Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Reformed theology

  • WHEN THE ORGAN GOES SILENT: BAD THEOLOGY 4

    WHEN THE ORGAN GOES SILENT I’m not sure when I first noticed that the organ had fallen silent. The synods of the Christian Reformed Church met for many years in the Calvin University Fine Arts Center Auditorium. (Lately, the synod has moved to the Calvin chapel building.) The auditorium features the impressive Zondervan Memorial Organ, built…

  • BAD THEOLOGY 3: THE THEOLOGY OF POWER

    BAD THEOLOGY, PART THREE I began this series of posts with a question: How has it happened that evangelical Christianity has so enthusiastically embraced Donald Trump. At first glance, this would not seem an alliance made in heaven—or anywhere else. In his book, The Violent Take It by Force (Fortress, 2024, Kindle Edition), a book I’ll come…

  • BAD THEOLOGY, PART TWO: AN APOCALYPTIC HABIT OF MIND

    In my last post—a short introduction to this series of blogs I’m calling Bad Theology—I asked why evangelical Christians seemed so susceptible to the blandishments of Donald Trump and his allies. Why in the face of his numerous lies, his business and personal failures, his many violations of basic Christian ethics, and his lack of any apparent allegiance…

  • BAD THEOLOGY

    Tim Alberta opens his bestselling book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (HarperCollins 2023), by recounting a February 2021interview with Chris Winans, the pastor of Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brighton, Michigan. At the time of the interview, it had not been going well for Winans. People were leaving…

  • THEOSIS: AN ADVENT MEDITATION

    Since all God’s divine power has been given to us, the power of life and godly living, through knowing the one who called us by [or “to”] his own glory and virtue [and] through which we have been given weighty and majestic promises that through these you may become participants in the nature of divinity,…

  • STRETCHING

    We are frequently told by “they”—anonymous experts cited in the popular media—that we should stretch before exercising. Good advice, I suspect, although in all my years of exercise I have never actually stretched. Still don’t. If it’s tennis, I grab a racquet and head for the court. If it’s a jog, I strap on my…

  • SPIRITUAL ADULTHOOD

    I should have called a recent blog piece, “The Way of Doubt.” Instead, I called it, “The Quest for a Moral Center, Part 1”— a title simultaneously drab and misleading. The piece was not about finding a moral center but about doubt: how doubt often leads in the direction of renewed faith. Doubt, I suggested,…

  • 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 QUEST FOR A MORAL CENTER: PART 1

    IDENTITY There are moments—and questions—for which the blog format does not well serve the purposes that I and perhaps you have for it. The topic that I raise in this post may be one such.  Lately I’ve been thinking about identity. Who we are in the deepest sense. How we form identity. What’s makes for…

  • 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…