Too often theology, philosophy, academia, church, and the Bible can feel dry, boring, abstract, irrelevant, dour, and a chore.
But this should seem strange because the Bible is full of celebration: feasts, parties, songs, and poems. They are celebrations of love, thanksgiving, and wonder; celebrations of the superabundant generous gifts of God to humanity.
It is refreshing to encounter an academic book that addresses theology, philosophy, and the Bible in a manner that is a celebration.
I have read most of Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture by Christopher Watkin.
There are many elements to the celebration. Here is one beautiful passage that reflects on the gift of creation and of the Cross of Christ.
The cross lifts Christianity out of the iron logic of necessity, of unbreakable cause and effect, up into a logic of superabundance......philosophy... could not receive theology's gift of a superabundance in the midst of life. There is no ultimate explanation of God's love, no rational justification for it, no way to bring it under the logic of necessity and equivalence. The love of God expressed in creation and in the cross is a reality with which the two-speed gearbox of chance and necessity can never come to terms. Divine superabundance is the raging bull that storms through the staid china shop of demure philosophical concepts, shattering every symmetrical plate and dashing every systematic bowl to the ground in a way that leaves not a trail of destruction but a grander, richer, and more open imaginary than ever before.
(pages 420-1)
Celebrating God's generous gifts to us: existence, meaning, and love
“This paradigm of the gift places us in the posture of recipients. We receive existence, we receive meaning, and we receive love. To be sure we are creative recipients,... and receiving the gift of the universe certainly does not make us passive. But the fact remains that we are recipients nonetheless. The one thing we should not do with a gift is pretend we bought or made it ourselves. The giver is usually thanked, so our fundamental orientation to existence in the paradigm of the figure of gratuity is one of praise and thanksgiving.”
(page 60)
Engagement with the world, in all its limitations, can still be a celebration
To live in God’s city here and now is to enjoy God’s limitless peace, love, and creativity; it is also to live a subversive, revolutionary life in this world as we repeatedly scratch the surface of the earthly city to reveal God’s goodness, truth, and beauty under its makeshift palimpsest.
Celebrating the gift of human language
Watkin writes as a gifted wordsmith, delighting in turns of phrase; not just his own, but also that of masters including C.S. Lewis, David Bentley Hart, G.K. Chesterton, and of course, the Biblical authors.
