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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE REFORMED: THE GRAMMAR OF GOD’S GLORY
When I began this post, the third in a series on what it means to be Reformed, I had in mind writing about a way of interpreting the scriptures sometimes called “the Reformed hermeneutic.” It is frequently said that Reformed people read the Bible differently from other Christians groups. I wanted to explore whether that’s…
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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE REFORMED? THE REFORMED ACCENT
A few weeks ago (it’s been a busy season for me), I started a short series of posts posing the question: what does it mean to be Reformed? This question is much mooted these days. I noted, for example, that the Calvin Theological Seminary promotional magazine, forum (yes, that’s how they write it), gave over its…
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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE REFORMED?
What does it mean to be Reformed? For several reasons—reasons I will lay out in a subsequent post—it’s an odd question. But if you hang around in the ecclesiastical circles which I frequent, you will hear it asked. Often. I recently received a promotional magazine from Calvin Seminary, a school I once attended. featuring that question:…
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ONCE, ONLY
ONCE ONLY War was in the air. It was the leadup to the First Gulf War. Armies were poised to invade Kuwait, and the news was alarming for many of us. What would happen? Would it spread? Would war come to us? At that point in 1991, we were blessedly innocent of the prospects of…
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QUESTIONS AND CONVERSATION: READING THE AKEDAH
One task in literature is to formulate questions and construct counter-statements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. –Susan Sontag, quoted from The Best American Essays 2023, edited and with an introduction by Vivian Gornick; Robert Atwan, series editor, p. ix. The Bible…
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I CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION: TOWARD UNDERSTANDING THE CHRIST STORY
Louise Erdrich’s novel LaRose is a Christ story. Erdrich does not say so, but she hints at it. And such a strange story it is. The story begins with a killing. Dusty, the young son of Peter and Nola Ravich jumps down from a tree just as Landreaux, Dusty’s uncle, pulls the trigger to take down a…
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THE POPE’S BLESSING
This week the front page of the e-edition of the New York Times prominently featured two religion stories, each in its own way about whether the church will fully accept LGBTQ people and same-sex marriage. The lead story was the pope’s decision to allow priests to bless same-sex unions (“Pope Francis Allows Priests to Bless Same-Sex…
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WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS AND WHAT THE BIBLE DOES
Usually the question is what the Bible says. In my denomination, for example, we have carried on a long and often acrimonious debate about what the Bible says about women and a shorter but no less acrimonious debate about sexuality. The standard procedure in my denomination for these kinds of questions is to appoint a…
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FORGETTING AND REMEMBERING: THOUGHTS AT THANKSGIVING
How should we remember the past? In this Thanksgiving season in the US, that question has considerable force. What is our relationship to what has shaped and formed us as a country? What is the story that we will tell this Thanksgiving Day to our children and to ourselves? In my own case, the story might…
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ARE WE MAKING PROGRESS?
Are we making progress? Are we making progress? I don’t have in mind technology here, although progress in technology makes an interesting test case for the assumptions we make about progress generally. Nor do I have in mind scientific knowledge. Even there the case is more complicated than one might think. But what of moral…