The Attentions of Contemporary Theology (ft. Mike Allen)

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Faculty of Podcasts at RTS Washington. I'm Tommy Keane, Professor of New Testament here and academic dean. And I wanted to introduce very briefly a special episode for you. We were able to have Dr. Mike Allen, Professor of Systematic Theology at RTS Orlando and academic dean there. We were able to have him up to our campus recently to teach a class on Augustine, City of God. And he also blessed us with a special lecture, the attentions of contemporary theology, bringing us all up to date on matters in his discipline that I hope is a blessing to you all. Also stay tuned after the episode for just some special announcements and seminary news. And with that, Dr. Mike Allen. - There we go. So as we talk about the attentions of contemporary theology, we want to consider a number of diverse strands and developments that are evident in some cases and more subtle in others. And to observe ways in which those contribute to theological exploration, for a number of traditions, ways they can influence and resource those of us in the Reformed and Evangelical world, but also ways in which particular research approaches, particular infacies that drive programs of theological study can also distort our attention. And it's perhaps helpful to focus on that word in particular. More than humans in any other time, we have become accustomed to talk about attention in lots of contexts. We talk about those who have attention deficit disorder. We realize that there can be a hyperactivity that can make paying close attention rather challenging, particularly in certain contexts or circumstances. All of us are increasingly aware of our capacity for distraction, particularly for overstimulation as we see screens all around us. And as we are increasingly used to interacting with that, which gives us constant dopamine hits, making reflection harder. Plato and Aristotle spoke of many things and all sorts of troubles of the intellectual life, but we have moved into an era where the notion of attention is especially before us. And I want to suggest theologians haven't thought about that as consciously, as patiently as we might. And that attention is actually a helpful way to think about some of the ways in which good theology, in particular, systematic theology, can help to discipline our reading of scripture, our thinking as Christian women and men, and our reflection on the wider world. So first, as we begin to think about the attentions of contemporary theology, I want to sketch something very briefly and somewhat rapidly, too rapidly, I'm sure, of the various foci of contemporary attentions, various ways in which contemporary theologians are turning to focus on this or that. The first thing we could observe in biblical studies in recent decades has been a rush of attempts to identify a center to holy scripture itself or to various portions thereof. And there continue to be debates, whether it's decades ago, George Ladd speaking of the kingdom of God as the center of the teaching of Christ, or its Herman Ritterboss, speaking of the overlap of the ages, in a certain form of eschatology as the heart of Paul's teaching. More recent times, my own colleague Greg Biel, former teacher of mine also, speaking of new creation as the center of not just Paul or the New Testament, but all of holy scripture. We observe old and new Testament scholars alike, debating what theme, what image, what focus, synthesizes, and draws together all the various strands that we see across the scriptures. In systematic theology, we can observe a rather different approach where, again and again, different approaches to thinking about doctrine have been focused not on a topic but on a perspective. So for instance, Dr. Cittanto mentioned that I recently edited a new companion to Christian doctrine and considering the first edition, 25 years ago, and then that which I was commissioned to edit, the biggest difference, surely, was the range of perspectives of people involved in the task of Christian doctrine, expanding around the globe, involving people, not just from different traditions, but different ecclesiastical traditions that converse and talk with one another in an active sort of way. But also people who are engaged in very precise programs of study. And so, for instance, we now have major areas of study focused on considering all of Christian doctrine every topic through the lens of disability. However, everything from the atonement to the doctrine of humanity relates to thinking about the disabled and their particular experience. We have, of course, not only the continuation of movements like liberation theology or feminist theology and the like, but we continue to also have further research programs where a particular form of philosophical reflection say analytic philosophy with its precise concern for definition and for logical argumentation is going to be applied again to each and to every topic of systematic theology. We have a host of different perspectives that are being used, each to challenge or to further the way in which we consider with precision the big topics of God, of humanity, of sin, of salvation. As we think about public theology, see also multiple perspectives, even in the popular sphere as well as an academic public theology, people taking up a theocratic lens or an exilic lens, people using various metaphors and even various portions of scripture as the lens by which to make sense of our current situation, wherever we may be found. Viewing ourselves either as elect exiles scattered, living as a minority seeking to maintain faithful witness or those in the land seeking to instill and to inaugurate God's kingdom to further his project and plan. In each of these cases, I want to suggest that we can observe a focus on a particular lens, a whole range of particular lenses, where theology has in the realm of biblical studies and public theology and also systematics, seemingly that widest of areas of study and research. It has focused on more specific, tighter, narrower concerns than ever before. Occasionally, there are folks who evidence a frustration with this. So perhaps the most significant and lauded work in religious studies and in Christian doctrine in just the past year would certainly be Jonathan Trans book, Asian Americans in the Spirit of Racial Capitalism. And Tran, a professor at Baylor, is challenging the idea that we can consider Christian theology simply through the lens of what he calls identitarianism, viewing a single racial perspective, whether it be black theology or muhorista theology, or South American liberation theology. But rather suggesting that we need to add other elements suggests that identity politics being brought into Christian theology is a narrowing lens. It's an unhelpful narrowing, he suggests. Any argues we need to recover other categories along the way. Arguing in particular, we need to think about class in economics, not just race and ethnicity. In one sense, you might say he argues neo-Marxists ought to remember not to lose Marxism along the way. I don't mean to suggest somehow that everyone has somehow become either a neo-Marxist or a Marxist. Simply that the fervor that one book has gained as a sign that there are many people realizing that taking up one program may well be insufficient, that thinking about categories of race or of identity, categories of economics is not going to address all the questions before us. At the same time, if you consider reviews and interaction with a book even like that one, you can see so many other people find that even trans suggestions are themselves narrow and myopic. And there are many questions. In fact, I might suggest some of the most profound questions that he doesn't address. Itches, he doesn't scratch at the most fundamental level. There's rather little that God actually does in the way in which he describes the world. That's a problem for Christian theology. I want to suggest in each of these programs, whether it's identifying a center of a part or the whole of the Bible, identifying a particular lens through which you're going to consider in research Christian doctrine, or considering a particular metaphor or image by which you're going to use to develop a public theology. We can gain detail. We can gain perspective. We can gain an awareness of how far too often, we are far too quick to assume things, to allow our own prejudice and assumption to go unexamined. And so those can all in their best forms be helps. I want to suggest at the same time, each and every one of those programs, from such a wide range of people, from analytic theologians on the one hand, to public theologians on the other, from biblical studies scholars to folks engaged in muhorista theology and womanist theology. And all those various movements, they are narrowing the attention span, theologically speaking. Perhaps it's helpful second to think about the way in which we can think about attention more broadly before we consider a theological response. The most significant work, the most discussed work, in brain science in the last 15 to 20 years, has been that of the British scientists in McGillcrest in a 2009 book, The Master and his Emissary, and then more recently in a two volume work appearing in 2021 called The Matter with Things. McGillcrest has addressed the hemispheric problem. You may not have known you had this, but you do. We have this very odd reality that we have two brain hemispheres. And making sense on why we would have two brain hemispheres. And the purpose of each of them, and the relation of them, has stumped people. And of course, you've probably taken in a good measure of pop psychology over the years. We know that we speak of those who leaning in one direction, they're more rational. Folks tilting in the other, they're going to be far more emotively attuned, far more interpersonally fluent. We speak of being right-brained or left-brained in various regards. There are memes and cartoons and jokes regarding each of those directions and vents. McGillcrest argues that left and right matter greatly, but they don't matter as we think they do. And we can actually study what left and right hemispheres contribute because we can now actually do F-M-R-I imaging of brains, particularly brains, that have suffered traumatic injury to one, but not the other hemisphere. We can observe what's done when one hemisphere is no longer functioning as it was. And therefore, we can pinpoint what's happening where. And how what happens here shapes what happens there. And this leads McGillcrest drawing together several hundred studies to observe that as we think about left and right, our big problem for decades now has been thinking that they do different things, one thinks the other feels. He argues instead there are different ways of attending, different ways of giving attention to the world, to that around us which we perceive. The right hemisphere attends most broadly to the world. While the left hemisphere zooms in and focuses in fine detail. For instance, I have a room before me with several dozen people in it. My right hemisphere is taking in all that's around 180 degrees from each flank to the other. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, allows me to zoom in and consider the precise facial response of a given person. To observe the way in which a sound comes from here or there. And of course, the two are interacting constantly. If I take in with my left hemisphere, a sound over here, that's going to likely shape the way in which I see others interacting, the way in which I perceive interpersonal group dynamics. McGillcrest argues that it's for that reason because the right hemisphere has the widest possible angle lens, you might say, because it takes in things in their connection to each other. That is what's most active when we are at our most emotive. Because emotion is generated precisely by observing connection or the breakdown thereof. You don't tend to get terribly emotional when you're staring at one Hebrew word and parsing its precise character. You're more likely to be drawn to tears when you're in Dr. Red's class, and you're considering the sentence or the paragraph and the very idea of what's being conveyed through a whole statement, a judgment, a poem, a claim about God. There we see that it's not surprising when we're doing the sort of thing our right hemisphere tends to do, that we are most drawn to emotive and effective realities. What we've observed in pop psychology is not totally wrong. It's just superficial. And McGillcrest's big point is that we need to realize the importance of attending to reality in both ways. If we don't constantly zoom in using that left hemisphere to catch detail and texture and find nuance, then we'll increasingly be driving with a hazy view as though you didn't have blinkers, as though you didn't have lights, as though you didn't have wipers, as though you were driving through a fog. But zooming in, catching a fine detail is all about knowing where to take your car or your feet, where to take a journey, where to move across a wider map. That's precisely where I think irrespective of the validity of each and every one of Professor McGillcrest's claims at the level of brain science, and you'll not be surprised to know that I'm no neuroscientist, and not going to speak to that. I want to suggest it's analogously helpful for thinking about the task of Christian theology. And for observing the way Christian theologians through the ages have gone about their craft. Moving between the widest angle lens, where they consider the connection between God and all things, including world and self. And where they zoom in here and there, focusing in fine grain detail. Like a camera that zooms in to catch the very details of a person's face, not simply the wider vista in which they're seated. We zoom in to study a particular pericopy in the gospel according to Mark. We zoom in to catch a Hebrew couplet found in the book of Psalms. And we zoom in to study a host of other areas, philosophical, historical, scientific, that can inform the way in which we perceive the world, reading not only the book of scripture, but the book of nature as well. But in zooming in, we are drawing in detail and nuance, color and perspective that's meant to shape the whole. For the whole is where we live. The whole is where we relate to God and to one another. I want to suggest that if that's marked Christian theology through the ages, doctrine, the wide angle lens, exegesis, the narrow zoom lens, then perhaps we could think about how that sort of approach to theology might actually serve to help us make the best use of trends in wider theology today. And not to miss the necessary center of the task of Christian theology. I want to suggest that there's a key idea here that's got to orient our efforts. There are others I'd love to speak about. We'll get to just a brief description of hopefully three others at the last moment. But I want to describe one key element in commitment. And that is that doing Christian theology is about wholeness. It's about wholeness. If you consider the Apostle Paul in Acts 20, he has been there amongst the Ephesians and he's spent time investing with them. We know he has further aspirations. The entire book of Acts is organized such that he's got to make it to Rome. The movement of the gospel has to go Jerusalem, to Jaya, to Samaria, to the ends of the earth, symbolized by that city. And so he can't stay in Ephesus. And we know the journey must go on. But he's remained and he tells us there in Acts 20, 27 that he has stayed until he can know in good conscience that he has not held back from teaching the whole council of God. In other words, there is a sense of wholeness that they require, if they are going to be a sustainable church, and he would be like a parent who had left a small child abandon it too early, left it to fend for itself too soon. Paul did not want to leave the Ephesian church under nourished and malprepared. And so he stayed over two years until he had taught through that whole council of God. We learn elsewhere in the pastoral epistles, that's not a unique game plan. That's not some demand simply for that church, for the church in Ephesus. When Paul's writing later to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3, in a passage that if you know any passage about the doctrine of Holy Scripture, you know these verses, 2 Timothy 3, 16, and 17. You know they famously begin with reference to all scripture being breathed out or inspired by God. But they also end with reference to the fact that all of this scripture is breathed out and inspired by God so that the man of the woman of God will be equipped for every good work. And what's noteworthy there, well there's a lot of noteworthy things, what's noteworthy there for our topic is to consider how all of scripture is meant for preparing us for every or all good works. Now Paul's speaking of course of the Old Testament, but we can observe that what he says there proves to be true also for his own words and the remainder of the New Testament. Paul says that all scripture is breathed out by God and it's useful teaching, rebuke, correction, discipline, or training in righteousness. This idea of pidea, of formation over time, invert you and in character. And the goal is so you'll be ready for every good work. Not just one that meets your personality type, not just one that somehow suits your sense of calling, not just one that might meet the urgent need of the day or the most talked about demand of the moment, but every good work. But here's the catch, all in every are paired. To the extent that we don't pay attention to all of scripture that's breathed out by God, why would we ever think that we're prepared for every good work? To the extent that all of scripture isn't functionally building us up, why would we ever think that we have been formed and ready to go about the entirety of the mission that God has for us? And here's what I want to suggest. We need to think not just about the canon of scripture, the idea that we attest that there are a certain number of books of Bible, but we need to address what we might call the functional canon of scripture. Are we actually attending to those books of the Bible, to all of those books of the Bible? Or are we fixing only on those that match a certain center, a certain metaphor, a certain theme? Only those that seem pertinent to a particular group or perspective, only those that lend themselves to analysis by some particular philosophical program or fit a particular metaphor for cultural engagement. Paul's concern, writing to Timothy and preparing him to carry on the ministry, seems to be the very same thing that marked Paul's own work in starting Timothy's church, that church in Ephesus, the idea of wholeness, the idea that all of scripture is meant to build up all of the people of God for every area of life. I want to suggest that that demands a lot of examination because the Bible is a large book and because we find all sorts of reasons to find our attention narrowed. It can be narrowed by our tribe. Different churches, of course, zero in and zoom in upon certain things and not others. Perhaps most obviously we know. Ever since the Marcianite era of the second century, we continue to see their churches that ignore the entirety of the Old Testament. It's the most obvious canonical amputation. But there are many others, churches that only pay attention to the red letters or churches that only pay attention to the gospels or Christians that only listen to the Apostle Paul because goodness, he seems the most evolved and philosophically astute. We can find that our tribe lends itself to certain texts or perhaps to certain ideas. We are defined by this doctrine or by that focus. We can be defined and limited by our origin story, spiritually speaking, if we came out of legalism or if our tradition was birthed in a particular controversy, that can so focus our attention that we often miss other things for us in God's holy word. We can be shaped also by that which is around us, the tyranny of the urgent, the blinking lights on screens and in the screams of our neighbors. We didn't need to attend to the challenges of the day. But there's of us studying a guest in this weekend will find that however much he's patiently and carefully gonna address what is then seemingly earth ending crisis just before him. He's also even more patiently gonna insist that we pay attention to the totality of God's word, that we not lose sight of the wholeness that is meant to build us up to equip us. As we think about wholeness though, we've got to think about other things and we don't have time to explore all of these in the same level of depth, but I'd suggest three others briefly. As we explore the totality of God's word and over years and decades find that our functional canon comes increasingly to actually match the given canon that we become more fluent and familiar with all that God offers for us in holy scripture, we'll also find that our priorities, secondly, have to be challenged. Priorities matter, not all of the Bible is equally pertinent to the formation of Christian men and women. It's all inspired of God, it's all true, it's all authoritative, it's all life giving. And yet that genealogy isn't as pertinent as that account of the crucifixion. Think of Paul again, writing to the Corinthians, they are as messed up as it gets. It's like watching a reality show and Paul patiently addresses so many skirmishes. He talks about divisiveness and schism. He talks about personality cults. He talks about manipulative leaders. He talks not just about sexual impropriety, but a failure of the group to be capable of addressing that. He talks about the worship war then, which none greater could be imagined, where the rich are getting smashed and the poor are there left without anything to eat or drink, only to watch and shame. He writes about so many things and he addresses them all. They're not beneath him or his God to teach on. But in 1 Corinthians 15, he nonetheless, at the end of all of that, still can say, that he passes on to them that which he received, which was of first importance that Christ died, that he rose according to the scriptures on the third day, that he was seen by many before he ascended on high. Paul is quite capable of adjudicating that, which is primary from that, which is secondary. And one of the great gifts of paying better attention to the wholeness of scripture is we come to realize where our false infacies are. Where our false priorities lie. Where increasingly we are too much shaped by our own curiosities as opposed to God's kingdom concerns. And so a second area we find God disciplining our thought and imagination as we pay more attention to the totality of his word and are equipped more and more to grow mature and full is that our priorities are shaped increasingly not to match our preference nor the pressing issues of the day, but the pertinent truths of God and his holy word. Another area that we find that paying attention to wholeness will shape invariably over time, is that paying attention to the totality of holy scripture will lead us increasingly to see the distinctiveness of its various claims. The Bible of course uses your words to convey God's word. It uses the words of humans. It uses human language. Some centuries ago people did in fact think that the New Testament for example was written in Holy Ghost Greek, that's simply because we hadn't yet discovered the manuscripts that would show that it was the most coin A or common of Greek. It uses even in some of its loftiest of claims very ordinary terms. And so you can go across the river and you can see words like justice. You can see words like peace. You can see them etched in stone and you can see them on any number of op-eds every week. And yet we find they appear in God's holy word. And in all of our daily lives we use other words. I love a good Kaffesito. And I find that basketball is a good thing. The Lord is good and God is love. And when Holy Scripture says God is love it's not quite the same as my delight in Cuban coffee. And when the Lord is named as good it's not exactly the same as saying that basketball is superior to baseball. It's good. Words are used analogously. It's not enough simply to say that they're used in a special way. We've got to appreciate increasingly the distinctive character of those words. And that only comes by reading more widely seeing how they're portrayed across the totality of God's word. We see this perhaps nowhere more pointedly than on the lips of Jesus himself. When we encounter him speaking in the great sermon on the mountain he begins with those beatitudes. Happy. We speak of being happy all the time. People are pursuing happiness on Friday night. I assume right here all over the area. Jesus describes happiness or the good life. But he characterizes it in rather different ways I imagine than what's happening. The various cocktail receptions and parties around town. He characterizes it in ways that seem to go inversely or contrary wise to our expectations as to those of the Roman and the Jewish worlds of his day. And we only see that by reading on seeing the way in which meekness or poverty of spirit or peacemaking get infleshed as we read on in the Gospel account where we learn that peacemaking involves not being nice, involves dying sacrificially for people who are enemies of you. It involves doing that which Christ Himself embodies and manifests on our behalf. And so a second great gift of paying attention to the wholeness of God's word is increasingly perceiving the distinctiveness of the various terms that it uses. Learning to talk Christian, learning to hear God's word, not simply with the prejudice ways we use those terms, whether it's the term redemption or the term love, whether it's the term justice or the term holiness, but to hear them in ways that actually befit the wholeness of God's revelation. And then finally, a third gift of paying attention to the wholeness of God's word is that it demands of us increasingly integrity. I don't just mean purity. Integrity goes beyond speaking of innocence or purity or uprightness. It speaks of this idea of not being fragmented, not being jackal and high, not being Janice faced, not being one way with your people, another way with the stranger, not being one way with the haves, the powerful, another way with the have-nots, and the powerless. Not being one way outwardly that others can observe in another way in the deep recesses, the darkened recesses of your sinful heart. And here too we see again, reading that's a tality of God's word reminds us of the significance of growing whole, growing complete, growing up into the measure of the stature of the wholeness of Christ. We can see this as we read passages like Galatians 3, where Paul can address the people who knew they began by grace, but he asks them, having begun by the spirit and by faith, are you now going to live as though by works? In other words, they've fragmented their life. They've considered their conversion to be God's gift, and now their communal life together is going to be something that's earned by fit and merit, by other conditionalities, by the right sort of ethnicity or the particular form of religious practice. They're going to live in a way that is marked by a legalism of a sort, though they would never confess that of their standing before God, their Janice-faced, and Paul's suggesting throughout those chapters that that's a failure and that it's a failure of misreading the wholeness of God's word. So to respond to it, he doesn't just quote Jesus. In fact, he doesn't quote him at all. To address it, he goes back to the Old Testament, and he quotes from across the Pentateuch, to show that they have paid attention only to particular verses, but not to the totality of the law. And so they've reveled in salvation by grace alone, but they've fallen into a community that's marked by works. They've failed to follow the way of the Lord. And what we learned from that, from Matthew 5, from so many other passages, is that paying attention to the wholeness of God's word doesn't just address the perspectival needs of a given identity group. It doesn't just address those texts or themes that lend themselves to a particular philosophical program. It calls us to wholeness, and that means integrity, to being challenged in every area across the board. That we would know that resurrection has to take hold of the totality of our life, and that means every bit of our imagination, every area of our mind, every recess of our heart, every term that we employ, and everything that we see. I'd love to explore each of those three results further, time precludes, but I hope you can see just a bit of how they allow us to commit ourselves to something, not to ignoring people who bring expertise, employing this or that research program. No, we ought to attend to them. They may well enable us to catch fine grain detail that we'd otherwise miss. They may point us back to examine again where we have failed to listen to the wholeness of God's word, the distinctiveness of its call, the priorities of its teaching, the integrity it demands of us, as Christian sisters and brothers. But that we should never simply allow ourselves to myopically be reduced to those programs. And I'd suggest that that's why systematic theology continues to have a pertinence. Precisely because we do put God in a box. We do pursue this line of inquiry or that center. We do view things from my perspective or from that research program. And the questions of systematic theology are always the questions of wholeness, the protocols of demanding and disciplining our thought, so that we continue to be challenged by God's word. By its wholeness, by its priorities, by its distinctiveness and by the integrity that it demands. And we've got a few minutes left and I'd love to explore whatever unclaredies I've offered but also whatever practical protocols might flow from that, especially those of you who are students growing into theologians right now. So we've got what, 15 minutes for Q&A maybe? - Why don't you trace your own back up? How you got to where you wanted to go? And you know what, just-- - Right, that's interesting. Interesting question, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I can do the most basic of things. You know, I grew up in a Christian home and before too long in a pastor's home and more specifically a Presbyterian home. And one of the great gifts of both my house first and then my education growing up and then my college experience going away was both to find the concerns and priorities and convictions of my own tribe encouraged and robustly held without irony and yet an eager curiosity to learn from whomever else can be engaged. And that was encouraged at home by parents and others, by mentors and teachers in school, by professors in college and graduate school and colleagues later. And in a very real sense, that is a constant challenge. Dr. Sutanto had mentioned that Dr. Scott Swain and I've written a number of things and perhaps a most significant book that we've worked on is called Reform Catholicity. This idea of trying to pay attention to the breadth of God's gift to us in scripture first and in the Christian tradition second. And saying that matters is one thing, learning to listen well and to be challenged and to engage things thoughtfully is another matter. And that's something that I find continually to be a constant challenge to gain the kind of patience and diligence and humility and teachableness. And just frankly the kind of ear and eye to be able to benefit from Bernard as well as Owen, from Thomas as well as Boving, from Augustan as well as Calvin or Luther. And hopefully that continues to be a journey. Do you feel that you're thinking about what brought you as to how you've done that now? Do you feel that S.T. as a crucified building as an approach is particularly helpful? A lot of other times, the introduction to a lot of the theological things-- Right. You and you decide on systematic theology-- Right. --to pay help in pursuing homeless for articulating homeless description? Yeah, I think so. There's a whole second element, a McGilchrist description of how thought and attention works. That is, the right hemisphere is the master. The left is the emissary. I was really hoping Tommy Keane would be here to hear me say this. But anyhow, this doesn't mean theologians are better than New Testament scholars. But it does mean that the way that our brains work-- and I think the way any reading of scripture works actually-- is that you're always contextualizing things in larger forms. And that means increasingly thinking in broader synthetic fashion, it has to be prevalent. But it also has to be checked, because it can be using terribly misperceived contexts. And so there's a symbiosis that's necessary. I do think particularly when you think about our cultural moment museologically, that precisely as most of us are living in contexts that are going to be increasingly biblically illiterate and morally post-Christian and culturally pluralistic in a more radical form, that it's precisely their systematic wide angle perception becomes more important. Because the very words that are used in a verse as simple as John 316 won't make any sense-- at least they won't make Christian sense in talking to someone. And so being able to paint a broader picture becomes very important. I think a new-- when you live in a setting where biblical literacy is higher, where theological fluency is encouraged, not ignored or curtailed by other institutions, then in that kind of setting-- and there are many of these still around the world-- in that kind of setting, you can coast without systematic thought intentionally. But to the extent that that's not the case, the work of Exodus just becomes almost impossible on its own. So I do think for museological purposes, we're at a moment where systematic thought becomes incredibly dire, yeah. So at the beginning of the lecture, you talked about how you think of this as an idealist. It's never an idealist. It's recently much repetitive. In a few minutes, we'll have to say matters of political idealist due to race, class, and so on. But you also argue that we shouldn't be my office, and that we should be attending to some of these studies. Yep. What protocol do you offer, and then being able to do that, it's basically that I need some patients to talk to, say, ignore or just be confused. Right. Let me answer with a different analogy. Probably, like most of you, I've had some severe medical issues at times. And if you haven't, you know relatives who have. And of course, when you're trying to identify and diagnose a problem, you need specialists who are going to be capable of bringing the eye of an oncologist or a very particular kind of oncologist. Or this or that specialist. But of course, the reality in many of us face is you find yourself talking to this and that specialist. And someone says, but I'm an endocrinologist. I can't think about X, Y, or Z. And there's a failure to connect things. And oftentimes, we suffer from a sense of how the whole body suffers to the extent that the expert here isn't in any way in conversation with the lens, the tools of imaging and of study there. Theologically, I think we can have the same sort of thing. You do need specialists. You do need advanced equipment. And a diagnosis that requires a kind of fluency in this comparative linguistic study or in that philosophical reflection. But the crucial thing is to be aware of the limitations of each and of the various interconnections. So for instance, to be able to always ask, what will and what won't this line of study catch? What will or what will it won't allow me to perceive and thus be challenged to intellectual theological repentance by? And mindful of what its benefits and limits will be, what other lines of study do I need to be in conversation with if I want to grow whole and mature and not amputated or imbalanced? And so that of course requires, for most of us, not being renaissance men or women who can do it all, that requires communities of expertise, communities of scholars to be sure, but communities of Christians more broadly. And that's surely one reason why Paul, in Ephesians 1, he prays that you would know the power of God's love. And by the time he loops back to the same prayer in Ephesians 3, he's very emphatic knowing the power of God's love is in a job for a solitary soul. It's the task of that you together, being rooted and grounded in love, would be capable of perceiving the height, depth, width, and breadth of God's love for you in Christ. And so being capable of conversing with one another about what this person's expertise can add, but the limits to what it'll bring before you. And how that has to be complemented by others. We too often think adversarially, we're not at all about others. And that's where I think the job of the systematic thinker is actually not to be an expert of a thing, but to be a conversation broker. And perhaps because I'm a middle child, I'm drawn to doing that, keeping people talking of sorts. But it seems to me that that's the unique challenge of somebody who's gonna try and focus particularly on the broadest connections, or the widest angle lens of perceiving God in relation to all things, how to observe and converse with all those different expertises. - You must have talked about this in the five days, or through a particular way that I thought I was thinking, you could get at the whole, through that kind of perspective, but can you just have the same success? - I can't, 'cause I don't think it's successful as such. If you were to tell the story of biblical studies, I mean, it would be a parallel version of the identitarian form of systematic theology in that just as there are so many perspectives or approaches to viewing doctrine, so there are also just as many centers claimed to be in holy scripture. And I don't take from that that goodness, there's a lot of people who've missed that covenant or kingdom or the gospel or apocalyptic is the right one and everyone's just wrong, but rather that the question itself is not helpful. But that the studies and the research actually can be quite helpful. So I'm not convinced that apocalypse in Christ is the organizing theme of the entire New Testament that strikes me as very strange to put it kindly. But a lot of scholars doing a lot of work on that theme are able to bring out elements of particular books in the New Testament, which you wouldn't be able to hear in the same way apart from thinking that theme. Similarly, with New Creation or Kingdom, where even something is brought as covenant, covenant doesn't bring out every element of every book. The Bible doesn't in the same way sound in each part of the canon. And so I would suggest we can glean from those studies, the good of each of them. But the form of the question that somehow any one of them could be the be-all or end-or-all. That's the myopia that I think we find our attention unhelpfully narrowed. - But you know, things that are made out of the form of sense of, I heard the book in the library that the book is made out of the body of God's body. It's just so intriguing to me, I believe, that the book is made out of the body of God's body. - Right. It's a great book by Jeffrey Wainwright, I've read it. It's wonderful, lots of good material. There are tons of things it doesn't, and I would suggest can't quite say using that category, which isn't to say that you can't somehow logically relate everything in the Bible to doxology. Simply, if that's your organizing lens, you're likely gonna miss or underperceive other elements. - It would be akin to somebody. I'm reminded of the great theologian Chris Rock. In one of his earlier theological tomes, he was commenting on growing up and how his father thought robotusin was the solution to every medical problem. That will solve many conundrums. Robotusin will either fix the problem or put you to sleep, right? Which eventually gets you right. But when you've got a broken arm, it doesn't help, right? And it may actually on certain occasions, when it's just putting you to sleep, actually mask what's really going on. It may actually hurt or at least hinder perceiving what the underlying problem is. And I would suggest if we take one theme, whether it's kingdom or worship or covenant or apocalypse, it will help in certain cases, because that's the matter at hand. In others though, it will hinder us hearing the text in its own terms. And other themes that would be more pertinent to us exploring that and receiving that. That would be the reason for my hesitancy. But go read that book, it's a great book. Yeah. - So in the near study of a visiting paying attention to the Catholic scripture, a couple of the God words and distinctiveness, the power and integrity, like, where are you drawn? You're influenced not only throughout all history, whether it's cross and low in Catholic or orthodox, but maybe even contemporary scholarship. Where do you see people doing that? - Right. - There's a host of people who are inspiring in that regard, attempting to think broadly in that way. You're hearing from a number of bobbin scholars and certainly like no human. As with every human, neither he nor anyone succeeds totally, but that's very much a concern of his. You can think of other recent theologians, like John Webster, for instance, trying to think of God in relation to all things and to pay attention to not just Christology or creation theology, but to the totality of what God's word says. And again, not being able to work that all out in one person's lifetime, but aiming at that, trying to train theologians to ask about that. Augustin's a great example, and that's the reason for talking to this at the beginning of a weekend looking at city of God, because Augustin has the biggest crisis we could imagine to address. The tyranny of the urgent is real and the eternal city has just been sacked for a weekend. And it's in some ways akin to living on September 12th, in people's perception. And he addresses patiently with great care and expertise, the immediate questions and responds to specific criticisms of Christianity. He doesn't dismiss that, like Paul writing to Corinth. He deals with all of that, but he doesn't restrict himself to that. And he goes on to pay attention to the whole of scripture and to provide a wider, more nuanced way of perceiving. Doing some detailed exegesis of passages like Genesis 1 to 3, or 1 Corinthians 15, 42, and following, but also this very wide angle lens, looking at literally the totality of scripture and post-piblical history. So that'd be as strong an inspiration as I could possibly name. Yeah, either. - Oh, that last question. - Make it good, no pressure. - So one might imagine somebody receiving some of the criticism being myopic and they would respond, by saying, well, that's good because you're not ex, you're not below, you know. The status quo benefits you, you're afforded people need to not have to worry about whatever the issue is. How do we respond to that criticism in terms of your statement? - Sure, yeah. That is a common animating concern, particularly on the the identitarian diversification of theology. That's where the example of trans books, actually interesting. Somebody's still pursuing that line of concern, but observing that an identitarian reading is, in his case in Asian-American, it limits hearing a whole host of issues felt needs in of itself. And so I do think there's an imminent critique you can offer of that saying, your issues aren't all defined by any one feature of life. Humans don't work that way. Communities don't work that way, which isn't to deny that various features are themselves real issues and may very well actually have real tragic consequence. And that thinking through that with disciplinary rigor in the form of certain experts in research programs is gonna serve all of us well or can and should do so because many of us won't have the time, the capacity or the familiarity to do so. But I think we could offer not just that imminent critique, we could also simply point to the totality of God's word. And particularly in times of crisis, the imagination of the people of God is wide and not constricted, right? Again, to go medical when you're in a severe medical crisis, it's precisely then when there's raw pain that your world shrinks. It's very hard to think about the person in the next room. You're thinking about your abdomen or something in your vertebrae or a brain bleed, you know. What we observe in scripture is precisely, particularly in the moments of utmost crisis, that's when God responds not by narrowing into focus on the immediate issue, but by widening the perspective of the people of God. So the problem of evil does not come up in the prophets, but the teaching about God's sovereign teacher and sentence and holiness and his ultimate purpose is does in a way like nowhere else. Similarly in the book of Revelation, you know, that's not a time for talking about sort of a martyrological kind of perspective on how woeful early Christian existence is, though it really was, but for this apocalyptic imaginative rethinking of how God is amazingly bringing promises to fulfillment and glory is coming as with Christ through suffering. And so I think the very form of how scripture responds to Christ's auto-shape our individual responses to Christ's in our life, but also communal ones, which isn't to say you don't talk about challenges where individuals, communities suffer in profound ways, but you're called not to zero in. In fact, scripture suggests you will, and so you're disciplined to widen your gaze. (upbeat music) - Well, hey, everybody, one more thought. We're all gonna be at the Evangelical Theological Society Annual Conference in San Antonio at the end of the month of November, so maybe we'll see you there. Three of us are presenting. So let me just go ahead and go around the table. Dr. Lee, what are you doing at the ETS? And I should also say you're sticking around for the Society of Biblical Literature as well also in San Antonio at the end of November. So what are you up to at the conferences? - I am gonna be both at ETS and SBL. The, I'm presenting the paper at ETS. It's part of a larger programmatic work I've been doing on the Abrahamic covenant, particularly in Genesis chapter 12, verses one through three, and to share some thoughts there on how the great nation promises central there in that passage as well as in the history of salvation. I'm also gonna be going to SBL and participating in a little few little things there. - Thanks, Peter, and how about you, Gray? - Yeah, thanks. I'm very excited to be there attending both ETS and SBL or rather AAR, the American Academy of Religion Annual Conference right after ETS. I'm excited to hear Isaac Whitney's presentation Herman Boving and Reformer Thedoxi on the theology of the body. Isaac Whitney is part of our advanced studies program cohort here at RTS DC, very proud of him as students and I'm glad that he's presenting already at a context like ETS. So that's gonna be Tuesday, I believe at about 3 3 30 PM in San Antonio. And then I will be attending and presenting within a panel on the Neo-Calvinism introduction book that we publish with Alexa Impress. Cam Clawing organized a wonderful panel for this occasion in which we'll include Vincent Baycoat at Wheaton University, Drew Martin out of Covenant theological Seminary, Uche Anisor at Biola University and also Gail Dornbos at Dort University. All good friends and I'm really excited to hear from them and to respond to them in that panel. I'll be looking forward to our very own Mike Allen who's gonna be presenting in our Reform Theology History group at AAR in the Steering Committee for that particular group and this particular year. We are having a session on Confessions so it'll be very exciting indeed. - That's great. Lots going on on the ST side. - Lots going on. - Tom and Keane. - Yeah, I'm doing two things. One would be this presentation on a little paper on cognitive metaphor theory. Is it CMT, is it true, but is it useful? So for those who don't know, cognitive metaphor theory is just one of these, it's a fancy term for, you build metaphors out of your basic experience and it's a natural fundamental process of, not only language but just understanding. So with that observation, does that actually help us interpret scripture? Is it a tool that we can use to uncover new knowledge or is it just a description of what we do? So that's paper one. And then on Wednesday, we're doing this Greg Lanier and Will Ross at RTS, RTS faculty. I have a organized book on the Septuagint, the authority of the Septuagint and I'll be presenting the New Testament component of that. - That's great. - With that paper. So excited about that. - All right, so if you're out there, Paul Jean and I will also be at the conference. So if you see us in the book room, come up and grab one of us. We'd love to meet you and look forward to seeing you in San Antonio.