Kathryn Tanner on Eternal Life and Action

By -
Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 122-3.
Eternal life amounts to an unconditional imperative to action in that this life in God remains an empowering source of our action for the good, whatever the obstacles and failings of Christians. The imperative to act is also unconditional in that it is not affected by considerations of success. Irrespective of any likelihood that one’s actions to better the world will succeed, and even though one knows all one’s achievements will come to nothing with the world’s end, one is obligated to act simply because this is the only way of living that makes sense in light of one’s life in God. Without primary concern for the consequences of one’s actions, one acts out of gratitude for the life in God one has been given, one acts out of joyful recognition that a certain course of action is part of those good gifts that stem from a special relationship with God…

In another sense, action is a conditional imperative as well; one is also acting in an attempt to bring about a world that more closely matches the one that life in God should bring. Although eternal life is not conditional on our action, since it is in a primary sense already achieved through God’s action in Christ, the blessings in the world that should naturally follow from it are yet in some significant sense conditional in the world as we know it. Blessings flow from life in God but their egress from that source can be blocked by sin, understood as the effort to turn away from relations with the triune God (and one’s fellows), the One from whom all goods flow. In this life, action that accords with the life-giving forces of God runs into the obstructions posed by our world as a realm of death – forces promoting impoverishment, suffering, exclusion and injustice. One is called to act to counter such forces in the effort to bring in another kind of life.

This action cannot, moreover, be delayed in hopes of more propitious circumstances to come. Action is present oriented and therefore realistic. One must work with what one has and that means figuring out the present workings of the world, with, for example, the help of the physical and social sciences, in order to intervene as best one can. Action has an urgency, moreover; every moment counts…

Failure to succeed is not, however, a reason to despair. Certainly, if our action is not primarily motivated by hopes for success, the failure of those hopes is no cause to give up the fight. But to the extent our hopes are for the furthering of God’s blessing through our own action, those hopes can be sustained even in the most dire and hopeless of circumstances; one can continue to hope in God, and specifically in God’s gift of eternal life since that is not conditioned by those circumstances or by our own failure because of them…
These thoughts are, like the entirely of Tanner’s brief book, insightful and thought provoking. While I’m not entirely on board with her in this volume (primarily because it is so brief; further elaboration might ally some of my worries), Tanner is always worth reading. At <$20, this volume is a great place to start.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

So You Want to Read….Dietrich Bonhoeffer?

By -
Image
"I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven." "The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community…may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door." "Since ethical thinking in terms of realms is overcome by faith in the revelation of the ultimate reality in Jesus Christ . . . there is no real Christian existence outside the reality of the world." "People who reject their bodies reject their existence before God the Creator." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer Prelude Andreas Steinhoff [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons I envisioned having a lot of time for blogging this summer, but that simply has not been the case - the last month has been a crazy one, to say the least. For two weeks, I was working at a theology summer camp of sorts, the Duke Youth Academy, and s...
Keep reading

So, You Want To Read Karl Barth?

By -
Image
Every now and then I am asked for advice about studying Karl Barth. So, I thought that I would share some of my standard advice here. But, before I do that, let me just say that I am by no means a Barth expert as compared to the people whose books I will mention below. I would be thrilled to find myself in their league one day, but as of yet that remains a distant dream. Still, I have been reading Barth for long enough, and under the supervision of a number of the scholars that I will mention below, that I think I can provide a decent orientation. I have never read Karl Barth before. Which of his books should I read first? Barth’s most famous work is the monumental 13-volume Church Dogmatics . Reading the CD with understanding is not an easy thing, so you definitely do NOT want to start here. Luckily, there are two smaller works by Barth that serve as helpful introductions to his work. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction - Based on the lectures that Barth delivered duri...
Keep reading

Karl Barth on Hell, the Devil, Demons, and Universalism – A Florilegium

By -
Image
You know, all the most interesting topics. Although Barth often confessed that he didn’t find these questions particularly interesting. At best they might draw sideways glances, as it were, as one travels the theological road. But I found a number of places in the records of Barth’s later conversations that I thought folks might find interesting, so I’ve collected them here. And if you aren’t familiar with the term “florilegium,” here you go ! All these texts are from the first volume of Barth in Conversation , with pages numbers given in parentheses along the way. As usual, italics are in the text and bold is mine. Hell “Now we come to hell. You shouldn’t laugh! There is nothing to laugh at! What does hell mean? I think hell means to be in the place where you are once fore all damned and lost without ceasing to exist, without losing the image of God, being what you are but being damned and lost, separated from God, whose creature you are, separated also from your neighbor, from...
Keep reading

George Hunsinger’s gloss of the Christ Hymn in Philippians 2

By -
Image
I’ve been reading George Hunsinger’s (my doktorvater , for anyone who might be new around here) entry in the Brazos Theoloical Commentary on the Bible series on Philippians. Anyone who has studied with George will find this book to be a compendium and application of many of his most characteristic and beloved analytical tools and patterns, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. But one of the things that really stood out to me was how he glossed the so-called “Christ hymn” of Philippians 2. George Hunsinger, Philippians , Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: BrazosPress, 2020). The gloss that Hunsinger provides is not a historical-critical interpretation. Rather, it is an ecclesial, ecumenical, and theological interpretation that attempts to fill in the blanks for how to understand this proto-liturgical formulation in light of the later formulations of the ecumenical creeds. In order to achieve this gloss, Hunsinger engages in “ecclesial hermeneutics” and makes “...
Keep reading

2010 KBBC: Week 3, Day 1

By -
On the Monstrosity of Christ : Karl Barth in Conversation with Slavoj Žižek & John Milbank By Paul Dafydd Jones For a while, I hoped to frame this conversation in terms of a dramatic interchange – something along the lines of “A Slovenian philosopher, a British theologian, and a Swiss dogmatician walk into a bar…” Alongside an eye-wateringly hip assemblage of cinematic references, literary allusions, and comedic scenes – my early favorites being when Barth imagines a young adult novel, entitled Are you there God? It’s me, Žižek , and when Milbank waxes poetic about the Twilight movies – I wanted to engage some topics that would likely receive attention, were the authors to meet for drinks. Primarily, I envisioned an intense discussion of the logos asarkos and the logos ensarkos , with Milbank talking up the former category, Barth emphasizing the latter, and Žižek asking whether recent debates are but symptoms of secret puzzle, embedded in the Church Dogmatics – a puzzle that...
Keep reading