Saturday, January 12, 2013

Crispianity

I’m going to comment on parts of an interview that’s getting some buzz:


Crisp gives a number of good answers. I’m not going to comment on what I agree with, since that would be redundant. I’d just be paraphrasing what he said. And he can express himself quite well without me.


Theology that is not done in the service of the Church is seriously defective, in my view. Although I work in a so-called 'secular' university, I am very conscious of the need to address the Church in what I do. I hope that in some small way my own work may be of use to the Church through the trickle-down effect of students of theology and prospective ministerial candidates getting trained in theology and reading the sort of stuff I write. I have taught in both secular and confessional contexts in the UK and North America, and I think effective theological education is of vital importance for the life of the Church. If we want an educated and effective laity, we need an effective and educated clergy to teach them.

I largely agree with this, although I’d add two caveats:

i) I’d actually broaden the vision. I think theology should be done in the service of unbelievers as well as believers. It should have an evangelistic, outward thrust as well as an ecclesiastical, inward thrust.

ii) In principle, theological insights can have practical value even if the theologian wasn’t consciously practical, but just pursuing a line of thought. It’s like spin-offs in math and science, where pure math or scientific speculation is developed without any practical application in view, but the results have an unforeseen practical payoff. Sometimes we can solve a problem better by looking away from it. Because all of reality is interrelated, solutions may not occur to us if we’re too focused on the problem before us, whereas work in apparently independent fields can pay unexpected dividends.


No, I don't. The creedal heritage of the Church is very important. We cast it aside at our peril.

There’s some truth to that. In particular, we shouldn’t clean out the attic and discard the contents without even looking inside the boxes to see what we’re casting aside.

On the other hand, there’s the opposite peril of following the path of least resistance by letting others make all the important decisions for us.


Some evangelicals are very much embedded in the tradition (e.g. some Episcopalians or Lutherans or Presbyterians).

i) And that can be a problem. That can foster an unquestioning, chauvinistic herd-mentality. Let’s not confuse following Christ with following our forbears. Unless we can see Jesus apart from our forebears, we dont know if they were headed in the right direction.

ii) Different theological traditions present different reading strategies. You can read the Bible with Lutheran spectacles, Anabaptist spectacles, Catholic spectacles, Calvinist spectacles, and so forth. Although we may always be reading the Bible with tinted glasses, it’s useful to try on different glasses, comparing and contrasting one view with another.


 But evangelicals in what we might loosely term 'non-confessional' traditions, such as some baptistic denominations, and charismatic/Pentecostal traditions tend to be less concerned about confessions, thinking they can simply leap over the tradition to Scripture. This is a mistake.

i) As a matter of fact, it is possible to “simply leap over the tradition to Scripture.” That’s the point of the grammatico-historical method.

And this isn’t limited to the exegesis of Scripture. When Crisp studies Jonathan Edwards, I assume he tries to immerse himself in the social and intellectual milieu of Edwards. Likewise, when Crisp studies Barth, I assume he makes allowance for the historical and political situatedness of Barth’s theology.

For that matter, when we read Homer, Dante, or Lady Murasaki, the point is to escape our own cultural mindset and step inside a very different culture. To see the world through a different pair of eyes.

Of course, initially, we bring our own framework to whatever we read. But in the course of reading, it’s possible to put some distance between our hereditary viewpoint and the viewpoint of the narrator. That’s a useful exercise. That provides a valuable contrast to our prereflective assumptions.

ii) In fairness to Crisp, I suspect he has a particular type of individual in mind. The kind of “Bible-only” Christian who’s oblivious to the impact of his own nationality, education, social class, and religious prism on his reading of Scripture. A Christian who’s unconscious of the degree to which his approach to Scripture has already been framed by a tacit, internalized tradition.

It’s important to become self-aware of our operating assumptions. Both confessionalism and “Biblicism” are vulnerable to the bias blind spot.


 We read Scripture in the household of faith, in company with the saints before us, not in isolation from them. And in so doing, we learn from our forebears (from their triumphs and their mistakes). It is folly and hubris to think one can set this great cloud of witnesses to one side in theologizing. Not that I think the fathers and Reformers of the Church trump Scripture. But they help us to understand Scripture better just as a teacher helps the student to understand matters that might be difficult to grasp were the student to be left alone with the class textbook.

Up to a point that’s true, but one-sided.  The household of faith includes the faithful who went before us, as well as those who come after us, as well as those who walk beside us. We can learn from them, but they can learn from us.

At the end of the day, we’re not answerable to our forbears. Rather, we are directly answerable to God.


Because he is a theological titan. I am a critical, but I hope appreciative, reader of Barth. In some ways, I am more sympathetic to Barth than I used to be, though it is sometimes a sort of love-hate relationship! But Barth is a profound theologian by anyone's estimate, and someone worth wrestling with. One is unlikely to find any theologian with whom one concurs on every point of doctrine. Yet great theologians like Augustine or Anselm or Thomas or Calvin or Luther or Edwards or Barth are the sort of thinkers with whom we can engage with fruitful results.

It is very difficult to isolate one voice from the great chorus of those who have gone before us as THE person I would like to meet if I had the chance. But in my top five (and in reverse diachronic order) would be Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury, Augustine of Hippo.

To judge by this answer, Crisp’s methodology isn’t really confessional. He isn’t using the lens of the church’s creedal heritage. Rather, he has a theological meritocracy. A short list of the most intellectually impressive or challenging theologians. He picks out these thinkers to be his sparring partners. He tests his theology against them. Develops his theology in a dialectical conversation with the theological giants. That’s selective rather than collective.


Robin Parry in his book Worshipping Trinity makes this point really well when he says that too many evangelical Christians he speaks to are effectively binitarians, not Trinitarians. Their understanding of the Trinity is borderline heretical.

It’s funny to see a heretical universalist be so judgmental. But I guess the best defense is a good offense.

9 comments:

  1. "But Barth is a profound theologian by anyone's estimate, and someone worth wrestling with"

    He is Profoundly Universalist and the cause of many missionaries just giving it up! Remember the furor of Bell's Universalism? Barth was his father!

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  2. SamWise,

    I'd like to see you document this missionary influence (of "just giving it up") by Barth. Mainline missionaries were reading the latest, faddish ecumenical fodder produced by the WCC -- all of whom considered Barth to be a throwback and retrogressive blip. Barth himself had a notably strained relationship with the WCC and missionary movements. The one exception was the significant influence that Barth (and Torrance) had on Lesslie Newbigin -- who himself lamented the religious pluralism (or sloppy inclusivism of Rahner) in the WCC.

    And, to lump Barth and Bell is lazy -- plus a massive disservice to Barth and far too great an honor to Bell.

    As for his "universalism," I'm going to hazard a guess that you've never read CD II.2 in your life and never will. So, stop proffering what you've heard through the grapevine. Barth intentionally refuses to affirm universalism, and he explicitly recognizes that election (salvation) can be rejected (see pp. 449-450 in CD II.2). Whether this rejection is only temporal is the sort of question that he does not answer. You can say that he is inconsistent, contradictory, or whatever -- but you cannot label him a "universalist." If I treated Calvin or Turretin with this sort of laziness, then you would rightly be indignant.

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  3. Hey Steve, these are excellent clarifications.

    As one who participated in “the buzz”, I’d like to just comment briefly.

    You quoted Crisp:

    But evangelicals in what we might loosely term 'non-confessional' traditions, such as some baptistic denominations, and charismatic/Pentecostal traditions tend to be less concerned about confessions, thinking they can simply leap over the tradition to Scripture. This is a mistake.

    As I was copying this, I quoted this paragraph with an ellipses, without an allusion to any particular group:

    But evangelicals in what we might loosely term 'non-confessional' traditions, … tend to be less concerned about confessions, thinking they can simply leap over the tradition to Scripture. This is a mistake. We read Scripture in the household of faith, in company with the saints before us, not in isolation from them. And in so doing, we learn from our forebears (from their triumphs and their mistakes).

    My intention was not to pick on anyone, but merely to make this as a general principle.

    You followed up by saying:

    i) As a matter of fact, it is possible to “simply leap over the tradition to Scripture.” That’s the point of the grammatico-historical method.

    It depends upon what you want to do with that knowledge. If it were possible to raise up a Scripture scholar in isolation, fully versed in the meaning of Scripture in its historical and grammatical context, and plopped him down in the middle of New York City (or on the campus of RTS Charlotte, or in Notre Dame university), he would be very much at a loss.

    One thing that pure a study of Scripture won’t do is give a person an understanding of his “situatedness” within the church as a whole, and within the world. It’s like a map. It’s not good not to know where you are in time and space. Of course the study of “tradition” should be “normed” by Scripture. But as with the study of anything, a study of church history also proves to be very useful both for those doing theology both “in the service of unbelievers as well as believers”.

    I would never read Augustine or Aquinas or Luther or Calvin (and especially not Barth) with the intention of agreeing with everything they said.

    Nor would I never want to enable those “very much embedded in the tradition” to allow those before them to have made all the decisions, or to foster a herd mentality, nor to follow a path of least resistance. I would always encourage people to re-think (or at least, to think through) their accepted traditions in the light of Scripture. In that respect, Crisp is correct. In reading “in company with the saints before us”, we learn from their triumphs and their mistakes.

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    1. continued ...

      Steve, you wrote:

      Crisp’s methodology isn’t really confessional. He isn’t using the lens of the church’s creedal heritage. Rather, he has a theological meritocracy. A short list of the most intellectually impressive or challenging theologians. He picks out these thinkers to be his sparring partners. He tests his theology against them. Develops his theology in a dialectical conversation with the theological giants. That’s selective rather than collective.

      That’s an important distinction. But you also don’t want to spend your life reading the schleps, either. I purposely left out the portions about Barth, because at my age, I’m finding that life is too short, and I have to be selective. My efforts can be much more productive without a side-track into Barth.

      But looking at “the church” today as a whole, things are very unbalanced. There are some evangelicals and even some Reformed folks who have no concept of their own situatedness in the history of the church. People like Jason Stellman, for example, who, though he had a WSC education, was totally unprepared for what he called the “sucker-punch” that was delivered to him by aggressive Roman apologists.

      I know other young Reformed (pastors!) who are enamored with things like liturgies and clerical collars, and who, for that reason, seem very unprepared to me to make that “evangelistic, outward thrust” that you mentioned, much less to put their theology “at the service of the church”.

      There are some Lutherans (I am finding) who don’t really know what the Reformed teach, only what they may have been told second- or third-hand.

      These are precisely the individuals where the process of “theology in service of the church” must start. As Crisp says, “If we want an educated and effective laity, we need an effective and educated clergy to teach them.”

      True, adherence to any particular “tradition” apart from the Scriptures can lead to great harm. But one of the purposes of the study of Scripture is precisely to “make application” within the context of the church, its history, and its theologians.

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    2. Just to clarify, I was aware of the interview before you posted excerpts of the interview. Hence, my remarks were independent of your post. I was planning to comment on the interview anyway. The fact that you posted some excerpts before I did my post is coincidental. My post is not an implicit commentary on yours.

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    3. I wasn't commenting on your excerpts. I didn't compare your post with mine. I excerpted what I did straight from the interview, because those were the parts I wanted to respond to. I bookmarked the interview last night, before you posted on it. That was my intention all along.

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    4. I kind of got that sense.

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  4. Samwise

    He is Profoundly Universalist and the cause of many missionaries just giving it up! Remember the furor of Bell's Universalism? Barth was his father!

    Crisp is and has been plenty critical of Barth (and, yes, he's criticized him on the universalist point). I think it's reactionary that we can't call anyone who doesn't line up down the line with our bona fides, a "profound theologian." Profound doesn't entail "correct."

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  5. Steve said:

    "In principle, theological insights can have practical value even if the theologian wasn’t consciously practical, but just pursuing a line of thought. It’s like spin-offs in math and science, where pure math or scientific speculation is developed without any practical application in view, but the results have an unforeseen practical payoff. Sometimes we can solve a problem better by looking away from it. Because all of reality is interrelated, solutions may not occur to us if we’re too focused on the problem before us, whereas work in apparently independent fields can pay unexpected dividends."

    Here's a story from Richard Feynman:

    Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing--it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn't have to do it; it wasn't important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn't make any difference: I'd invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

    So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

    Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate--two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, "Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it's two to one?"

    I don't remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one. I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, "Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it's two to one is . . ." and I showed him the accelerations.

    He says, "Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?"

    "Hah!" I say. "There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it."

    His reaction didn't discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked. I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was "playing"--working, really --with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

    It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it!

    There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

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