Malfunctions of Faith - Coerciveness

The other prominent sign that faith is malfunctioning, according to Volf, is an effort to combine it with force, whether that force is used to make others ‘convert’ or whether it involves a concerted effort to make society look more Christian. This, he argues, is a misunderstanding of what faith actually is.
So many [...]

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Malfunctions of Faith - Idleness

I’m back from a really enjoyable couple of days in Vancouver where I had the opportunity to listen to Miroslav Volf present the 2006 Laing Lectures. His lectures were entitled “A Voice of One’s Own: Public Faith in a Pluralistic World” and it was very interesting to hear his take on how the Christian [...]

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A Voice of One’s Own

Christmas comes in October this year. I’m off to Vancouver tomorrow for the 2006 Laing Lectures at Regent College. This year’s lectures will be given by Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School and are entitled “A Voice of One’s Own: Public Faith in a Pluralistic World”. I was first introduced to [...]

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Personal Destiny and Selfishness

I’ve now had approximately three weeks to digest the material from my ‘History of Protestant Spirituality’ course and it’s been interesting to try to understand the different ways in which Protestants have understood themselves in relation to God. From Luther’s ‘theology of the cross’ and its reminder that God is experienced in suffering to [...]

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Two Kinds of Pluralism

Many of you will know that I have an ongoing interest in the question of how to live as a Christian in a pluralistic society. On the surface it seems like an impossibility. Ideological pluralism rules out any kind of exclusive claim on the ground that, given a plurality of opinions, it is [...]

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The Church as the ‘Bearer’ of Salvation

“The Church is the bearer of the work of Christ through history, but not the exclusive beneficiary. God purposes the salvation of all. For this purpose he has chosen a people. Because that people have over and over again fallen into the sin of supposing that they have a claim upon God [...]

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Equality & Mutuality

Thanks for the challenging discussion on the question of rights versus (in addition to?) responsibilities. With some of these issues in mind I came back to Newbigin this morning and found that he had already said what I was trying to say, only with much greater clarity. His issue is not primarily with [...]

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Tolerance… Again.

For those who have endured my previous ramblings on the subject of tolerance, there is an interesting discussion going on around a ‘Christian’ legal challenge for the ‘right’ to be intolerant. Do religious believers have the ‘right’ to propagate their views (in this case on homosexual behaviour) or is that ‘right’ trumped by tolerance? [...]

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Pluralism and Private Religion

The last article linked the emergence of ‘personal relationship’ language in describing how we interact with God to the emergence of secularism as the dominant public perspective. If God is thought to address only private religious concerns there is no other way of talking him but to talk about ‘what he does for me.’ [...]

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Hauerwas - The End of Religious Pluralism

For those who are not tired of hearing Stanley’s name, a certain John Rasmussen from New York has pointed out that the lecture we heard Friday morning is available at the website below. I haven’t had time to read the whole thing but it seems like the exact paper he presented at the U [...]

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