Tyndale Seminary

Theology and the Laughter of the Angels

/ James Pedlar / 1 Comment

Two weeks ago I began teaching Systematic Theology II at Tyndale Seminary.   I suspect that not all of the students in the course are excited to be there, both because the class meets at 8:30 AM on Mondays, and because systematic theology is not everyone’s favourite subject.  Some of the students are probably only taking the class because they have to.  I told them, “That’s fine.  You don’t have to love systematic theology.  You don’t have to be excited about it.  But you do have to know the basics.”

I think anyone who wants to be a leader in the church needs to be familiar with the basics of Christian doctrine – how it has developed and why it is important.  Systematic theology is not idle speculation; it’s not about professors sitting in their offices thinking up topics for papers.  It’s about the gospel and the God of the gospel.  It’s about proclaiming that gospel faithfully and biblically.  It’s about seeing the big picture of how each doctrine relates to the others; and it’s also about learning the lessons of history, so that we are not doomed to repeat the theological mistakes of those who have gone before us.

Stanley Hauerwas makes an interesting observation about the nature of seminary training today.  He’s concerned that many people don’t take seminary training seriously enough, and he makes his point by comparing seminary and medical school.  He asks us to imagine if a future doctor got to medical school and said, “You know, I’m just really not into anatomy.  I’m not going to worry about that subject. I’m going to focus more on my bedside manner.”  What do you think the school administrators would say to that student?  They’d say, “It doesn’t matter if you’re not interested in anatomy.  It’s important.  If you want to be a doctor you’ve got to understand how the human body works!”

Likewise, leaders in the church need to be able to think theologically.  It’s important.   This means they need to know the basic doctrines, historical figures, schools of thought, and so on, but more than that, they need to be able to bring these resources to bear upon the questions they face in their own life and ministry, so that these questions can be thought through theologically, and not simply on the basis of other concerns, be they pragmatic, psychological, financial, etc..

It is often said that everyone is a theologian.  I think this is true.  Theology is, simply put, God-talk. We all talk about God, and in that sense, we are all theologians.  The question is, are we going to be good theologians or are we going to be hacks?  We don’t need everyone to be experts.  But just like we expect that doctors will know the difference between our heart and our stomach, church leaders need to know the difference between Christology and ecclesiology; they need to see how they relate to one another, and both our Christological and ecclesiological assumptions inform our practices.  Just like a doctor needs to be able to tell the difference between a healthy person and a diseased person, church leaders need to be able to tell the difference between orthodoxy and heresy.

Having said all that, it’s important to recognize that theology is not like anatomy.  God is not laid out on a slab for us to poke and prod and test and dissect.  Although God does make himself known to us through Christ and the Spirit, this is always a profound condescension on his part; he comes down to our level so that we can understand him with our limited human minds – but we have to always remind ourselves that God is bigger than any theological system.  He is greater than the greatest thing we can possibly imagine. and so we have to remain humble about our theology.  We can speak truthfully and faithfully about God but we can never speak exhaustively.

I ended my introductory remarks during our first class with this wonderful quote from Karl Barth.  I reminded them that Barth was the greatest theologian of the 20th century – many would say the greatest theologian since the Reformation.  He wrote prolifically.  His Church Dogmatics was up to six million words when he died – and he hadn’t finished it.  In spite of all this, Barth retained a wonderful humility, both regarding himself as a person and about his theological work.  I always try to keep this quote in mind as I think theologically:

“The angels laugh at old Karl. They laugh at him because he tries to grasp the truth about God in a book of Dogmatics. They laugh at the fact that volume follows volume and each is thicker than the previous one. As they laugh, they say to one another, “Look! Here he comes now with his little pushcart full of volumes of the Dogmatics!” And they laugh about the men who write so much about Karl Barth instead of writing about the things he is trying to write about. Truly, the angels laugh.”
Quoted in Robert McAfee Brown’s “Introduction” to Portrait of Karl Barth, by George Casalis, trns. Robert McAfee Brown. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1964, p xiii.

Fourth Annual Wesley Studies Symposium at Tyndale

/ James Pedlar / 1 Comment

On March 13, Tyndale Seminary will be hosting its Fourth Annual Wesley Studies Symposium, organized by Dr. Howard Snyder, Chair of Wesley Studies at Tyndale.

I’ve been privileged to be a part of the previous three events, and it has been exciting to see the Symposium grow from about a dozen participants in 2009 to well over 50 in 2011.   We’ve had some great presentations from established scholars, practitioners, and graduate students.

Most importantly, it has provided an opportunity for networking among people who are interested in Wesleyan history and theology.  The Wesley Chair is an interesting partnership between five Canadian denominations and Tyndale: the Brethren in Christ, the Church of the Nazarene, the Free Methodist Church, The Salvation Army, and the Wesleyan Church.  It has been wonderful to build connections, share resources, and encourage one another across denominational lines via these events.

This year’s program looks very interesting, and covers a wide variety of disciplines and topics (detailed schedule available here).  The papers to be presented are:

  • “Statistical Profile of the Wesleyan Community in Canada,” by Rick Hiemstra (Director of Research and Media Relations, Evangelical Fellowship of Canada)
  • “Graced Practices of the Salvation Army,” by Major Wendy Swan (ExL Program Director and Asst. Professor of Theology, Booth University College; PhD student, King’s College, London)
  • “Herbert E. Randall: From Canadian Holiness Missionary to Pentecostal Leader,” by  Dan Sheffield (Director, Intercultural and Global Ministries, Free Methodist Church in Canada)
  • “The Role of the Holy Spirit in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley”by Dr. Jeffrey McPherson (Asst. Professor of Theology, Roberts Wesleyan College)
  • “Toward a Wesleyan Holiness Homiletic,” by Mark Schnell (Ph.D. student, Emmanuel College, Toronto School of Theology)

In the evening, we’ll have a keynote lecture by Dr. Victor Shepherd, on the topic “Wesley as Theologian and Leader in the Universal Church.”  Dr. Shepherd is Professor of Theology at Tyndale Seminary, and was the first occupant of the Bastian Chair of Wesley Studies at Tyndale.

The Symposium will be held in the auditorium of Tyndale’s new Bayview Campus.  If you’re in the area and interested in Wesley Studies, please consider coming, and register here.   The event is free but we do need people to register so we can plan for meals.

Hope to see some of you there.

John Wesley’s Theological Interpretation of Scripture

/ James Pedlar / 1 Comment

Last week I was assisting Howard Snyder as he taught the class “John Wesley and the Mission of God” at Tyndale Seminary.  Towards the end of the class I asked the students about their general impressions of Wesley’s sermons.  One of the first comments was that Wesley doesn’t really do “exegesis” of a text.   Rather, he usually takes a single verse as his starting point and then expounds upon a theme.  His sermons are, in a sense, more “topical” than “exegetical.”

Personally, I’m quite wary of topical preaching.  Typically it means that the preacher begins with a topic, knowing what they want to say, and then goes to the Bible to find a verse or passage that supports their preconceived idea.   Scripture then becomes (in the worst case scenario) a prop to support the preacher’s ideas.  The better way, then, is to begin with a passage of scripture and a blank sheet of paper – no preconceived agenda, other than allowing the text to speak to the particular context in which you are preaching.

Having said that, it would be wrong to dismiss Wesley’s sermons as examples of “topical” preaching.   Although his preaching is not exegetical in the contemporary sense of the term, I would argue that his sermons are thoroughly biblical, in that they arise out of Wesley’s consistent theological interpretation of scripture.

This point is underscored by an excellent essay, “Wesley as Biblical Interpreter,”  by Robert Wall, which is included in the recent Cambridge Companion to John Wesley.   Though, as Wall indicates, Wesley is sometimes misread by some as an uncritical biblicist, a closer reading reveals that he can be seen as “an exemplar of theological interpretation of the Bible.”

Wesley had a keen sense of the overall shape of the Biblical narrative, centred on the saving message of salvation by faith, and read through the Epistle of 1 John as the simplest and most sublime statement of the gospel.  While it might seem arbitrary for Wesley to give 1 John primacy of place, his logic was that the Apostle John lived the longest, and his writings were the last, and therefore, the most advanced witnesses to Christ.

Consider this quote from Wesley’s Journal, July 18, 1765:

In the evening I began expounding the deepest part of the holy Scripture, namely, the first Epistle of St. John, by which, above all other, even inspired writings, I advise every young Preacher to form his style.   Here are sublimity and simplicity together, the strongest sense and the plainest language!  How can any one that would “speak as the oracles of God,” use harder words than are found here?

The reality is that every interpreter makes these kinds of choices, but most protestants read the Biblical canon through Pauline eyes, rather than Johannine (which is generally seen as the Eastern preference).  Not that Wesley spent all his time in 1 John.  His sermons are peppered with scriptural quotations and allusions which range throughout the biblical canon.   But 1 John served as a kind of hermeneutical key for Wesley.  As Wall summarizes:

Whereas Wesley’s extensive use of biblical citations and allusions in his sermons instantiate an interest in letting each part of Scripture engage the whole – obscure texts illuminated by more lucid ones – his final court of appeal is 1 John.  (“Wesley as Bibilcal Interpreter,” p. 117-118).

Wall also goes on to list ten “interpretive practices” in which Wesley engaged as a biblical interpreter (his headings, my summaries in brackets):

  1. The intuited text (role of the HS)
  2. The naked text (use of critical tools to understand the literal sense)
  3. The canonical text (sense of the way the whole of scripture fits together)
  4. The community’s text (reading scripture in the church, alongside other interpreters)
  5. The salvific text (reading scripture “for salvation”)
  6. The ruled text (use of the “analogy of faith” – the non-negotiable core of Christian faith – as a rule for interpreting each part)
  7. The preached text (translating the text to the immediate context)
  8. The responsive text (interpreting scripture so as to be changed by it)
  9. The performed text (relating scripture to Christian experience)
  10. The sacramental text (using scripture as means of grace for the community)

These practices, so helpfully illuminated by Wall, give us a rich picture of Wesley as a nuanced interpreter, who was well attuned to important theological and pastoral issues as he read scripture – a far cry from an uncritical biblicist!

The essay is well worth reading if you are a student of Wesley.

Second Canadian Wesley Studies Symposium

/ James Pedlar / Leave a comment

Howard Snyder, chair of Wesley Studies at Tyndale Seminary, has been trying to encourage networking among Wesleyan theologians and pastors in Canada.  A few of us got together last spring for an informal Wesley Studies symposium, and we’re trying to make it an annual event.   So if you’re interested in Wesley and you can be at Tyndale on March 23, please let me know, because we’d love to have you there.

Second Annual Wesley Studies Symposium

Tyndale Seminary, Tuesday, March 23, 2010

9:00 a.m. – 7:30 p.m

Schedule / Agenda

8:45 a.m. Coffee – Information

9:00 a.m. Welcome – Introductions – Announcements – H. Snyder

9:15-10:15 Amy Caswell: “The Story of Christian Perfection: the Perfection Narrative of George Clark and Other Friends of John Wesley”

10:15-10:30 Break

10:30-11:20 Chad Short: “John Wesley and N. T. Wright in Dialogue”

11:20-12:15 Bob Munshaw: “‘Be Thorough, But Be in Haste’: Impetus and Self-Understanding of Mission in the Early Free Methodist Church”

12:15-1:00 Lunch (Courtesy of Tyndale Seminary)

1:00-1:50 Howard Olver: “A Theology for Reaching the City”

1:50-2:30 Updates on Wesley Research (Current & Proposed)

2:30-2:45 Break

2:45-3:30 James Watson: “Social Science Methodology for Multiethnic Church Planting”

3:30-4:15 Matt McEwen: “Wesley and the Environment: A Sacramental View” (provisional title)

4:15-5:00 Resources, Programs, New Publications, Etc. – Discussion

5:00-6:00 Free Time

6:00-7:30 Dinner, Denominational Presentations