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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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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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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…
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A Meditation for the New Year: Melancholy and Hope
For an aging boomer like myself, the years now come around far too swiftly. We are on the cusp of the year of our Lord 2023. If you were born, as I was, sometime before the midpoint of the previous century, 2023 seems hardly imaginable. And worse, as the years go by, they seem increasingly…
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A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION
Christmas is never the New Testament’s first thought. The stories of the birth of Jesus are found in only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke. Our Christmas celebrations and songs are narrower still, mostly from Luke. Matthew’s account we slip in and around the Luke story as best we can, putting camels in our…
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SPEAKING TO THE PRESENT AGE: TIM KELLER AND MARILYNNE ROBINSON
I’ve been writing about Calvin and Calvinism lately, and I mean to write more. I have lately been spending time reading and rereading Calvin’s chapters on divine providence with which he concludes the first book of the Institutes of the Christian Religion. I’ll get back to that and to Calvin’s approach to scripture in subsequent posts, but…