Hanging Rock

Just a couple of photos:

Oscar and Cesca at the top of Hanging Rock (from 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' fame).

And Daniel being a cute baby.

The Fault Line

 Here’s a nice quote from Adam Cooper’s new book ‘Life in the Flesh’:

‘Between traditional Christian thought and the greater deal of contemporary theology there runs a fault line dividing them off as two quite different ways of going about the theological task. Putting it most simply, the former perceives its main task in terms of the receptive vision of reality, the rational discovery of objective revelation, the affective experience of divine things. The latter, by contrast, perceives its task in terms of the production of reality, the subjective creation of divine things, the sublimation of the data of revelation to the exigencies of historical and personal evolution.’

I think this quote sums up things succinctly and accurately. It also helps me understand why I find traditional Christian thought generally so much more serious and challenging than much contemporary theology.

Reinhard Hutter, is, on the other hand, a contemporary theologian whose work interests me. But his ‘Suffering Divine Things’ is an attempt to do theology in the more traditional way – at least in terms of receiving rather than self-creating revelation.

Come and See the Violence Inherent in the System

On the First Things site there is an interview with French-born American resident Rene Girard.

 

Girard is an historian, philosopher and literary critic. He taught at a number of American Universities, and was a professor at Johns Hopkins and Stanford.

 

Here’s a quote from the interview:

 

‘In a way, Christianity is the end of archaic religions because it reveals that the victim is innocent. When you understand Christianity correctly in its closeness and distance from archaic religion it is the same structure, the scapegoat phenomenon, that Jesus is victim of. Yet the text is intended to destroy your belief in scapegoat phenomenon instead of using it in order to have sacrifices. The relationship is very central and rational with all archaic religions in the past that may go back tens of thousands of years … I think the question and the paradox of the scapegoat (it is there when you don’t see it, and not there when you see it) is going to be understood better and will play a role in apologetics that it has never played. The view of Christianity is not paradoxical enough. I think that when you read Kierkegaard carefully he is not very far from several of the things that the scapegoat theory can formulate more rationally. Therefore, it can be a tool of apologetics that hasn’t been discovered yet.’

 

I first came across Girard’s ideas in the writing of Roger Scruton. I was immediately interested, because Girard seems to want to deal seriously with the reality of violence – to get at the truth of violence, so to speak. This is important to me, because I think that when the desire for violence is not acknowledged, it will out somehow, someway. There will be hidden, desperate, and murky  violence under the cover of a rhetoric of peace.

The Formal and Material Principles

I’m on the Australian Lutheran Catholic Dialogue. Recently we have been discussing the Word of God in the Church. Although for both Lutherans and Catholics the phrase ‘Word of God’ means more than Scripture, it certainly includes Scripture.

 

In the last dialogue meeting both sides presented papers on the interpretation of Scripture in their respective communions. The Lutheran paper included a section on the Formal and Material Principles. The catholic theologians probed us on this point- especially on whether this distinction uses the terms ‘formal’ and ‘material’ in an Aristotelian sense.

 

At the dialogue I said that this Lutheran approach does use Aristotelian terms and categories, but now I think I was wrong to say this.

 

My hunch at this stage is that the distinction between the Formal and Material Principles is post Kantian: that it uses Kantian, not Aristotelian terms. It may be that it uses Kantian terms in a non Kantian way. I’ve not been able to find much in my library or on the net to help me.

 

One thing that I’m having a lot of trouble with is locating the genesis of the distinction between the Formal and Material principles in the Lutheran dogmatic tradition. I can’t find any sure references so far in the early dogmaticians. The Lutheran Cyclopedia defines the Formal Principle as the principium congnescendi. This is certainly not correct, at least as Gerhardt uses the term as distinct from the principium essendi. The earliest references I’ve found so far come from the 1940’s and 50’s – but I’m assuming that it can’t be that late.

 

 Preus’s book ‘TheInterpretation of Scripture’ apparently touches on these terms on pages 14-23, but does so in a way different from our current usage. The orthodox bods, it seems, distinguish quite precisely between two things. 

1.       They do not speak about the formal principle but about the forma of the Scriptures in two ways.

a.       The forma externa which is its idiom or style of writing as a human document

b.      The forma interna which is its inspired sense as God’s word

2.       They do not speak about the formal principle but about the materia of the Scriptures in two ways.

      a.   The materia ex qua which is their text

      b.   The materia circum qua which is their teaching, their doctrinal content

 

So not much help there in locating the genesis of the distinction.

 

I can’t find anything on the Formal and Material principles in Schmidt’s “Doctrinal Theology of the Lutheran Church’, but it’s possible that I haven’t read closely enough.

 

I don’t own Pieper, but I’ve been assured that he uses this distinction in the way it used now. Where does he get it from?

 

Does anyone who read this blog have any idea?