Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Narrative

  • READING THE BIBLE WITH JOY

    Five Proposals for Discovering the Joy of the Bible I’ve lately been puzzling over the Bible. Not the Bible itself but the joylessness of its readers. Or would be readers. In the minds of many the Bible is a forbidding and severe book, a book of thou-shalt-nots. For others, an ancient self-help book that doesn’t…

  • THE INFANTILIZATION OF THE HUMAN RACE

    How Theology Reduces Us to Children A couple of posts back (available here), I reflected on biblical views of evil—evil as the coming apart of things. I mentioned in that essay that the T of Tulip (total depravity) in Reformed theology has a way of letting us off the hook. We need not, in fact in…

  • Culture or Confession? Bad Theology 7

    Is God Mean? I had meant to write this week about penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). (Doesn’t that sound exciting?) I thought to call the piece: “Is God Mean?” And, in line with the direction of my Bad Theology series, to ask whether a mean God leads to mean politics. (The answer is yes.) For those…

  • THE QUEST FOR A MORAL CENTER, PART 2

    It’s been a while. Since my last post, I have spent a couple of weeks in Pennsylvania and Michigan, catching up with family and old friends. In that time, I continued to think about identity. What does it mean to be Christian? To be Reformed? To be Christian Reformed? To be, in any true sense,…

  • THE SUBTLETY OF STORY: NOTES ON READING THE BIBLE

    The story of Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:10-22) is a marvel of concise storytelling. In the space of just 13 verses, it satirizes not just one ancient holy place but two. It speaks hope and purpose to the scattered people of God. It lays out in brief a theology of election. It allows Jacob to make…

  • Reading Genesis with Marilynne Robinson

    Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson is an occasionally aggravating, sometimes confounding, and almost always brilliant engagement with the first book of the Bible.  The opening paragraph sets her approach to the book. Speaking of the Bible generally, she says that it “is a work of theology, not…

  • WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE REFORMED: THE REFORMED VIEW OF SCRIPTURE

    Traditions must sometimes be saved from those who claim them. In this series of posts, I’ve been asking the question, “What does it mean to be Reformed?” There are those who give ready answers to that question. Their answers might include the early 20th century acronym TULIP. Or penal substitutionary atonement. Or declaring that same…

  • READING PAUL: THE TWO APPROACHES OF DUNN AND WRIGHT

    In the past two posts, I’ve been writing mostly about the (capital P) Problem with the human race: what’s gone wrong. The Bible has much to say about that, much that is ignored in popular theology, which tends to focus on a mistaken interpretation of the Genesis 3 narrative. The biblical idea of human evil…

  • TEXT AND TRAJECTORY: PART ONE OR HOW THE LITTLE PRINCE CLUES US TO READING THE BIBLE

    I began this post with the intention of writing about text and trajectory on the basis of John 14. I’ll do so in the next post in this series. But as I got into it, I realized I need to clear some ground. Along the way I wrote and discarded material on the history of…

  • DOES THE BIBLE HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR?

    Is the Bible ever funny? The question was put to me by an older friend. This friend had two worries about the Christian faith. One was that he would get to heaven and discover that there was no sporting competition there. He lived for his games and his teams. The second was that in heaven…