The Way of Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Bruce K. Waltke
352
The Way of Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Bruce K. Waltke
352eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
“Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.” —Proverbs 4:7 (NIV) When a man’s life embodies the pursuit of wisdom, it bears among its fruits the deep love and respect of his family, friends, and colleagues. Bruce K. Waltke is such a man. Wisdom has defined Dr. Waltke, both as one of his personal qualities and as the core of his many years of biblical study, invoking the highest efforts of his formidable intellect and etching itself indelibly on his character. In tribute to Dr. Waltke, we present this collection of writings exploring the wisdom perspective of the Bible. The Way of Wisdom displays a level of scholarship and insight in keeping with Bruce Waltke’s high academic standards, and a breadth of outlook reflective of his own broad grasp of God’s Word and its application to all of life. May you, the reader, benefit.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780310864608 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zondervan Academic |
| Publication date: | 05/24/2011 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Sven Soderlund (retired), Dean of Students, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies, at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Read an Excerpt
The Way of Wisdom
Essays in Honor of Bruce K. WaltkeZondervan
Copyright © 2000 ZondervanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-310-22728-3
Chapter One
Theology and WisdomJ. I. Packer
I. What Is Theology?
"She's a rum 'un, is nature. Nature is more easier conceived than described." So declared Charles Dickens's dreadful creation Mr. Wackford Squeers, schoolmaster, pontificating on the world around him. And an observer today might well feel like saying something similar about theology as it goes on show at gatherings of what is nowadays called "the guild"-the professionals who teach theology in universities, seminaries, and a variety of schools and colleges, along with their pre- and postdoctoral apprentices and the people who write books and articles, edit journals, manage Web sites, and publish CD-ROMs of which theology is the announced theme. Here we confront a "rum 'un" indeed. Never before has the world or the church seen anything like the range of views about God and religion that is paraded at these meetings in papers read, discussions mounted, and books set out on publishers' display tables. What account of theology, we ask, will embrace all this? Common ground and agreed method seem to be lacking. Should we then echo Mr. Squeers's cop-out and say, in effect, that describing and defining theology is currently a task beyond us? Do we adopt this counsel of despair, or what?
Eventually I want to argue that true theology is essentially identical with God's gift of wisdom, but let us start where we are. The first fact to be faced is that during the past two centuries the word theology has been drastically secularized and de-doctrinalized among us. No longer does it signify, as it once did, the analysis and assertion of a dominant churchly orthodoxy. Theology has become simply the voicing and discussing of any and every notion about God and religion-good and bad, old and new, familiar and strange, conventional and eccentric, true and false-and it is clear that many institutions of the theological trade wish to keep it that way. The idea that the church should somehow oversee the study of theology or that there should be basically one theology for everybody is dismissed as naïve ecclesiastical primitivism, not to say atavism; and the concept of heresy is deconstructed as a kind of outdated and sordid power play. Following this path, we reach the four frames of a memorable Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy, with her habitual schoolmarmly pertness, delivers the following speech: "My topic today is the purpose of theology. When discussing theology we must always keep our purpose in mind. Our purpose as students is undeniably selfish. There is nothing better than being in a class where no one knows the answer." Lucy focuses very well the fundamental frivolity of much theology today.
To put it clinically (for it is in truth a pathological development), pluralism-that is, the acknowledging of plurality as totally right and entirely proper-has become the popular theological paradigm among the Protestants of what we may call the Old West (North America, Britain, continental Europe, and Australasia). Roman Catholics and Orthodox in their different ways still think of theology as a spelling out of the faith of the church within an essentially biblical frame. But for Protestants generally, theology has come to mean adjusting the faith more or less to the prevalent culture according to each adjuster's individual ideas, so that doing theology and having a theology of one's own becomes more important than any of the specific affirmations and denials one makes. These personal theologies are repeatedly redesigned as their creators continue to read and discuss. For such Protestants, the Bible is a historical testament of religion with which to dialogue rather than the abiding testimony of God from which to learn and before which to bow; and the supply of energy for their dialogical engagements and theological experiments with Scripture seems endless. So pluralism is evidently here to stay.
This present-day plurality of positions among purveyors of theology can be accounted for in various ways. In North America, at any rate, sociological pressures have had something to do with it. The sequence of events is quite simple and predictable: the academics who are promoted are those who publish; publishers naturally want to sell books; notoriety speeds sales; ergo, new ideas and way-out opinions quickly find their way into print. In turn, this cycle provokes fascinating academic discussions, reminding us of what the late Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to say, namely that discussing religion is always a delightful activity, for it makes us feel good without our needing to do anything except talk.
Again, for the best part of a century now, many theology-teaching institutions have employed instructors less for the orthodoxy of their views than for their technical prowess and their penchant for stabbing sleepy minds awake. Moreover, many of these teachers seem to have operated on the assumption that their students' education was best served by challenging whatever confessional, Bible-based certainties were brought into the classroom. This has had the knock-on effect of impoverishing churches, for though it is a truism that congregations want to hear their preachers' certainties rather than their doubts, this kind of theological education makes the proclamation of certainties impossible, thus undermining the morale of believers and churches alike.
Behind these sociological realities, however, stands a problem that is both convictional and methodological. During the twentieth century, a number of streams of thought converged to produce what we now speak of as the post-Christian mind-set. Among these were philosophical and scientific rationalism's claim of being the only way to knowledge; evolutionary theory's attempt to explain everything in progress terms; literary and historical criticism's challenge to the Bible's trustworthiness; and positivism's skepticism about any form of supernaturalism. These ideas stand in startling contrast to the view that they displaced. Up to the seventeenth century, Christians everywhere had assumed, more or less explicitly and clearheadedly, that theology was a true science and indeed the Queen of the Sciences, in the sense of its offering an account of God that determines where the other sciences fit in and how they should be practised. Christians believed that this theology constituted a cognitive apprehension-that is, actual knowledge-of the reality of God in Christ according to the Bible and the church's creeds and liturgies. By the same token, they also believed that the apprehension was not self-generated but was given by God through the means of grace that he provides in and via the church. They believed, moreover, that this apprehension was marked by three integrated characteristics: that as it was factually instructional, so it was devotionally relational and morally transformational. In other words, knowledge of God is as much communion with him and obedience to him as it is grasping facts about him; and theology-that is, the formulation of this knowledge in orderly speech-is real and authentic only to the extent that it embodies these three elements with biblical accuracy and then expresses them in worship and holy living. This was the intellectual paradigm of the whole Christian world for a millennium and a half.
II. Theology Deformed
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, however, under the influence of commanding thinkers in the Cartesian mold, this consensus view was shattered by an epistemological upheaval in the Protestant West. The concept of knowledge was itself secularized and shrunk, with the result that theology (already over-intellectualized in many circles after more than a hundred years of ceaseless debates) was subjectivized, a process that virtually guaranteed the hegemony of pluralism. Theologizing-once an orderly, reverent, and heartfelt echo of biblical teaching, kerygmatic and catechetical, normative and edification-oriented, an extension indeed of preaching, evangelism, and pastoral care-turned into a scholars' second-level reflection on the primary levels of Christian existence. In this secondary process of reflection, peoples' thoughts, feelings, and declarations-both historic and contemporary-become the agenda prescribed for treatment in place of the message of Scripture as such; and constantly, in this kind of exploration, the academic quest for coherence has taken precedence over the properly Christian passion for faithfulness to what God has revealed. In former days, theology had been conceived in personal terms as the discerning doxological devotion within which a teacher's knowledge of the Bible, church history, and practical ministry would be set and linked up; now, however, theology appears as one leg of a fourfold syllabus for clergy education, alongside biblical studies, church history, and ministry skills. Edward Farley well describes the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century's reconceiving and academicizing of theology:
In brief, this shift is from theology viewed as a habitus, an act of practical knowledge having the primary character of wisdom, to theology used as a generic term for a cluster of disciplines. Crucial to this shift is the definition of theology by its reference and not by the subject's act. This objectification of theology appears to be the outcome of the sectarian (Catholic and Protestant, Lutheran and Reformed, orthodox and heterodox) controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is, dogmas, articles of faith (pure and mixed), the teachings of the church obtain a certain primacy. "God and the things of God" had always defined the reference and content of theology, but theology itself had always been a sapiential knowledge that attended salvation. When the step is taken to define theology by its reference, it becomes the doctrinal truths themselves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Way of Wisdom Copyright © 2000 by Zondervan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.