Ortlund Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals

Why We Need Our Past to Have a Future
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4335-6529-8
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Restless for rootedness, many Christians are abandoning Protestantism altogether. Many evangelicals today are aching for theological rootedness often found in other Christian traditions. Modern evangelicalism is not known for drawing from church history to inform views on the Christian life, which can lead to a 'me and my Bible' approach to theology. But this book aims to show how Protestantism offers the theological depth so many desire without the need for abandoning a distinctly evangelical identity.  By focusing on particular doctrines and neglected theologians, this book shows how evangelicals can draw from the past to meet the challenges of the present. 

Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Seminary) is the president of Truth Unites, theologian-in-residence at Immanuel Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and visiting professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary. He is the author of several books, including Humility and Finding the Right Hills to Die On.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ortlund, Gavin

Leseproben

Preface

I can remember the day I discovered Anselm. I was sitting at the airport, waiting with my family for our flight. Somehow I’d gotten my hands on an article by Alvin Plantinga, defending a modal version of Anselm’s ontological argument. Although I had no clue what the word modal meant at that time in my life, I remember being utterly captivated. Could God’s existence really be logically proven from the mere idea of God in the human mind? I spent about thirty minutes looking at the syllogism he provided, trying to figure out what the catch was—surely it couldn’t be a sound argument! This led me to read Anselm’s formulation of the argument. I spent a lot of time with it, but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. (Actually, I still can’t.)

What I found so valuable in Anselm, however, wasn’t so much the argument itself but the whole way of doing theology that I found modeled in his writing. Anselm helped me understand something of how enthralling it is to think about God. I had already believed there is a glory and gravitas to God, but Anselm impressed upon me that there is also a glory and gravitas to the idea of God. This is one basic and somewhat colloquial way to summarize the import of the ontological argument: that God’s uniqueness and necessity bombard us at the realm of thought as well as at so many other levels of our existence. In this way, Anselm opened up in me an awareness that would, years later, make me sympathetic to Barth’s comment that theology is the “most beautiful of all disciplines.”

My interest in Anselm never left me, and when I was studying abroad a few years later in college, I somehow got my hands on the Latin text of the Proslogion (the book in which Anselm advances his so-called ontological argument). I gave the argument a more careful reading in its original context, and I began to be intrigued by the spiritual intensity of Anselm’s writing. Why is he writing this argument in a prayer? Why does he go on and on about seeing God (isn’t God invisible)? And, related to this, what are all these later chapters doing, after he’s proven God exists? Ultimately these interests led me to my doctoral work on the Proslogion.1

Anselm then led me elsewhere. I became more and more interested in the peculiarity of medieval theology as a whole and what I could learn from it as a contemporary evangelical. I also began to read the church fathers with greater interest. I used the coursework stage of my PhD at Fuller Theological Seminary to pursue a number of studies in theological retrieval, immersing myself in the classic texts of church history, as best as I could, for help in doing theology today. Having grown up in evangelical circles, my previous experience in historical theology had focused primarily on Protestant theologians such as Martin Luther or Jonathan Edwards. So I was stepping into a new world as I sought to engage theologians such as the Cappadocian Fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, John of Damascus, Thomas Aquinas, and others. I can vividly recall sitting at my desk in the spring quarter of 2013, doing research for a study on patristic and medieval views of divine simplicity, and thinking, Wow! There is a lot of treasure to be mined here. This is like discovering Anselm all over again. (The results of that study are roughly represented by chapter 5 of this book.)

It is difficult to describe what these excursions into the classical texts of historical theology have done to me. The best I can do is compare them to getting lost in a profound piece of literature, or spending significant time in a foreign country. It has been a formative experience that has shaped not only my theological positions but my whole approach to theology. At the same time, my interest in historical theology has always seemed somewhat disconnected from my broader life and ministry in evangelical contexts. Most of the Christians I interact with regularly have never heard of Anselm or struggled to understand what value there could be in studying a monk from the Dark Ages. So an abiding question in my life as an evangelical Christian and minister has been: How does my theological interest in classical theologians such as Anselm relate to my calling and context in the United States in the early twenty-first century?

Let me lay my cards on the table right up front in an effort at explaining what is basically driving this book: I think evangelical Christians can and should engage Anselm. Or Tertullian. Or Athanasius. Or Photius. And so forth. This book stems from the conviction that has been formed in me about the tremendous value of retrieving the past and broadly aims to encourage more evangelicals to join in this effort. The first section lays out an overall manifesto for theological retrieval, and the second puts it into practice with a series of case studies.

Why have I spent the larger half of the book focusing on specific retrieval efforts? My approach to engaging history emphasizes “snapshots” more than running commentary. If you are trying to get to know an unchartered jungle, it will likely be more helpful to establish three or five reliable outposts or bases from which you may make further explorations than simply to slog through from one end of the jungle to the other. So if we consider pre-Reformation church history like a dark jungle (an apt analogy for many modern evangelicals), our goal here is to carve out several outposts from which further retrieval expeditions may be made.

In this respect Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation has served in my mind as something of a model for the strategy of historical engagement attempted here.2 Ellis credits the style of history telling attempted in his book—covering six particular episodes in early American history as a way to enter the whole of the Revolutionary era—to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, which he describes as “a combination of stealth and selectivity.”3 Strachey’s quoted justification for this method may serve well as explanation of our own effort:

It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hither-to undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.4

Another model in this respect has been Mark Noll’s brilliant book Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, which in its preface articulates several benefits to focusing on key “turning points” as a way to narrate history.5 I think similar principles can be at play when engaging historical theology specifically as opposed to church history more generally.

I have written with pastors, theology students, and interested lay Christians especially in mind. This is a sort of mid-level book that engages the scholarly machinery but ultimately hopes to influence a broader readership. Historically, my overall leaning has been toward those people and debates and contexts that have been particularly neglected in our own context; thus I favor patristic and medieval theology over Reformation and modern, and particularly those figures at the transition from patristic to medieval who are often neglected today, especially Boethius, Gregory the Great, and John of Damascus (in the third chapter I introduce these three figures as examples of theologians we often overlook).

Earlier versions of several chapters have appeared in the following publications:

• “Why Should Protestants Retrieve Patristic and Medieval Theology?,” in The Task of Dogmatics: Explorations in Theological Method (Los Angeles Theology Conference Series; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017).
• “Explorations in a Theological Metaphor: Boethius, Calvin, and Torrance on the Creator/creation Distinction.” Modern Theology 33.2 (2017): 167–86.
• “Divine Simplicity in Historical Perspective: Resourcing A Contemporary Discussion,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 16.4 (2014): 436–53.

I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these journals for their permission to republish these articles here. A few paragraphs from this preface, chapter 1, and chapter 3 are loosely related to earlier material from online writings.6

I want to express my thanks to Oliver Crisp and John Thompson, my professors at Fuller Theological Seminary who oversaw several of these studies in their embryonic development. Dave Lauer has also proofread several chapters and sharpened my thinking with our many theological discussions over lunch. Joel Chopp offered helpful suggestions to the first part of the book. Above all, I want to express my thanks to my precious wife, Esther, who supports me beyond what I could possibly hope for in a wife. None of my writing—indeed, very little of anything I do—would be possible without her...