To Think God as Love

How are we, as Christians, to rightly make use of the Old Testament? In my experience, most of us have no idea how to do it, and refrain from reading it altogether if possible, instead hiding behind cliched phrases that betray a lack of understanding, at best, or a lack of faith, at worst. The [...]

In a recent conversation with a friend, I remarked that giving teenagers and immature believers Bibles was something like giving them condoms. Let me explain what I meant. No one knows by instinct how to live a sexually ordinate life. No one. Properly-ordered sexuality does not happen by accident, but only with intense and intentional [...]

Recently, an Egyptian professor came under fire for his comments about the Koran. He said it was a ‘supermarket’ in which a reader could find anything he would like to find. The same could be said for our Scriptures, as well. However, I think the problem has more to do with us as readers than [...]

In his paper ‘Using and Being Used: Scripture and Systematic Theology’  the late Colin Gunton, a widely influential Reformed theologian, argues for the formative power of words, and so, of texts – in particular, the Scriptural texts:  Words are among the earthen vessels by which we become what we are in our relations to one another. In so far as it [...]

Given inherency and given circumstance-situated human refraction, the Bible is endlessly a surprise beyond us that Karl Barth famously and rightly termed “strange and new.” The Bible is not a fixed, frozen, readily exhausted read; it is rather a “script,” always reread, through which the Spirit makes new. When the church adjudicates the inherent and [...]

Thus Eucharist and Scripture need to be held together if we are to have an adequate theology of either. The Eucharist is the primary locus of the listening Church, the place where it shows itself to be there in response to the call of God; and the Scripture that embodies that call has to be [...]

The Bible is not an intellectual sinecure, and its acceptance should not be like setting up a talismanic lock that seals both the mind and the conscience against the intrusion of new thoughts. Revelation is not vicarious thinking. Its purpose is not to substitute for but to extend our understanding… The full meaning of the [...]

“Every time a story is well told, the Gospel is served.”  - Eugene Peterson ~ The older waiter in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” has no sense of God’s nearness. Unlike the younger waiter, he’s come to terms with himself, and all the illusions of youth – and of a naive faith – have been [...]

In spite of the fact that Pentecostalism (in myriad forms) has found and continues to find wide acceptance, the distinctive Pentecostal phenomenon, speaking in tongues (glossolalia), has not enjoyed the same success; this is especially true now in the West. According to Charette (“Reflective Speech: Glossolalia and the Image of God,” Pneuma 28:2 {Fall 2006}), tongue-speaking in most North American Pentecostal/Charismatic [...]

“To claim that if Jesus had joined us on the Emmaus road we would have recognize him is not unlike claiming that in order to understand the Scripture all we have to do is pick it up and read it.” Stanley Hauerwas, “The Interpretation of Scripture: Why Discipleship is Required” ~~~~~ This much is obvious: the [...]

I had known the Esther story was a kind of thorn in the canonical side of both Jewish and Christian exegetes through the ages. I had known it was the only book of the Hebrew Bible not found among the Dead Sea scrolls. And I had known that Luther, rather inconsistenly, thought it little better than [...]

What in Scripture most troubles you? What narratives or doctrines? Is it the unrelenting violence (up to and including genocide) committed in the name of our God – even, according to some narratives, by our God? Is it the patriarchy and misogyny? The factual or conceptual discrepencies? I’ve come to believe our attempts to honestly answer this [...]

A quick post. (This is the week before finals, and I’m swamped.) Briefly, I think the misinterpretation of Scripture is less of a problem than the misappropriation of Scripture. I hold this opinion for several reasons, a few of which I’ll quickly enumerate. (1) Due to our limitations and frailties, we simply cannot trust ourselves to [...]

And what have I now said, my God, my life, my holy joy? or what saith any when he speaks of Thee? Yet woe to him that speaketh not, since mute are even the most eloquent (Confessions, Book I). Most of us assume we know what we mean – and what others mean – when [...]

I’ve recently come upon the ideas and work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in part due to poserorprophet. Also recently, I heard Zizek’s brief but brilliant commentary on Alfonso Cuaron’s film, Children of Men. My interest piqued, I sought out some of Zizek’s writing – he is deliriously prolific, it turns out – and [...]