Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Reformed theology

  • THE ART OF THE STORY I: REFLECTIONS ON DANIEL 2

    People want the Bible to come at them head-on. Sometimes it does. In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus often comes head-on (something Pier Paolo Pasolini got right in his 1964 film, “The Gospel According to St. Matthew “). Take, for example, this saying of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount: “Unless your righteousness surpasses…

  • TEXT AND TRAJECTORY: DOES THE BIBLE LEAN LEFT?

    Does the Bible lean left? Someone recently asked me that. Truth be told, the question was more of an accusation than a question. It was, as I recall, “Clay,do you think the Bible always leans left?” More about me than about the Bible. The question is whether I characteristically read the Bible in a way that…

  • TEXT AND TRAJECTORY: JOHN 14 AND THE REVELATION OF GOD

    What do you look for when you read the Bible? More often than we would like to admit we look for confirmation of what we already think. The Christian Reformed synod did just this in 2006 when it appointed a committee “to articulate a foundation-laying biblical theology of human sexuality.” This was a dubious project…

  • 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…

  • RETRIEVING THE BIBLE

    THE PROJECT: I began writing these blog posts (after a long hiatus) as a critique of a certain way of reading of the Bible, a way of reading that seemed to me to bind rather than to free, that has often been used against people rather than for them, a reading represented recently by the…

  • JACOB’S LADDER: HOW OUR SPIRITUAL ANCESTOR GOT EVERYTHING WRONG

    The Bible is a subversive book. It subverts our assumptions about life, about good and evil, about where God is and where God isn’t; it often subverts even what seems like the obvious meaning of the story it tells. Few passages are as subversive in this last sense as the story of Jacob’s ladder in…

  • RETRIEVING THE WORDS OF FAITH

    Introduction to the Series: Over time, through overuse and bad theology, words of faith tend lose their meaning or come to mean something which they did not originally mean. An example would be the word “faith” itself. “Faith” has come to mean mostly belief, as if faith is what we do with our heads. As a…

  • IS THE CHURCH’S STANCE ON HUMAN SEXUALITY A CONFESSIONAL MATTER PART 3: 1 CORINTHIANS 6

    A The study committee appointed by Synod 2016 of the Christian Reformed Church “to articulate a foundation-laying biblical theology of human sexuality” was asked by the same synod whether in regard to what the church teaches about human sexuality (with same-sex marriage central to the discussion) the church should declare a status confessionis, ecclesiastical Latin…

  • IS THE CHURCH’S STANCE ON HUMAN SEXUALITY A CONFESSIONAL MATTER PART 2: THE CLARITY OF SCRIPTURE

    Let’s go back to where we were (for more introduction, see the previous post: “Is the church’s stance on human sexuality a confessional matter? The status confessionis question”). The study committee on human sexuality (a committee charged by the Christian Reformed synod of 2016 “to articulate a foundation-laying biblical theology of human sexuality”) was asked whether the…

  • 1 Timothy 2 and Women in Leadership: a Reading of the Text

    Those who oppose the recognition of women as pastors and elders in the church often suppose that they have the biblical high ground. They accuse those who welcome women into church leadership of denying the literal meaning of the texts, playing fast and loose with scripture. To open church office to women, they argue, undermines…