Out of all the new theology book releases this year, one of the most promising works is Gary Dorrien’s Social Ethics in the Making. Dorrien is the world’s leading expert on the American liberal theological tradition. He is a wonderfully balanced and insightful historian of modern theology and this book will almost certainly become the history of modern Christian social ethics.

Here’s a glimpse at the table of contents:
Introduction
1 Inventing Social Ethics: Francis Greenwood Peabody, William Jewett Tucker, and Graham Taylor
2 The Social Gospel: Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Harry F. Ward
3 Lift Every Voice: Reverdy C. Ransom, Jane Addams, and John A. Ryan
4 Christian Realism: Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, John C. Bennett, and Paul Ramsey
5 Social Christianity as Public Theology: Walter G. Muelder, James Luther Adams, John Courtney Murray, and Dorothy Day
6 Liberationist Disruptions: Martin Luther King Jr., James H. Cone, Mary Daly, and Beverly W. Harrison
7 Disputing and Expanding the Tradition: Carl F. H. Henry, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Novak, and Jim Wallis
8 Dealing With Modernity and Postmodernity: Charles Curran, James M. Gustafson, Gibson Winter, Cornel West, Katie G. Cannon, and Victor Anderson
9 Economy, Sexuality, Ecology, Difference: Max L. Stackhouse, Dennis P. McCann, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Marvin M. Ellison, 10 John B. Cobb, Jr., Larry Rasmussen, Daniel C. Maguire, Sharon Welch, Emilie M. Townes, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, María Pilar Aquino, and David Hollenbach
11 Borders of Possibility: The Necessity of “Discredited” Social Gospel Ideas
Index

Christian spirituality is often understood in terms of a quest. We think of God as some thing out there after whom (or from whom!) we diligently search or quest. And so we seek God under, beneath, behind, above, or beyond temporality. God is some thing who is outside of it all. Temporal reality, that is ordinary life, thereby becomes something that must be penetrated or even overcome. Of course, we are always in this stage of seeking, for to claim to have “found” God would appear to be utterly presumptuous, would it not? And what would we do then, after we found God? The practice of questing for God is not limited to the “mystics” in our midst. Christians “seek” God in any number of ways, whether it be in social action or contemplation, rocking out to U2 or worshiping in a more traditional way.

According to Robert Jenson, however, the gospel is “an attack on this religious way of dealing with time,” for the gospel “denies the eternity of timelessness” (110). This questing for God is “regularly launched by some event in the world, that makes us see the peril of our temporality and suggests a refuge” (110). Instead, “the true eternity is temporal liberty, from exactly such fixity” (110). Jenson goes so far as to say the gospel unmasks this God of timeless eternity as Satan. This pseudo-God is bent on destroying us with the guilt of our own past and deludes us in a false sense of security in who what we are. In other words, the God of the gospel, the Father of Jesus, is not someone or something to whom we flee. We do not need to fear, flee, or defend ourselves from the future precisely because “Jesus’ triumph is our future” (110).

Christian spirituality is, therefore, not about questing for God, for the gospel reveals that “God” is not some distant thing above, beneath, within, or behind it all in some other realm of being. God is not out there to be reached for. The gospel identifies the eternity of God with radical temporality, for gospel reveals “God” as Jesus in death and resurrection. This is the crucial point. Jesus is not the revelation of some distant and hidden God. In other words, God does not lie “behind” the man Jesus. Rather, God is identified with the very person, the historical man, Jesus. Thus, in Jenson’s own words, God is “not transcendent by his distance, to be quested after; he is transcendent in that he is coming” (111). The Christian spiritual life is perhaps better described as discipleship or pilgrimage, for we follow a person on a journey toward a goal. And this goal is Jesus himself, a man who is “framed by the same time and space as we; we are not called to seek him, but to follow him” (112).

My dear friends Drew and Dana Johnson recently launched culture goes POP! a blog devoted to “rants, raves and reviews about movies, music, and media.” The husband and wife duo make for a real team. From Dana’s recent post Why I Love Iron Man to Drew’s Remembering Sydney Pollack, they’ve managed to kick off their new blog with a bang. Dana and Drew are my go-to experts on all things related to film and they want to become yours as well. There’s my pitch -subscribe now.

“It is the social function of the church to intrude an ultimate vision into the comfortable arrangements and watered-down values of political and economic everyday, to be the unauthorized upsetter of the achieved world.”

Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973) 85.

In the sixth chapter of Story and Promise Robert Jenson reminds us that the gospel’s morality is a morality of freedom. Contrary to the legalistic construals of morality that have so often plagued Christianity, the gospel’s specific morality is, in Jenson’s words, “a matter of opened opportunities” (Story and Promise 81). The gospel’s morality is not concerned with what we ought to do, but what we may do, because Jesus lives.

Because Jesus lives, Christian morality is, then, not about laws, but about freedom. It does not follow the pattern “Do this and do that because you ought/must/should/would be best advised/will be rewarded.” Rather, as Jenson rightly emphasizes, the gospel’s discourse on morality “imposes no conditions whatever, on anything at all” (82). Instead, the pattern of the gospel’s morality is: “You may . . . because, if Jesus is risen, there is no need to fear . . .” (81).

As I alluded to in my last post, only in recent years have I come to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. By “belief,” I don’t just mean a mere intellectual assent to certain dogmatic propositions or truth-claims. Indeed, “belief” in the resurrection of Jesus is nothing less than affirming belief in the aliveness of God. To echo the apostle Paul, if Jesus lies dead in the grave, if he is not alive and with us, then our faith is in vain. If Jesus is dead, then we have no hope. The popular idea that Jesus was a “good teacher” and a “wise man,” akin to Gandhi, provides us with little hope if Jesus has not been raised. For if Jesus has not been raised then there is no future for humanity other than death. Because Jesus is alive, our memory of Jesus’ life, ministry, and his giving himself wholly for others is not simply a recollecting of past events. That is to say, Jesus is not finally useful for our work of building peace, of learning to love each other in all of our differences, for his very person is the peace that we seek. The gospel is the news that this person, this peace, is alive, present, and full of promises for the future.

All of our hopes for communion with our enemy and with our neighbour, our hope for revolution, for the end of capitalism, will finally end in death, if Jesus has not been raised. But, since death has been left behind in the resurrection of Jesus, we do indeed have hope for the future. By virtue of his resurrection Jesus offers us unconditionally the promise of a future in God. This future as future is not a stagnant one, but a future full of surprises. As Robert Jenson says, “If Jesus lives, his future will surprise us. The surprise of his aliveness will be how he will include all our follies and triumphs, each singular variety of publicanism and phariseeism, and the individual plot and style of every human life, in the mutual fulfillment wrought by his hope and acceptance” (Story and Promise, 44). Our future together - the revolution - finally finds rest in Jesus. As Jenson rightly asserts, to say “Jesus is risen” is just another way of saying “We may await surprises dramatically appropriate to his life of unconditional hope for his fellows and the death which came of it; and dramatically appropriate also as the fulfillment of our life, in all its individuality, glory, and alienation” (44).

This may prove to be a most difficult question, but if you could name one book that dramatically changed your life what would it be? For me, this is a difficult question because a number of books have changed me in a variety of ways. And as I look back I realize that certain books have helped prepare the way for the impact of others. The most important book for my personal and theological development has to be Rowan Williams’ book Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel. In all honesty, this book more than any other was fundamentally integral to my faith journey. Reading this (after four years of heavy doses of biblical criticism) I began to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus again. Runners up include William Cavanaugh’s Theopolitical Imagination and Stanley Hauerwas’ The Peaceable Kingdom. Again, I’m not limiting this to theology books, so let’s hear it. What is the one book that dramatically changed your life? Why and in what ways?

The right of liberal democratic states to defend themselves with nuclear weapons - and this seems to be accepted by the international community - is in effect an affirmation that suicidal war can be legitimate. This leads me to the thought that the suicide bomber belongs in an important sense to a modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of a free political community: To save the nation (or to found its state) in confronting a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound by ordinary moral constraints.

Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 63.

“The violence at the heart of liberal political doctrine makes this clear: the right to self-defense eventually calls for a project of universal redemption. Another way of putting this is to say that some humans have to be treated violently in order that humanity can be redeemed.”

Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 62-63.

Ever since I took a class with legendary peace activist Marv Davidov I’ve been following the “cluster bomb” debate. It seems a big step forward was made yesterday when the UK decided to not only ban cluster munitions from the military but also ban the US from storing stockpiles on UK soil. Read the story here.