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THE ART OF IMPERFECTION: A MEDITATION ON MICHELANGELO’S LAST WORK
Pietas–works of art that portray typically Mary alone, holding the dead body of Jesus, are a form of devotional art. They pay homage to the suffering of Jesus and to the suffering of his mother. They are more than that. In the hands of the masters, they are an examination of the relationships between hope…
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TRADITION
“Tradition!” Tevye, the milkman sings at the beginning of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a great beginning, as Tevye walks us through his village and points out how things are done and why. Well, not why. Tevye mostly doesn’t know why they do things the way they do. It’s just what they have always done. Despite the song,…
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CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM AND THE FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM
“What keeps gnawing at me,” he writes, “is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?” (Letters and Papers from Prison, Kindle edition, page 353). Compared to what Bonhoeffer was going through in April of 1944, for those of living in the US or Canada these are easy times. True,…
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NO BEARS (2022)
Directed by Jafar Panahi (Iran) In 2010, Jafar Panahi was arrested in Iran on charges of disseminating antigovernment propaganda. Part of the Iranian New Wave and already well-known in the West, Panahi was convicted, put under house arrest, and forbidden to make movies or to leave the country for twenty years. In the thirteen years…
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THE GOSPEL AND THE FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM
We have failed our people. We—I have in mind people like me: preachers, church leaders, professors, bloggers—have failed those who come to our churches, week to week, who listen to what we say, who go to our Bible studies, who read our books, who look to us for a word from the Lord. We have…
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THE BIBLE AND THE FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM
Are we coming to the end of Protestantism as we know it? In Snow, a novel by the prize-winning Irish writer John Banville, a Catholic bishop asks the beleaguered detective, John Strafford, a Protestant, “How long can you go on protesting?” Strafford doesn’t answer. But as both the bishop and Strafford know, Protestantism has long…
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A CONFESSIONAL MOMENT
A Confessional Moment The Christian Reformed Church (CRC) is in the midst of a slow painful crisis of identity—as, indeed, are many other Christian denominations. Or, worse. The denomination may be in its death throes, a small denomination slowly splintering into smaller chunks. It’s not been pretty. The denominational prayer with the appropriate edits might…
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TOWARD A HERMENEUTIC OF THE CONFESSIONS II
The Harry Boer Gravamen In a previous post (Toward a Hermeneutic of the Confessions I), I made two broad points about the Reformed confessions. The first addressed the status of the confessions as they now stand in the church to which I belong, the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). What I said was that the confessions…
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TOWARD A HERMENEUTIC OF THE CONFESSIONS I
I don’t remember much if any discussion in seminary about how to interpret the confessions. I don’t think this was because I was not paying enough attention—although, I may not have been. While it was often said that we—the Christian Reformed Church (CRC)—were a confessional church, not much was said about what this meant in…
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A WORD FOR THOSE WHO CANNOT BELIEVE: FAITH AS ENCOUNTER
In the Bible “faith” rarely means “belief”—at least, not in the sense that “belief” has come to have in popular Christianity: what I will call “belief about.” We are not saved by belief. This is not what the Bible teaches. But if my experience is at all representative, this is what many in church think…