A Companion to the Theology of John Webster

Michael Allen, R. David Nelson, Michael Allen, R. David Nelson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780802876744
• eBook ISBN: 9781467462297
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

An overview and analysis of John Webster's seminal contributions to Christian theology  

At the time of his death, John Webster was widely hailed as one of the leading Christian theologians in the world. Over the course of three decades, he produced groundbreaking studies on the theologies of Eberhard Jüngel and Karl Barth and, especially since the turn of the millennium, numerous books and essays on various themes in Christian dogmatics. He then intended to write an encyclopedic systematic theology—a project he was unable to complete.
No substitute is possible for that lost opus, but the contributors offer this volume as an homage to Webster and an aid to those who want to learn from him.  A Companion to the Theology of John Webster begins with an introductory section on Webster's theological development, then continues into an extensive overview of Webster's contributions to contemporary discussions of particular doctrines. An epilogue suggests how Webster's theology might have unfolded had he lived longer and imagines the continuing influence of his work on the enterprise of Christian dogmatics. Readers hoping to understand the legacy of this great theologian, and also those eager for fresh insights into the present state and future trajectories of contemporary Protestantism, will find much to offer here.

CHAPTER 1

John Webster (1955–2016)

Ivor J. Davidson

“The matter to which Christian theology is commanded to attend, and by which it is directed in all its operations, is the presence of the perfect God as it is announced in the gospel and confessed in the praises and testimonies of the communion of saints.”¹ Most scholarly prose doesn’t sound like that. In John Webster’s, the idiom was standard issue, and deeply felt. If his work dazzles in its intellectual depth and style, its motivations were different from those that typically hold sway in the realms of academic culture.

To anyone who knew him, Webster was likely the most unassuming scholar ever met: firm in his convictions, crystal clear in presenting them; devoid of personal grandeur, suspicious of quests for scholarly prestige that jeopardized the uniqueness of theology’s vocation. As he saw it, all theological work occurs in the history of grace, its mandate and possibilities determined by the miracle of divine generosity. As such, theology can only go about its tasks in gratitude and humility, confessing with joy and wonder the God whose immensity meets us as unfathomable love. To those tasks it brings no gifts other than the ones this God gives, redeems, appoints, enables. Only in recognition of the divine abundance, enacted in freedom for our blessing, do we begin to think and speak and act aright.

EDUCATION AND CAREER

John Bainbridge Webster was born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, on June 20, 1955, and brought up in West Yorkshire. Converted in his teens from “watery suburban Methodism into a tough version of Calvinistic Christianity,”² he received his education at Bradford Grammar School, nowadays a distinguished independent coeducational institution, at that time still an all-boys’ direct grammar school.³ Specializing in languages and literature, he went up to Clare College, Cambridge as an Open Scholar in 1974. He read English initially but was glad to switch to Theology at the end of his first year. Gifted student as he was, his experience of literature at Cambridge was disappointing; the course seemed preoccupied with criticism in detachment from fundamental questions of moral practice. Theology was suggested as an alternative, and so it was to be—albeit supposedly “only because I could not think of anything else I wanted to do.”⁴ He would later claim he had been offered yet weirder academic options but had by a kindly providence declined.

While he flourished academically, gaining First Class Honours and the Burney Prize, he found himself a little frustrated by the dominant idioms of his environment. Drawn to systematic theology, especially of the modern period, he was finding his way in a discipline that had in the 1970s acquired a certain style in much English theology. Rather than treating Christian doctrine as a set of essentially positive confessional claims, determined by Scripture, molded by tradition, systematics in England (somewhat less so in Scotland) was heavily concerned with doctrinal criticism, the analysis of what it might be feasible for faith to say under the conditions of modernity. The approach seemed anxious in manner, limited in scope—preoccupied with the problems attaching to belief in general or with the necessary contemporary reformulation of individual loci at the expense of the grandeur and coherence of Christian teaching as a whole. Heavily focused on questions of method, sources, and context, the subject appeared to take its cues as much from other fields of inquiry (philosophy above all, but also history, social theory, and other disciplines) as from its own territory. Dogmatics in particular existed at a discount. There were exceptions, not least the example of Donald MacKinnon, Cambridge’s Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, whose intense presence remained an intriguing force to persistent young minds. MacKinnon in particular refused to discredit the importance of dogmatics in grappling with philosophy’s toughest questions. On the whole, however, Cambridge offered fairly thin soil on which to cultivate an interest in doctrine.

Webster embarked on graduate studies at Clare, a Beck Exhibitioner. Here he was drawn to a figure whose significance was not yet much appreciated in English-language theology: Eberhard Jüngel. Studying Jüngel pushed Webster to reflect on the distinctiveness of Christian claims about God—the fundamental inability of Christian theology to proceed from any starting point other than divine revelation; the hopelessness of idealism’s assumptions that the knower takes priority over the known; the material integrity of Christian confession as established in the economy of God’s works. The particularity of Christological and Trinitarian teaching was vital—check upon the dangers of speculation, only sure basis for the differentiation of God and creatures for creatures’ good. If Christian faith speaks of God, it does so on its own terms.

In all this, Webster was driven to take with increasing seriousness Jüngel’s chief modern inspiration: the grand old man of Basel. Karl Barth’s theology would ultimately affect Webster far more profoundly than Jüngel’s, but the influence of Jüngel was important in his discovery of Barth, and in the emphases in Barth which most commanded his attention. His PhD, its critical edges softened somewhat as the first monograph in English on Jüngel’s theology, marked him out as a scholar of exceptional promise.⁵

After a year’s research fellowship at the University of Sheffield, he was appointed in 1982 to teach systematics at St John’s College, Durham, where he remained for four years. It was a congenial environment; he was nurtured by kindly colleagues and taught some able students, both at St John’s and in Durham’s Department of Theology. Ordained as deacon in the Church of England in 1983 and as priest the following year, full-time parish ministry seemed a distinct possibility; he served an assistant curacy in County Durham and as chaplain at St John’s.

Looking back on his teaching as it took shape over these years, he considered he was still struggling to break free of the habits of doctrinal criticism—still needing to discover what it might mean to tackle the big themes in overtly confessional fashion and to draw deeply on the church’s historic resources, uninhibited by the restrictive sensibilities of late modernity. It was obvious to anyone experiencing the young Webster’s teaching or reading his work (which included popular as well as scholarly material)⁶ that he was already a gifted communicator, but his determination to think in earnest about the office of the theologian—about what responsible theological instruction ought to be—attested his refusal to be satisfied with the conventional, and his desire for a tighter integration of theology’s scholarly activities with the interests of the church.

Married with a young son, he moved in 1986 to Canada, where he was to teach at Wycliffe College, Toronto, one of the founding schools in the later nineteenth-century federation of church colleges that had evolved into the Toronto School of Theology. No longer restricted to teaching undergraduates, he had opportunity to pursue Christian doctrine at greater depth, offering more advanced text-based courses to students for whom foundations had already been laid. The ecumenical context of the federation to which Wycliffe belonged also meant he encountered a wider range of traditions and intellectual influences than he had known in Cambridge or Durham; in these engagements he found that theological affinities and differences did not map denominational boundaries in straightforward ways.

He was influenced in particular by a Jesuit colleague, George Schner, with whom he came to work closely. Schner, who would die at just 54 in 2000, was professor of religion at Regis College, Toronto, and a stimulating dialogue partner to many from traditions other than his own. A philosophical theologian with interests in Hegel and Schleiermacher, he had been educated at Yale, and had imbibed much from the instincts of his “postliberal” teachers. Highly suspicious of North American correlationist theologies, especially their Roman Catholic expressions, he challenged the supposition that theology was obliged to meet its modern challengers on their own ground, using the supposedly fancier resources of critical philosophy in preference to the logic of Christian doctrine. For Schner, it was crucial to recognize how profoundly the trajectories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theology had been affected by modern intellectual impulses and to ask about the legacies of those influences in the instincts of contemporary theological reasoning.

Sharing a regular graduate seminar, he and Webster would inch their way through texts theological and philosophical, pondering genealogies and discussing their implications for method in their own time.⁷ Webster would continue to treat the concerns of liberal theology with seriousness, but he became increasingly critical of late-modern theology’s prejudices, which—besides the problems which attached to the readings of history and texts—appeared to offer little with which to edify the church. At the same time, he was, like others, dissatisfied with alternatives that seemed more reactionary than constructive—tame accommodations rather than meaningful responses to cultural pressures. As he had already been nudged firmly to do by Jüngel and Barth, he kept on thinking about why it was that the really decisive movements in modern Protestant systematics had unfolded as they had, and pondering the work that doctrine ought to do. Should not the classical resources of Scripture, tradition, and creed—rather than obsession with context and its supposed imperatives—determine the substance of Christian confession?⁸

Powerful as their insights into modernity’s character had been, postliberal theologians had not paid enough attention to Barth’s insistence on the primacy of God and God’s acts. They had placed too much emphasis on theology as a practice of creatures, a form of social and religious life whose major features might, it seemed, be delineated as much by ethnography as by dogmatics. The postcritical idiom had learned a good deal from Barth in its suspicions of the general and in its commitment to the plain sense of biblical narrative. It had not learned enough about Barth’s resolute commitment to God’s essential plenitude as necessary starting point for all things—including a due account of the integrity of creatures and their actions. Only with something akin to Barth’s sense of the antecedent freedom and abundance of the triune God in himself—God’s capacity to enact, but not realize, himself in the history of his creating, reconciling, and perfecting works as set forth in Holy Scripture—would theology begin to chart a responsible course. It would refuse modern forms of the illusion that human life might possibly know meaning or freedom as a way of being in merely symbolic relation with God; it would also—crucially—escape a drift into cultural anthropology, where talk of the gospel proceeded largely in the register of social and moral practices.

Only a positive dogmatics of God and his aseity would do. Pace enduring suspicions, that approach would not inhibit, but rather fund, a rich account of moral theology—the life to be lived by created, fallen, and reconciled creatures on the way to eschatological perfection. This was, Webster came to discern, just what had happened in Barth’s own work. It had found its moral and political density neither in the isolation of ethics from doctrine nor in the substitution of ethics for doctrine, but precisely in the recognition that human action is taken seriously when it is located in a substantive account of human moral ontology—created, fallen, restored—and so in terms for which Christian doctrine provides indispensable categories.

Webster advanced rapidly to full professorial status at Wycliffe in 1993 and became Ramsay Armitage Professor of Systematic Theology in 1995. From 1994, he also undertook adjunct teaching at McMaster Divinity College. He edited and introduced two volumes of Jüngel’s essays,⁹ opening up a number of key articles to a much wider readership, and assembled a stimulating Festschrift for Jüngel’s sixtieth birthday.¹⁰ More significantly, he produced a major monograph on Barth’s later ethics.¹¹ A strikingly lucid analysis of the final sections of the Church Dogmatics (IV/4) and The Christian Life, the work presented a robust case that the fabric of Barth’s dogmatics was—contrary to its glib critics—ethical at its core, for its construal of agency, covenant, and reality underwrote a rich account of moral selfhood. Webster showed how this was worked out in Barth’s depictions of baptism, prayer, and creaturely agency as enclosed and governed by the creative, redemptive, and sanctifying work of God in Christ, present by the Holy Spirit’s power. The ethical and sacramental theology of Barth’s last period emerged from some of his most fundamental concerns. Other substantial essays on Barth’s ethics reached back into neglected territory in Barth’s lectures of the later 1920s, and looked additionally at the themes of original sin, hope, and freedom in the Church Dogmatics, exploring examples of Barth’s recurring presentation of grace as restorative of fallen agency to its intended creaturely shape.¹²

And so began to take form many of the enduring building blocks of Webster’s own thinking. While continuing to work on Jüngel and Barth, he increasingly devoted his attention to tracing out major areas of Christian doctrine and their relation to moral questions. The research and writing were wrought amid a busy life. Husband and father of now two sons, in addition to teaching and supervision he undertook various academic administrative roles, including director of advanced degree studies at Wycliffe and, for a two-year period, chair of the Toronto School of Theology’s Department of Theology. He continued to be energetic in service to the church, as an honorary assistant in parishes in Ontario and as a member of national and diocesan committees and working groups, including the Anglican Church of Canada’s Doctrine and Worship Committee and the Canadian Lutheran-Anglican Dialogue group.

In 1996, he returned to the UK as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford. Among the most prestigious of the faculty’s historic chairs, the appointment was an obvious recognition of his abilities and an opportunity to teach and supervise the work of some of the best young minds on the UK theological scene. The chair brought a residentiary canonry of Christ Church; Webster’s gifts as a preacher found regular deployment in Oxford and well beyond. As in Canada, he also engaged in wider ecclesiastical service, serving on the Church of England’s Doctrine Commission and in the Faith and Order Advisory Group,¹³ which offered advice to the House of Bishops and the Council for Christian Unity on matters of ecumenical and theological significance.

At the same ti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Kevin J. Vanhoozer
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. John Webster (1955–2016)—Ivor J. Davidson
• Part I: John Webster’s Theological Development
• Part II: John Webster on the Theological Topics
• Epilogue: Courses Charted but Not Taken—R. David Nelson
• Bibliography of Published Works by John Webster
• List of Contributors