Colin Gunton and 3 Quotes

I just finished reading Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology, an excellent book that marked the first big contribution of Colin Gunton to modern theology. Count me a fan. The book does many interesting things as it explores the relationship between form and content in the ancient and modern study of Christology (how a thing is looked at is often determinative of what will be discovered about that thing). For Gunton, it is primarily the dualistic assumptions brought in predication to the subjects God and Human that are so crippling for Christology, which he works out to be the study of how the saving love of God resides in local expression in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This brings in a very helpful discussion of the nature of language, wherein Gunton exposes the improperly diachronic strangleholds that have been placed on the use of the words “God” and “Human,” that would preclude their simultaneous usage in description of the person of Jesus Christ. For instance, one might bring the a priori assumption that God is incapable of suffering, and that since we see Jesus suffering, we therefore cannot acribe deity to him, or maybe it only seemed like he was suffering, or maybe only the divine personality retracted at each moment of suffering, or maybe he only became divine at the ascension, ad infinitum. At any rate, this book is a laudable attempt on Gunton’s part to do theology in response to what we actually see taking place in the life, death, and resurrection, rather than speculating on what must have happened based on what we think we know to be the case about God.

3 Quotes, in No Chronological Order:

What students need to be taught, then, is that definitions are not given to us by God; that we may depart from them without risking our immortal souls; that the authority of a definition rests entirely on its usefulness, not on its correctness (whatever that means); and that it is a form of stupidity to accept without reflection someone else’s definition of a word, a problem, or a situation. All of this applies as much to a definition of a verb or a molecule as it does to a definition of art, God, freedom, or democracy.

- Neil Postman. “Defending Against the Indefensible,” in Conscientious Objections, p. 25.

The objection to classical Christology…assumes that the so-called divine attributes of omnipotence and the rest are static possessions which do not admit of exercise except in a purely external relationship to the world…. But in claiming the divinity of Jesus we are not claiming that Jesus of Nazareth was omnipotent. That is not the way in which the predicate should operate in this context. Rather, the whole human life and suffering of Jesus should be conceived as the exercise of divine omnipotence. If the predicate is understood from above in this way and not from below, the very humanity of Jesus is construed as the way in which God’s power operates. We thus come to concieve omnipotence in a new way as the result of our engagement with what it means to say that this human being is God incarnate. To be God omnipotent does not mean an arbitrary throwing of the weight around, but of the exercise of power in this thoroughly human and gracious way. The power is not the less for its self-limitation.

- Colin Gunton. Yesterday and Today, pp. 161-62.

19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened [Rom. 1.20]. **
20. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

- Martin Luther. Heidelberg Disputation