frequently asked questions

This book is written some years before the Jesus book, but it has the same ”bringing-it-all-together”-character to it. Again it is hard to avoid the comparison with Yoder, but whereas Yoder is an ethicist with very good knowledge of the Bible, Lohfink is a NT scholar with a very good grasp of political theology. And, as I said he is German and a Catholic. But they end up with an extremely similar understanding of Christianity and the church.

This book, then, traces the centrality of ”community” from the Old Testament, through Jesus, the Early Church and on to the church of today’s world. Obviously, the point is that Christianity just does not make sense without the community of Gods people, but Lohfink also tries to characterise this people. The best parts, understandably, is the chapters where he examines the role of the community in the teaching of Jesus and the apostles.

The book ends with a very beautiful auto-biographical chapter on ”The Church and I”, with tells of Lohfinks own experience from childhood up till now, through the ”critical” years up to his experiences in the Katoholishe Integrierte Gemeinde.

It is a bit difficult to know what to do with this book. Its central idea can be summed up in one sentence: By breaking up the unity of truth claims, the reformation spawned secular society. It is not a new or original claim, yet Gregory develops it over some 500 pages. It leans heavily of the work of people such as John Milbank and Alisdair MacIntyre, and does not in any way alter their accounts in any significant way. On the other hand it is not a introductory text either, its argument is quiet complex at times. This means that it occupies that awkward middle ground between a detailed historical study and a more grand-narrative type of story, which means I, for one, tend to nod in agreement a lot, but more because I already thought this way than because I learnt something new.

The strength, and thus also the weakness, of Gregory’s book is thus the level of detail he goes into. He actually tries to provied solid historical backing for his claims, tries to be sufficiantly nuanced in his arguing and show the complexity of historical events. This means that for those of us looking for a ”story” the text proceeds rather slowly at times, especilly since the story is largely familiar. On the other hand, then, much of this detail is interesting and useful, like the key role of the Dutch society acting like a experimental lab for secular society, and the wide variety of reformation thinkers that we seldom hear of today.

The best chapter to me is the one dealing with economy – which is a bit odd, since it is the one where Grigory’s theory doesn’t really work, and he actually tends to argue that the seculaisation of economy happened not because of the reformation but in spite of it. But what is good with this chapter is the way it shows how consistently Christians preached against what we today call capitalism, and yet continued to develop it in practice. There is much to be learned from this lesson.

The question is thus: for whom is this book useful. I’m thinking, first year doctoral students; but then, I want them to read MacIntyre and Milbank in the origianl, and I’m not sure if this book helps them with that or spoils some of the fun. Of course, for those studying secularisation per se, Gregory’s book is and will be essential for a long time.

I cannot claim to have read a ton of Jesus-books, but this is definetely a book that does what I would want a Jesus-book to do. Solid engagement with the results of historical research combined with theological, philosophical and political sophistication, that produces a picture of Jesus that is theologically relevant. Lohfinks emphases’ are not original: the jewishness of Jesus and the early church, the centrality of the reign of God to Jesus preaching, and the necassity of a commitment to the church to understand Jesus. But he presents it brilliantly and with just enough polemical bite to keep us interested. As  yoderian I find my self nod in recognition and agreement several times.

As far as I can tell Lohfink does not shy away from the ”difficult” aspects of Jesus, like his judgements sayings, excorcisms and miracles in general. And I at least find his criticism of the standarn 20th century take on these – based on enlightenment world views – convincing.

The final chapter, where he compares Jesus understanding of Gods reign with the notion of utopia is an absolutely brilliant piece of political theology, that I suspect I will have reason to return to many times.

Lohfink is almost 80 now, so this book too fits in the section of scholars summing up their life’s work. One cannot overestimate the importance of books like this in our time of quick publishing. Highly recommended.

I must confess I find it hard to read Barth – the Barth of Kirchliche Dogmatik I mean. So I have taken the lazy approach to Barth, reading several of his smaller works, like the Anselm book and Dogmatics in Outline and so on. I chanced upon this one online while looking for stuff on Schleiermacher, and this really is a book about Schleiermacher, at least in this version, since it is a shortened version of Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert where most of the 19th century theology is left out. So most of it is the philosophical background – essentially Barths reading of the enlightenment thinkers and beyond, and that is why this book is so interesting. In a sense it is Barths attempt to understand his own background, i.e. the background he mostly rejects but obviously still builds upon.

The chapter on Hegel in particular is interesting. Among the philosophers discussed here (Rousseau, Lessing, Kant, Herder and Hegel), Hegel is the only one Barth is unsure of. He is in complete command in his reading of the others, pointing out their inconsistencies and errors with perfect confidence. When he gets to Hegel it is almost as if he is careful not to mess up. His attitude is basically: ”perhaps Hegel after all was the one that got modernity right”.

The chapter on Schleiermacher is the center of the book in the sense that the chapters before and after it points towards it. Barth is ambibvalent towards him: as a historian he approves of him, as a theologian he is critical. Here he is mostly playing the historian and that is what makes the treatement exciting. We know that Schleiermacher in a sense represents all that Barth wants to get away from, still he cannot deny his importance.

As a whole the book complicates my understanding of the development of modern protestant theology in several ways. For one thing, how completely lost the Christian narrative seems to have been in the 18th century academic theology – which means that in some weird way liberal theology must be seen as a recovery of Christianity’s historical truthclaims. Another thing: I was not aware that not even the reformation thinkers were well known in this period before the great Luther-rennaissance in the decades before and after 1900. As so often we discover that what we believe is traditional  (in this ”classical lutheran theology”) is much younger than we think.