Just arrived from Amazon “No human being would stack books like this” Bill Murray as Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters, 1984

I’ve spent the last week doing all my bookreading in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, by Eberhard Bethge, since last Friday when I bought it at Border’s (with a 30% coupon). I’ve read about 200 pages, and I’m now at the sopt where he has returned from America, has met Barth and had many conversations with him and continued correspondence, and Continue Reading

I am starting in on Stanley Hauerwas’ essay The Church as God’s New Language , from the Hauerwas Reader , pp. 142-162, referenced in a footnote in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p.39 n32 In the note Smith quotes Hauerwas from another essay in Modern Theology saying: “not only that Barth’s Dogmatics should be read as a training manual for Christian speech, Continue Reading

(I actually wrote this post yesterday, and just saw that I had yet to move it into Publish from Draft. Although I have taken what might seem to be great pains to press this point,and posted on simialr things just a while ago, I found this post to be reflective also of some different ways I have wanted to pose Continue Reading

In Introducing Radical Orthodoxy ch.2, under A Reformed Rendition, on. pp.82-83 Smith talks about Reformed Tradtion’s Michael Horton saying that Turretin and Geerhardus Vos are the first post-modern theologians, “decidedely post-foundationalists” that “do not try to justify their claims by appeal to natural reason”. “Their method is NOT bringing a prior philosophical construction to the Scriptures; rather, their method— centered Continue Reading

Smith identifies what he sees as a tendency in Dooyeweerd: Dooyeweerd sometimes seems to think that there is a “biblical-founded philosophy” that even employs a unique language, untainted by apostate ground-motives. Thus, he sometimes levels the charge of “scholasticism” or “synthesis” simply on the basis of language and categories employed. IRO, p. 154, n35 And so I find yet another Continue Reading

the majority of modern Christian theological and eccleasial projects operate as colonies of the Tubingen empire , where they assume the neutrality of other sciences, receive the objective findings of such neutral sciences, and then seek to correlate the claims of Christian confession with these facts — thus furnishing , indirectly, an apologetic demonstration of the truth of Christian revelation. Continue Reading

the church , as a transnational body, must necessarily both transcend the boundaries of the state and also be a fractive force within the state precisely because it asserts difference — an antithesis. IRO, p.134 Cavanaugh, and to some degree, Hauerwas, is concerned about the church ceding politics to the state, such as : New Christendom ecclesiology (of Jacques Maritain) Continue Reading

I have metnioned in a few posts here lately as I sit with Introducing Radical Orthodoxy about how I am anticipating a discussion about just how an apologetic is best carried out in light of RO’s seemingly basic principle of always being “distinctly Christian”. I know and believe that the church’s best “apologetic” is in its being the church, but Continue Reading

This question, asked as a prelude to dialogue, engagement, or often confrontation between modes of thought and ontologies, is a good way to describe what much of my journey through the first two chapters of Introducing Radical Orthodoxy Movable Theoblogical: The Church IS a cultural critique I want to return to the previous post (linked above) , and especially to Continue Reading

the church does not have a cultural critique; it is a cultural critique. Its politics is an ecclesiology. Central to the project of RO, then, is a radical consideration of politics — and the political nature of the church and gospel– in a way that does not simply concede political expertise to the secular but rather attempts to unfold a Continue Reading

This is why a movmement that is so contemporary is nevertheless deeply committed to tradition, convinced that the insights of the Spirit given to the early church have much to say to the contemporary church — and to the world. Is this implying something about a lack of legitimacy of “ongoing revelation” or just that the early church is most Continue Reading

Some summaries and quotes from Chapter One in defining and describing “What is RO?” While RO may have a program, we should not therefore conclude that it has a singular agenda built “on a discrete edifice that purports to be a stronghold”. Rather RO describes a certain spirit that is “a call to look again at things one has too Continue Reading

My reading of Introducing Radical Orthodoxy (IRO) has been a bit on the defensive. But I think that is a good tool for really engaging with the subject. Here, it has been James A.K. Smith’s article he wrote after Wallis visited the Calvin College campus (I’ve said this earlier, but I wanted to re-state it a little differently now that Continue Reading