Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Reformed theology

  • RETRIEVING CHURCH

    Congregations For years I stayed put. As I like to tell the story, River Terrace Church, the congregation I served for 31 years, gave me an office—a great corner office facing the campus of Michigan State University—and I didn’t want leave. All I needed was that office. A salary in addition was more than anyone…

  • TAKING EVIL SERIOUSLY

    RETRIEVING A BIBLICAL VIEW OF EVIL We who grew Reformed pride ourselves in taking evil seriously. Total depravity, and all that. The doctrine of total depravity does make us wary of anyone who claims too much righteousness. We were taught that pious talk often serves as a cover for dishonorable motives. We expect people, religious…

  • Retrieving Worship

    Retrieving worship. Mostly when worship comes up in places like this blog, it’s the style of worship that’s on hand: worship wars, as they were once known. Where I lived, in the Christian Reformed Church, the wars were mostly about songs. Should one sing exclusively or, at least, mostly from hymnals? Or should the church…

  • THE ART OF HOLDING TOGETHER WHAT WANTS TO FLY APART: RETRIEVING THEOLOGY, JULIAN OF NORWICH

    I’ve called this series of blog posts “Retrieving Theology.” It comes from two convictions. One is that old theologies have in them insights that remain crucial for understanding the truth about ourselves, our world, and God. We throw away these theologies at our peril. The second is that these same theologies are too often presented…

  • OF GOD AND OCTOPUSES

    ON GOD AND OCTOPUSES Retrieving God A few posts back I proposed to engage, along with you, my readers, in the work of theological retrieval. The challenge of theological retrieval is to recapture in a new time the excitement and insights of old theology.  I tried to do a bit of that with the Reformed…

  • THOUGHT CONTROL

    THE PERILS OF BEING TALKED ABOUT It was an introductory Bible and Theology class at a small Christian college—a required course at the time. The students, mostly freshmen, many with Christian school educations, were bored before they arrived in class. I remembered taking the same class when I was a freshman and finding it almost…

  • Begin with Belonging

    Retrieving Election Begin with belonging. Churches (not just churches but many religious groups, regardless of the faith they espouse) begin from the opposite direction: they tell you that you don’t belong, that you will belong only if you believe what they believe, if you take the membership class, if you say the prayer, if you…

  • THE WORK OF THEOLOGICAL RETRIEVAL

    Thinking Old Thoughts in New Ways In theology, as in much else in life, you can’t go back. Take human origins. Once the stories in Genesis were taken naively by many as the way things happened: Once upon a time there was a garden, a man, a woman, and a snake . . ., that…

  • NAMING WHAT CANNOT BE NAMED: MEDITATIONS ON THE PAST, PART 4

    I had thought to conclude this short series on the necessity of history with my last post, available here. I had planned to move on in several different directions, including some thoughts on the significance of the Reformed theology of the divine decrees, trying to retrieve from that seemingly stale theology something of value for the…

  • THE HISTORICAL ADAM AND OTHER MYTHS: MEDITATIONS ON THE PAST, PART 3

    The importance of the past In his introduction to Athanasius’s On Incarnation, C. S. Lewis suggested that one should read at least one old book for every new one. By old, he had in mind books from the previous century and beyond. He mentions in a single breath St. Luke, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas,…