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REFLECTING ON CHURCH IN TRIESTE, ITALY
THE LIMITS OF THEOLOGY We’ve been traveling. You may have noticed the radio silence from me. Or not. I had almost forgotten it was Sunday. Easy to do when you are traveling, nine time zones from home. We were wandering the streets of Trieste, Italy, the lovely town on the shores of the Adriatic. We…
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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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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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THE HISTORICAL ADAM AND OTHER MYTHS: MEDITATIONS ON THE PAST, PART 3
The importance of the past In his introduction to Athanasius’s On Incarnation, C. S. Lewis suggested that one should read at least one old book for every new one. By old, he had in mind books from the previous century and beyond. He mentions in a single breath St. Luke, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas,…
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RESURRECTING THE PAST: MEDITATIONS ON THE PAST, PART 2
“‘There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ [O’Brien] said. ‘Repeat it, if you please.’ ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’ repeated Winston obediently. ‘Who controls the present controls the past,’ said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. ‘Is it your opinion,…
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REMEMBERING: MEDITATIONS ON THE PAST 1
REMEMBERING Meditations on the Past, Part 1 Adria and I are recently returned from time in Europe. We visited among other places Berlin, Prague, and Vienna. In these places we were confronted with the remnants of the still close past, the history of Naziism and of Soviet era communism. In thinking about this history, I’ve…
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FOR THE WHOLE WORLD
GRACE FOR AN ANGRY WORLD I’m back. Having spent much of the past couple of months traveling—more on that in subsequent posts—I’ve had the chance to return to the topic I’ve been considering off and on for some time: atonement. The subtext of this discussion is the way that theology often claims to be about…
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BACK TO THE PSA: A FRESH READING OF ISAIAH 53
Isaiah 53 and a New Understanding of God Back in the PSA It’s been a while. I’ve been traveling. And other things keep coming to mind and to hand. But with this post I’m back to PSA: penal substitutionary atonement and its way of (mis)construing the Christian gospel. Somehow writing this paragraph put me in…
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GOOD FRIDAY, EASTER, AND BEYOND: NOTES ALONG THE WAY
Resurrection: Eastertide Meditations For the Easter season—the eight Sundays from April 20 (Easter) through June 8 (Pentecost)—I am writing the Sunday Blog for the Reformed Journal. The posts appear here. For the series, I am following the gospel readings from the Common Lectionary. I’m calling the series, “Windows on Mystery.” In the first of the meditations (posted on…
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Windows on Mystery