Gather around, all of you. Look with me at this drawing. What do you see? Yes, that’s right, a squirrel. A happy squirrel?
Yes.
Climbing a tree, that’s right. Stop pushing. This is a marker drawing of a squirrel climbing a tree, under a cloud under the sun. Would you say this is a sunny day or a cloudy day? “Partly cloudy” is a good answer, the kind a meteorologist would give. But if you think about the artist designing this tall rectangular panel, he chose to put a big iconic cloud and a big iconic sun right in there. Please don’t lean on the walls, okay? The squirrel probably thinks it’s a cloudy day, because the cloud is closer to him and would block the sun from his vision.
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Reuben Archer Torrey (1856-1928) is a revered figure among conservative evangelicals with good memories. He was Dwight L. Moody’s right hand man, a world-travelling evangelist, the first dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and the inspiration behind the honors program where we work, which is of course named for him. We’ve cited him here before (and before and before), and you can expect to hear from him again at this site, because, as the plaque on the wall in our hallways reminds us daily, “He being dead yet speaketh.” Our affection and respect for Reuben Archer Torrey are unfeigned.

What just occurred to me, however, is that his co-laborers usually called him either “R. A.” or, more often, “Dr. Torrey.” One contemporary said that Dr. Torrey often wore a tall formal hat, but he always spoke in a tone of voice that suggested he was wearing one. His family, on the other hand, invariably called him Archie, from his middle name Archer. Letters to and from his wife Clara always use this name: Archie.

Archie.

So that got me thinking. The only Archie I know, maybe the only really famous Archie out there, is that crazy teenage resident of Riverdale… (seen here in a 70s drawing by Christian cartoonist Al Hartley).

Definitely a far cry from the distinguished and dapper gentleman shown in the many portraits of R. A. Torrey. So the idea of calling Our Founding Dean and Moody’s Right Hand Man by the name Archie is just mind-blowing. It brings together two things which should never come into contact, two things which have nothing in common. America’s favorite teenager and the founding father of fundamentalism.

Once the idea of combining them occurs to you, however, there’s no stopping your imagination. So with apologies in advance, I give you: Reuben ARCHIE Torrey:

Pope Benedict XVI has been calling on Christians to pray for peace in the middle east, and adds that believers should “pray also for the terrorists, because they do not know that they are doing evil not just to their neighbor, but, first of all, to themselves.” Pray for terrorists? Pray for anything but swift and thorough vengeance to fall on their heads? Yes. Pray that the one good thing would happen to them, that they would fall into the hands of a living God who surely knows how to defeat his enemies, but is also able to do something greater: to convert them to serve him. This must be the line of thought that led the Pope, and which led Mike Potemra at National Review’s The Corner, to say

The Pope is reminding the world, and especially those who are engaged in great crimes against humanity, that no matter what they do they are not outside the province of God’s mercy and the call to repentance. (He knows that, for example, one prominent anti-Christian terrorist and human-rights abuser went on to write the Epistle to the Romans. . . .)

Well said!

hat tip: Urban Onramps

“Preexistence” is an awkward word. It looks like it needs a hyphen (pre-existence) or a diaeresis (preëxistence). Plus, the “pre” in preexistence begs to be clarified:

Insurance Agent: Do you have any pre-existing conditions?
Patient: Yes. Wait. I have a condition, and it exists.
Insurance Agent: So does it preexist?
Patient: Well, if it preexists, wouldn’t that mean it doesn’t exist yet? That it’s in a state previous to existence? Like “pre”-mature is before maturity?
Insurance Agent: (pause) Do you have a preexisting condition?
Patient: No, my condition is already in existence.
Insurance Agent: What I mean is, does your condition exist prior to your buying this insurance policy?
Patient: Oh, I see. Yes, my condition already exists previous to buying the policy.
Insurance Agent: Okay, we can deal with that. Will this be prepaid?
Patient: Yes. Wait. Aren’t we already previous to payment? If I pay now, won’t that make me postpaid?

In Christian theology, the “pre” in the doctrine of the preexistence of Christ is a reference to his incarnation, which is what he exists pre. Previous to the Word becoming flesh (John 1:14) by taking on human nature, the person Jesus Christ already was. Admittedly, it’s odd to call this person “Jesus Christ” before his birth in Bethlehem and his receiving a human name (Jesus) and title (Messiah, Christ), but we have to call him something, and “unincarnate Logos” is just not warm enough. When Paul calls him this (”have the same mind as was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God…” Phil. 2:5-6), he’s using the kind of shorthand we use when we say, “The sixteenth president of the United States was born in this cabin.” At the time he was born, of course, he wasn’t the sixteenth president of the USA, he was a mewling infant. And before Abe Lincoln was a mewling infant, he was nothing, unless you want to count as preexistence such things as a twinkle in his father’s eye, or the plan for Lincoln in the foreknowing mind of God.

Unlike Abe Lincoln, Jesus Christ was somebody before he was the mewling infant of the first Christmas.

That Christ preexisted Christmas is easy to see and easy to say. (more…)

Justin Taylor reports that New Testament scholar Leon Morris died earlier this week at age 92.

In Morris’ obituary, Peter Adam says:

He wrote over fifty books of theology and biblical commentary which have sold nearly two million copies worldwide and been translated into many languages. … He was well-known throughout the Christian world as a careful, conservative biblical scholar. Extraordinarily, Morris received no formal theological education, apart from two years of supervision for his doctorate in Cambridge. He was self-taught theologian who brought his rigorous and disciplined training in scientific enquiry to his study of the Bible and theology.

Of Morris’ “over fifty books,” I’ve only read a couple. I worked through his big commentary on John a few years ago, and it has stayed high on my list of John commentaries I recommend when asked.

I have especially profited from his 1965 book The Cross in the New Testament, a 400-page study of a subject which, if you need any convincing, Morris will convince you is the center of the New Testament gospel. It seems like every five years or so the church goes through another wave of criticism in which influential pastors, Bible scholars, or theologians breathlessly announce that they’ve looked into the matter and discovered that the death of Christ isn’t the main thing after all. The most recent such outbreak was messily entangled with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and featured movie reviews which started by critiquing the movie (fair enough) but soon enough devolved into dismissals of the centrality of Christ’s crucifixion for the Christian faith. These demotions of the cross always bring out the latent fundamentalist in me, who it turns out is always hiding just under the urbane theological veneer, humming “The Old Rugged Cross” and hearing the echo of a prophetic sermon in the Foursquare Church of my upbringing in the seventies: “Just wait and see,” warned the preacher, “they’ll find a way to take the blood out of the Bible. The devil can’t stand that blood.” Don’t get me started. Instead, get Leon Morris started:

Leon Morris, with passion and patience, made the case for the cross over the course of his scholarly career. “In view of the way theological knowledge advances,” he wrote, “it is well that from time to time someone should seek to evaluate the total witness of scripture to this key doctrine. The atonement is the crucial doctrine of the faith. Unless we are right here it matters little, or so it seems to me, what we are like elsewhere.” Morris wrote with a tone of reserve, sought balance in his presentation, and tended toward understatements. He had a tendency to state his points in a sober tone in the main text, but then tuck into the footnotes the more arresting comments and zingers. Speaking of footnotes, his reference footnotes in The Cross in the New Testament range so widely that it seems he must have read every book on the cross ever written, and taken notes.

Leon Morris was a model of evangelical theological scholarship, and I pray that some young thinkers are prepared to step into the gap this 92 year old’s departure leaves in our ranks.

What happens when professional philosophers, trained with all their formidable analytic skills, turn their attention to an important Christian doctrine like the Trinity?

Things get tidy; radically tidy.

Philosophers do their philosopher thing, sorting things out, clarifying terms, making sure definitions are used consistently, criticizing bad arguments, and trying out new arguments. They disambiguate. They go formally logical. They reduce opponents ad absurdum, defeat defeaters of defeaters, and shine the glaring light of logical consistency on all claims –no matter how thick the fog of metaphor may be. They often try to be polite, but they don’t flinch from pointing out that you just said 2,000 words without actually making any claims which could be determined to be either true or false. They ask what counts as evidence, then generate new hypotheses and conceptual models to do justice to the evidence. After that, other philosophers come along and problematize those new hypotheses, and the cycle starts over again at a higher level.

The result is an enterprise called philosophical theology, and it’s a discipline that’s generated shelves of books and entire scholarly journals. There are hundreds and hundreds of professional practitioners and they have big academic conferences.
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The military newspaper Stars and Stripes reports that a new religion has been born in Iraq. A whole new religion! It is called Americantology.

Invented by a Marine deployed in Fallujah (Company C, 1st Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment), this religion’s chief symbol is the American flag, its only priest wears a civil war cap (blue: this is a yankee unit that calls itself “New England’s Own”), and its liturgy consists entirely of patriotic music, generously defined: “The National Anthem, Anchors Aweigh and the Marine Corps Hymn … Bruce Springsteen, Toby Keith, Neil Diamond, AC/DC … Lee Greenwood, and Ray Charles.”
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Since the Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry anyway (it’s an embroidery), I figured it would be okay to do an homage to it on a roll of industrial paper towel. The original depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066, but with brown marker in hand, Freddy age 5 produced a more generic knights-ready-for-battle scene, intentionally mixing various types of armor.

The Bayeux Paper Towel also departs from the original by falling a little bit short of the 230-foot length. It’s a little over two feet long, monochrome, and disintegrating as I type. So for the time being, the artifact more worthy of close study is the Bayeux Tapestry itself. But the five year old with a marker and a roll of industrial paper towels gave it a pretty good run for its money. You won this skirmish, Bayeux Tapestry, but watch your coastline, we’ll be back…

Here’s a sneak peek at a book review I wrote for a future issue of Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture. The summer 06 issue is just out. Hassle your library to subscribe!

This book, Sigurd Bergmann’s Creation Set Free, is interesting, but I can only recommend it in the qualified ways I describe in the review. I got to hear Bergmann speak at the American Academy of Religion meeting last year, and watched him in conversation with some American theologians. Bergmann is proud to be in the first wave of “ecotheologians of liberation” (which he swears with a straight face is not just a trendy title). But when a more excitable, more reckless American theologian took his book’s ideas in strange new directions (”GOD IS A BIRD! WORSHIP THE AVIAN DIVINITY!), Bergmann back-pedaled hard. Partly to distance himself from the BIRD GOD guy, Bergmann emphasized the fact that it’s been ten years since the first edition of Creation Set Free, and he’s moved to new conversations in fields like “aesth/ethics” (which he swears with a straight face is not just a trendy title).

Creation Set Free is a pretty hard read, partly because the material is difficult, but partly because the author’s style makes undue demands on the reader. For all that, I’m glad I read it and will be keeping an eye on Bergmann’s future work.

Sigurd Bergmann, Creation Set Free: The Spirit as Liberator of Nature (Eerdmans, 2005).

Sigurd Bergmann is a theologian who teaches at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Creation Set Free, a volume in Eerdman’s Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age series, is Bergmann’s first major publication in English. It will seem to most of the Anglophone theological world that a new voice has just made itself heard in Christian doctrine, but Bergmann has in fact already authored a number of other books and essays, and it has been a full ten years since the publication of the original German edition on which this revised English translation is based.

The cosmos is enslaved by its alienation from God’s life of triune communion, and it is the work of the Holy Spirit to bring the world out of that enslavement and into relationship. That is probably the central idea of the book. I say “probably” because Creation Set Free is really not about a central idea, and readers who look here for something so straightforward will inevitably be frustrated a few dozen pages into this wide-ranging (nearly 400 pages) book. The book is about connections, conversations, and whole constellations of ideas interacting with each other in dynamic complexes. The actual proposals emerge only as Bergmann moves around among the many influences and projects which are simultaneously at work in this book.

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In case you haven’t been notified yet, let me be the first to break the news. Ranch style houses are cool! I mean officially cool, complete with their own trend being analyzed by news stories, two different hip magazines documenting their coolness, and great big books filled with pictures of them.

It’s safe to say this trend is aggressively retro, even revisionist. It only works because the conventional wisdom of the past few decades is so clearly that ranch-style houses are ubiquitous, undesireable, and nothing special. As soon as our culture reaches a consensus of taste, you can count on the polymorphously perverse to get out there and subvert that dominant paradigm.

So let the backlash begin: (more…)