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Archive for April, 2024
Is Enrichment in Theology ever Possible?
April 26, 2024‘I Believe That I May Understand’, How to Think Theologically
April 21, 2024
The picture on the left was taken from a wiki. It is a representation of a risen Christ. If there is a difference between Protestants and Catholics the cross is one of them. The Roman Catholic Church uses Christ on the cross and a lot of Protestants prefer an empty cross. One puts more emphasis on the Atoning work of Christ and the other puts more emphasis on the ‘resurrection of Christ’. Both images are necessary. Last Week I put a picture of John Henry Newman on my blog and I think I may have offended some readers. I’m sorry if this is how you felt. With anything we need to be grown ups about this and sometimes I may walk a route of the history of Christianity or even of religions. This blog is for everyone no matter what they believe. Just to be clearer the next paragraph explains my stand point on certain points of faith.
Before I continue, I want to begin by saying I am convinced that Adam and Eve were literal people. The reason for this position is very simple. Our Lord Jesus did not see Adam and eve any other way. Our Lord did not say that ‘Adam was generic’ therefore the fall is still seen as the Fall and hence go down a theistic evolutionary road. No, I reject that road because for me it is not helpful and goes against our Apostolic deposit, that Scripture is Holy given to us through the agency of the Holy Spirit. My proposition and presupposition have to stem from the gift of faith. As Anselm said somewhere ‘I believe that I may understand’. I start from the presupposition of worship in our Holy Trinitarian God.
This does not mean that this position is against rationality. It is not irrationality, but it is being human. We are not machines who just churn out answers at the press of a button. On the contrary from the position of faith and by the Holy Spirit we can start to try to work out how to fix this broken world because of sin. So then this brings me to the point that sometimes I may touch on scholars who do not agree with my or your point of view. By studying those we agree with and don’t agree with we are like that proverb:
As iron sharpens iron,
So one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
Thus, Professor Gunton is not Herman Bavinck. In their teachings, one scholar may be seen as sour cheese to you and the other a very tasty delicacy. No matter which way we jump another proverb and I don’t know where I picked it up from:
‘You eat the meat and spit the bones out’
The ‘meat’ is the Word of God and the ‘bones’ are the left overs that not much good for anything.
Theology is about the study of God. Unfortunately, a lot of people are afraid to think about the Divine. There can be many reasons for this. Many Systematic theologies no matter what tradition tend to be prescriptive, and the thinking is done for them. As a believer in the faith there are some prerequisites. It is interesting that Karl Barth, when he wrote a very thin book called Dogmatics in outline it follows the Apostolic Creed, and he explains it. His real Dogmatics which was not completed also had a structure. The doctrines of the Christian faith have a natural structure thus they are not that difficult to follow.
Why am I saying these things. The truth is that I want you the reader to grow closer and closer to Christ in your faith. If you are an atheist who reads my blogs, then I pray for you because your soul is on the line. It maybe that a person is convinced that they are only made up of chemicals (star dust). If this is the case, then one is living in the 17th and 18th centuries in which reality was seen as clockwork and the human becomes insignificant in the name of progress. The 19th century is more interesting because the whole movement of the Romantics was a reaction to this. People have imagination, they can think, feel, love, laugh, cry et al. People are more than machines. Whether you believe in God or not from the religious perspective, according to the book of Genesis, you have been created in the image of God.
Do you love God? Do you love your Bible? This is great if you do but unfortunately not everyone’s motives are pure who preach. As a believer you need to know why you believe in Jesus and why Christ is the foundation by the Holy Spirit. For myself I have a presupposition.
Christ of St John of the Cross, Dali, Salvador 1904
I believe and I want to know more about my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who died for me through his atoning work on the Cross. I believe in his resurrection and one day my hope is that I will meet my Lord again in the eschaton. Not all preachers and teachers of the Bible follow this. Many have crept into the various Churches around the world and corrupted them for self-gain. Holiness has gone through the window and utilitarianism has taken its place. I’m sure if John Calvin or Martin Luther came back to our time and place, they would be very angry and heartbroken. What looks like faith on the surface is actually corruption, evil and sin in God’s eyes.
This is why you need to think theologically yourselves by getting on your knees praying for the wisdom of the Holy Spirit so that you soul is not led away by the bright lights of sin and darkness, ‘having the wool pulled over your eyes’. In the real world I am sure that someone has probably stolen from you or pretended to be a friend but was actually a con artist. However, the con-artist needs salvation as much as anyone else no matter how low they have fallen.
I’m one of the lucky ones, If I can use that term loosely. I can read Greek and Hebrew at a very basic level to function. I have had a theological and master’s degree from a renowned college. I have read Karl Barth under Colin Gunton one of the great experts on Karl Barth. I have many smaller writings of John Owen; I have read Irenaeus’ Against Heresies and some of Saint Augustine. I now have the whole batch of Reformed dogmatics by Herman Bavinck… so on. But I am saying to you now, that as a Christian you are already doing theology. It maybe that you don’t like the word theology because it gives you the creeps.
As I said I am going though the book of Colin Gunton on learning to do theology through the theologians. It may be that as soon as I mentioned Samuel Taylor Coleridge that you switched off because he was a poet and got hooked on opium and was not a model parent and husband. Those things are actually true and yes, he became a great poet and then trashed his life. To tell you the truth this happens all the time in our news. Coleridge was however special in some ways. He knew he did wrong; he was sorry and later on in his life, he believed in the Trinity and confessed Jesus as his Lord, and he even had Martin Luther’s table talk by his bedside. He wasn’t trained as a theologian, but he questioned and read everything. A lot of the questions he had during his life have become common questions. For example, ‘free will’, various schools of thought have different explanations of this. In this blog I am not trying to win an argument, but I am attempting to offer you a way of thinking that allows you to keep your faith and at the same time to engage in discussions about your faith that you have just taken for granted. True Godly education takes a lifetime and into the beyond and even in the New Jerusalem our awe of God will get deeper and deeper as we meditate on what the Lamb of God did for us. We will see and feel even more indebted for the sacrifice God made for us so that we could be brought into the love of God by the Father through the Son and the Holy Spirit. So then never judge a book by its cover but by the contents in that book. Do not judge Coleridge on the beginning of his life but by the end of his life. No one is perfect and we have to be humble enough to learn even from the imperfect perfect things.
I can see why the late Gunton found Coleridge interesting. The enlightenment made people into mere machines, and this needed a push to get our humanity back. This is what Romanticism attempted to do. Coleridge went back to Martin Luther, back to the state of the will, back to the fall, back to the Atonement which was a reversal of Schleiermacher ever stood for and back to the Trinity. Even though Coleridge made a lot of mistakes a long the way, he came to understand that Christ is the Way, The Truth and the Life.
Some of these things I should have said at the start of this blog, but the truth is that as I write these blogs I have to study and go deeper myself. Then as a good teacher I still need to break these things down so that teenagers and adults can understand.
Reflection
Which theologians do you look up to as good examples? 😊 My heroes are Irenaeus, Augustine, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Herman Bavinck et al. You may also have a list of ones you don’t agree with Schleiermacher, Oregon, Pannenberg. Hmm I’m just having a bit of fun here, but I still hope you get the idea. I’m not so sure I agree with everything Gunton says such as that a lot of ills in our society stem from Augustine. This is quite a charge, and I haven’t made my mind up yet. So, I have done a lot of Biblical exegesis over these few years, and this gives me a change. Theology does not need to be ‘a stick in the mud’ on the contrary by engaging with these theologians no matter what your predisposition is, we can learn how to think about deeper spiritual issues and in the long term become more like Christ.
What is the Nature of Dogmatic or Systematic Theology? Looking at Augustine and J H Newman
April 13, 2024Before I start talking about theology I just wanted to share with you a collage of the birds from our garden over Winter time. It is very difficult for some birds to survive the winter. They don’t fly South and they don’t collect stocks in the Winter time. When there is no deposit of food in the Winter and with the deep snow we feel it is important to give bird food.
How do we understand the nature of dogmatic theology?
From the point of view of the Fall we all make mistakes and we all sin. This is especially true for theologians through the centuries. Although we need to be empathetic to theologians, we also need to be critical because the Church at times has needed to be protected from false teachings. In the wake of a defense for the Gospel inadvertently theologians have made mistakes that have influenced the very foundations of society. So then in writing this Weeks blog I found it quite deep so because of this I am writing a simpler version of that blog for the non specialist.
Sometimes I imagine that I am a cowboy in the Wild West of the United States in some small town of no significance. I go to the bank and I put into the bank a 100$, £ or euros. I have deposited a 100 Euros into that bank and I want it to stay safe. Lo and behold the next day some robbers come, kill the sherif and plunder my deposit!
I have lost my hundred euros and the thieves go to the saloon, spend my money on women, food and alcohol. Not a pretty story but you now understand what a deposit is. A deposit is a thing of value which needs to be protected. In the same way the Church also talks about a ‘deposit of faith’. The deposit is what was passed down to the Church in the Apostolic teachings and their lives by the Holy Spirit. Various Churches see the deposit in different ways. Some think it is just the Bible such as Luther. Others see the ‘Apostolic Tradition’ as part of this deposit. I am not here to argue which is correct or not, I simply wanted to explain what it is.
Now in today’s lesson Gunton talks about St Augustine and J H Newman. We have all heard of Augustine, but Newman was a Roman Catholic theologian with Anglican roots coming from the 19th century. Augustine Lived in the 4th century and Newman lived in the 19th century.
Augustine had a problem as sometimes he could lose arguments with his adversaries the Manichaeans, so he devised a way of keeping the Manicheans in their place. When Augustine would probably lose an argument, he would call on the authority of the Church to keep the adversaries in their place. He could do this because Augustine’s Deposit of the truth had Scripture and the Apostolic tradition so he could do this. The problem of this way of winning arguments would haunt the church in the future and the reality is that calling on authority isn’t needed if you are confident in the One you have believed in.
In theology balance is very important and how you tell the truth. In Newman’s day the Reformation and the Enlightenment had already taken place and there were a host of movements of ideas. Locke for example had reason and revelation as concepts. The problem was that in his view revelation as knowledge should always be in subject to reason. This reason was known as Rationalism and the idea was to base the whole of human knowledge on reason. Reason became mechanized and the human beings faith was not very high on the agenda. Explaining miracles away and seeing things in purely naturalistic ways had the effect of writing God our of human experience. This was a very serious situation.
Newman was concerned about this, and he argued very strongly that we are not like robots, but genuine human beings and all knowledge cannot be compartmentalized this way. We also have personal knowledge, and it may not be perfect knowledge, but it is still knowledge. Newman unfortunately moved on parallel lines with Augustine. Perhaps if he looked a little more closely at Coleridge who by then was an orthodox Anglican a better way of explaining the Gospel could have happened. Newman missed this opportunity even though his ideas were a hundred years in advance of the Roman Catholic Church. A lot of the questions Newman came up with and the importance of the Bible were discussed in the 2nd Vatican council in the 1960s.
Reflection
What can we learn from this. When doing systematic or Dogmatic theology we need to consider the ‘Deposit of Faith’ and what it contains. Whether it is Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin, every theologian needs to take this into account. Some theolgians have been naughty such as Pannenberg and his use of Hegel for thesis, antithesis and synthesis or Aquinas’ use of Aristotle who was a pagan. This is my view. What do you think.
This first reading has now ended. This is my easy version of what I think Gunton wanted to say about Augustine and Newman. You do not need to read the next section unless you are up for a challenge. Thanks for reading this far.
John Henry Newman and Augustine on the use of authority
When thinking about the Apostolic deposit in relation to the Church and tradition where is it found?
Please make sure that you understand the following concepts before reading further.
Dictionary Key words
Dialectic = through the use of speech attempting to get closer to the truth.Organic = used as a metaphor to explain some spiritual truth
Doctrine = teaching for example, ‘the doctrine of the Trinity’ means ‘teachings concerning the Trinity’
Deposit of faith = the original Apostolic teachings given to the Christian church. This can be expanded in some churches to include the original traditions or reduced just to the teachings of the Bible. There is debate here between Protestans and Catholics.
Dogma, dogmatic= teaching
Introduction
As I said last Week, we are going through Gunton’s book on learning about theology through the theologians. It looks like an easy task, but it is not. It requires some spade work sometimes:
- J H Newman and his Theory of Doctrinal Development
- Professor Gunton’s critique of Newman on the Apostolic Deposit of Faith and if the balance is correct.
John Henry Newman part 1
“John Henry Newman CO (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890) was an English theologian, academic, philosopher, historian, writer, and poet, first as an Anglican priest and later as a Catholic priest and cardinal, who was an important and controversial figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s,[11] and was canonised as a saint in the Catholic Church in 2019.” (Taken from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Newman)
Dr James Merrick on the Theory of Doctrinal Development by J h Newman
Before looking at Guntons appraisal of J H Newman on this subject I felt it necessary to look at Newman’s teachings on this. I think James Merick has done a lot of the spadework so I will at what he has to say about it.
Merrick writes:”This task prompted him to write An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. In this essay he described the growth of doctrine as organic, like the growth of an acorn into a tree. An example of doctrinal development is the Scriptural depictions of Mary as the New Eve and Ark of the Covenant. This title required her holiness and moral purity, developing to the point that the Magisterium defined the dogma of her immaculate conception in 1854.
This process of doctrinal development had discernible characteristics one can use as criteria to distinguish development from corruption. However, as he worked through this task, Newman found that “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant” (Newman, Essay on the Development of Doctrine, 8). He became a Catholic in 1845. His study led him to conclude that the Roman Catholic Church is the only contemporary church that retained and faithfully developed the doctrines of his beloved early church.” Taken from media.ascensionpress.com/2019/10/18/st-john-henry-newman-and-his-critique-of-modern-ideas/
Evaluation
So, then Newman saw doctrine growing like a tree. Doctrine is seen as ‘organic’ from a seed you can get a tree. Merrick goes on to use an example:
“…development is the Scriptural depictions of Mary as the New Eve and Ark of the Covenant. This title required her holiness and moral purity, developing to the point that the Magisterium defined the dogma of her immaculate conception in 1854. (from ibid)”
In the second paragraph as Newman looked at the history of the Church, it brought him to believe that the Roman Catholic Church was the true church as it is supposed to have stuck close to the deposit of the Apostolic faith.
Guntons Critique of John Henry Newman on the idea of the deposit of the Faith Part 2
In some ways J H Newman was a hundred years ahead of his time but in other ways he wasn’t able to break free from authoritarianism which he possibly inherited from St Augustine somehow. For Gunton’s critique, he starts with Augustine’s ‘… unique combination of rationalism and authoritarianism.’ (Page 19) Augustines meeting with Manichaeism,… his confidence was shaken that the rationality of Christian truth needed some type of compensational tendency… Falling back on ecclesiastical authority thus Harnack wrote,”… the thousand doubts (Augustine’s doubts) excited by theology, and especially Christology , could only be allayed by the Church… The Church guaranteed the truth of the Faith, where the individual could not perceive it… Openly he proclaimed it: I believe in many articles of the Church’s authority; nay, I believe in the Gospel itself merely on the same ground.”( From page 19)
This is quite shocking what Augustine believed at this point. Authority comes Trinitarianly by the Father through the Son and the Holy Spirit. Here though authority has been invested in a formal Church. Gunton says that this problem in Augustine runs parallel with Newman when he says,”… That the Church is the infallible oracle of truth is the fundamental dogma of the Catholic religion”(From page 20).
Gunton goes on to say about Augustine that, “The dialectic of faith and reason of trust in authority that drove how Augustine had reasoned also became the pattern for Westen Theology upto the time of the Reformation and the Enlightenment.” (From page 20) The enlightenment didn’t help things either. Reason and revelation with lock became a problem in that revelation was made subordinate to reason. Reason took the place of the authority of the Church. Gunton says that in this sort of situation Newman was right to repudiate this situation.
What this means is that the Church gave too much emphasis to ‘authority’ as a rationale. The Enlightenment smashed this rationale. The problem was that in thinking about the Apostolic deposit, too many eggs were put into the Authority of the Church and this was a mistake, the same mistake Augustine made has come to haunt the Church.
In fact Newman in his Grammar of Assent moved behind Locke and Martin Luther back to Augustine thus he regurgitated past mistakes from the 4th century.
Thus there are three areas rationalism goes wrong:
- ‘Rationalism can be an abuse of Reason… its purposes were never intended and is unfitted..
- The tendency to hold that unless everything is known then nothing can be
- Thirdly rationalism’s tendency is to reduce religion to morality or utility
The first mistake is to think of knowledge as impersonal and scientific. People have their own personal knowledge and the problem of rationalism here is in a way to dehumanize human knowledge.
The second mistake is to see everything in terms of closed systems. Unless everything in known nothing can be known.
Thirdly by giving primacy to reason religion is de mythologized (the important elements of mystery in religion is taken away) (from pages 21 to 23)
Newman did well to critique these elements in society in the 19th century and yes in these pages one will find elements that show Newman could have said a lot more. However, as I said earlier Newman did well to spot these movements in the 19th century.
There were problems with with Newman’s position, but this can happen in any century. For me as well as the above I found it interesting that some of the problems could have been alleviated if faulty shared presuppositions with who he was debating with didn’t get in the way.
Gunton finishes of by saying that if Newman had took on board what Coleridge was saying (except when he was in Unitarianism and hooked on opium). As Coleridge could see things more wholistically this could have helped Newman. Coleridge finished his life as an orthodox Church of England theologian. These are some of the date between the lives of the two theologians:
Coleridge
Born 21 October 1772
Born John Henry Newman 21 February 1801
Died 25 July 1834 (aged 61)
Newman
Died 11 August 1890 (aged 89)
When Newman was born Coleridge would have been about 28 years old. Thus when Newman was 20 years old Coleridge would have been 58 years old and he died at 61 years of age. Thus at this stage it is a possibility that Newman knew about Coleridge’s more mature thinking.
Reflection
Theologians along with road sweepers, weavers, teachers, doctors et al. We all make mistakes and theologians make mistakes too. From the little that I did read, that the contents of the Apostolic Deposit should rest more on Scripture. Then on early Church Fathers and not to be too dependent on one or two theologians calling the shots. What I mean is Augustine and Aquinas as major repositories of truth at the expense of faith. This also goes for Protestant theologians who put too much emphases on certain individuals even if it is Luther and Calvin. I have the greatest respect for these theologians, but the Fall has affected every person. The main point I get from this that Dogmatic or systematic theologians need to be aware of these pitfalls so that they do not make the same mistakes of the past.
Talk about God through the Theologians; A reflection on the late Professor Gunton’s book chapter 1
April 7, 2024This Week I was looking at the first chapter of Theology of the theologians by the late Colin E. Gunton. Gunton raises the question of if it is feasible to think in terms of an English systematic theology. Hmm this is an interesting question but I prefer British theology as not a German Theology. At the end of the day I think the Europeans need the Brits as much as the Brits need the Europeans for theology. Then again Theology belongs to the whole gamut of humankind. Reading that first chapter reminded me of my days at King’s and how I miss those days listening to Colin Gunton teach us, especially about Barth and Irenaeus.
Even before reading the book, there were some photos of various theologian on the front cover. At the top section of the front cover, we have Edward Irving, Robert Willis Dale, John Owen and PT Forsyth.
On the bottom of the cover, we have Luther, Karl Barth and Coleridge.
In the English speaking world, they all had something to contribute to the Church. They had their flaws as we all do but they also had their ideas:
- Edward Irving’s teachings were certainly a precursor to Azusa Street Pentecostal church. He also got kicked out of the Church of Scotland for the heresy that Jesus was born with sinful flesh.
- Robert Willis Dale was instrumental in helping the poor and helpless in society in Birmingham and my idea is that he was a precursor to the welfare social systems we find around the world.
- John Owen was a solid Bible teacher, who was also Oliver Cromwell’s personal minister.
- PT Forsyth who by some is seen as a precursor to the ideas that Karl Barth came up with. He certainly saw the evils of WW1. It made him think about the incarnation and the atonement and God also put his money where his mouth was… That God was also willing to suffer for his creation…
- Martin Luther is famous for Justification by faith alone and hatched the egg that Erasmus laid. In other words Erasmus made it obvious that there was corruption in the Church. Luther was responsible to start the Reformation and inadvertently the Roman Catholic Church had to look at itself with the counter Reformation.
- Karl Barth is known for his Church Dogmatics, and he did strange things such as to make our Lord the subject and object of God’s Mercy and God’s Wrath.
- Coleridge one of Gunton’s favourites, the one who set off the Romantic Period in the UK in his later life made significant moves into thinking about the Trinity and Culture
Rationalism
Rationalism according to the Oxford dictionary via Google search engine says:
- the practice or principle of basing opinions and actions on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response.
“scientific rationalism”
Philosophy
the theory that reason rather than experience is the foundation of certainty in knowledge.
Theology
the practice of treating reason as the ultimate authority in religion.
Then we had the Counter Rationalist movement of Romanticism:
- literary and artistic movement marked chiefly by an emphasis on the imagination and emotions.
- the quality or state of being romantic. (From Merriam webster.com)
As can be seen some serious things have happened over the last couple of hundred years and the modern world, we live in is still dealing with these issues. We cannot escape culture and religion because it touches on what it really means to be a human. Hermann Bavinck had one of the coolest heads on these issues. If one over emphasizes rationality over against emotion or vice versa then we are missing the point. As human beings we have the power to think but also to feel. (From Reformed Dogmatics; pages 264-269; Herman Bavinck; edited by J Bolt)
Today the situation for humans has got even worse. We are no longer people but data! We all have our social security numbers and if we lose them, we cannot access necessary services for living. People who fall out of the system are in grave danger of being isolated or even being found dead under a bridge or perhaps frozen to death. This is a serious problem and charitable and religious organizations have stepped in such as the Salvation army. If a person is only data, then from one perspective, they are passively deemed not important and the innate importance of being human, created in the image of God becomes a problem. In Western society, as progress marches forward people are becoming less and less human to the point of becoming ghosts inside the system of progress. When officials contact people, they can hide behind the face of the computer.
So then because of these reasons I have given, we need to return to look at how to become human again. Being human includes rationality but also feeling. We cannot over emphasize one over the other. This is why Gunton’s work is so important… Gunton had done a lot of the dirty spade work in finding out why our Western cultures are in melt down. His book, The One the Three and the Many gives us direction and it shouldn’t be read just by theologians; it should be read by all Christians, atheists, agnostics and by other religious and non-religious traditions who have an ability to bring about social change for the better. If we could put the bit in the mouth of the Western cultural horse and somehow turn the beast in the right direction so that we can find our humanity again. To learn to love our Trinitarian God and our neighbour again.
Theology through the theologians
Gunton starts where Karl Barth also started, in the 19th century. The picture of theology and history in general in some ways looked rather bleak. Everything in the 19th century was in turmoil and the French Revolution sent shivers throughout Europe. In this period, we had two great movements of thought within Europe; Rationalism with Kant who caused a break between thinking and doing, then the counter movement of Romanticism that emphasized feeling over against pure reason.
John Henry Newman
Obviously when we are looking at God it has also something to say about human nature and culture. Even not saying anything about God is saying something about God. I was also rather taken aback when I read the following on page 9:
“For Newman, talk of the oneness of God is one thing, the product of philosophical reflection, while the threeness is a matter of authoritative revelation. Speculation about the relation of the one and the three is forbidden:“…the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity is mere juxtaposition of separate truths, , which to our minds involves inconsistency, when viewed together; nothing more being attempted by theologians, for nothing more is told us.”
If Newman really did say “Trinity is a mere juxtaposition of separate truths” then this is very serious and is an act of irrationality of the highest order. I know that Roman Catholic theology uses Aquinas’ theology, and he would never close his mind to this type of thing. It seems to me some sort of defensive position for the Trinity.
Juxtaposition means: ‘the act or an instance of placing two or more things side by side often to compare or contrast or to create an interesting effect’ (From merriam-webster.com).
In the advance of the onslaught of modern rationality and pantheism this by John Henry Newman was a copout (Hiding behind the walls of authority). In fact, Newman was wrong and as Gunton said, if Newman had read a little more perhaps, he may have come to another view.
What Gunton had said earlier on in this book is that we need to see examples from our tradition such as Anselm and Irenaeus as people who thought outside the box and did not allow philosophy to contain theological ideas. Not allowing philosophy to run on parallel line to theology. Rather being able to see the bigger picture of reality. Being systematic in thought does not necessarily mean that one has to give in to being over systematized.
“…Why is it that I wish to recommend the odd figure of Coleridge as a model for an English systematic theology? (From page 10) … Yet Coleridge’s quest for truth was not one which divorced it from practical concerns. Far from it, for in many ways a moral concern was very much at the centre, as we shall see. One form the quest for truth took was in his engagement with the thought of that prince of modernity, Immanuel Kant. Kant, as we are often reminded, stands at the watershed of modern thought, as is revealed above all else in the breach he engineered between the truth of being and the truth of doing. Coleridge took up his moral thought, and developed from it the possibility of a unified — and theological — view of reality. Of course, there was an element of wish-fulfilment in his assertion that he could not believe Kant really meant what he said about the impossibility of metaphysics. But Kant served as a first step, as a liberator from the mechanistic view of reality that threatened to sweep all human values off the face of the earth. Freedom, human freedom, was Coleridge’s concern, as it was Kant’s. But rather than assert it against the blank wall of the empty universe — as the Kantian Sartre was later to do — he used it as a starting—point in a search for a universe containing the possibility of personal truth.” (pages 10-11)
For Gunton Coleridge in his later life was someone who evolved into having a more mature theology of the Trinity. In fact, Coleridge was in some way looking for the truth of God and sometimes he went down the wrong tracks. He got himself addicted to opium, he was highly influenced earlier on with Pantheism and Unitarianism. Somehow though he was able to break out of this straight jacket that led him nowhere. Gunton says the following about Coleridge:
I can see why Gunton found Coleridge very interesting… Coleridge was able to breakthrough the many walls of culture and find the importance of the Trinity. Coleridge is not hiding behind any wall of authority to make a point about the Trinity.
Gunton finishes this chapter off by looking at the present reality and if it is a possibility to have a home grown (British) Systematic theology with the ability to converse with other traditions.
Reflection
The way we do theology is important because what we believe to be true affects what we think it is to be human. At the moment in the various Western societies people are not being treated fully as social beings but as commodities. Rabbi Sacks book on Morality is a correction for this situation, but also, we need to think through how to do theology because there has to be a balance between the created order and the infinite. Many times, this balance is broken, and it has led to catastrophes in the real world.
I think what the late professor Gunton wants us to do is to step outside of our laurels and take the doctrine of God seriously. The Trinity is an enormous subject that affects our world view about everything and the whole of reality. Sin has indeed entered our world through the Fall and even these theologians we are talking about had their own idiosyncrasies, but these faults spurred them on to go deeper. Coleridge for example had a great mind but got hooked on drugs. By faith he was able to move forward and find God and became a fully fledged Christian. Because of his experiences we are able to critique those who would want to put God on a side burner.
Going on a Tangent
I also found it fascinating that Coleridge was also affected by the French Revolution negatively. It was a very big thing that happened and even Herman Bavinck took this very seriously. For me when thinking about political systems. The French Revolution was all about human endeavour and purely secular. God was written out of the constitution. There are flaws with this system because as Rabbi Sacks says:
“…If we continue to adopt the French model of rights and stop believing in the existence of a significant arena of individual responsibility, we will lose the sense of common morality that finds its natural home in families and communities. We will be left only with the market and the state. The market cannot deliver distributive justice. The state cannot deliver dignity and resilience, civility and responsibility, for and in its citizens. The state can deliver much: health, welfare, education, defence and the rule of law. But it cannot deliver the active citizenship that creates, daily, in myriad local contexts, the face-to-face care and compassion that constitute the good society. Remove the moral matrix of civil society and eventually you get populist politics and the death of freedom in the name of freedom. It is the wrong road to take.” (From Morality; pages 128-129 Rabbi Sacks: )
The British system is quite unique but the authority in the crown is placed before God as the ultimate authority. This is why the British system works. The questions about God and the state are very real thus eventually the French system may lead to more suffering as it is based on purely secular grounds.
Returning to the Trinity
In this chapter Gunton raised questions about the nature of systematic theology and if it is at all possible. We looked at this through some theologians. In the next chapter we will look at the nature of Dogmatic theology looking at it through the eyes of Professor Gunton.
I also stepped outside of the remit of ‘theology through the theologians’ as well because more work needs to be done across all religious tradition for the benefit of humanity. Obviously work starts in our own back yard but it needs to take the whole world into consideration so that together we become more human; faithful to God, faithful to each other, loving, caring, reaching out to others when they are impoverished… God created this world and he created us, and there is a relationship between the two lets continue reflecting on what this might entail.
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