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TAKING EVIL SERIOUSLY
RETRIEVING A BIBLICAL VIEW OF EVIL We who grew Reformed pride ourselves in taking evil seriously. Total depravity, and all that. The doctrine of total depravity does make us wary of anyone who claims too much righteousness. We were taught that pious talk often serves as a cover for dishonorable motives. We expect people, religious…
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HOLDING TO OUR HUMANITY IN INHUMAN TIME
“Wake Up Dead Man,” a movie by Rian Johnson and “It Was Only an Accident,” a movie by Jafar Panahi We are just back from the Boston area, where we walked where some of my ancestors walked, explored places we had long heard about but never visited, had thanksgiving dinner with friends, and attended the…
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Retrieving Worship
Retrieving worship. Mostly when worship comes up in places like this blog, it’s the style of worship that’s on hand: worship wars, as they were once known. Where I lived, in the Christian Reformed Church, the wars were mostly about songs. Should one sing exclusively or, at least, mostly from hymnals? Or should the church…
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THE ART OF HOLDING TOGETHER WHAT WANTS TO FLY APART: RETRIEVING THEOLOGY, JULIAN OF NORWICH
I’ve called this series of blog posts “Retrieving Theology.” It comes from two convictions. One is that old theologies have in them insights that remain crucial for understanding the truth about ourselves, our world, and God. We throw away these theologies at our peril. The second is that these same theologies are too often presented…
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OF WIDOWS AND KINGS
Where the lectionary meets the events of the day I have been working on a post about Julian of Norwich, the 14th century theologian, as part of my “Retrieving Theology” series. I’ll post it in a week or so. Julian is a fascinating theologian. As Denys Turner argues, she’s not really a mystic, the category into…
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OF GOD AND OCTOPUSES
ON GOD AND OCTOPUSES Retrieving God A few posts back I proposed to engage, along with you, my readers, in the work of theological retrieval. The challenge of theological retrieval is to recapture in a new time the excitement and insights of old theology. I tried to do a bit of that with the Reformed…
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THOUGHT CONTROL
THE PERILS OF BEING TALKED ABOUT It was an introductory Bible and Theology class at a small Christian college—a required course at the time. The students, mostly freshmen, many with Christian school educations, were bored before they arrived in class. I remembered taking the same class when I was a freshman and finding it almost…
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PLAY IT THE BEST YOU CAN: ESCHATOLOGY AND KATIE KITAMURA
Katie Kitamura, Audition (Penguin Random House, 2025) Preachers should read novels. Good novels open what otherwise we would not see. What’s more, novels teach preachers (all of us, actually) how to read. How to read, among other things, the Bible. The Bible is frequently novelistic. Or, better, novels are frequently biblical. The ancient Hebrew writers—the writers of…
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Begin with Belonging
Retrieving Election Begin with belonging. Churches (not just churches but many religious groups, regardless of the faith they espouse) begin from the opposite direction: they tell you that you don’t belong, that you will belong only if you believe what they believe, if you take the membership class, if you say the prayer, if you…
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WALKING ALLEYS
A Labor Day Meditation WALKING THE ALLEYS A Labor Day Meditation My wife walks alleys. We live in a neighborhood that has alleys. Newer subdivisions mostly don’t have alleys, but in this older part of town alleys are everywhere. If the streets are front doors for the neighborhood, the alleys are back doors. Like back…