-
RESISTING INTERPRETATION
For my on-again, off-again, series of posts on renewing theology, I have been thinking lately about salvation. Salvation is at the heart of Christian theology, but what does it mean? How should it be understood? There’s much to consider in those questions. But sitting in church this morning past, the lectionary and the sermon turned…
-
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…
-
POLITICS AND KOREA: A PALM SUNDAY MEDITATION
The question was how Christians should respond to political developments. It came, as such questions often do, from deep anxiety about what was happening in her country. How should she be involved? Should she join a demonstration? Should she be shouting across the street at those who opposed what she stood for? What in these…
-
READING THE BIBLE . . . WRONG: BAD THEOLOGY 6
The gospel reading this past Sunday was Luke 4:14-21. In the reading, Jesus has returned home. With “the power of the Spirit” resting on him (4:14), he must have seemed different. He has already been preaching in the villages round about Galilee, but now at last he is home in Nazareth. His fame (Greek phēmē)…
-
WHEN THE ORGAN GOES SILENT: BAD THEOLOGY 4
WHEN THE ORGAN GOES SILENT I’m not sure when I first noticed that the organ had fallen silent. The synods of the Christian Reformed Church met for many years in the Calvin University Fine Arts Center Auditorium. (Lately, the synod has moved to the Calvin chapel building.) The auditorium features the impressive Zondervan Memorial Organ, built…
-
SPIRITUAL ADULTHOOD
I should have called a recent blog piece, “The Way of Doubt.” Instead, I called it, “The Quest for a Moral Center, Part 1”— a title simultaneously drab and misleading. The piece was not about finding a moral center but about doubt: how doubt often leads in the direction of renewed faith. Doubt, I suggested,…
-
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,…