Category: <span>Online Resources</span>

Category: Online Resources

Online Resources

‘Only the Suffering God Can help’. divine passibility in modern theology (Bauckham, 1984)

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In 1917 H. M. Relton made a judgment which has turned out to be remarkably far-sighted: ‘There are many indications that the doctrine of the suffering God is going to play a very prominent part in the theology of the age in which we live.’ The idea that God cannot suffer, accepted virtually as axiomatic in Christian theology from the early Greek Fathers until the nineteenth century, has in this century been progressively abandoned. For once, English theology can claim to have pioneered a major theological development: from about 1890 onwards, a steady stream of English theologians, whose theological approaches differ considerably in other respects, have agreed in advocating, with more or less emphasis, a doctrine of divine suffering. A peak of interest in the subject is indicated by J. K. Mozley’s important study, The Impassibility of God (1926), which was commissioned by the Archbishops’ Doctrine Commission in 1924 and which itself tells the story of English theological interest in the suffering of God up to 1924. Since then, a large number of English theologians have continued the tradition.

Online Resources

Loving our Fellow-creatures: Christians and Animal Rights (Bauckham, 2003)

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Do animals have rights? It is becoming quite common to think so. Talk about animal rights follows on, of course, from talk about human rights. Those who advocate animal rights are proposing we extend the idea of rights from humans to other animals. How should Christians think about this? Does the Bible give us any guidance?

A more biblical sort of question about animals would be this: do we humans have a duty to love animals, just as we have a duty to love our fellow humans? We are commanded to love God and our (human) neighbours, but what about other creatures? Even if the Bible does not instruct us in so many words to love all our fellow creatures, it nevertheless rather strongly implies that we should. ‘Be merciful,’ said Jesus, ‘just as your Father is merciful.’1 God’s mercy is his caring and compassionate love, which he extends not only to humans but also to all his creatures. He ‘is good to all, and his compassion is over all he had made’.2 The psalmist can even say that God, in his love and his righteousness, saves ‘humans and animals alike.’3 So, if we are to love as God loves, surely we must love all that God loves.

Online Resources

The Decline of Progress and the Prospects for Christian Hope (Bauckham, 1999)

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The vocation of Christians is ‘to bear the witness of Jesus’ (Rev. 12:17; 19:10), i.e. the witness Jesus himself, ‘the
faithful witness’ (1:5; 3:14), bore to God and God’s rule in his life and death. Witness in the face of the Roman imperial idolatry meant faithful witness in suffering and as far as death if necessary.

Online Resources

Approaching the Millennium (Bauckham, 1999)

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Richard Bauckham offers a perceptive analysis of the hold which the year 2000 is exercising on our culture. Against this background, he argues for the central importance of a Christian eschatology which takes seriously
both the transcendent (God’s promised future new creation) and the utopian (inspiration to work for change in the
present).

Online Resources

The New Age Theology of Matthew Fox: A Christian Theological Response (Bauckham, 1996)

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Richard Bauckham examines the popular New Age theology of ex-Dominican, now Episcopalian, Matthew Fox. He
values Fox’s theological focus on the goodness of all of creation and the themes of gift, blessing and gratitude that
spring from such a recognition. However, he offers a critique in two areas: first, over a reading of theological history that offers a simple binary division between pro- and anti-nature traditions, which, claims Bauckham, did
not exist. Secondly, he warns against the tendency to confuse Creator and creation; a proper valuing of creation will come from a reappropriation of creatureliness, not a divinization of ourselves and the cosmos.

Online Resources

The Relevance of Revelation (Bauckham, 1996)

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Revelation is the Bible’s climactic and concluding prophecy. Writing deliberately in the tradition of the Hebrew prophet, the prophet John gathers up and completes their contributions to the overall theme of biblical prophecy: the coming of God’s kingdom in all the world. His own prophetic revelation discloses the way in which the universal kingdom of God is finally to come, through Jesus the Messiah and his people.

In order to read Revelation appropriately, we need to recognize equally the way it relates to its original context and the way it transcends that context and continues to address the church in all periods. Like all biblical prophecy, Revelation addressed a concrete historical situation— that of Christians in the Roman province of Asia at the end of the first century CE— with the purpose of enabling them to discern the purpose of God in that situation and to respond in an appropriate way. So although the prophecy concerns the final victory of God’s rule over all evil and the final completion of God’s purpose in the new creation of all things, it portrays the coming of God’s kingdom in direct relation to the situation of its first readers. The eschatological future is envisaged in terms of its impact on the present, so that the first readers might see how to live in their own situation in the light of the coming kingdom. This means that we cannot ignore the situation of the first readers if we are to perceive correctly the continuing relevance of Revelation to later readers.

Online Resources

First Steps to a Theology of Nature (Bauckham, 1986)

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‘Nature’ is a slippery term with a wide variety of meanings and nuances which can all too easily encourage the unwary writer or reader to slide from one to another without making necessary distinctions and to carry the evaluative nuances of one sense over to another. In theology it has several distinct usages.

Online Resources

The Delay of the Parousia (Bauckham, 1979)

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Early Christianity was both continuous and discontinuous with first-century Judaism. Its theology shared many features of contemporary Jewish thought, though these were given a distinctively Christian character by their relationship to Christianity’s unique faith in Jesus Christ. As in the case of many other issues, an adequate account of the understanding of the delay of the parousia in early Christianity must reflect both the continuity and the discontinuity with Judaism. In some respects the problem of the delay of the parousia was the same problem of eschatological delay which had long confronted Jewish apocalyptic eschatology; in other respects it was a new and distinctively Christian problem, in that the End was now expected to take the form of the parousia of Jesus Christ in whose death and resurrection God had already acted eschatologically. Our subject therefore needs to be approached from two angles: from its background in Jewish apocalyptic and in terms of its distinctively Christian characteristics. Within the limits of this lecture, I can attempt only one of these approaches, and I have chosen the former