” I think that the Bible wants us to get there, and that contextualized, contemporary modes of thought can be helpful in that journey, but they cannot set the agenda; that must be done theologically by the living God -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Monday, February 11, 2008
conversation in the blogosphere
The whole idea of blogging is a bit overwhelming for a relational person because there’s a question about how many people you can really have an authentic relationship with. It’s conceivable to have literally thousands of people who are on your Facebook friends list or to have people responding to your blog, and to not really have a sense of knowing and being known, which I think is so central to what a relationship really looks like. There is a sense in which even weak connections do have some value; as my friend Dwight Friesen says, that a free-scale network that has many weak connections is a strong network. And so I do believe in blogging, but I just wonder about its limitations and the nature of choices that we have to make as to what it is that we value. Do we have communities of faith, do we have family, with whom we balance our time and our openness, or is it possible for there to be an overtaking of the blogolog (like dialog, except it’s blogolog) that might fill us up or consume our time? So, in the same way that one might say that idolatry is anything that takes the place of a living relationship with Christ (idolatry can include worshiping the church and the Bible and all kinds of good things that are just one step away), so too, all of these communication devices of blogging and skyping and cell phoning and everything can be part of the very connecting life of relationship or they can become idols. And I’m on my own journey of trying to figure out what that looks like. I have a deep sense of many, many years of not being in the conversation in the way that I would like theologically because I haven’t published books (though I have published articles). Since I haven’t published books, some people don’t seem to acknowledge what I think (unless they happen to be my students at one of the places where I teach); they don’t seem to acknowledge my thought or my thought processes as having value simply in the dialog, but it’s the published that seems to take precedence in terms of giving an authoritative voice. And yet I think the blogosphere is creating opportunities for that conversation, so I want to affirm that and to make the connections and move out of the place of exile that it seems that I have been in, and that’s why I’m pleased to be here in the conversation with you all.
Monday, February 4, 2008
about being persons
Let me introduce you to three influential thinkers who shape what I do.
The first one I’ll speak to is John Zizioulas. John Zizioulas is a Greek Orthodox theologian who wrote a book called Being as Communion. The basic thesis of this book is that when we talk about what it means to be a person, for God, it is not tied up with bodily being, but it’s tied up with that being of God that is known in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where each person of the Trinity is not a person merely by virtue of having a face. The word person comes from the word procopo, which is like a mask or a face that one would wear in the Greek theater. But there’s something more essential to who we are; there is a going out from within one’s self that meets another in conversation, who is also going out to meet you. That’s the transcending of the self -- to go beyond one’s self as your words go and meet another. It’s not just words; it could be any nonverbal being of one’s self, but to say that the whole being of the Son goes out to meet the Father, who is going out to meet the Son, and the same would be true of the Spirit. That whole life of the interrelated going out to one another creates a mutuality between them, an irreducible connectedness, that is the very constitution of God’s life, and John Zizioulas identifies the most basic thing in the universe as this personal being in communion. So, largely based on John Zizioulas, my vision of God is a relational being.
Karl Barth is the second person who is very influential for me. And his basic task in the twentieth century is to say that if we’re going to do good scientific theology, we have to let God speak. And God speaks where? God speaks in the person of Jesus Christ. So all of our theology has to continually go back and ask who Jesus is as the One who fills out all of our terms of God and our terms of humanity. So we can’t ask what it means for a human to be free without asking what it means for Jesus to be free and to actually give content to the meaning of that word. Webster is not the authority, nor any other dictionary, not even Wikipedia. Jesus is the One who truly defines, by living out all of the words of the Christian faith. And so Karl Barth sets us on a whole theological methodology that stands over against filling out our terms with human experience. And the nature of human experience is that we all have different human experiences and therefore we end up with different theologies of what it means for God to be Father and to be loving and all those things, so to not have any of those be our starting point, but to let God be the starting point, as witnessed to by Scripture, looking at the Father-Son-Spirit relationship, opens us up to what Barth calls the happy science of theology.
The third person is John Macmurray. John Macmurray was a Scottish philosopher who studied on the nature of what it means for us to be persons. He was a Christian, and his basic thesis is, once again, that the very form of what it means to be persons is not to be merely bodily or to be separate from one another, but it is being in relation. Macmurray said that the whole Western mode of thought is built on thinking or rationality as the basis of what a person is, building on Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and Kant’s concepts of the transcendental unity of apperception, which gives the human a priority in all knowledge, and merely attempts to fit God within the limits of human reason. Macmurray suggested that what he calls an act, the act of a human being, precedes any thinking about that act. And so if we are going to really understand the nature of who we are as persons, it’s an acting, and that acting is not something that’s done apart from others, but we grow up from the very time we are babies in the context of relationships. So what it means to be a person is to act in the context of relationships. And so, “I relate, therefore I am” would be a basic thought within John Macmurray’s thought, and that shapes my thinking about the nature of how we work out a God who lives in relationship, who’s revealed to us (Karl Barth) in the person of Jesus to understand that relating on Planet Earth in a way that defines our ethics and our very understanding of being a person in a term that John Macmurray calls friendship. One of his most famous quotes is “All meaningful knowledge is for the purpose of action, and all meaningful action is for the purpose of friendship.”
These three thinkers were focal in my doctoral work and still heavily influence the way that I think as a relational theologian.
The first one I’ll speak to is John Zizioulas. John Zizioulas is a Greek Orthodox theologian who wrote a book called Being as Communion. The basic thesis of this book is that when we talk about what it means to be a person, for God, it is not tied up with bodily being, but it’s tied up with that being of God that is known in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where each person of the Trinity is not a person merely by virtue of having a face. The word person comes from the word procopo, which is like a mask or a face that one would wear in the Greek theater. But there’s something more essential to who we are; there is a going out from within one’s self that meets another in conversation, who is also going out to meet you. That’s the transcending of the self -- to go beyond one’s self as your words go and meet another. It’s not just words; it could be any nonverbal being of one’s self, but to say that the whole being of the Son goes out to meet the Father, who is going out to meet the Son, and the same would be true of the Spirit. That whole life of the interrelated going out to one another creates a mutuality between them, an irreducible connectedness, that is the very constitution of God’s life, and John Zizioulas identifies the most basic thing in the universe as this personal being in communion. So, largely based on John Zizioulas, my vision of God is a relational being.
Karl Barth is the second person who is very influential for me. And his basic task in the twentieth century is to say that if we’re going to do good scientific theology, we have to let God speak. And God speaks where? God speaks in the person of Jesus Christ. So all of our theology has to continually go back and ask who Jesus is as the One who fills out all of our terms of God and our terms of humanity. So we can’t ask what it means for a human to be free without asking what it means for Jesus to be free and to actually give content to the meaning of that word. Webster is not the authority, nor any other dictionary, not even Wikipedia. Jesus is the One who truly defines, by living out all of the words of the Christian faith. And so Karl Barth sets us on a whole theological methodology that stands over against filling out our terms with human experience. And the nature of human experience is that we all have different human experiences and therefore we end up with different theologies of what it means for God to be Father and to be loving and all those things, so to not have any of those be our starting point, but to let God be the starting point, as witnessed to by Scripture, looking at the Father-Son-Spirit relationship, opens us up to what Barth calls the happy science of theology.
The third person is John Macmurray. John Macmurray was a Scottish philosopher who studied on the nature of what it means for us to be persons. He was a Christian, and his basic thesis is, once again, that the very form of what it means to be persons is not to be merely bodily or to be separate from one another, but it is being in relation. Macmurray said that the whole Western mode of thought is built on thinking or rationality as the basis of what a person is, building on Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and Kant’s concepts of the transcendental unity of apperception, which gives the human a priority in all knowledge, and merely attempts to fit God within the limits of human reason. Macmurray suggested that what he calls an act, the act of a human being, precedes any thinking about that act. And so if we are going to really understand the nature of who we are as persons, it’s an acting, and that acting is not something that’s done apart from others, but we grow up from the very time we are babies in the context of relationships. So what it means to be a person is to act in the context of relationships. And so, “I relate, therefore I am” would be a basic thought within John Macmurray’s thought, and that shapes my thinking about the nature of how we work out a God who lives in relationship, who’s revealed to us (Karl Barth) in the person of Jesus to understand that relating on Planet Earth in a way that defines our ethics and our very understanding of being a person in a term that John Macmurray calls friendship. One of his most famous quotes is “All meaningful knowledge is for the purpose of action, and all meaningful action is for the purpose of friendship.”
These three thinkers were focal in my doctoral work and still heavily influence the way that I think as a relational theologian.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
