Veli-Matti Karkkainen on Wolfhart Pannenberg

Small review that I wrote almost a few years ago. 

"No other theologian on the contemporary scene has labored so untiringly to establish the intellectual credibility of Christian theology, nor shown a wider intellectual breadth in dialogue not only with biblical, historical, and contemporary Christian views, but also with philosophy, science, history of religions, and cultural disciplines. This is in keeping with his advocacy of a coherent theology of truth. Everything is to be related to the whole." Page 124, Wolfhart Pannenberg: Trinity as "Public Theology".

That is one of the quotes that Veli-Matti Karkkainen makes about Systematic Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg in his book The Trinity and Global Perspectives. Being outside of America for the last 2+ years I've had the privilege of seeing the world with my own two eyes and have experience breaths of fresh air being in the new heartland of Christianity. Also with those privileges, I've been able and open enough to study European theologians and read some of the best Pentecostal theologians also.

Even though I am Reformed, Reformed theology and theology in general isn't confined to a certain group of individuals from California who act like small popes. Theology is never healthy in a vacuum. With that said, cessation isn't accepted by the majority of scholars around the world, but only in certain pockets.

To conclude, it's been a joy to work through Pentecostal theologian Veli-Matti's books.

Institutes of the Christian Religion Book 1

Some books aren't meant to be read fast and that goes for Calvin's work. No pastor should be pastoring without having the Institutes. Calvin packs so much in every well thought through sentence that is an invaluable resource to have when starting out in ministry. 

One thing that Calvin's Institutes isn't is a Systematic theology. You will have to go other places for that, but what is left in Calvin's work is a Spiritual theology that can be preached from with his examples both in history and the situations he encountered. 

Simply put through out Book 1 is the Reformer's God who is for us. We only know the Triune God in relation of what he did for us through the suffering, death, resurrection of his Son and the giving of the Spirit. He wasn't a God who died outside of us like sometimes developed in later Reformed theology, but he brought his elect with him. When Christ died, we died to sin, and when he rose for our justification, we also rose with him to newness of life. In other words......Union with Christ. 

So if you haven't read Calvin in a long time or maybe you have just read his work through what has been rehashed through American Reformed theology, then this is the time for you to get back to the Reformer's own thoughts on the Protestant Reformation.

Ken

Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body by N.T. Wright

‘Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body: All for One and One for All

Reflections on Paul’s Anthropology in his Complex Contexts’

By the Rt Revd Prof N. T. Wright

University of St Andrews

An exegete among philosophers! I don’t know whether that is more like a Daniel among the lions or like a bull in a china shop. We shall see.

When I was teaching in Oxford twenty years ago, I had a student who wanted to study Buddhism; so I sent her to Professor Gombrich for tutorials. After a week or two he asked her to compare the Buddhist view of the soul with the Christian view. She replied that she didn’t know what the Christian view was. He wrote me a sharp little letter, saying, in effect, ‘You’ve been teaching this young woman theology for a whole year and she doesn’t know what the soul is.’ My reply was straightforward: we had spent that first year studying the Old and New Testaments, and the question of the ‘soul’ simply hadn’t arisen.

Now of course that was a slightly polemical stance, but I still think it was justified. The problem is that there are a great many things which have become central topics of discussion in later Christian thought, sometimes from as early as the late second century, about which the New Testament says very little; but it is assumed that, since the topic appears important, the Bible must have a view of it, and that this view can contribute straightforwardly to the discussions that later thinkers, up to the present day, have wanted to have. The most striking example of this is the referent of the word ‘justification’: as Alister McGrath points out in his history of the doctrine, what the great tradition from Augustine onwards was referring to with that word is significantly different from what Paul was referring to when he used the word. That’s fine; we can use words how we like and, with that character in Alice in Wonderland, can pay them extra on Thursdays; but we must then be careful about importing back into our reading of scripture the new meanings which we have assigned to technical terms which, in the first century, simply didn’t carry those meanings. We should also pay attention to the question of whether the word may, in its original scriptural context, carry other meanings which we may simply be screening out.

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