Category Archives: Gabriel Fackre

Clam chowder, clerihews, and Cardinal Newman: The best from my browsing this week

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Here are some of the best of my recent browsings:

Scott Carson at An Examined Life laments the return of the right to intellectual darkness in his insightful post The Rightward Turn.

Pastor John Castricum shares the recipe for his award-winning clam chowder  at Reflections of a Reformed Pastor.

Halden Doerge over at Inhabitatio Dei gets a lively discussion going on the question: Is there a postliberal theological project?

For those word nerds among you who actually know what a clerihew is, Kim Fabricius has a funny post at Faith and Theology called Poetic Graffiti: clerihews on ten modern Christian poets.

The quick-changing world of information technology is highlighted in a post at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab about how the magazine Foreign Policy is e-publishing (through Amazon) a book about Afganhistan by war journalist Anna Badkhen, comprised of her daily dispatches.

A thoughtful piece appeared in the Christian Science Monitoron the Pope Benedict XVI’s beatification of John Henry Newman. They quote my friend Gabe Fackre, “The heart of ecumenism [or interfaith work] is when each tradition brings its own gifts to the other.” Newman, Fackre argues, was known for the idea that theological ideas have a “trajectory” in which “you don’t abandon the teachings but let them flower – the ordination of women might be an example. It is a very supple concept of doctrine that is a long way from Benedict, who seems to rigidify doctrine.”

“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement” is now available at Wipf and Stock Publishers

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Some of you have asked me how to get a copy of my little book on the atonement, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross:  Reflections on the Atonement.  The book was a Confessing Christ book, and published in 2000 by Pickwick Publications, which Wipf and Stock Publishers acquired in 2004.

This is good news for us theologs, since Wipf and Stock, like Pickwick before it, has made many useful and significant books available that would otherwise not be published for lack of a sizable market.

Confessing Christwants to support Wipf and Stock in this important mission, and so we now have an agreement with them to carry the book.  It has been selling at Amazon.com for $14.00.  Now you can get it at Wipf and Stock for $11.20.  It is in paperback with a thoughtful foreword by Gabriel Fackre, Abbot Professor Emeritus at Andover Newton Theological School, with a striking cover designed by James R. Gorman.

Alan P. F. Sell, Professor of Christian Doctrine and Philosophy of Religion, Aberystwyth, Wales, writes on the back jacket: “I warmly recommend this book to all who wish to reflect earnestly and joyfully on the heart of the Christian Gospel. May the Cross of the crucified and risen Savior ever be at the center of our worship, service, evangelism, and ecumenism.”

If we sell out our limited stock Wipf and Stock will make a new printing available, but I’m guessing without the beautiful cover, so get yours now here.  Some of you Barthians may recognize the cover picture, as Karl Barth had a reproduction of it over his desk when he wrote his monumental Church Dogmatics.

Confessing Christ owns the copyright, so profits beyond what Wipf and Stock gets will support their good work of encouraging “joyful and serious theological conversation.”

(Cover: Crucifixion by Matthias Grunewald from the Isenheim Altarpiece, Musee d’Underlinden, Colmar, France.  Copyright Giraudon.)

Gabriel Fackre on The Life Everlasting

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On Gabriel Fackre’s blog he has been doing a series on Hope. The most recent one is on The Life Everlasting. Here’s some of it:

“The ancient creeds—Nicene and Apostles—are really dramas in three acts—creation reconciliation, redemption, the acts being the sequential missions of the three Persons as the “economic Trinity,” albeit as immanent Trinity all are involved in every act as this is the drama of the one triune God. With biblical specificity in mind, the theatre metaphor can be transposed to that of literature and conceived as a narrative with 7 chapters. I have tried to do this in the various volumes of The Christian Story series as creation, fall, covenant, Christ, church, salvation consummation. Whatever the genre we are now at the end of the final act or chapter, the finis that fulfills the divine telos. Using the language of the Apostles Creed, we have to do with the bold Christian affirmation of “everlasting life.”

The portrayal in Scripture —yes through a glass darkly—of this final state is rich and varied. Sometimes it is described in cosmic terms as “a new heaven and a new earth.”(Rev.21:1) At other times it is visualized politically and socially as the Kingdom of God come to earth (Matt 6:10). And yet other times, the focus is on persons and their fulfillment. And in every case it is clear that the alienations that mark our fallen world of Now are overcome with a reconciliation of all the broken and separation parties to God’s purposes. Thus what God finally wills and achieves is the very reflection of who God is: an everlasting life together that mirrors the eternal Life Together.

At the very center of Things to Come is the Person through whom the triune God will make such possible.”