We are on the very brink of the nativity. Our sense of the power of the One coming in has been stretched, challenged and recast over the past three weeks. Now the reality of that power begins to dawn more clearly, and what is astonishing about it is that, unlike any power we know, this power is confident enough to be vulnerable. And that means confident enough in us to be vulnerable to us.
Schwartz has two very proper insights. The first is that identity forged over against others is violent, because the “other” is always conceived as despicable. And the second is that sibling rivalry is in some way tied to the concept of a jealous monotheism with a scarcity of blessings for distribution.
Your first book was an examination of original sin — not, for most people, a topic connected with joy. But the title of the book is The Joy of Being Wrong. What joy is associated with original sin?
It’s the joy of not having to get things right. The doctrine means that we are all in a mess, no one more or less than anyone else, and we can trust the One who is getting us out of the mess, who starts from where we are. If it were not for the doctrine of original sin, which follows from the resurrection — just as a parting glance at who we used to be follows from seeing ourselves as we are coming to be — we would be left with a religion requiring us to “get it right,” and that is no joy at all.
Abstract – What does it mean to say that Jesus died to save us? The traditional account of atonement “in which Jesus becomes a substitutionary sacrifice for human sinfulness” is revealed as problematic as long as it is understood as a theory. In the experience of Israel, atonement was not a theory at all. It was a liturgy whose goal was not to placate some otherwise non-forgiving God (the Aztec or pagan imagination) but the more subversive action in which God’s creative, saving, redeeming activity is poured out to us despite our human sinfulness. Rather than invoke the idea of sacrifice as something God demands of us, by becoming the victim in our place Christ puts an end once and for all to the human insistence for sacrificial victims. This is what makes the Eucharist a liturgical event with such profound ethical implications.
My main constructive point in this paper is that, whatever else it might mean, a Christian conception of God’s power and human flourishing that come together in “living in the Spirit” involves seeking wisdom and shaping life through reading and rereading Scripture. So it is appropriate to begin by discussing two biblical passages in which the power of God comes together with human flourishing.
First, what is theology and why does it matter today? Theology is not a term that all religious traditions use, but for now I am using it for the thinking that goes on within, between and beyond religious communities concerning their issues of meaning, truth and practice. There can be many dimensions of this, it can draw on various sources and fields of inquiry, and it can have many aims, but above all I am taking it to be about wisdom-seeking. Theology matters because, to put it at its lowest, not to be thoughtful, or to think and be foolish, can be disastrous for individuals and communities.
The first point to make about RE is that it should be the most exciting and important subject in the curriculum. Just think. Four to five billion of the world’s population are directly involved with the major religions and most of the rest are affected by them in various ways. Lives, communities and civilisations – past, present and future – are shaped by them. Yet the other side of their importance
is that many of the major conflicts in our world are linked to them. If we want a peaceful world we have to get the religions right, because they are here to stay. In a world where there is much ignorant faith, foolish faith and dangerous faith, can faith become more educated and intelligent, wiser and reconciling?
There is an emergent paradigm in which theology, which seeks to answer questions of meaning, truth, goodness and beauty that
arise within and between specific religious traditions, is taught and researched in an interactive, collegial relationship with religious studies, which seeks to answer questions about specific religious traditions through a range of disciplines, but not normally with a view to producing constructive or normative religious positions. The institutional integration of the two has so far in the twenty-first century lacked clear articulation and advocacy. (A version of this paper was published as Chapter 8 in David F. Ford, The Future of Christian Theology, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 2011).
Introduction and Chapter One of “Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love” (CUP. 2007)
