The Little Friar

I began thinking this morning of my friend and mentor, Susan Keefe. She died two years ago this month. And in thinking of her, I realized I've never said words of thanksgiving for her life. She taught me to love God. "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints" (Psalm 116.14). Dr Keefe was, when I first met her, a small, wisp of a woman, emaciated, her hair clean but limp, her face sunken, her frame fragile. She was wearing what looked to be a homemade dress and carrying a stack of books and papers that appeared to outweigh her. She glided into our small seminar room for a 3-hour, one-night-a-week in-depth study of "Pastoral Care in the 6th-8th Centuries in Merovingian Gaul". Just hearing her explore the requirements for the seminar made me believe this was a journey into reliquaries and baptismal pools with someone who'd seen Gregory of Tours baptize and preach. After Susan Keefe, students -- myself included -- would never s...

" True respect for the mystery [of the incarnation] can express itself, among other ways, just in the attempt to understand it fully", according to Pannenberg.  As an undergraduate I delved into various theologies, hoping they could guide me in a quest better to understand the God of the Bible.  But it was not until I picked up my copy of Jesus:   God and Man  (1964) by  Wolfhart Pannenberg  for a series of seminars by our philosophical theology prof that I made significant progress.  Others had helped me to see the transcendence of God and the majesty of the creator, but Pannenberg brought me face to face with the manifestation of God's glory on planet earth.  It was here that the discovery of the historical Jesus became relevant to my expedition of  fides quaerens intellectum .  Instead of  assuming  Jesus' divinity, Pannenberg saw the task of Christology as offering reasons why one should embrace the divinity of Jesus. ...

Stanley Hauerwas was my thesis adviser at Duke.  He was and is a thoroughly unpleasant man in the social sense.  I've heard him dismiss Jurgen Moltmann as "full of shit".  Stan the Man -- as some of us lovingly call him -- is a self-admitted violent man.  Not exactly what you'd expect from a Christian theologian who engages in ethical reflection.  I'm always inclined to respond to those who attack Stan in the same way he  responds:  "What else do you expect from a Texan?"   But then Hauerwas also happens to be an Episcopalian layman and one of the church's most outspoken apostles of non-violence.  Gandhi wouldn't be surprised:  The violent, he said, often make the best pacifists. I love Rowan Williams because he's so irenic and humble.   Stan Hauerwas I love because he’s such a rootin' tootin' gunslinger.  He stands in the venerable tradition of the  rabies theologorum  that can be traced back to the vitriolic Paul, v...

Great theologians are like icons rather than religious paintings:  You not only look at God, God looks at you.  The theology of  Rowan Williams  is iconography. In it we meet the gaze of God.  It's the look of agape .  Not since Bonhoeffer -- an immense influence, obviously, to all my regular readers -- have I felt so love-touched by a theologian.  But the divine gaze is an x-ray of penetration, revealing the  cor inquietum  (Augustine is probably Rowan's most significant theological other), exposing the self-love and self-hatred that infect the human project, and the self-deceit that blinds us to both.  Rowan is completely conversant with postmodernism, but he doesn't need Derrida to resource his own hermeneutic of self-deconstruction and social suspicion.  Iconoclastic as well as iconographic is Rowan's theology. In fact, there is hardly a language-game Rowan cannot play (Wittgenstein is another mentor).  He quite promiscuous...

I've been thinking for some time about a new series on those theologians I love.  I'm not so much interested in a roll call of "great" theologians (as fun as that might be) nor do I care to come up with a list of influential thinkers.  Instead, I'm going to write on why I love  particular theologians.  So it's meant to be personal and subjective.  Doubtless other lists would contain other folks.   In other words, the series is as much about love as it is about theologians .  Why is it that the experience of love is so closely tied to theological study?  Why is it that we are really deeply influenced only by those thinkers to whom we open ourselves in love?  Why is it that the absence of love so often constitutes an obstacle to genuine understanding -- so that the thinker whom we have not yet learned to love seems remote and unintelligible? Those are questions I want to address, however indirectly, in this series.   This may seem a stran...