A Must Read: William Stringfellow...

A Must Read: William Stringfellow...check out the Stringfellow Week at Ben Myers' Faith & Theology Blog

Check out all of Ben Myer's postings on Stringfellow HERE

Here is but one excerpt:


Stringfellow on American Leaders

“The … ingenious aggressions of the principalities against human life in society, the victimisation of human beings … by the demonic powers exposes a crucial aspect of the contemporary American social crisis. The American problem is not so simple that it can be attributed to a few – or even many – evil men in high places…. Our men in high places are not exceptionally immoral; they are, on the contrary, quite ordinarily moral. In truth, the conspicuous moral fact about our generals, our industrialists, our scientists, our commercial and political leaders is that they are the most obvious and pathetic prisoners in American society. There is unleashed among the principalities in this society a ruthless, self-proliferating, all-consuming institutional process which assaults … and destroys human life even among, and primarily among, those persons in positions of institutional leadership. They are left with titles but without effectual authority; with the trappings of power, but without control over the institutions they head; in nominal command, but bereft of dominion…. The most poignant victim of the demonic in America today is the so-called leader”

(An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, pp. 88-89).

Advice for theological students: ten steps to a brilliant career

Ever fancied yourself a theologian? Ever wondered if you should pursue a degree in theology?

The quite brilliant Ben Myers, over at the "Faith and Theology" blog has this advice for those seeking to be excellent theological students...just absolutely beautifully funny and irreverent (and wise!)

Check out an excerpt below, or read it all HERE.

~ The Rev. Peter M. Carey

Advice for theological students: ten steps to a brilliant career
by Ben Myers, at "Faith and Theology" blog

1. As a theological student, your aim is to accumulate opinions – as many as you can, and as fast as possible. (Exceptional students may acquire all their opinions within the first few weeks; others require an entire semester.) One of the best ways to collect opinions is to choose your theological group (“I shall be progressive,” or “I will be evangelical,” or “I am a Barthian”), then sign up to all the opinions usually associated with that social group. If at first you don’t feel much conviction for these new opinions, just be patient: within twelve months you will be a staunch advocate, and you’ll even be able to help new students acquire the same opinions.

2. At the earliest possible opportunity you should also form an opinion about your favourite theological discipline: that is, you should choose your specialisation. To communicate this choice to others, you should dismiss as trivial or irrelevant all other disciplines: the systematic theologian should teach herself to utter humorous remarks about the worth of “practical” theology, while the New Testament student should learn to hold forth emphatically on the dangers of systematic theology; and so on.

3. As far as possible, you should try to avoid all non-theological interests or pursuits. All your time and energy should be invested in reading important books and discussing important ideas. (Novels in particular should be avoided, as they are a notorious time-waster, and they furnish you with no new opinions.)

4. Every successful theological student must master the proper vocabulary. All theological conversations should be peppered with these termini technici (e.g. “Only a demythologised Barthian ontology can subvert the différance of postmodern theory and re-construe the analogia entis in terms of temporal mediation”). The less comprehensible and more sibylline the sentence uttered, the better. There are some stock-in-trade terms that are de rigueur (e.g. perichoresis, imago Dei, Heilsgeschichte, Bullsgeschichte), but the really outstanding student should find creative ways to deploy a wide range of foreign polysyllabic words. Phrases of Latin, Greek or German derivation are particularly prized. (Those of Hebrew of Syriac extraction should be used more sparingly – they are usually greeted with some puzzlement, or with cries of “Gesundheit!”)

5. Now that you’re a theological student, you will discover that the world is filled with people who don’t share your new opinions. Every conversation should thus be viewed as an opportunity to persuade others of their simple-mindedness and to convert them to a better understanding. If you’re feeling shy about this, you should start by practising on your family and closest friends. And it’s not always necessary to engage in a full-blown discussion; at times a single Latin term or a knowing smirk is all that’s required to demolish another person’s argument.

Read the other five steps HERE

Ben Myers, Stanley Hauerwas, and Rowan Williams on the Moral Superiority of Gays

Ben Myers, at Faith and Theology Blog, has a wonderful and brief discussion of Stanley Hauerwas's famous 1993 essay, "Why Gays (as a group) are morally superior to Christians (as a group)" that was published first in the Charlotte Observer and then later in the Hauerwas Reader.



Coupled with this discussion, Myers also comments upon Rowan Williams' 1999 lecture, The Body's Grace. While the stated "subjects" here may be homosexuality and Christianity (of which we have heard much, of late), but the real message goes to examine Christian ethics and its function ... put another way, each of these writers challenge a Christian Ethic that merely supports and sanctions the status quo.

I recommend reading Ben Myers' interesting post, as well as the dozens of comments that it inspired. Here is an excerpt from his post (and below it, I have also posted his response this afternoon to the 4-5 dozen comments on the post).

from Faith and Theology blog:

As writers like Williams and Hauerwas remind us, then, the task of Christian ethics is not to shore up the status quo, not to reassure us of our own security – and certainly not to naturalise the status quo, so that our own behaviour becomes the self-evident norm against which every deviation can be identified and condemned as such. Instead, the task of Christian ethics is to bring us under the judgment of the gospel, and to remind us that our action is always fraught with danger. In every new decision we are balanced precariously on the edge of a knife. In every decision, we stand under judgment. It is the false prophet who cries “peace, peace – when there is no peace.”


read the rest HERE


...and, here is his comment in response to a flurry of posted comments:

Hi folks: sorry, I honestly didn't mean to start a big war about the legitimacy of same-sex relationships! In fact, the point of my post was simply that, from the standpoint of Christian ethics, the question of same-sex legitimacy is not especially interesting or important. If anything, I think the heated debate over this question tends to distract us from the really significant moral questions, such as: what are the basis and function of sexual "norms" within the Christian community? What does it mean for the church when Christian ethicists naturalise the moral status quo? What is the function of the church's "moral no" to same-sex relationships, etc? These are the kinds of questions that Hauerwas and Williams are trying to provoke.

In my opinion, questions like these are of urgent importance for Christian ethical reflection — and these are precisely the questions that tend to be elided in heated debates about the "homosexual question". Sunday, May 04, 2008 2:54:00 PM

Interview of one of my favorite bloggers!

Check out this interview of Ben Myers, the blogger behind the "Faith and Theology" blog. Upon leaving seminary just last May, I wondered quite a bit how I would keep my head and heart reading and doing theology. I subscribe to several journals, but have found that blogs such as Ben's give me great food for thought, and point me toward other books to read. Some of his favorite blogs are Inhabitatio Deo, and The Immanent Frame, and I read these daily as well. I find these bloggers to be brilliant and teach me much in the wonderful area of theology and I commend them to anyone interested in getting their minds stretched out a bit!

You can read the interview HERE. Ben's Blog is "Faith and Theology" which you can find HERE.

Check them out,

The Rev. Peter M. Carey

Blogger of the Month for March 2008

Jim West Interviews Ben Myers

Editorial Note: Ben Myers is the author of Faith and Theology at http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/.

JW: Ben, thanks for agreeing to answering some questions for our readers. Let me say, right at the front, that though you are not officially a ‘biblioblogger’, your blog is related to the wider field of Biblical / Theological studies. Is that how you see it as well?

BM: Yes, I think that’s right. Although my main focus is on dogmatic theology, I’m very interested in the relation between theology and exegesis. My own theological thinking has been deeply influenced by the work of biblical scholars like Bultmann, Gerhard von Rad, Ernst Käsemann, and J. Louis Martyn. And on my blog there are occasional skirmishes into biblical studies — for example, my recent posts include an engagement with Mike Bird on the question of the exegetical basis of theology, as well as a theological critique of Gerd Lüdemann’s interpretation of the historical-critical method. So although I’ll only ever be (pardon me, Jim) a dilettante in biblical studies, the blog at least allows me to have conversations with biblical studies specialists, and I’m very grateful for that. Come to think of it, I’m also very glad to see bibliobloggers who are willing to venture a bit of dilettantish engagement with theology! One of the things I like most about the blogosphere is its interdisciplinary ethos, and the way it enables conversations between people from very diverse academic and ecclesial backgrounds.

JW: Tell us about yourself. Where did you study, and what was the topic of your dissertation?

BM: I did my PhD at James Cook University in Australia, with a dissertation on John Milton’s relation to 17th-century theological controversies. Before I got interested in the history of theology, I was really into modern literature — I wrote a short thesis on Samuel Beckett at one stage. And although I ended up doing my doctorate on Milton, I’ve also been obsessed for several years with the work of Karl Barth. So my current postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Queensland is allowing me to spend plenty of time with Barth.

JW: What about your ‘non-academic’ background? And I mean by that, where were you raised and what do your parents do for work? Have you siblings and if so, how many?

BM: I was born at the bottom of the world — Tasmania, that is — but I grew up on the coast of tropical North Queensland. Some of my earliest years were spent living in a beach-front house on Magnetic Island, which is a little island on the Great Barrier Reef. Although these days the island is overrun by sunburnt tourists, at the time it was just a little bohemian community.

Read the rest HERE.