The Bavinck Review 5 (2014)

The Bavinck Institute have just made available online volume 5 of The Bavinck Review. The contents are listed below, with the summaries of the main articles taken from Laurence O’Donnell’s editorial. Individual articles are available here, or the entire issue can be downloaded as a 13.2 MB pdf here.

Editorial

Articles

Bert de Vries

What Kuyper Saw and Thought: Abraham Kuyper’s Visit to the Holy Land

With the mind of an archeologist, the eye of a photographer, and the heart of a Reformed Christian, Professor Emeritus de Vries leads us back to the early twentieth century where we trace Abraham Kuyper’s footsteps in the sands of the Holy Land as he recorded them in his travelogue, Om de oude werldzee. In response to Kuyper’s enthusiasm for sacred soil, orientalist biases, and colonialist notions that come to light along the way, de Vries asks us to consider how much of what we think about Palestine-Israel today has been inherited from Kuyper and his contemporaries a century ago.

John Bolt

The Missional Character of the (Herman and J.H.) Bavinck Tradition

“Missional” is a buzzword in theology these days. But what does it mean? How is it defined theologically? In what sense is God on a mission? Should we replace ice cold, abstract “systematic” theology with white hot, relational “missional” theology? These are the questions professor Bolt addresses in his essay on the “missional character” of the Bavinck tradition. He presents a series of rhetorical questions to explain how Herman Bavinck (in dogmatics) and Johan Herman Bavinck (in missiology) together contributed a robustly “missional” voice within twentieth-century Protestant theological discourse and to suggest how that tradition offers wisdom that is still relevant for enriching “missional theology” today.

Gayle Doornbos

We Do Not Proceed into a Vacuum: J.H. Bavinck’s Missional Reading of Romans 1

How do Christians evaluate non-Christian religions? Gayle Doornbos looks at how J.H. Bavinck addressed this fundamental missiological question both psychologically and ultimately on the basis of his interpretation of Romans 1:18–32. She then offers several suggestions for how Bavinck’s psychological and theological insights can enrich current missiological discussions that flow out of the recent shift to the Triune-God-as-missionary-God paradigm.

John Bolt

An Adventure in Ecumenicity: A Review Essay of Berkouwer and Catholicism by Eduardo Echeverria

Professor Bolt’s ecumenical adventure introduces a longstanding friendship with a colorful criss-crossing of Roman Catholic and Neo-Calvinist traditions. What arises out of this friendship is the type of academic exchange that is at once amicable, critical, and real – a gift that invites the wounds of friend for sharpening and perfecting. Professor Echeverria’s close reading and patient analysis of Neo-Calvinist criticisms of Roman Catholic formulations of the relation between nature and grace will certainly interest if not challenge Reformed Protestants as will Professor Bolt’s frank assessment of where and how Echeverria’s critiques ring true in the Neo-Calvinist tradition.

In Translation

Herman Bavinck, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman

The Pros and Cons of a Dogmatic System

Pearls and Leaven

John Bolt

Bavinck as Pastor (1880–82)

Bavinck Bibliography 2013

Stuttgart Theological Topics

Thanks to Tim Davy over at Bible & Mission for the heads up on Stuttgart Theological Topics, the publication of the Eusebia conference for Bible, Theology and Mission, Stuttgart.

Volumes 2 to 5 are available online here, and contain essays devoted to the following topics:

• Volume 2 (2007) – The Impact of Christian History and Theology on Judaism and Islam and its Significance for Missions Today

• Volume 3 (2008) – Currents in New Testament Interpretation on their Effects on Theology and Missions

• Volume 4 (2009) – The Interchange of Christianization and Islamic Expansion in Historical and Missionary Perspective

• Volume 5 (2010) – Bible Interpretation in the Horizon of Old Testament Theology and in Interaction with the Islamic View of Scripture

Marilynne Robinson on Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred

Marilynne Robinson, ‘Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred’, The Chronicle of Higher Education (12 February 2012).

In an earlier post, I referred to a forthcoming collection of essays by Marilynne Robinson. One of them, published in the book as ‘Freedom of Thought’, is available online here.

Beginning with her own experience of education, she writes:

‘At a certain point I decided that everything I took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics, cultural history, and so on did not square at all with my sense of things, and that the tendency of much of it was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty.’

She goes on later in the piece to reflect on the general societal assumption that the physical and material preclude the spiritual:

‘[A]lmost everyone, for generations now, has insisted on a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual. So we have had theologies that really proposed a “God of the gaps,” as if God were not manifest in the creation, as the Bible is so inclined to insist, but instead survives in those dark places, those black boxes, where the light of science has not yet shone. And we have atheisms and agnosticisms that make precisely the same argument, only assuming that at some time the light of science will indeed dispel the last shadow in which the holy might have been thought to linger.’

And a little later:

‘The notion that religion is intrinsically a crude explanatory strategy that should be dispelled and supplanted by science is based on a highly selective or tendentious reading of the literatures of religion. In some cases it is certainly fair to conclude that it is based on no reading of them at all. Be that as it may, the effect of this idea, which is very broadly assumed to be true, is again to reinforce the notion that science and religion are struggling for possession of a single piece of turf, and science holds the high ground and gets to choose the weapons.’

International Bulletin of Missionary Research 35, 4 (October 2011) on Religions and the Common Good

October 2001’s issue of International Bulletin of Missionary Research (available here, via a free subscription) carries main articles on the theme of ‘religions and common good’, including one by Terry Muck on Christian witness in a multi-religious world, and one by Lamin Sanneh on religious freedom and citizenship.

Michael Goheen on a Missional Code of Conduct

Michael Goheen, ‘Missional Code of Conduct’, Cardus (3 August 2011).

Some time back, I linked to ‘Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World’, a document on the ethics of mission and evangelism produced by the World Council of Churches, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and the World Evangelical Alliance.

Mike Goheen comments on it for Cardus. He notes that while the gospel was first proclaimed in the context of religious pluralism, for much of its history the church has ‘lived isolated from the great religious traditions of Asia and Africa, cut off by the power of Islam, and separated from the religions of the Americas by the ocean’.

Today, as he says, things are quite different. ‘The church has awakened to its missional identity. It is a global church which now exists in every part of the world. All major religions have experienced a resurgence in growth and vitality, and there are an escalating number of conflicts worldwide fuelled by racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological animosities.’

While the document doesn’t back down from the responsibility of the church to witness, he says, it ‘does not touch on the issue of the theology of religions, the kind of claims that are made for the finality of Christ, the issue of conversion, or a variety of other sticky theological issues that would have made any kind of ecumenical consensus impossible. It is a document that restricts itself to the ethics of witness – a global code of conduct for witness that will not betray the gospel or cause suffering for others’.

Goheen writes that he was encouraged (1) by its ‘strong affirmation of Christian witness’, (2) by its ‘remarkable display of ecumenical cooperation’, and (3) by its ‘thoroughly Trinitarian basis for Christian witness’.

However, he says:

‘I hope that the large theological issues this study group did not address – like the content of the gospel, the meaning of the work of Christ, the nature of world religions, and the nature of evangelism, witness, and mission, among other things – will remain subjects of ongoing discussion.’

Encounters 36 (March 2011) on Faith in Europe

The latest issue of Encounters from Redcliffe College is now available, this one devoted to ‘Faith in Europe’, in part opening up the extent to which the European Union is shaping the lives of ordinary citizens across Europe.

The pdf of the full issue is available here.

The Future of Evangelicalism

As part of a summer series on ‘The Future of Religion’, Patheos are promising a set of essays on the ‘Future of Evangelicalism’.

They write:

‘A rapidly evolving tradition with deep historical roots, evangelicalism confronts abundant opportunities and abundant challenges. How will current movements within the church shape the face of American Christianity in the next ten years? What is the best way to influence culture while retaining the distinctive qualities of evangelical faith? How should evangelicals relate to other Christian traditions, and even non-Christian ones? How ought evangelicals to engage in politics? And how are evangelical ministries responding to the swiftly changing circumstances of life in the twenty-first century?’

With some significant contributors in place, the essays themselves are organised according to the following themes:

• Transforming the Church
• Transforming Culture
• American Evangelicalism and the Varieties of Christianity
• Transforming Society, Part 1: Social Justice and the Progressive Christian Movement
• Transforming Society, Part 2: Liberty, Responsibility, and the New Evangelical Conservatism
• Transforming the Shape of Evangelical Ministry

Interestingly, evangelicalism finds itself in a list on the future of religion as a category alongside mainline Protestantism, Mormonism, as well as the mainstream world religions.

Lausanne on World Faiths

The March 2010 issue of Lausanne: World Pulse is available, the topic this month being ‘World Faiths: A Primer for Evangelism’.

It contains short pieces on ‘The Uniqueness of Christ and Committed Pluralism’, engaging with people of faiths other than Christianity, and more besides.

There are links to individual articles from here, or a pdf of the full issue here.

Encounters 32 (2010) on Christianity and World Religions

This issue of Encounters from Redcliffe College explores the relationship of Christianity with other world religions, suggesting that ‘the future of Christianity will depend in part on her ability to engage meaningfully and missionally with the growing religious plurality of our world’.

Dan Clendenin on the Gospel and World Religions

In preparing for a sermon on John 14:6 (‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No-one comes to the father except through me’), I came across a post by Dan Clendenin – ‘Is Christianity a “Sublime Bigotry?” 10 Reflections on the Gospel and World Religions’ – in which he briefly expands on ten reflections related to religious pluralism.

1. Some religious views and practices are clearly false, harmful, and even despicable.

2. The claim that all religions teach the same thing is patently false; this is precisely what religions do not do.

3. Pluralism tries to solve this problem of contradictory truth claims in two ways (agnosticism, or the identification of a ‘common essence’ in all religions).

4. Christians need not reject everything about other religions.

5. The conundrum of relating 10,000 religions to each other is not a ‘Christian’ problem.

6. I agree with the liberal Jewish writer Michael Kinsley that it’s not wrong or intolerant to try to convert other people.

7. A rule of thumb in Bible interpretation is to understand the complex and ambiguous parts of Scripture in light of simple and straightforward passages.

8. Instead of discarding what you don’t like in Scripture and ending up with a Bible that reflects only your own biases… Christians should hold together two broad themes (God’s desire that none should perish and Jesus as God’s ultimate means of salvation).

9. Exactly how the universal love of God and the particularity of Jesus fit together isn’t clear.

10. Finally, a long time ago I quit trying to understand everything and admitted the many limitations of my knowledge.