“Christian faith, and therefore Christian theology, emerges out of the shock of the gospel.
Christian faith, and therefore Christian theology, takes its rise in the comprehensive interruption of all things in Jesus Christ, for He, Jesus Christ, now present in the power of the Holy Spirit, is the great catastrophe of human life and history.
In Him, all things are faced by the One who absolutely dislocates and no less absolutely reorders. To this regenerative event, this abolition and re-creation, Christian faith, and therefore Christian theology, offers perplexed and delighted testimony.
That perplexity and delight– that sense of being at one and the same time overwhelmed and consumed yet remade and reestablished– are at the heart of the church, or as we might call it, Christian culture.
Christian culture is the assembly of forms and practices which seeks somehow to inhabit the world which is brought into being by the staggering good news of Jesus Christ, the world of new creation.
‘Behold,’ says the enthroned One in the climactic scene of the Apocalypse, ‘I make all things new’ (Rev. 21:5).
Christian theology is an activity in a culture which reaches out toward that miracle, sharing that culture’s astonishing new life.”
–John Webster, “Culture: The Shape of Theological Practice,” The Culture of Theology, Eds. Ivor J. Davidson and Alden C. McCray (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2019), 43.
