Juxtaposing Comic and Tragic Theological Accents There are few theologians I admire as much as Nicholas Lash. In fact he’s the subject of a thesis I’m currently writing. That fact in itself, however, is nothing remarkable. What I do find puzzling, though, is the fact that I would also consider John Webster to be one of […]
Nicholas Lash on Christ’s priority to the Church Is it the case that the church is a community of people who, at any given moment, pre-exist the presence of Christ in their midst, or is it rather the case that the presence of Christ pre-exists, and is the essential precondition for, the existence and activity […]
Nicholas Lash on tragedy and Christian hope Bethlehem, the city of Ruth, and Micah, and Jesus, is not far from Gethsemane. In that child’s birth at Bethlehem are ‘represented’ the wastelands of human tragedy, of human history as ‘stillborn.’ And, in that birth, these wastelands are depicted as pregnant with promise. Christian hope is an eminently […]
Interdisciplinarity: Theological Threat or Opportunity? The following are two antithetical(?) proposals. My problem is that I find myself attracted to both of them. Each, I’m persuaded, lays claim to a measure of wisdom; neither can be ignored altogether. But what is the alternative perspective that “sees round them both”? That’s a question that has occupied […]
The Primacy of Practice in Nicholas Lash The truth of christian ‘theory’ is too closely bound up with the quality of christian ‘practice’ for it to be possible to press the necessary distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ to the point where they can be handled as fundamentally separate issues. In 1837 Newman claimed that ‘Action […]
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