Mark Thompson has just posted up a bunch of short summaries of the papers given at the Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference. Very interesting bunch of speakers: Henri Blocher, Mike Horton, Bruce McCormack, John Franke and Mark Thompson himself. Here’s s little snippet from Mark’s summary of his paper:
“Perhaps the most controversial part of my paper was the suggestion that the relationship between preaching and the sacraments can help us to clarify what preaching is about. In other words, preaching can be displaced by sacramental maximalism and it can also be distorted by sacramental minimalism. The sacraments remind us that the Christ of preaching is ‘Christ crucified’ not some abstract theological principle; they insist on the proper posture of the Christian as one who receivessalvation rather than effecting it; and they will not allow us to reduce preaching and the Christian life in general to the purely rationalist apprehension of eternal truths.
Some rather insistent voices suggest that the problem with some of our preaching at least is that it contains too much theology, making the sermon too complicated or too remote from the concrete realities of Christian living. I suggest what we need is more theology, not less and, in particular, careful thinking about the place preaching has in our doctrine of the church.”
Go, and check out the rest! Here.
