Panel | N. T. Wright, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, and Scott Sunquist

[Music] [Music] well we have the great opportunity now to have a conversation together we'll do what we did last night where there will be an opportunity for two of our faculty to uh respond and engage with tom about some of the things that he said then we'll have an opportunity for some of your questions to be raised so the two esteemed faculty that are joining us uh this morning our first uh velamati professor of systematic theology at fuller in the school of theology and scott sundquist who's the dean of the school of intercultural studies so we're very very glad that you could join us and look forward to your opportunities to uh to respond if we just begin with you villamati and just uh uh begin by sharing what you would like to and then uh tom will respond and then we can pick it up from there so thank you thank you uh bishop first of all it was a rich feast and there are so many things we could talk about but i have to say uh even though i'm not methodist that my heart is strangely warmed when a biblical scholar is talking about the doctrine of the trinity some of your colleagues are not so fond of um of the doctrine of the trinity and also because um i'm coming uh directly from the building preaches muslim christian dialogue which um bishop you have also been part of and of course talking about trinity and unity is always the subtext what really struck me um and of course i had read already the book also and also in your earlier writings but today the the uh passionate um the the way you so passionately talk about the the practical implications of monotheism for judaism because a systematic theologian i am used to reading for the past many years texts by my colleagues who are talking about almost like peturatively of monotheism as opposed to trinitarian faith like for example my great hero moltmann who uh very peturatively names kind of a monotheism as something uh almost like a semi not christian and and and now when we i mean having this talk about um the um this overwhelming um importance and presence of one god uh among his people and then when you link it with a very passionate talk about the meaning of christ and then the spirit i think this is very very healthy for us who do christian doctrine and and we are we have to be reminded um of the of the narrative and dynamic and kind of life-oriented meaning of the of the blockchain of the trinity so i i really um i mean i was not overstating when i said my heart is uh very much i warmed thank you i i would love to know more about moltman's rejection of or at least holding back from what he means by monotheism and to try to figure out what's going on there i'm not a moltman scholar or specialist at all um and just know little bits about that i wonder if it's connected with though what i've heard about moltman's idea of why god creates that he uses this rabbinic doctrine of zimzam that god retreats into himself so that there's a space for there to be creation and it seems to me that's exactly the wrong way around that i would say that um god overflows with generous love to make a world that is other than himself in order then to fill it with with his love um and so when you then get in maltman and some others um i'm not sure is miroslav still around or has he gone home um that's that's too bad and because it'd be interesting to have his responses as well um that people have often explored the doctrine of the trinity in relation to church as community it seems to me the danger with that is that it still becomes part of a closed circle and it seems to me what you get in say galatians 4 is an outward movement of god as trinity not simply to say here is a community but here is here is actually mission that the the trinitarian god is is as with a missionary god um and also then yes i suppose monotheism if you simply say there is one god that is always in danger of collapsing into some kind of totalitarianism and obviously i think that's what molten will be be worried about um from looking at say first maccabees where you get this fierce monotheism over against um antiochus epiphanes and uh second maccabees where in chapter seven where you get the the the seven brothers who are being killed for their refusal to to compromise on torah they are all talking about there is one god and you wicked pagans are actually on the wrong side and watch out et cetera um it's it's not so much a totalitarian doctrine as a protest doctrine um and then akiba himself of course um that that's how it functioned that you cling on to this business that there is one god therefore we are not going to submit precisely to totalitarian pagan regimes now of course that can turn round and it then can be used as a weapon but i think its natural habitat is in that protest movement and i think that's where paul then picks it up and develops it he doesn't lose any of that he merely trinitarianizes it does that make sense yeah good good let's good i think that uh one of the things that the benefit you have from being here is we have three schools and so you have people analyzing you right now psychologically that's fine and then also i'm thinking as a a missionary as well as a missiologist and the last year language was a nice segue into some of my observations uh it's been my observation that most people in the world as in the ancient world do take a look at the world as divided up and parcelled and there's certain idols or there's certain areas of powers that control different things in the world and i like your chapter 9 very much because it comes up with this very strong monotheistic understanding and let me just tell you a quick story of how important this is uh velimati works and has worked in the buddhist world quite a bit and even though there's this philosophical buddhism but on a grassroots level uh there are spirit houses everywhere people are trying to appease the spirits and so you want to control all these different areas we had students working among the eastern chamber in vietnam who are not islamic background the way a lot of cham are but they're sort of hindu backgrounds so they have all these different idols and places and sacred stuff they come in and hear about jesus christ and they're just overwhelmed so one of our students went there for two weeks to teach bible studies so he was prepared you know about the life of jesus about sanctification all this stuff so he had all these lessons and he asked them well what is it that you'd like to hear about and they said creation for two weeks he was just scrambling like mad to talk about creation and if i remember correctly in the early church there were as many or more commentaries on the hexameron as anything else because of the in the ancient world with all the different deities and polytheism to figure out one god creating everything and setting everything in motion and that was just so radical but also so beautiful and because that gave meaning to everything that i do because i'm connected to this one god i remember when i was in singapore reading the book the kitchen god's wife and recognizing that if you take care of the kitchen god you've taken care of the food and the hearth and that sort of thing and there are other areas of your life that can just spin out of control completely but you have this taken care of and as you were talking about this today i was thinking of the places where the church is growing in the world so much of that growth has to do with a very radical understanding of monotheism but also there's an intimacy because this god that's out there for example for the chinese it might be heaven in africa it could be the creator god that we know nothing about but we do know about these ancestors and these things here now all of a sudden this creator god who's so big and so beyond has walked among us and so there's an intimacy and an availability to this god that was never there before so um speaking again as a missiologist as i was reflecting on i said this is really valuable stuff this is so important for people training to plant churches people playing planning to work in most areas of the world and as our western world becomes so much more pluralistic with many different sort of deities we divide things up and so forth to recover this understanding of monotheism is really quite important so that's really exciting thank you um obviously i'm not uh in any sense a missionary in in that way and uh these stories and i've heard similar elsewhere are really really exciting because i think for so many christians in the western world they've just grown up with yeah god as creator and then that collapses into debates about did god do it in six periods of 24 hours or not which is you know that's an avoidance technique that's that's a kind of um you will answer that in the lecture tonight um i'll when i get to that point i'll invite you up and you can say that what needs to be said um and by the way if anyone is out there psychologizing me i'll give you my wife's email and you can send her the results and that's that's just just fine i'm sure she'd like to know um but uh i it seems to me what you were just saying is about creation and covenant and uh it's very interesting in in new testament studies um how there's been enormous resistance to covenant theology from um the lutheran tradition and i think of of say kaseman who's a great commentator on romans just didn't want to have any of that stuff because that was this in his view that was this jewish thing which paul was opposing um although even in casement despite his best efforts it does keep coming back because he's too good in exegete to ignore it but it seems to me systematically that's you describe it exactly that the creator god is also the god of the covenant and vice versa the danger with covenant theology and we see this in a low grade in contemporary western um spirituality where um was it you saying this the other day mark i think that that we just get matey with god and uh or with what's in islam saying it that that that god just becomes our best buddy and we sort of say hi good morning god and and hang on wait a minute um that that's that's the covenant shrunk to our own little understandings you always have to say this god with whom we're in covenant is the creator of all things and the sun and the moon was singing about before and so that dynamic it's quite difficult i think um for churches to to to stick with both sides of that um but i think paul is is a great help in doing that what i thought was so exciting about this morning was the way that you continued really what you began last night which is to try to demonstrate the work that theology is meant to do a work not just of the transformation of our mind but the way that that transformation of our mind then leads to transformation of life in various ways and i was struck by this partly because i've been preaching my way through philippians in our chapel uh this fall or through the school year and one of the things that has always struck me is that philippians 1 9 that we might discern that which is best is really this thematic verse which is ultimately expressed and clarified in philippians 2 which is the place where we then get the traction to be able to live in this kind of unity and and holiness that you're describing i wonder if you could just comment on that in in that way that that theme yeah works its way through yeah i mean i'll i'll be coming back to philippians 1 really 6 to 11 this evening because the whole idea of the one who began a good work and you will bring it to completion and what is going on in between those two um and the danger again with western christianity particularly in the protestant tradition is that anything going on between those two is we're a bit worried about it in case it means that we are somehow adding our works to god's free gift and and sovereign salvation etc and paul isn't nearly as hung up about that as we are with our traditions and and so yes in the middle of it the moral discernment but it's not just moral discernment it's the theological okay i'll take a step back from this because it's really rather important um in the ancient philosophical traditions as you know um physics ethics and logic go together that is to say the study of what is goes together with how we know what is and together they go with how we then behave and for paul the new world that has come into being in jesus is the new physics if you like the new creation and in order to know god in god's new world you need this new kind of knowledge but together that will precisely generate this then is how we are to live and when i see paul doing that actually so explicitly i get really frustrated at the way in which so much western christianity thinks well here is the doctrine of salvation and then there's a sort of a bit about ethics at the bottom somewhere which um yeah there's a few rules that you're supposed to obey but it doesn't really matter because we believe in grace not law and i think no we're invited to be part of god's new world and that means a whole new life and that means the thinking of discerning and then as as was said last night it comes down to tutto fronite in uh in two five think this among yourselves have this mind and the fact as i said last night the fact that that is difficult for us to translate is a sign that our contemporary categories are not really doing a good job for us in helping us articulate what it is that paul is saying the theme of the inauguration that i've experienced this fall was really built on that text and the sense of having this mind among us which is in christ jesus and i do think that it's it is a way of as a as a single tag of framing a great deal of what you are trying to argue in the whole book and in the the working out of the information right our lives great we're gonna have a chance to uh respond to some of the questions that you would like to ask and up on the screen we're going to have a comment from tom and then just one of our respondents to each of the questions so let me uh invite you to read them i appreciate your emphasis on the renewal of our minds and the importance of all christians engaging in theology paul's ministry like that of jesus was also characterized by miracles healing and miraculous signs what is the place of supernatural acts of spirit in the church today okay um didn't know we were going there you can pass that on i um two things to say first which is one god is god and god can do whatever god wants to do i'm very clear about that um god does do remarkable things um most of the time most of us only hear about this second hand or whatever but occasionally when it happens in our own lives or the lives of our families we think wow this stuff's real oh my goodness you know and then we go back to a humdrum existence again but i'm i'm very very clear god can do whatever god wants to do and we should celebrate that and and be cheerful about it i don't think healings and so on stopped at the end of the first generation or any nonsense like that second thing is that this blessed word supernatural doesn't do us any favors because though it has a good pedigree going way back into much older english usage through the enlightenment it got bundled up with the implicit deism and then epicureanism of western culture so that when people now say supernatural often they are reinscribing rather than deconstructing a split-level world in which god is a very long way away and we are down here um and said that supernatural means god invading from the outside and then going away again and i want to say no the doctrine biblical doctrine of creation is of a god who having made the world remains dynamically involved with it and heaven and earth as i've often said are not far removed from each other they are the overlapping and interlocking spheres of divine reality so if by supernatural you mean that within that strange overlap and interlock and it seems to me that's what sacramental theology is all about that there are times and places and actions which that is kind of particularly manifest if within that you mean does god sometimes then heal people etc absolutely yes he does but if by using the word supernatural you are in effect doing the split level thing again then i will say no sorry don't go there not because i'm a naturalist or materialist but precisely because i believe in the heaven earth overlap and this is something which i think with the new biblical vision of the temple which has come up very strongly in biblical scholarship over the last generation we are better able to grasp now than we were because the temple was all about heaven and earth coming together and when heaven and earth come together funny stuff happens affirming what you said bishop about the supernatural um thomas aquinas had it right when he said that supernatural does not mean like against nature but something that goes beyond transcends it's still so there is we we don't have a dualistic world so therefore and therefore there'll be different types of of healings which may happen second comment is that um there's a great irony in post-enlightenment epistemology uh if you believe in the big spirit god you shouldn't have a problem with lesser spirits or with uh so anybody who believes that there is god um and certainly if believes that the idea of christ is quite not intuitive to say that therefore nothing else can happen and thirdly um healings uh and even exorcisms and others they were very much um integral part of jesus's ministry telling us that salvation and the new way of living in the world encompasses all of life it can be embodiment it can be spiritual but they all belong the same reality and therefore it's interesting uh that in many religions for example in islam it is sufism which is the almost like the main main manifestation of spirituality which is very much open to visions charismatic elements and such or terabyte buddhism is i know which is a non-teached religion if you go to any theravada land you can't have you don't find any more any mystic setting and i know that missiles don't talk about animism anymore right it's a good word so so it's almost like pan religious and and and human intuition that uh if i believe in god god should have some dealings with everything in my life yeah yeah just a couple of very quick comments um the comment about jesus exorcisms and so on reminds me that uh it seems to me in the scriptures when god does the extraordinary things that he sometimes does sometimes they seem to be random but frequently they are part of a larger agenda and in the gospels particularly jesus exorcisms are clearly part of his kingdom work and they're meant i think by the evangelists at least to lead the eye up to the greatest exorcism of all which is the cross itself um and so they're not just random things um the second thing is about thomas aquinas that clearly that what you said makes sense because of his whole thing of grazia paphik niktolik um that grace fulfills nature and doesn't abolish it there's a danger in western protestantism that in the rejection of a kind of easy-going catholic natural theology of as though it was just sort of topping up with a little bit of grace and will be there sort of thing that we go to the other extreme and i think granted the 20th century history of theology with carl barton so on reacting against nazi paganism basically there's a danger that we then as i said simply re-inscribe a split-level world which which then does cause problems at the local pastoral level when people only have split-level language to talk about what god is doing in their lives and then they get into models because of that let's take one more question and then we'll close you assert that the trinity is functionally irrelevant in many christians lives can you summarize some practical daily implications of living with faith in the triune god uh having held romans off for a moment i'm just going to go straight to romans 8. um we're also relieved really you'll get more later um in romans 8 paul talks surprisingly because it doesn't seem to fit into his argument at first about the spirit groaning within us helping us in our weakness because we don't know how to pray as we ought but the spirit groans within us within articulate cronings and paul frames that within the larger picture of the groaning of all creation and then he talks about we the church groan and then he says the spirit groans within us as an extraordinary triple groaning like sort of three russian dolls within one another um and uh in each case it's this image of of the birth pangs um and it seems to me that that tells us something enormously profound about the vocation of the church this is part of a passage in which paul is saying that we suffer with him in order to be glorified with him in order to share his inheritance the he being jesus and it prepares for um 8 29 where he says um that we are made to be younger brothers of jesus that we might be conformed to the image of his son that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters and so how i see that and this is just deeply trinitarian theology in practice is that it is the vocation of the church to be in prayer at the place where the world is in pain um and many people here i suspect do that in their ministries all the time and we don't understand what's going on but when we find that the pain of the world is resonating with the pain in our own communities and in our own individual lives and then we stand in the presence of god without even knowing how to pray and maybe some people think he's talking about praying in tongues there i'm not absolutely sure i don't really mind whether it is or not but the point is the inarticulate prayer of holding on to the pain our own and the worlds in the presence of god is how we know then that the spirit is at work within us and the spirit and the father are in communication and we are being formed according to the pattern of christ the cruciform pattern of christ that it seems to me is a very very rich trinitarian theology of prayer and also of ministry in the real world amen i have nothing to prove upon that except paul's words i've been crucified with christ is no longer how you live but christ who lives in me and to understand our life as a life of participating in christ and therefore suffering with christ and that in that way we're fulfilling uh those sufferings for the sake of the world that's it's very deeply trinitarian yeah it's incarnational it's missiological and whenever i preach or talk about that i just find people remembering their own sufferings and remembering christ's presence there and if i can just end with one quick story i was with a communist woman in china who lost her father lost her uh husband and i was sitting there looking at her i said here's this communist woman what do i say to her and i said you know the most important chapter in the bible is repeated more than anything else is psalm 23. and so i looked at her and i said the lord is my shepherd i shall not want and i went through the valley of the shadow of death and i said god promises to walk with us you know through all those times and that kind of identification not only he comes and walks with us but then we are invited to let go of ourselves and to enter into his suffering is i think just it'd be some really rich helpful spirituality for christians in the united states today in the west probably in scotland too maybe even in scotland yes we have a lot of sheep and quite a lot of shepherds yes yes um and uh yeah and quite a few dark valleys yeah quite a lot of dark valleys yeah thank you very much thank you let's take this opportunity to thank professor kirkanian and sundquist as well as tom for the time thank you thank you very much [Music] you

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Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020