An Interview with John Webster by Jason Byassee Jason Byassee is pastor of Shady Grove United Methodist Church in Providence. North Carolina. and a Ph.D. candidate in theology at Duke Divinity School. This article appeared in The Christian Century, June 3, 2008, pp. 32-34. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscriptions information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted Brock. One of the world's leading Reformed
theologians, John Webster, has focused his study on the works of Eberhard
Jüngel and Karl Barth (he edited the Cambridge
Companion to Karl Barth) and on the
theological interpretation of scripture (a commentary on Ephesians is
forthcoming). He is working on his own multi-volume systematic theology. He
cofounded (with Colin Gunton) the International Journal of Systematic
Theology and is a coeditor of the Oxford
Handbook of Systematic Theology. He
taught at the Toronto School of Theology and Oxford University before taking up
his current post at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. There seems to be renewed interest in
systematic theology over the past decade or two. How would you account for
that? The renewed
confidence that constructive theology is possible and worthwhile is probably
the biggest change in theological culture since I was a graduate student in the
late 1970s. The confidence has many roots: the steady decline of models of
theology in which "critical appraisal" is the dominant task;
receptiveness toward and fresh engagement with classical thinkers, patristic,
medieval and Reformation; a sense that the Enlightenment is only one episode in
the history of one (Western) culture and not a turning point in the history of
humankind; the work of a number of gifted and independent-minded theologians
now at the height of their powers who have shown the potency of constructive
doctrinal work. That being said,
the renewal of interest ought not to be overstated: much doctrinal theology in
English remains preoccupied with keeping up a conversation with other fields of
inquiry (often literary and cultural theory) and is so eager to do so that it
often neglects the descriptive or dogmatic tasks of systematics. In your work on the theology of scripture
you have had negative things to say about historical criticism when it's
regarded as the lone means of accessing truth about Jesus. How does the
historical-critical approach hinder rather than help efforts to get at who
Jesus "really was"? Historical
criticism is not a single entity but a family of approaches to texts and
religious history. Constructive Christology has much to learn from what
historians can tell us about the temporal realities into which the eternal Word
descended. But for the past two centuries, historical study of Christian
origins has been plagued by historical naturalism, which converts the history
of Jesus into one more temporal state of affairs. And this naturalism means
that something basic to the church's confession about Christ is missed--the
fact that the history of Jesus is what it is only because it is rooted in God's
being in a direct and immediate way. To say that
Jesus is God incarnate is to say that there is a history of Jesus only because
in it God's very being reaches out to us; only because of that outreach of the
divine being is there this historical figure, and only on that basis can his
history be known for what it is. Put differently: incarnation goes all the way
down; it's not something added onto a more basic historical reality. Without
the movement of God's unrestricted love and self-giving, without the Son's
eternal obedience to the Father, there is no history of Jesus. And so
historians who seek to find a Jesus of history behind the incarnate one of the
apostolic Gospels are looking for a figure who doesn't exist. If that's so,
then the church's conceptual formulation of its confession of Christ--its
dogma--doesn't obscure Jesus so much as tell us who he is, what's going on in
his history: God's very life is being borne to us. Karl Barth looms large in your writings.
What aspects of his theology, or what accounts of his theology, do you
especially seek to engage? Barth's work is
still in the process of reception (as might be expected from a corpus of texts
of such range and depth). Many readings of him (especially hostile ones) are often
not thoroughly acquainted with his work, and so tend to promote caricatures.
I've tried to look at him whole, and to let him explicate himself before moving
on to appraisal. From the
beginning, it's been common for many readers of Barth to worry about the
apparent one-sidedness of his descriptions of the sheer plenitude of God.
Perhaps Barth thinks that God's glory has to be maintained at a cost to
creatures. Nowadays this worry is often expressed by speaking of Barth's
supposed "extrinsicism," that is, his presentation of the Christian
faith in terms of an encounter (or collision) of divine and human wills in
which creatures are kept separate from God's being. I've tried to
suggest that this isn't really the case. From the beginning Barth was deeply interested
in the reality of creatures and their acts, and he conceived of Christianity as
concerned with the active fellowship between God and creatures. He is, I think,
a moral theologian. My interest in Barth as moral theologian suggests to me
that his interpretation of the Reformed tradition (as equally concerned with
God's glory and the free action of creatures) was deeply important in his
theological growth. Finally, we can
learn much about Barth (and, of course, other great Christian thinkers) by
watching how he interprets scripture; work at this task is still
underdeveloped. Why should ordinary Christians care about
such seemingly recondite matters as how to articulate the immanent being of the
Trinity? There aren't any
"ordinary" Christians; there are saints, a few of whom are appointed
to the task of thinking hard about and trying to articulate the common faith of
the church. We don't usually need to use formal theological language and
concepts in the everyday life of the church in prayer, preaching and service. But like any
other important human activity, faith has to achieve a measure of conceptual
clarity if it is to understand and express itself, and part of that process is
the development of abstract concepts like Trinity, incarnation and substance.
What's important is that we don't treat such concepts as if they were
improvements on the ordinary ways in which the saints express the faith; they
are simply shorthand terms, a tool kit which helps us keep certain crucial
aspects of the gospel alive in the mind and worship of the church. Theology and
theological abstractions matter because the gospel matters, because the gospel
concerns truth, and because living in and from the truth involves the
discipleship of reason. Does theology have anything to fear--or
learn--from the "new atheists" such as Richard Dawkins and
Christopher Hitchens? The saints fear
God, not their opponents, because God's good and gentle rule outbids all that
opposes the gospel. The "new atheism" looks to me pretty much like
old atheism, but it is more aggressive, less historically informed and woefully
ignorant of what Christians (and other religious practitioners) actually say
and think. Compared with serious critiques from the past, much new atheism
reads more like a tantrum than an argument. But we have to
distinguish atheism from atheists; atheists are our fellow creatures, like us
the children of Adam, and we do well to listen to them with care, to confess
our shortcomings, and also to look them in the eye with cheerful confidence and
friendliness and explain as simply as we can how the gospel witnesses to God's
gift of life. If you were just starting out in theology
today, what topics and issues would you want to tackle? What I didn't
get round to doing when I set out: lots of exegesis, lots of historical
theology, mastering the big texts of the traditions of the church. Then I'd be
better able to figure out what to do with whatever showed up than I am as I
stumble around now trying to work out what I should be about. What current trends in theology give you
hope? Theological
interpretation of scripture (when it is not burdened by large-scale
hermeneutical theory or an inflated ecclesiology); historical theology
(especially when animated by astonishment at the gifts which the Spirit has
given to the saints through the great thinkers of the past); systematics (when
it sets aside anxieties about relevance or plausibility and gives itself to the
task of loving description of the gospel). |