I Read This and Snapped-Help!

[Carolyn]

The first feature of the center is its role as a bridge over the chasm between right and left. [...] The church of the center as "span" entails providing a safe space where otherwise hostile partisans can cross culture-war boundaries and speak to one another.

[...] The rise of ecclesial tribalisms cries out for a witness to catholicity. Honor the diversity, but attend as well to the Pauline counsel: "the eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you'" (1 Cor 12:21). A bridge-building center constitutes a meeting ground for civil conversation among disputants. Here the diversity is understood as charisms reaching out to one another, seeking a fuller body of Christ.

The church of the center in its bridge-building role, while an alternative to ecclesial war-making, does not gloss over differences. Bridge talk includes mutual admonition as well as mutual affirmation, the formula ventured by the recent North American Lutheran-Reformed dialogue. [Note 16 here references Keith F. Nickel and Timothy F. Lull, eds., A Common Calling: The Witness of Our Reformation Churches in North America Today (Augsburg Fortress, 1993), p. 29-32, 66.] The eye has every right to remind the hand that "standing" alone, a hand is an odd-looking body. And vice versa. As such, the invitation to mutual fructification is a model of diversity juxtaposed to the currently popular "theological pluralism." In the latter case, a plea is made to recognize the equal legitimacy of alternative understandings of the Christian faith, in popular lingo, "different strokes for different folks...you do your thing and I'll do mine." Theological pluralism, so understood, is a justification of the status quo. Paul's Corinthian catholicity rejects this static view, demanding an interactive diversity, one in which the "variety of gifts" are engaged in a demanding mutual encounter, learning and growing into and as the body of Christ.

The center as span is grounded deeply in the classical theological commitments, especially in the doctrine of the Trinity. The triune God as Three-in-One affirms the diversity and distinctions of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in a perichoretic unity. In this "coinherence," God is not just loving; God is Love - Mutuality, Community, Sociality, Life Together. [Note 17: "So stressed in the recent works on the Trinity, as in Jurgen Moltmann...; Wolfhart Pannenberg...; Thomas Torrance...; Colin Gunton...; Catherine Mowry LaCugna...; Leonardo Boff....] And who God is constitutes what God wills for the world: community, shalom, a life together in freedom and peace. The church, the body of Christ on earth, is thus called with is many parts to live and work in a mutually enriching ecclesial koinonia - a church of the center performing its "bridge-work."

From Gabriel Fackre, Restoring the Center: Essays Evangelical & Ecumenical (IVP, 1998), p. 32 ff.




Here's what happened. Meg Thomas brought up Krister Stendahl in another thread and crabby memories of reading him, Bultmann, and Moltmann in college surfaced. Then, the next blog I read had the above quoted. When I hit the phrase "mutual fructification", I just snapped. Look who this person has been reading!

Why are all these young "FV/NPP/Emergent/Post-modernists rehashing REALLY old (and bad) mainline theology and acting like they discovered the cure for the common cold? It is so weird to have people young enough to be my kids jumping up and down about the same tortured theology that my parents' generation raved about 40 years ago! Plus how are they reconciling that these guys are all "modernists" with their "post-modern" sensibilities?

And their (old mainliners/FV/NPP/emergents) writing stinks! It flows back and forth between tortured and trite. When I try to slog through their works, I end up muttering words that, uh, relate to the end of the digestive process. I just finished books by Wayne Grudem (yes I know, but his responses to biblical feminism are great) and D. A. Carson this past week. Now those men can write clearly and persuasively! Grudem is an example of someone with whom I disagree on a number of points and still admire how he presents his case. So I don't think I'm only flipping out over people who don't share my understanding of an issue.

Actually, if anyone made it through this post to this point, and has some insight regarding why this old stuff is showing up again, I wouldn't mind reading it.

Thanks!

 

[turmeric]

Perichoretic! Did he really say perichoretic!!! That is too funny! How pretentious on a blog! What in the world is that? I must go to Wikipedia.

 

[calgal]

That is painfully tortured theology. I guess there really are a few heresies recycled over and over and over again...... The only thing distinguishing one from another is the medium used to emit the garbage.

 

[Carolyn]

Well, the blogger just used the quote on his blog, but an editor somewhere let this author get away with it!

 

[turmeric]

All I can say is - how perichoretic! (Obviously I haven't looked that up yet!)

 

[panta dokimazete]

Google says:

No definitions were found for perichoretic.

now THAT is obsure...

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In theology, perichoresis, Latinized and borrowed into English as circumincession or circumincession, is a term used to express the existence of multiple divine persons in one another, such as the Holy Trinity of Christianity.

John of Damascus, in the 8th century, used the Greek term περιχώρησις (perichoresis, literally: circuition, going around, or more precisely for John of Damascus' meaning envelopment) to signify this, in his explanation of the text, "I am in my Father, and my Father is in me."

In Eastern Christianity, perichoresis is associated with deification as part of salvation.

 

[turmeric]

I can see why they don't want to call it circumincession.

 

[bookslover]

Perichoretic! Did he really say perichoretic!!! That is too funny! How pretentious on a blog! What in the world is that? I must go to Wikipedia.

The quote is laughable, as English, but "perichoretic" is a real word. The doctrine of perichoresis teaches that all three Persons of the Trinity, being spirit, interpenetrate each other (without losing their distinct Personhoods, of course).

 

[turmeric]

Yes, it's a good doctrine and a good word, but in the context above it was obviously meant to mystify. Big raspberries! We need a raspberry emoticom.

 

[bookslover]

Yes, it's a good doctrine and a good word, but in the context above it was obviously meant to mystify. Big raspberries! We need a raspberry emoticom.

That quote has, of course, more than a whiff of ivy-covered halls. It has actually occurred that people have been criticized for writing clear, understandable English! I kid you not...

 

[calgal]

That quote has, of course, more than a whiff of ivy-covered halls. It has actually occurred that people have been criticized for writing clear, understandable English! I kid you not...

O/T your sigline made me LOL! Back to the topic, my response to the critics you mentioned would be some variation of: if we are supposed to be salt and light to the world, wouldn't it behoove us to at least be understood by our audience?

 

[tewilder]

Why are all these young "FV/NPP/Emergent/Post-modernists rehashing REALLY old (and bad) mainline theology and acting like they discovered the cure for the common cold? It is so weird to have people young enough to be my kids jumping up and down about the same tortured theology that my parents' generation raved about 40 years ago! Plus how are they reconciling that these guys are all "modernists" with their "post-modern" sensibilities?


Actually, if anyone made it through this post to this point, and has some insight regarding why this old stuff is showing up again, I wouldn't mind reading it.

Thanks!

I think that there really is a coherent explanation.

First, the old garbage really is better than the new garbage. So for the person whose soul is fed by garbage, this stuff is more palatable that, say, nonesense by Spong or someone like that.

Second, the people who get into this stuff have a starting place in their own lives in an Evangelical (in some sense) upbringing, and this old stuff is close enough to neo-orthodoxy, and its Biblical Theology Movement, and stuff like that to be approachable from the starting point that these new fans have in their personal histories. It will translate to a degree to categories they bring to it, while also seeming sophisticated and new, relative to what they knew before.

Third, the people who go for this today don't have enough of a sense of history and of how intellectual and cultural development works to understand that the sorts of movements represented by these writers obsolete themselves by eventually undermining their own premises.

In fact, a big part of being post-modern is a lack of an appreciation for this sort of inevitability of cultural development because of direction of the intellectual content of culture. They don't understand how things have to go a certain direction, and you can turn the clock back and have the old ideas again with the same authority and conviction if you already know how they get depleted.

Finally, when I said "the person whose soul is fed by garbage", I mean the person who is not attracted by sound doctrine, because of what they are.