Transcript
Please welcome Dr. Ellen Charry. [applause] Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here not only with you today but here at Princeton. This is the conclusion of my first year here and I will tell all of you alumni it's been a wonderful year for me. And I think things are doing, we're doing well here at Princeton and I don't think you need to worry. My talk really is about theology after post-modernity. And I agree with
my colleague Professor Allen that the post-modern setting, provide, please come in. The post-modern setting provides a wonderful opportunity for Christian theology to reclaim an autonomous voice. After some of the strictures and anxieties that Christian theology had facing modernity are opening up. At the same time there's another strand of post-modernism that I think is not as friendly to Christianity and is indeed hostile to Christianity. And I am concerned about that interpretation of post-modernism.
But rather than give you an analysis of all of that, what I thought I would just do is talk about what it means to do theology after modernity and even almost after post-modernity. Or as my friend Kenda Dean just said to me a few minutes ago, what it means to do theology in traffic. So that's what I'm going to try to do with you today. It would be, one thing that I've been hearing around the Presbyterian
Church is that there's been a phrase floated around that theology matters. I don't know, maybe some of you have heard that phrase. Yes, my reaction exactly. You were like, well, I would kind of say, well, yes, theology matters. Is there a question about that? But apparently there is a question about that. And someone who conveyed this to me said, yes, theology matters, but we're not quite sure why theology matters. So I said, OK, well, I'll take
a shot at that. Because it would surprise most Christians prior to our own day to learn that we today are unsure why theology matters, for even the most illiterate among them would never have doubted this fact. Theology is the core self-understanding of the Christian community and it is the core of each Christian's identity. It is the way Christians articulate to one another and to the culture that they live in, the way they articulate the hope
that is in them. It is the way that they voice their yearning for God. It is the way that they seek to know the truth and seek a happy life. The fact that we today must defend the theological endeavor, as we have been since modernity and now within the nihilist strand of post-modernity, testifies to our own confusion about who we are as the body of Christ. Before defending the claim that theology does indeed matter, I
will venture to suggest what I understand theology or at least ecclesial theology to be. Ecclesial theology, as I practice it, is the reflective attempt to help the theological tradition, help people know and love God and the things of God better than previous formulations of the faith could. By turning a critical eye on the tradition, for the sake of the theological growth and understanding of believers, theology is, in my understanding, at once a critical and a practical
undertaking. The reason Christians need theology is because we cannot understand ourselves without understanding God. We have not created ourselves. We do not belong to ourselves. We do not craft our own destinies. All of this belongs to God, from whom we have come, and our destiny is God, to whom we return partially in this life and fully in the life to come. As the shorter Westminster Catechism puts it crisply, our chief aim is to glorify God and
enjoy him forever. This God-defined starting point immediately puts Christians in tension with other starting points of human self-understanding, and here I'm going to take the example of modernity. In our day, one of the most powerful challenges to this theological starting point, even though we've declared modernity dead, it isn't really. It's really out there alive and well, even though we intellectuals are always out there in front. In our day, one of the most powerful challenges
to this theological starting point, Christian theological starting point, is one that claims that human beings can understand themselves and the world adequately without reference to God. On this view, we are autonomous and therefore self-directed and self-created. The challenge of life is to create one's own destiny. The goal of life is self-fulfillment, self-actualization, self-realization, self whatever you want to put in it, built on one's chosen identity. You will probably hear, and I'm
going to go out on a limb here with my colleague, many youth programs that stress this understanding of the self. And what young people need to be doing with their lives, especially anything but accept their parents' values and faith because it's been handed on to them. But Christians cannot accept this foundation for their lives. This is a brief way of suggesting that for Christians, theology is not a luxury or an option. It is a necessity. When
the church spurns theological reflection and fails to train everyone how to do it and do it well, trouble ensues. Every confessing Christian must reflect theologically, that is from the perspective of God, on her or his own life because every Christian is called to obedience to God. But this is never to be understood as blind servile obedience. It is what I would call guided or reflective obedience because life with God is often perplexing, as I think it
is for the church today. That is, Christians have a core belief system articulated in the ecumenical creeds and refined in the confessions and liturgy and theological tradition of the church to which they are accountable. These guide them in making sense of themselves, their behavior, and their choices in light of their life before God. In addition to the belief that we belong to God, Christians also believe that God has revealed himself in history by acting in time
and space. The Bible witnesses to divine action that discloses who God is as well as who we are. As early as the Sinai Theophany, Scripture already taught that, and this is a quote from Exodus, you may recognize it. The Lord is a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty. Now, this
talk of God, ostensibly based on the story told only from Adam to Moses, is the confession of faith of the earliest presentation of the Scripture story. This confession, extrapolated from the events witnessed in Scripture, concluded that there is ambiguity, paradox in God, because it says on the one hand, forgiving sin and iniquity, and then in the next phrase it says, not forgiving iniquity. So in this early paradoxical confession of faith, Christians and those who are under
the authority of the Scriptures recognize that God defies easy categorization. For this reason, further theological articulation and reflection is needed in order to enable the confession to guide faithful belief and practice. Later reflectors on the tradition, particularly the prophets, looked on some of the practices of Israel and concluded that they reflected a lopsided understanding of God based on the sacrifices ordained in the law. Isaiah, for example, chastised the people for adhering to the conditions of the
sacrifices, but abandoning justice and righteousness, which God demands even more. This theological corrective is stated explicitly in Psalm 51. For, and this is the psalmist speaking, for you, God, have no delight in sacrifice. If I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. So the psalmist and the prophet are already trying to help Israel
clarify and better understand the points of tension within their scriptures and the understanding of God and the practice of the faith. Now this theme recurs in the New Testament, when Matthew has Jesus denounce the scribes and Pharisees for their attentiveness to details of the law while neglecting justice and mercy. The point of these convictions is that without continuous theological reflection on what we are doing and why, Christians become confused. Keeping the tradition on the right path
and making sure that people understand their faith properly so that it directs them aright is the task of theology. So in addition to being formed by our scriptures, creeds, confessions, liturgies, and practices, we must also enter into conversation with them, not to shape them to our liking, but to be sure that we understand them correctly. Now the fact that today theology is, in my judgment, irrelevant to the society, the academy, and largely to the church, and
is viewed by some... I'm not making a joke. [laughter] Oh, good. I mean, I'm a person known, as those colleagues here know me, I'm not a person who's very delicate. And is viewed by some as even counter, that Christian theology is viewed by some today as even counter to the proclamation of the gospel and dangerous to the people of God, is a symptom of this confusion and calls for careful theological reflection. Today, sociology often reigns while theology
has been exiled. This is a danger signal, I believe, spawned by many factors, some coming from theology itself, while others come from an anti-theological culture in which the church now resides. Thus, it may look to some as if the church needs to expunge theology from its midst in order for people to flourish. I take this as a serious and legitimate, yet misguided challenge to theology. For if theology has not enabled God's creatures to flourish, the
fault is with ourselves, not with God. It calls for further theology, not no theology. Now, while all Christians theologize, or ought to theologize, in seeking to live a godly life, some have more time and inclination for this undertaking than others, and some have the luxury, or I should say the punishment, of devoting themselves full time to helping the tradition help people know, love, and enjoy God. So here I am for my sins. Ecclesial theologians, then, are
the physicians as well as the attorneys of the Christian faith. They work within the parameters of its formative documents, the scriptures, creeds, confessions, etc., and simultaneously interpret these to the culture in which Christians live, and in turn interpret the culture back to the church. Our particular moment is quite complex in this regard, more complex than I understand, try as I might. For starters, Western Christianity is in decline in North America and Europe because in the modern
world, God is viewed as an option, a personal preference selected by those too weak to stand on their own two feet. Faith is thought of as a crutch, a baby blanket. Therefore, Christianity can no longer, I'm going to say this slowly, in my view, Christianity in North America and Europe can no longer rely on the culture to support it. It must find strength in its own resources. This is not to say, of course, that there is
nothing, there's no constructive conversation to be had with the dominant culture, but my point is I do not think that the church can any longer rely on the dominant culture to sustain it. With the resources of modernity currently looking thin in regard to the things that Professor Allen spoke of this morning, I personally am inclined to listen more attentively to pre-modern Christian voices. At the same time, we stand at a great ecumenical moment, ripe for
retrieving the fullness of Christian life and thought. To illustrate my argument about the need for critical ecclesial theology, I would like to consider, and this is where I'm going to get into the exercise for today, that was basically locating what I'm doing, now I'd like to move into doing what I've located myself to do. And I'm going to do, this is a kind of theological exercise, a thought experiment in what I'm calling critical ecclesial theology. I
would like to consider soteriology. As a result of my recent work in historical theology that you can see in the book that was mentioned earlier, I have been reflecting on the Creed. The Creed, that is the Apostles and the Nicene Creed, are a statement of the Christian doctrine of God that is further elaborated by systematic theology and handed down from generation to generation for guidance in understanding the Christian faith and the practice of the Christian life.
This work has enabled me, this work meaning my book on this history, has enabled me to reflect carefully on the Creed. In the Creed, the second article focuses on salvation. Are you all with me when I say the second article of the Creed? The second article on the Creed focuses on salvation. In meditating on this, it has occurred to me that Western soteriology that ought to take its bearings from the Creed has not been as attentive
to the breadth of the second article as it might. The second article in both forms of the Creed begins with the Annunciation. The Nicene Creed makes a special mention then of the incarnation, both then move to the cross, Christ's descent into hell, the resurrection, the ascension, Christ's session at the right hand of the Father, and conclude with the Parousia. This, I suggest, is the full narrative of Christian salvation. Yet in my studies, I found that beginning
with the rule of St. Benedict and clearly by the 11th century in the West, this narrative has been narrowed down to primarily one moment of that story. That is Good Friday. And this because, perhaps, the reason that I think, I mean I don't have any hard data on this, I haven't done this much research, but one thing I want to explore about how that happened and why is because perhaps with the fall of Roman civilization in
the 5th century and so on, Christians came to interpret the political, intellectual, commercial, and economic collapse of their world as an expression of divine wrath. And so Western theology came to worry about dealing with the wrath and judgment of God. In addition to seeing this by studying Christian theological history, I have another, there's another place that I turn to where I find corroboration of this observation about Christian theological history. The problem is also revealed by liberation
theology's interest at looking at the effects of construals of Christian doctrine on believers. Feminists have recently, perhaps, been the most strident and point to some potentially harmful themes in Western soteriology, particularly the teaching on the cross. This doctrine claims that the Son of God accepted execution to atone for the sins of the whole world. Some feminists now claim that this doctrine reveals a vicious, capricious, and wrathful God. Identification with this God and the events attributed to
him, especially to the Father, are considered to be morally and socially harmful to believers. Even if the claim for the cross's contribution to child abuse, which you may have heard about, may be one-sided and exaggerated and a bit outrageous to some ears, I think there is a point to the concern, an issue not lost on luminaries like St. Augustine and St. Anselm. Both of them realized that Christ's death on the cross was a really strange
way for God to save humanity. Both of them, but especially Anselm, saw that either God's goodness or God's power seemed to be impugned by the cross, and both of them worked hard to defend God, to defend the mercy of God. But that is another conversation. In focusing on soteriology, one is reminded of the story of the little boy with behavior problems who was expelled from several different schools. Finally, his parents sent him to Catholic school, and
the change was amazing. When asked by his friends what did it, he answered, You've got to follow the rules here. If you don't, well, they've got a guy nailed up on a wall in there. Even though Protestants removed the body from the crucifix to focus on the resurrection instead, Western doctrine did not make the same shift. Protestant soteriology remains focused on Good Friday. What feminists object to is, and I think this constitutes a shift for theology,
what feminists object to is not the coherence or intelligibility of the doctrine of the atonement, but the potential message it conveys to those who confess it. They are looking at the doctrine's potential psychological impact. This is a fresh turn to theology, especially for modern theology, that has been focused on the intelligibility and the coherence of the doctrine in the face of modern claims about knowledge and truth. I am sympathetic with the view that post-Augustinian Western
soteriology, note I said post-Augustinian Western theology, may have fostered a negative self-concept of depravity and disgrace before God, that in spite of itself may rationalize depraved behavior. For in acting ignominiously, one is only acting according to one's fallen nature. And further, the teaching that we are helpless against our depravity undercuts any attempt to change. At the same time, the other side of the argument, stressed by Calvin, for example, is also true. We are self
-absorbed, self-concerned, self-centered, self-directed, and so on and so forth, and need God's judgment on that to wake us up, especially today when the fear of God has nearly vanished from the church. It's complex. Today I'm going to argue that the problem we are seeing is the result, which is one way of construing the problem doctrinally. I'm going to argue that the problem we are seeing is the result of having separated the incarnation from
the cross and the resurrection. Narrowing salvation to the cross alone, reflected in the rise of the penitential system in the medieval church, is both unfaithful to the creed and has wrought harmful effects. I suspect that this problem is central to the modern, it's not the whole story, but I think it is central to the modern rebellion against Christianity that is now reaching a fever pitch and is coming now from within the church itself. It is possible
to view modernity, especially as it took shape in the 18th century and beyond, as a reaction against this self-contempt fostered by certain forms of Christian piety, many of them emerging, for better or worse, with monasticism. To address this problem, I will propose that the full narrative of salvation be reclaimed, beginning with the Annunciation. Today I will just focus on the incarnation. For it provides human beings with an identity grounded in the grace and power of
God that provides a foundation for healing once the work of the cross neutralizes the power of sin. Now I want to go a little further into this problem so you get a sense of what I'm talking about. By the time of Anselm of Canterbury, the incarnation had ceased to do soteriological work. It came to authorize the work of God through Christ's death. Today it has no autonomous soteriological function. The fact that in systematic presentations of Christian
doctrine, with the exception of Karl Barth, the person of Christ is usually treated separately from the work of Christ, often accompanied by disclaimers that this, of course, is not the case, testifies to this circumstance. I know, it's really kind of odd. There are probably many factors that contributed to this situation, too numerous to develop here. But the bottom line is that the incarnational grounding of Christian redemption was lost to the West, and salvation as forgiveness of
sin alone was read as expressing the whole story. Yet before the Middle Ages, it was recognized that the humanization of logos, the order, reason, truth of God, renovated the whole creation, including the healing of human nature. It was recognized that the humanization of God entailed raising human nature to the dignity of God. And because, as in Adam, all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive, the reclamation of the dignity of God in Jesus Christ
was on behalf of all humanity. Staring straight at the renovating power of the incarnation this way reveals a broader weakness in the Western theological tradition. I will argue that a freestanding doctrine of the atonement, cut off from the ennobling power of the incarnation, misses the truly cosmic scope of the work of God in bringing creation, including humanity, to fulfillment in God. To put it in technical terms, it preaches the law first and then the gospel, rather
than enabling God's judgment to be heard on the prior foundation of God's respect for his own creation. In truth, with this suggestion, I am doing little more than elaborating Barth's criticism of Luther and Calvin, in which he reversed the order of law and gospel, correcting the tradition to expound gospel law. But I'm going to make a case that what Barth did needs to be elaborated. Christian theology worries about sin, and Western soteriology focused on the cross
as the outpouring of divine grace that imputes to the sinless Christ the sin of us all. By accepting Christ's death in place of our own deserved demise, we go free to celebrate God's mercy on us. In this view, Christ's work gets rid of something bad, God's anger at our sin and therefore our shame and guilt. But it does not really restore to us something good. Although we go free, we are not really healed of our malady,
only acquitted of its consequences. The slate is wiped clean, but we end up basically where we started, without the nobility with which God created us, made clear to us. We are told to trust God's mercy, so we may feel more secure of God's love, but the only identity we have from which to begin a new life is that we are forgiven sinners who still deserve punishment, even if God has averted the severe decree. It seems to
me, after all of Christian history, that this is not enough. That is, faith in God's mercy, even God's mercy shed abroad in the cross, is not enough to sustain us. We need what Paul and the author of Ephesians called the full armor of God, the full strength of Christ himself strapped onto our bodies, so that in the midst of our struggle with sin and despair, we can grasp and see a healed self that God allows us
to reclaim, the nobility of God given to us in the incarnation of the logos. God's coming in our very own flesh that we can taste and touch and know that that is our true self, rather than the self that we live with most of the time. In the Middle Ages, Christ came to be pictured as a fearsome judge, and hell loomed large. The incarnation ceased to function soteriologically and became simply a prelude to the cross. But
before that, as I've said, the cross and the incarnation, cross and resurrection were one. Redemption for Irenaeus, for example, and the Greek-speaking tradition, salvation was the renovation of humanity. This is, I think, the original meaning behind the slogan, God became human, that we might become divine. The East, and I would submit strong strains in St. Augustine himself, focused on this repair of human nature, the fruition of human wholesomeness and happiness as God intended it to
be from the beginning. The West, I think, never grasped and largely feared the notion of salvation as deification for a variety of reasons, some of them very good reasons, I suspect. This idea, however, survived in the medieval West in the longing for union with God. Yet even this caused anxiety in Protestantism, and faith in God's mercy by the forgiveness of sins came to define salvation. But the incarnation is central to both Pauline and Johannine soteriology. Its
goal is to lift believers to God in a very tangible sense. This is concretized, for example, in the Eucharist as described in John 6, where the believer ingests Christ, sanctifying her own body with sacred food. God's presence in the world through logos in creation and the incarnation carries human nature through embarrassment and pain and returns it to God. Understanding this as one's true, original identity provides the believer with a self-concept through which the order, truth,
and goodness of God dwell in the believer. I quote from Colossians 2, For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. It is precisely this theology of restoration, which is prior to and deeply linked with the cross of Christ, that has been problematic. Talk of union with God has made the West anxious because, if viewed through the doctrine of the
communication of properties or attributes, it could be misconstrued as suggesting that human nature takes on the attributes of God, omniscience, omnipotence, and so on and so forth, omni-benevolence and some of these being the most disturbing. It could also be construed as suggesting or inviting pantheism. It is clearly not a good idea for people to go around thinking that they are God. In short, there is the danger that in seeking to heal human nature from the
deforming consequences of sin, that we might go overboard and do away with God altogether. I myself have seen communities where this has happened, and I agree that it is a problem to be avoided at all costs. But atonement soteriology detached from the incarnation also carries a danger that feminists are pointing to. There is the danger that God never really heals us, that he only dissolves the basis of our fear of him. So here we seem caught
between the Scylla and the Charybdis. I think we must carefully navigate a path between, praying that there will be theologians after us to assess and correct our work. Let us make one thing perfectly clear. That this is one thing that is not the case. There is no trace of Pelagianism in what I am saying. All this is utterly, purely, and completely the work of God in Jesus Christ. It is simply that by reclaiming the soteriological power
of the incarnation, we recognize that God means to be for us. My contention is that if we look at the incarnation as a genuine renovation of human nature, on which God's judgment of our continuing sinfulness falls, we will reclaim a God-given dignity against which our sinfulness will appear alien to us, rather than a corroboration of our own depraved selves. Without a restored self, the forgiven sinner has no healthy and noble self to turn to in
order to build a new life. With the loss of the soteriological aid of the incarnation, the possibility of ascent to God was lost. After Augustine, God came to be thought of as so angry with us that his primary means of discipline became the threat of hell. Real healing faded from view. The Heidelberg Catechism makes it clear that the first thing we need to understand about ourselves is the greatness of our sin and wretchedness. The only respectable
response to the admission of one's true wretchedness is, of course, self-despair, precisely the attribute counseled by Luther as the means of turning us to God's grace. But self-despair, meaning the inability to save oneself through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, expanded to fill the space. Instead of hating what God hates, our sins, popular piety came to prize humility and guilt. So that self-hatred was seen as an expression of piety, as if God hates the sinner
along with the sin. This was made logically possible by the judgment that we are nothing but a pile of sin. Psychologically, it probably works something like the following sororities. Since God hates sin and I am a sinner, God must hate me. Since God must be right, I must adopt God's judgment and hate myself. The more I hate myself, the more humble I will become. The more humble I become, the better I become. And the better I
become, the more God will love me. It is this linkage between self-hatred and pleasing God that trapped the medieval West into a piety that is potentially, at least psychologically and spiritually, harmful. Although he did not intend it this way, I suspect that the rule of St. Benedict's teaching on humility was read in this light, even if it was not intended that way. Along with this development, baptism shifted from the Pauline understanding of engrafting into Christ
and the full dignity of God to get rid of original sin. With the baptism of infants and the promiscuous spread of the faith under the threat of damnation, penance that gets rid of actual sins committed after baptism loomed large. Unction takes care of sins just before death. And just to make sure, purgatory offers a final opportunity to purge oneself of sin with the hope of eventual residence in heaven. The anxiety created by this fixation on divine
wrath, in the face of which we are totally helpless, contributed both to the corruption of the medieval church that scrambled for a way to do something to alleviate the distress it caused and, of course, led to the Reformation. Luther's great quest for a merciful God amounted to asking the believer to look toward divine mercy in the cross and away from divine judgment. Redirecting the believer's looking may be comforting, which is what Luther was seeking. But my
concern is that it does not substantially fortify her with the dignity of God, which is her true identity and destiny provided by the incarnation. In Lutheran and Reformed piety, righteousness remained alien and imputed, and the practical result of justification is the absolution of guilt by the remission of sin. Calvin was more willing to talk about the renovation of the image as a means to sanctification, but he was also of a more dour temperament and spoke at
least as much about the burial of the image under the dross of sin. And so there remained in Protestant piety, quote, I'm quoting from the Westminster Confession, a continual and irreconcilable war, the flesh lusting against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. My reason for pointing this out is not to say that this continual lusting against struggle of sin and lust is not true, for surely it is, as everyone in this room knows. Nor is
it to point toward a Wesleyan doctrine of perfection, but only to suggest that in these particular forms of piety that require per constant perseverance in the in the need to hold on to the mercy of God. That's what John Bunyan's trip pilgrimage is about. This process speaks little of the human dignity and nobility given in creation and restored by Christ, which is a means for sustaining us in that journey. The believer remains in a precarious situation.
Fearful that the elect might make too much of their justification, the Westminster assembly taught that, I quote, Although the elect can never fall from the state of justification, yet they may by their sins fall under God's fatherly displeasure and not have the light of countenance of his countenance restored to them until they humble themselves, confess their sins, beg pardon and renew their faith and repentance, end quote. So the cycle of displeasing God, feeling bad about yourself,
repenting and throwing yourself back on the mercy of God, begin anew, even among the justified. The problem with this soteriology is not that it is not true to the psychological and reality that we live in, but rather it is that we are supposed to love God and God's judgment on us, whatever it may be. And this is all grounded primarily in God's wrath. Now, any experienced parent can tell you that children are much more likely to
obey, cling to, listen to, respond to and pattern themselves after a parent they know utterly loves them. The problem that I have with traditional Western soteriology is that it invites us to love a God who may still think that we deserve death, who thinks that we do deserve death, but at the last minute interposes his mercy and takes the hit for us. There is, I think, deeper evidence for God's love for us than this incident actually
conveys to believers. Additionally, on this model, the mercy of God only fully discloses itself after we are condemned by the knowledge of our sins. In tacking our way through this zigzag course between God's justice and God's mercy, a question arises. What is the first thing God needs to teach us? His goodness and power or our wretchedness? Surely both are necessary. The question is, which word is to be spoken first? It is a matter of finding the
most effective strategy on God's part. Karl Barth saw the problem here, as I have referred to, and placed God's yes prior to God's no. Still, this did not challenge the fact that in my reading no genuine healing of human nature occurs. Justification and sanctification, I suggest, alone do not supply the believer with the full armor of God, a God-given strength to go beyond alternately fearing divine wrath and trusting in divine mercy in order to celebrate and
enjoy God's world, fully confident of our being taken up into the divine life. This may sound like no more than a semantic issue, but I doubt it. I believe that the focus on human depravity without a prior grounding in the genuine healing brought for us by God in Christ has harmed Christians, not only women. The modern criticism, now with a feminist accent, is helping us to see this. But now we are in the usual Reformation danger
of going overboard with this new insight and losing sight of the proper balance that needs to be reclaimed. Failing a balanced Christian self-concept, modern secularism has moved in to fill the gap, substituting a natural and good self whose self-esteem comes from itself and needs only optimal conditions to flourish. This is what most of our children are reared on. It has no identity in God and no discipline from God in order to navigate through life.
Having broken free from Christianity, late secularism and much of postmodernism, nihilist postmodernism, may be viewed as an overreaction to Western Christian doctrine and piety. Medieval practices of food and sleep deprivation, hair shirts, self-flagellation, cultivated a deep distrust of the body, the self, fun and personal relationships because these might lead to inappropriate sex. Protestants, but they might actually. The only problem with that sentence is it's true. There's no easy way here, folks. Protestant scholasticism squeezed the
faith into a rigorous set of ideas that at times slipped into a strict moralism arising from a punitive outlook on human nature. These efforts at discipline sought to help believers return to God, but they appeared to later Christians to become ends in themselves, virtuosic expressions of piety instead of means toward recovery. Now, I want to talk about the contemporary alternative. There's problems here. Today, in contrast to early and even high modernity, our culture, I want to
turn to the culture, appears morally and spiritually vacuous and collapsing. Capitalism and technology, at least consumer capitalism and technology have become amoral, as social and indifferent to human flourishing. Even science and medicine are turning out to be morally ambiguous. This is all part of the postmodern moment. Secularism provides no theological resources to call consumer capitalism and autonomous individualism to count before God. The decay of our society might give one pause before entirely discounting the older forms
of piety, even if their austerity is off putting to moderns. The medieval councils to poverty, chastity and obedience, although perhaps applied in excessive ways, still had a point. Money, sex, power, food, drink, and now drugs are dangerous. The church may have been astute to flag unruly desires, even though instead of strengthening the fall to overcome them, it may have hoped unrealistically to extinguish them. Still, the fierceness of the modern reaction against Christianity, above all in the
great masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, might give Christians pause. Encouraging meekness, inappropriate self-denial, and even suffering have become key instruments in the Christian arsenal for the promotion of godly obedience. This is out of keeping, I submit, with God's desire that we have life and have it abundantly. For if God's exfoliation, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit point to anything, it points to God's desire that we flourish joyfully but cautiously and with measured
self-control. Western theology constructed a chasm between the majesty of God and the poverty of humanity. An unwitting effect of the chasm was, in my judgment, to engender more despair than hope, even if unwittingly. Calvin recognized that the word of the gospel is first revealed in creation, yet his theology as a whole sent a different message. This, I hold, is out of keeping with our knowledge of the triune God that we have from scripture and the creed.
While it is necessary to hold the tradition accountable for its missteps, it would not be wise simply to excise those parts of the tradition not to our taste. Following the pattern of the Protestant Reformation, there is today an understanding temptation to throw off those features of Christian piety that the modern rights tradition and secular psychology now point out may be harmful if misapplied. This is, for example, the suggestion of Dolores Williams, who wants to eliminate the
atonement of Christ and turn to the ministry of Jesus instead. You may have heard about some of her interests. But while there is a suspicion of human nature, especially our life in the flesh in Christian piety, it is not without a point. We sin with the body. My argument is that reclaiming the full narrative of the second article of the creed may provide a way forward. Now to my conclusion. Although postmodernism has rapidly become a cipher
and therefore may now be more confusing, more confusing than helpful word at its best, the critique of a truncated rationalism, along with a fresh eye on the powerful shaping function of language, could embolden theology and release it from the strictures of a certain interpretation of reason. That has plagued it in the modern the past 300 years in the postmodern move mood. The issue is no longer the intelligibility of the Christian faith, as I mentioned before, but
its morality. Today, the objection is not that Christianity is not rational, but that it is positively immoral. It is this criticism, I believe, that needs to be responded to now. If God means well for us, both when he disciplines us and when he encourages us, and I believe this is the case, we need a renewal of theology to keep us both honest and sober. Now careful theological thinking is hard. It has always been hard. It is
especially hard today when the church is not is not even sure what theology is, let alone that it could be helpful. I myself am persuaded, however, that despite the potholes into which Christian theology and practice have fallen, that it can be reclaimed and recalibrated and indeed must be. For the church, the society, and even the academy desperately need theology to guide and call them to account. In short, we need the Holy Triune God. And unless Christians
can speak of this God lyrically and with passion, the culture will continue to languish on its own resources. There is not one perfect Christian theology. There is only one long theological conversation that we are all invited into. Within that conversation, there are articulations of the power, goodness, wisdom, righteousness of the Triune God that better help persons know, love, and enjoy and glorify the source of our life and our destiny. I invite each of you to think
of yourself and the congregations that the members of the congregations that you pastor and the culture in which we live outwardly from God the Holy Trinity to whom we belong and for whom we long in order to know who we are and where we ought to be going. Thank you. [applause]