Content area
Full Text
In his teaching and in his writing,1 Clark M. Williamson has addressed the church at its grass-roots level, its congregations and pastors and pastors-in-formation. He has exhibited the virtues of the theologian who serves the church by serving the living and incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, who is the head of the church. Such a theologian is a blessing to the church when the church converses with - listens to and speaks with - him or her. This conversation, which is theology, is a measuring of the church's language by Jesus Christ, the good news of the gospel, and it is a theme in all his books. With Karl Barth, Williamson sees theology as both faith's witness to God in life and liturgy and a testing of this witness.2
This essay singles out three core elements in Williamson's work as a church theologian. These elements, and the way he approaches them, I believe, commend his work to the churches in a way that will be a blessing to them when they take up the conversation that is theology. The first core element is the clear statement of God's prevenient and redeeming grace. The second is his strong challenge to pastors and executives in the churches to lead, which requires them to think theologically, conversationally with congregations, the world, and the scriptures. The third is his exegetical skill in interpreting the Bible and especially in calling the churches away from their supersessionism and anti-Judaism.
TO SPEAK THE TRUTH ABOUT GOD
This is the church's divine call in the lives of its members, and in its witness and liturgy as a community. "The Church confesses God, by the fact that she speaks of God," says Karl Barth in the first article of his Church Dogmatics. The seriousness of the matter resounds in these words. As long as the church is going to speak about God, it had better speak rightly! This matter is probed throughout the large corpus of Clark Williamson's published work. Like Barth, he finds the norm of this right-speaking in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures as they witness to God's grace, shown in the gift of the Torah way of life in the Hebrew Scriptures (Tanach) and of Jesus Christ in the Greek Scriptures.
...