Robert Benne

From Goodreads:

Benne’s book is mandatory reading for anyone interesting in public theology today. Taking its title from one of H Richard Niebuhr’s types in “Christ & Cuture,” Benne defines and articulates Lutheranism’s unique contribution to public theology. The so-called “paradoxical vision” is also known as the classically Protestant two-kingdoms doctrine. Benne lists four key elements to the doctrine. Wherever they are, the paradoxical vision is at work: 1) Qualitative difference between God’s salvation and human efforts; 2) paradox of human nature; 3) God’s paradoxical rule; and 4) paradox of history. Taken together, all four keys to the paradoxical vision avoid turning the gospel into law and the law into gospel—unfortunate tendencies he sees at work in Calvinistic and Catholic circles. We might also call these tendencies by other names: sentimentality and transformationalism, respectively.

Benne concludes his book by offering a typology of his own, differentiating various practices of the paradoxical vision according to intentionality and means of implementation. Overall, it’s a meaningful contribution to evangelical public theology.

Where Benne’s work may be improved is in more subtle analysis of various Reformed approaches which he wants to use as a foil to his own. What Benne really describes is neo-Calvinism or neo-orthodoxy. Classical Reformed positions are indeed very similar to what Benne is advocating for. I don’t see why someone in the Reformed camp, like myself, can’t find much in Benne that fits squarely within our own tradition.… (altro)