Grenz, Hauerwas and Newbigin

The idea about the sociological nature of value formation that Prof Grenz espoused there is actually not that new.

Stanley Hauerwas, in his essay "A Story Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down" already wrote about the relation between character and the community socialization. The essay is found in his book A Community of character: toward a constructive Christian social ethic.


What is interesting is how he introduces the book:
My wish is that this book might help Christians rediscover that the most important social task is nothing less than to be a community capable of hearing the story of God we find in the scripture and living in a manner that is faithful to that story (1)

In the same way, Leslie Newbigin also wrote about this:

The business of the church is to tell and to embody a story, the story of God’s promises concerning what will be in the end. The church affirms the truth of this story by celebrating it, interpreting it, and enacting it in the life of the contemporary world. (Newbigin 1993, 76)

I had a very interesting discussion with Edmund Chan in a Chinese restaurant in the northern suberbs of Chicago sometime in Aug or Sept 2003. We were discussing Alan Cole's article 'At the Heart of A Christian Spirituality', Reformed Theological Review, 52 (2, 1993)where Dr Cole wrote about orthodoxy, orthopraxis and orthokardia as indicators of a biblical informed spirituality. Edmund mentioned the additional need to include as a criteria, orthokoinonia.

I wrote to Dr Cole about the matter and this was his response at the end:

PS: I have been teaching for some time the need for a spirituality quadrilateral that includes orthokoinonia.

Great to know these great Christian leaders are emphasizing the same thing and setting some parameters on what might be a biblical informed ecclesiology.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that the role of a biblically informed community, ie a community that not just espouses the Biblical metanarratives but lives out the values of this narrative is critical to sustaining Christian faith.