Spiritual Warfare in the Library: The Grave Danger of Theological Suspicion in the UK Church - Part 2
In our last Greystone Conversations episode, we asked the question of how long can the Christian Faith survive in recognizable form in a Church context where the work of theology is held in suspicion and the priority of divine authorship of Holy Scripture plays little to no role in biblical interpretation? We asked if there is not a true sense in which the frontlines of the Church's spiritual warfare today is in the library?
As we turn our attention to possible remedies for this situation, does our concern for ideas suggest a new kind of Gnosticism or is there another way to think about the rehabilitation of the theological life of the church in relationship to Scripture and the ministry?
Last episode, Drs. Letham, Williams, and Garcia explored the issues at hand regarding the questions above. Today's episode explores what the solution or solutions might look like. That solution we suggest includes at least three elements:
1. the recovery of properly theological interest in the faith, life, and ministry of Christ's church, and one which we recognized has both exegetical roots and exegetical consequences. Our theology shapes how we read Scripture, whether we intend this relationship or not. And it is in fact quite unbiblical to divorce faithful, biblical reading and interpretation from the work of Theology. Theology is in fact the disciplined and ordered reading of Holy Scripture which attends to its anchor in the trinitarian God of the Christian faith, and the purpose of that God in history. A purpose brought to its fullness, beginning to end, in the Lord Jesus Christ.
2. Attention to the institutional and organizational contexts in which such a recovery might be advanced. This requires exploration of the successes and failures of traditional institutions but also openness to the ways non-traditional and newer entities might be well equipped to serve as vehicles for further reformation of the church according to the word of God.
3. Liturgy. We are Gnostics, and so we must not allow ourselves to indulge the temptation to think that the remedy is simply more ideas or better ideas whether about doctrine or the Scriptures. No, it is, in fact, a refusal of the scriptures themselves to imagine that orthodoxy can long survive in a church context where it is detached from the worshipping and common life of God's people; where the routines, rhythms, cadences of the sacred assembly cannot repeatedly reorder us toward our life in Christ including our thinking.
To discuss this and more Greystone President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, is joined once again with Greystone Fellows, Dr. Garry Williams and Dr. Robert Letham. Dr. Robert Letham is Greystone Fellow in Theology and History and professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Union School of Theology. Dr. Garry Williams is Greystone Fellow in Theology and History and director of the Pastor's Academy in London. Drs. Garcia, Letham, and Williams have extensive experience teaching and writing theology in the UK, and are therefore keenly aware of the challenges facing the church in that context.
