Consolation Enough

A Review of David Kelsey, Human Anguish and God’s Power A book by David Kelsey is always eagerly anticipated among theologians. Kelsey is the father, grandfather, and now great-grandfather of many like myself who trained as professional theologians in the American context. His densely packed arguments often attend to matters of pastoral concern. By my read,…
The (Relative) Goodness of Our Concrete Materiality

Our purpose in what follows is to help answer the following question: what do Christians mean when they confess that creation is good? This question is both timely and difficult. Admittedly, creation’s goodness is not always self-evident to us. Evils in this world are often more apparent to us than its goodness, especially in times…
The Goodness of Created Existence

Our purpose in what follows is to help answer the following question: what do Christians mean when they confess that creation is good? This question is both timely and difficult. Admittedly, creation’s goodness is not always self-evident to us. Evils in this world are often more apparent to us than its goodness, especially in times…
The Goodness of the Creator and the Creative Act

Our purpose in what follows is to help answer the following question: what do Christians mean when they confess that creation is good? This question is both timely and difficult. Admittedly, creation’s goodness is not always self-evident to us. Evils in this world are often more apparent to us than its goodness, especially in times…
Broken Christian Practices and the
Perfection of God

Lauren Winner has offered a short but pungent volume on the way central Christian “practices” are historically suffused with distortive, even abusive energies. Focusing specifically on eucharist, prayer, and baptism, she presents an argument that is pointed, deft, often elegant and always enlivened by injections of narrative energy and provocative conceptual summaries. Winner is a…
Voice, Vestigia, and the Holiness of the Triune God

I’ve organized my response into a loose series of comments, appreciations, and questions, as I try to begin to take in Katherine Sonderegger’s extraordinary work in this volume. Here, I will comment on 1) her voice in the project, 2) the vestigia Trinitatis, with sex/gender as an example, and 3) the holiness of the Triune…
The Holy One in Our Midst

What might it look like to pursue a theology that, in its very form, is warped and bent around the voice of the God who speaks, the one who was is indeed most fully and vivaciously alive, of the one who truly “is a consuming fire” (cf. Heb 12:29)? Volume 2 of Katherine Sonderegger’s tour…
Permanent Self-Hallowing and the Processional Life of God

Katherine Sonderegger freely admits that in her Systematic Theology, Volume 2 she has written “an unfamiliar, perhaps odd book on the Holy Trinity” (p. xxix). It is also a masterpiece, a sustained virtuoso performance at the highest level of academic systematic theology. Sonderegger attempts things that only a handful of living practitioners could aspire to;…
The Inner Life of God

Katherine Sonderegger confesses that Volume 2 of her Systematic Theology “is a strange book, a disorienting one, and, some would say, an impossible one” (p. xv). It is, after all, a book about the inner Life of God, as its title makes clear—The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons. Theologians have been eagerly…
The Logic of Chalcedon and the Burning Bush

“As the voice, so the vision of God is the end of the creature; no one looks on the Lord and lives.” —Katherine Sonderegger “Whoever wishes to deliberate or speculate soundly about God should disregard absolutely everything except the humanity of Christ.” —Martin Luther In 599, Gregory the Great was alerted that the Bishop of…
Where do the Divine Missions Fit in Abraham’s Theology of Divine Action?

There is something naturally compelling to Abraham’s call for theology’s return to the language of divine personal agency. It is as if theology had languished under a spell, which was preventing us from seeing the obvious: that there is no metaphysical quandary about the claim that God acts. Invoking an open concept of action, he…
God-Centered Dogmatics

I am not the first to observe that the loss of John Webster in May of 2016 was not only the loss of a leading theologian, mentor, and friend. It was also a loss for the discipline of systematic theology. Friends and I spoke of John’s yet to be published systematic theology in the way…