Year: 2022
Type: book-review
Abstract: In one of the best contributions to this collection of essays on the theology of the late John Webster—who died suddenly and unexpectedly, barely into his 60s, in 2016—Fred Sanders writes that ‘as a dogmatician . . . Webster set to his work as a corrector, at a strategic time when on so many . . . matters modern theology was distracted, dislocated, and deranged’ (p. 158). Indeed. The importance of Webster’s work and of its influence can be gauged from the fact that the term ‘dogma’, and its cognates, seems significantly to have increased in currency (in Anglophone, Protestant circles) owing to his revival of the field—not least by his advertising the term in the titles of several of his books. Webster came to general prominence on his appointment to the Lady Margaret chair at Oxford in 1996. A few years earlier, in an article that gave two cheers to postliberal theology, Webster had written that ‘I have no doubt that mainstream liberal Christianity has largely failed “to make vivid the judgment the gospel casts against our culture”. But if we are to remedy this—lamentable—situation, we need to learn what the gospel is’ (‘Locality and Catholicity: Reflections on Theology and the Church’, Scottish Journal of Theology 45 [1992], p. 17, quoting William Placher). The leading British liberal theologian of his generation, Maurice Wiles, had recently retired from the Regius chair of Divinity at Oxford, and it is sign of the respect in which Webster was already held—as it is also of Wiles’s generous unorthodoxy—that, when Webster’s name came up during informal discussions with members of the graduate student body about who might succeed Rowan Williams, Wiles could see that the pendulum was, as he put it, swinging away from the kind of theological approach he favoured and towards Webster’s. All of the contributors to this collection share Webster’s basic account of ‘what the gospel is’. Several of the essays clearly emulate Webster as a careful, profound, and lucid teacher. But few register with the significance it deserves just how great was the change in the theological climate Webster contributed to bringing about: it would be easy for a reader not already familiar with the field to wonder why this Companion is warranted. One of those who does attend to Webster’s importance in this respect is Justin Stratis, who, writing about Webster’s work on the doctrine of creation, observes that ‘he is not so much innovating as retrieving what he regards to be a lost habit of mind’ (p. 177), and that it is ‘as if Webster were seeking to gain fluency in a form of discourse whose currently counterintuitive nature necessitates repeated practice’ (p. 175). Webster was not the only theologian working in this way, but his influence on contemporary Protestant systematics (in contrast to patristics, and moral theology) has been very great. So, one misses in this book any sustained treatment of the context in which the pendulum swung and hence of the reason why Webster’s work found a ready audience—and has abiding significance. Yet if one were to ask for a contemporary representative systematic theologian of Reformed Catholicism (in distinction from ‘Evangelicalism’ or ‘Protestantism’), many would name Webster. Webster was a leading English-speaking interpreter of Karl Barth, but an important role in his restoration of lost habits of mind was played also by the work of postliberals such as Hans Frei and George Lindbeck (and their students, his contemporaries), and behind them, not only Barth but also Wittgenstein. It was they who created the conditions in which it was possible for orthodox Anglophone Protestant theologians such as Webster not to be intimidated into thinking that the substance of the Christian confession had to be stated in a defensive, apologetic register—as the youthful Webster had himself in his first book. (Though he later repudiated this work, it marks an important moment for understanding Webster’s theological maturing. Yet, like the astonishing articles he wrote for the journal Evangel, it rates only the briefest mention in this Companion.) Webster’s development tracks closely major trends in theology and church in his lifetime, which are sketched by Katherine Sonderegger in her excellent essay on ‘Jesus Christ’. For both liberal and conservative Protestants it had seemed impossible—improper, even—to think of the world in any other terms than those which suppose that it is self-evident that there is a hard metaphysical distinction between ‘the natural’ and ‘the supernatural’. But the seemingly binding epistemological, metaphysical, and normative authority of Kantian scruples about whether theology can pass muster at the bar of neutral reason, and of Spinoza’s naturalistic approach to Holy Scripture, were both clearly and cogently rebutted by Webster. By sheer hard work, he retrieved a theological discourse that was not bound to the dialectic of (the pendulum swing between) liberalism and conservativism—which, as Frei had shown, were in fact siblings. So although this collection contains essays on ‘Reason’ and ‘Metaphysics’, and other relevant topics such as ‘Scripture’, it is disappointing that on the whole—there are exceptions, and one does not know what the book’s editors asked for—its contributors focus on what Webster himself says on these topics and do not locate his teaching in its wider intellectual and cultural context or explain its deeper undercurrents. There is no sustained discussion of the influence of either postliberalism or philosophy on the way Webster came to understand (the practice of) dogmatics as a correlate of the church’s confession. Nor is sufficient attention given to Webster’s reading of the Christian tradition, whether as marked by the increasing significance for him of the Fathers, of the Scholastics (especially Thomas), and of Reformed thought, or by his masterly accounts of contemporary trends in systematic theology, such as in Theology After Liberalism, which he edited with his close friend and colleague, the Jesuit George Schner, or in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology. In his helpful and interesting essay, Martin Westerholm acknowledges the difficulty of writing about Webster. Webster’s prose was muscular, precise, and lucid (which is not to say ‘easy’), and his arguments were deeply penetrating, closely reasoned, and rigorous, yet without causing his readers to become lost in superfluous refinement. Each essay—his usual medium—was a highly polished gem. He loved the English language, and his choice of words was often—to use an adjective he reserved for the highest praise of others—exquisite. But some of the essays in this collection fall far short of the admittedly high standards set by their subject. It was surprising to find several contributions that were seriously under-informed by Webster’s own work in the areas under discussion, that lacked the depth and precision of his thought, and that amounted to little more than a paraphrase of what a perusal of the indexes of Webster’s books would enable a reader to discover for him- or herself. Sometimes one suspects that Webster would have found himself puzzled and amused by the misunderstandings of his arguments. This most notably in the essay on ‘Scripture’ where the author seeks—in what strikes this reader as either a deep misunderstanding or a forced misreading—to identify in Webster a position that is clearly and carefully ruled out by the works the author himself refers to. Not that Webster’s thought is beyond criticism, certainly. To make this collection even more companionable, it would have been good to have had more contributions from Catholics, from Webster’s contemporaries, and from other beneficiaries of postliberalism who have gone in different directions. In addition to the essays by Sanders, Sonderegger, Stratis, and Westerholm already mentioned, Webster is well served also by Ivor Davidson on salvation, by Joseph Mangina’s thoughtful and appreciatively critical account of Webster on the church, by Christopher Holmes on the perfection of God, and by Paul Nimmo, who, writing of Webster’s ethics, captures how ‘countercultural’ his thinking was (p. 284). As is evident from the breadth of themes addressed in this collection, Webster was always pushing his thinking in new directions but always his goal was learning ‘what the gospel is’. If he was innovative it was not for innovation’s sake. He was a private man who sometimes expressed surprise at the attention his work drew. So it was not for any ephemeral reason that he allowed himself to be put under such punishing demands and produced such a substantial body of work. Mangina identifies in Webster’s ecclesiology a feature one sensed more generally in his disposition—a ‘pneumatic restiveness’ (p. 261). And less than a year before he died, Webster wrote that, ‘In heaven, said Augustine, we shall rest, which I think is a good thing.’
DOI: 10.1093/jts/flac092
Author: Andrew Moore
Institution: University of Oxford
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,217
OpenAlex ID: W4297912153