John Webster was born in the suggestively named parish of St Sepulchre, Newgate in London between 1578 and 1580. November 27, 2020 Bobby Grow American Evangelicalism, American History, Barth, Cultural Christianity, Culture, James Ungureanu, John Webster, Theopolitical. [2] It is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg, naturally. God is the teacher, the theologian a lifelong learner. It is a description of the Christian Bible with necessary and irreducible reference to the triune God’s being and works. His response is worth quoting in full: If theology is truly authorized by its object and so truly a joyful exercise, it will face affliction simply by saying what it has to say—whether about mercy or about anything else—without adopting either a concessive or a defensive posture. John Webster (1955–2016) by Ivor J. Davidson Part One: John Webster’s Theological Development 2. Those of us who knew and followed his work learned the news with heavy hearts. [7][8] Subsequently, Webster's translations and theological interaction with Jüngel are largely responsible for introducing him to the English speaking academy. His training was largely devoid of dogmatics but focused on methodological matters wedded to doctrinal criticism, that is, undertaking the theological task as the treatment of problems raised in light of normative modern concerns. There is, second, the moment of reconciliation. One does not endeavor to understand divine things for the sake of earthly recognition. In his mature thought, however, christology, while crucial to the theological task, neither absorbs nor exhausts it. For those of us who did not know him personally, then, his background and personal life were almost entirely unknown. The object of a theological system is God and all things relative to God; God is considered absolutely and relatively. See, e.g., “The coherence of God himself and God in his revelatory acts is…best articulated, not by making the economy, Cf. Jesus is the climax, but neither the commencement nor the conclusion, of God’s work in the world. Frederick Marquand Professor of Divinity and Professor of Religious Studies. Although Webster devoted himself to a number of major doctrinal topics, the one overriding locus was the doctrine of God, or theology proper. Brad East is Assistant Professor of Theology at Abilene Christian University, Abilene, Texas. The late John B. Webster’s The Culture of Theology is a series of six lectures given at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand in August 1998 as the Thomas Burns Memorial Lectures. Contemplation is rapt attention to God the cause of all things rather than to the things of which he is the cause.”[33]. Cambridge University Library Manuscripts & Theses (Newton Catalogue), "Professor John Webster Appointed to Chair in St Mary's College", http://www.royalsoced.org.uk/fellowship/fellows.pdf, Webster's webpage at the University of Aberdeen, Webster's webpage at the University of St. Andrews, "Perfection and Presence: God With Us, According to the Christian Confession", Kantzer Lectures in Revealed Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, "On Mercy", 2007 Christianity and Ethics Conference at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Webster_(theologian)&oldid=1008816673, Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Academics of the University of St Andrews, Articles with dead external links from April 2017, Articles with permanently dead external links, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 25 February 2021, at 05:27. The temptation to avoid mention of this name arises. Distinguishing Between God and Man: Aspects of the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel (PhD). From heaven, Christ is present to the world and, in particular, to the church in the power of his Spirit. 1. Webster on the Theology of the University by Martin Westerholm 6. “The particular relation of prophetic and apostolic words to God’s own Word is ambassadorial; they are an embassy of God’s eloquence.”[47] On the one hand, divine speech is christological: “God speaks as in the Spirit Jesus Christ speaks.”[48] On the other hand, Christ’s speech is bibliological: “God speaks as inspired Scripture speaks.”[49] As Webster puts it in a sermon preached at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford: When we listen to the Bible…we are placed in the presence of Jesus Christ. The knowledge of God repays study without end. commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance. God initiates, accompanies, and concludes the undertaking. I illustrate the subject of conditional theology through discussing John Webster’s theology. Like the labourers of the parable, the theologian’s charge is to receive the gifts of God gratefully, without continually pausing to demand justification from the giver for … religion: [noun] the state of a religious. It is a living reference, and God in Christ is its singular referent. Not only is there much more where it came from; as Webster would want to insist, what you catch merely a glimpse of here can be had in full far beyond his relatively manageable oeuvre: in the liturgy, in the Great Tradition, in Holy Scripture. Sin—and the religious consequences of sin—run rampant in The Duchess of Malfi.The tragic forces of the play’s major plotline are primarily driven by sin: it is because they are greedy for her fortune and prideful of their noble blood that the Cardinal and the Duke do not wish the Duchess to remarry. Many theological scholars from the last generation or two talk about the work of Hauerwas as a kind of gateway drug into the world of Christian ethics. We will never know. For Webster, a faithful theologian is one who focuses on the content of God’s revelation, thereby recognising but also moving beyond the mere fact that God has revealed Godself. Webster closes a mostly appreciative essay review in this way: “But most of all I could wish for a gentler book. A sounder approach would be to subsume ‘interdisciplinary’ engagements under theology’s apostolic vocation” (, “Scripture can no more be read in isolation from the divine Word than the history of Jesus can be grasped apart from or prior to its relation to the eternal divine Logos” (. Misreadings can come through textual narrowing, that is, excerpting and foreshortening a corpus. Sin—and the religious consequences of sin—run rampant in The Duchess of Malfi.The tragic forces of the play’s major plotline are primarily driven by sin: it is because they are greedy for her fortune and prideful of their noble blood that the Cardinal and the Duke do not wish the Duchess to remarry. Webster only rarely ventured that way, overcorrecting the tendency by remaining in his sphere of interest almost exclusively. This is a form of philosophical theology, with interesting links to natural theology, but not subject to Barthian strictures about natural theology. It included a few well-born Muslim converts, but the vast majority were Hindus and from “a low grade of society,” many of In the work of theology itself, then, God is first and last. Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture. Such diverted attention is only one of modern theology’s many pathologies, per Webster. Field of Interest: Theology. University of Cambridge. Webster devoted all that he was and had, the entirety of his mental energies (and then some), to seeking, contemplating, and articulating the one true and living God of Christian confession. John Webster, Holiness (London: SCM, 2003), 17. This means that theology “is summoned to extend divine instruction to others, indicating, repeating and commending what it has heard.”[64] How does that apostolic task work in practice? • Webster, John B. But that came later: First he studied language and literature and went to Cambridge in the late 1970s to pursue English, though he was quickly disabused of his interest. We misread theology regularly and in various ways. From that point on the congregation grew. [57] The church, in fact, is best understood as creatura verbi divini, the creature of the divine Word, for “the church is that human assembly generated and kept in life by the continuing, outgoing self-presentation (‘Word’) of Jesus Christ.”[58] Or as Webster puts it in another sermon: “To be the church is to be spoken to by Jesus in the Spirit.”[59], Furthermore, in Reformed vein, the church is fundamentally passive. John Webster, (born c. 1580, London, Eng.—died c. 1632), English dramatist whose The White Devil ( c. 1609– c. 1612) and The Duchess of Malfi ( c. 1612/13, published 1623) are generally regarded as the paramount 17th-century English tragedies apart from those of Shakespeare. There is not one word in his prolific writings untouched by the undimmed majesty of the Holy Trinity. Its human authors and tradents were moved by the Holy Spirit to write what would become, in God’s good pleasure, the living word of the risen Jesus to his church. Webster was born in London between 1578 and 1580, the son of John Webster (d. 1614/15). It is a polity unlike any other, yet this is invisible to the naked eye. [10] Jüngel and Barth present important influences on Webster's own constructive dogmatic work, which offers that the most reliable articulation of Christian truth is that made in shared attention with the Reformation's renewal of Chalcedonian Christianity and guided by the perfect and free God who makes himself the proper object of extended paraphrase by his active self-presentation in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.[11]. Although Webster’s bleak tragedies do feature a lot of death dealt out in various and lurid ways, both the man and his writings are more complex. Theology may be the one intellectual practice that actually is its own reward: the one inquiry whose object provides satisfaction to the mind that undertakes it. Birth of Daughter: 29 JUL 1621 Name: Ann Webster. I will then take up some paired themes in his work: Trinity and creation, Christ and salvation, Scripture and church. “I resolved to work on the assumption of the truthfulness and helpfulness of the Christian confession, and not to devote too much time and energy developing arguments in its favor or responses to its critical denials.”[9] Indeed, that statement encapsulates the mood and mode of Webster’s theology from the early 1990s up through his final works. Webster devoted all that he was and had, the entirety of his mental energies (and then some), to seeking, contemplating, and articulating the one true and living God of Christian confession. Christ is the sovereign eternal Word of God become flesh to save sinners: to reconcile them to God; to restore fellowship with himself and one another; to forgive their sins; to set them right before divine justice; to satisfy divine wrath; to incorporate them into God’s people; to impart to them eternal life; to make them holy; to purify them of all faults through a true and perfect sacrifice; to triumph over the devil and all his works; to put death to death; to chart a path to heaven at God’s right hand; to make them children of God the Father through the gift of the Holy Spirit: all this and more, Christ came to do and did, as the one work of his person, the incarnate Son. Theologians are not speculative philosophers, probing possible gods in possible universes: “Christian dogmatics is not concerned with deity but with God.”[27] This has a number of implications. That other, that someone or something else, that subject matter that so consumed the life and mind of John Webster is at once simple and impossible to say: God. Although Webster’s bleak tragedies do feature a lot of death dealt out in various and lurid ways, both the man and his writings are more complex. John Webster was born in United States on Tuesday, November 21, 1989 (Millennials Generation). Human creatures reject the vocation that their given nature entails, and seek to be what they are not: self-originating, self-sustaining, self-perfecting. That is probably the thinnest area in his thought, and probably on purpose. commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance. The late John Webster advocated both for a theological theology and a robust recovery of God's intrinsic perfection. [31] That is why theology—unfashionable in modern academic environs as ever—is properly understood as contemplative: “because it attends to divine instruction, freeing itself from distraction in order to be absorbed by the limitless depth of that by which intelligence is met.”[32] For contemplation “requires the mind to move through created things to the divine reality of whose self-communication they are signs and bearers. What the church says to itself and what the church says to its neighbors outside the church will be the same thing; in both contexts, theology has to describe the gospel well, and to persuade by description. This is marked visibly in Webster’s writings over the last decade by the decreasing presence of Barth—by citation and by material influence—and the increasing presence of St. Thomas Aquinas, along with other representatives of the catholic and scholastic traditions. He also insisted on reading Barth as a whole (not just the Römerbrief, not just the doctrine of revelation), as consistent thematically and consistently biblical, and most of all as the church theologian he was—not, that is, as a critic of liberalism or cultural polemicist or harbinger of postmodernism or whatever. God, uniquely, is a se: God has neither arche nor telos other than himself. It has no natural visibility, only spiritual visibility. He describes the faith of his teens as a “conversion from watery suburban Methodism into a tough version of Calvinistic Christianity.” Ordained to the priesthood one year before his 30th birthday, he remained in the Church of England for the rest of his life. Theology’s public responsibilities are best discharged by explicating the Christian faith and its understanding of reality out of the canon of texts in which the church receives the gospel. Webster on the Theology of the University by Martin Westerholm 6. He was also a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church and of the Scottish Journal of Theology Monographs. Perhaps nothing tops the way in which Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae was excised and gutted immediately upon his death. [4] Perhaps the most paradoxical feature of Webster’s work was the way in which it was simultaneously deeply antagonistic to any number of prominent modern and postmodern trends without, as it were, raising a ruckus. His PhD thesis was on the German Lutheran systematic and philosophical theologian Eberhard Jüngel: Distinguishing Between God and Man: Aspects of the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel (1982). John Bainbridge Webster FRSE (1955–2016) was an English Anglican priest and theologian writing in the area of systematic, historical, and moral theology. Not at all. He looked back on this training and on his own early work as “lack[ing] the right sort of clarity, focus and coherence that can only be derived from a sense of the vocation of theological work.” Clarity came after a move from a theological college in England to the Toronto School of Theology in 1986, where Webster “began to find my way out of doctrinal criticism, to realize that its scruples were in large measure misplaced, and so to rediscover that positive Christian dogmatics is a wise, edifying and joyful science.” The clinching factor in this rediscovery was the “remarkably emancipating decision to teach confessionally,” a decision that informed his subsequent writing as well. He is the editor of Robert Jenson’s The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture, published last summer with Oxford University Press, and his book The Doctrine of Scripture will be published next year in the Cascade Companions series. In Summer 2013, he became Chair of Divinity at the University of St Andrews. [51], Part of the polemic’s bite undoubtedly stems from his inhabiting the theological subculture at Oxford, and England more broadly, for close to a decade. After a distinguished career, he died at his home in Scotland on 25 May 2016 at the age of 60. In proposing “a dogmatic ontology of Holy Scripture,” that is, an account of the Christian Bible “for the depiction of which we must deploy language of the triune God’s saving and revelatory action,” Webster in effect declares war on reigning academic discourse on the church’s sacred text. It is not dead or inert or at one’s disposal; it is nothing without the real article. He, the living Christ, present among us in the Spirit’s power as we assemble in this place, is the one who speaks. [9] Through study of Jüngel, Webster became well acquainted with the theology of Karl Barth whom he has written on extensively and developed a unique account of, which stresses the significant role of biblical interpretation and the Reformed tradition in Barth's work. Two years later he appears in the records as the curate of Kildwick, in Craven. John Webster was a playwright and younger contemporary of William Shakespeare in the 16th century. With good reason does the church not designate someone a doctor until after her death. 6:1)” (“Webster’s Response to Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, “Breaking the spell of [ecclesial] anxiety is not easy. Whereas Ward declared in his 1996 Religion & Creation, the second volume to his project of comparative theology, that “theology is an enquiry into the being of God and the relation of God to the universe,” Webster countered that “theology is an office in the Church of Jesus Christ.” His published work includes a number of books on the theology of Karl Barth, on the nature and interpretation of Scripture, and on Christian dogmatics, including Confessing God. Canadian, b. Together with Colin Gunton (1940–2003), Webster co-founded the International Journal of Systematic Theology. Religion: John Webster (A Congregationalist) was an active member of All Saints Church in Cossington where he held the office of Churchwarden in 1618 and 1630. In so doing, his attempt at r John Webster’s birthstone is Topaz and Citrine. “The triune God is one simple indivisible essence in an irreducible threefold personal modification”; “the Holy Trinity is perfect blessedness in himself in the absence of creatures.”[28] Unlike us, God does not create out of need or codependency. Webster on Eberhard Jüngel by R. David Nelson 4. As Webster writes: Far from abstracting from the history of the economy, theological talk of relations of origin [within the triune Godhead] is a way of articulating the infinite depth within the being of God, that ocean whose tide is the missions of the Son and Spirit by which lost creatures are redeemed and perfected. animating his arguments, all the while avoiding the rhetoric, aggression, and enemy-making so typical of Barth and those of similar temperament. Following the Baptist, Webster desired instead to decrease, that another might increase. One answer comes in a late essay on mercy. This is also why even exegesis of Holy Scripture must attend to more than the text, to what Barth calls the text’s Sache, the reality signified by the words rather than the words alone, lest reading the Bible be reduced to a merely natural endeavor (as it has been in too many seminaries and schools of theology). [email protected] (951) 785 2040. Webster summarizes and narrates this history repeatedly, often in conceptually abstract form, such as the following: This history is the long, complex, yet unified movement of God’s giving, sustaining, and consummating created life. On the one hand, this is a reflection of the low esteem in which intellectual work in general and theological thought in particular are held today. It is the means of God’s speech to God’s people, and through it God rules, guides, and teaches them; it is thus a means of communion as well. Assembling, hearing, obeying, the members of this body go forth into the world with humility (as sinners) and confidence (as God’s children) that nothing can separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Muhammad John Webster (England) President, The English Muslim Mission . Why should God make what is not God? ... these problems being basically relating to the reconciling of everyday affairs with the claims of religion and here I came across the first weakness of Christianity. [63] I imagine, too, that readers might be eager to learn of his politics or engagements with political theology. This is the simple statement which we have to develop and explain… In so doing we confront the hardest and at the same time the most extensive task of church dogmatics…. John Webster (1955–2016) by Ivor J. Davidson Part One: John Webster’s Theological Development 2. It is a history with three principal moments, which correspond to the three great external divine works. (For that reason I have elsewhere termed Webster “a theologian proper.”)[22] This intensity of focus was both positive and polemical: positive, because God is the principal matter (theos) of this particular discourse (logos); polemical, because God has all too often been exchanged in modern theology for more manageable items of interest, usually of a social-historical character: people, events, texts, institutions—phenomena apparently being more patient of analysis than noumena. John Adams Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Second President of the United States [I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. What is the church? Scripture has its being in the prevenient will of the Trinity. According to Webster, God's holiness is known not in his simple transcendence but in his gracious and free relationship to his people. Associate Professor of New Testament Studies and World Religions (1990) PhD Vanderbilt University 1982. Kathryn Tanner. Birth, family background and education. In what follows I would like to introduce the theology of John Webster to those who have not yet had the pleasure. God creates out of sheer gratuity. The trope of human reason as at once created, fallen, and redeemed in Christ appears throughout Webster’s writings. We should be patient with one another in theological debate, especially when we fear another has transgressed a boundary; the apostle commands us that we restore in a spirit of gentleness and look to ourselves, lest we, too, be tempted (Gal. As he writes elsewhere, theology is “that delightful activity in which the church praises God by ordering its thinking towards the gospel of Christ.”[24] Indeed, as “the scientia of what faith knows and desires,”[25] theology is a work of and for faith, which is God’s gift; it is joyful, moreover, because it is an act of praise to the gift’s giver; and it is intellectual, because it is an exercise of reason brought up short by the ineffable reality of the living God. Answer: “The doctrine of the Trinity is not one doctrine among others; it is foundational and pervasive. The knowledge of God repays study, but the knowledge of God is not like knowledge of Wittgenstein or ancient Rome or quantum mechanics. This is not to deny “that each element of Christian teaching bears some relation to Christology.” A well-ordered systematics, however, “considers Christology, not as in and of itself the basis, center or starting-point of everything else, but rather as a principal part of Christian teaching having wide dispersal across the doctrinal corpus by virtue of the fact that it is an integral element of the doctrine of the Trinity.” So that “it is not Christology per se but a doctrine of God’s triune being and his inner and outer works (including the godhead of the Son and his works in time) which occupies the preeminent and commanding place in Christian teaching.”[39] Yet because of modern theology’s disproportionate preoccupation with the economic and historical—phenomena whose supposed density outweighs that of the invisible, immaterial God—“systematic theology must specify with some scruple the sense in which God is the formal object of each Christian doctrine, Christology included.”[40] In other words, the principle that created signs should be traced back to their uncreated source applies even, or perhaps especially, with reference to the person and work of Jesus Christ.
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