“Remythologizing” is a mouthful of a word, and it may scare people a few away from Kevin Vanhoozer’s fascinating book Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (2010: Cambridge University Press). Vanhoozer explains in great detail what he means by it, and I won’t rehearse that here. But one of the reasons he picked the title was because it rhymes with the famous mid-century buzzword of a certain kind of liberalism, Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologizing. Vanhoozer’s style of theology is certainly... Read more

Vanhoozer says “My wager is that this brief detour into the dispute over the meaning of Dostoevsky’s authorship will yield theological dividends for understanding God’s communicative relation to the world.” (p. 311) Indeed it does, in two ways. First, it sharpens the meaning of divine authorship in a way that clarifies the God-world relationship. “God authors/elects creatures to be dialogical agents in covenantal relation through whom his Word sounds (and resounds).” (p. 331) God relates to the world like an... Read more

Reading in modern liberal theology, you begin to notice some recurring themes. Especially when liberal theologians get around to describing God, they tend to emphasize a few characteristics. You find these pervasive patterns of thought: that God is deeply mysterious, but is always opposed to oppression; that God is intimately and immanently near to us, affirms matter in all its materiality, and is genuinely, deeply moved in the core of his being by all that affects us. Different authors say... Read more

English metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) insisted that in spiritual matters, “the manner is always more excellent than the thing.” This has great implications for the idea of God as author. When Kevin Vanhoozer presents God’s relationship to the world as a relation of authorship, his point is never simply that God is an author. What he’s after is what kind of author God is. Vanhoozer insists that everything depends on exactly how we construe the God-world relationship, and it... Read more

A short post here before plunging into the next major topic in Kevin Vanhoozer’s 2010 book Remythologizing Theology (coming out in paperback this year, they say). That next major topic is how God speaks. But first a word about how Vanhoozer speaks. Remythologizing Theology is a book about the doctrine of God, but it also extends into the doctrine about how God relates to the world. Vanhoozer’s main idea, on both fronts, is that God is communicative: he is communicative... Read more

It’s one of the most famous verses in the Bible, the hit single everybody knows even if they don’t listen to the rest of the album. You can wave it on a banner, paint it in your eyeblack, or print it underneath your In-N-Out cup; John 3:16. No matter how often I see it, no matter what kind of knuckle-head has stuck it to their bumper, no matter how out-of-the-blue or isolated it is from its context, it always gets... Read more

Here are two books I recommended when I was talking Christology on the Frank Pastore show on Jan 12. The single best book on the deity of Christ is Putting Jesus in His Place (Kregel, 2007). The authors, Bowman and Komoszewski, work through all the best arguments and even provide a handy mnemonic device, HANDS: Jesus shares the Honors, Attributes, Names, Deeds, and Seat of God the Father. Go, get, read. The Chalcedonian Box that I talked about is here:... Read more

Does God speak? Does he have a mouth that words come out of? Does God suffer? How does he feel the feelings he feels? Does God do things? Does he have hands that reach out and accomplish his will? Do we have a personal relationship with God? Is God somebody in particular, a center of awareness and choice, a person with a psychology and a history of relationships? To some extent, all of these questions involve anthropomorphism; descriptions of God... Read more

On Friday, the Church celebrated the feast of Epiphany, reveling in Christ’s revelation to the Gentiles, and to the world. This day marks his going public, the laying bare of the secret long hid in the counsels of God and only whispered in the prophets. Isaiah looked forward to Epiphany: ‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.’ John rejoiced in Epiphany: ‘In... Read more

Cultural critic Neil Postman wrote two books whose titles picked a fight with each other: Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1971), and Teaching as Conserving Activity (1982). Well, which is it, teacher, are you subverting or conserving? I ask because I’m coming to terms with Kevin Vanhoozer’s Remythologizing Theology, which similarly looks in two directions at once. It subverts to conserve. To be more precise, Remythologizing subverts recent developments in order to conserve classical theological positions. In this book, Vanhoozer... Read more