Glen Stassen gives a scathing critique of the Bush administration concerning his policies effecting mothers, parents, babies, pregnant teenagers, the poor, and so many others caught in the downward spiral of his policies.
Abortion is always tragic, but the tragedy of abortion is not always immoral. Hand-wringingly sensitive to divergent views, the Catholic bishops give all sides a hearing, even the winnable nuclear war hypothesis -- a position they themselves find abhorrent, but change the topic to abortion, and nothing is the same.
Some churchmen and politicians are so intransigent on the issue of abortion, over which men have no physical control, and so tolerant of killing in war, over which men have always had control.
The pro-life hecklers and speech disrupters evidently are breeding backlash by satisfying their own need to lash. They are driving more people into the camp that finds abortion to be a reasonable choice, at least under certain conditions.
The pro-life movement has always known that in order to help the unborn, women must also be helped, but it has not yet found a way to make this moral insight the operative and unquestioned premise of the entire movement.
Effort to make "truth" unitary and absolute, as a way of strengthening acquiescence to church teaching authority, has exactly the opposite effect. If the Catholic church can be wrong on birth control, it can be wrong on anything. If uncertainty exists about something which the church has taught with its full authority, then anything it teaches with its full authority may be wrong.
That persons have rights is a universal belief in our society, but that a fetus is already an actual person -- about that there is and there can be no consensus. Coercion in such matters is tyranny. Alas for our dangerously fragmented and alienated society if we persist in such tyranny.
Perhaps it is time to stop thinking and acting in 30-second sound bites and engage instead in serious moral discourse on abortion. A blanket No is simply not a sufficient response to regulation.
If the pregnancy does not threaten the mother’s physical existence, then the rights of the child ought to be considered as on the same level as the mother’s. Compassion may be demonstrated in providing all possible assistance, including emotional support to the mother throughout pregnancy and beyond. It is not a perfect solution, but neither are many in life.
This article questions the commonly held assumption that the pro-choice and pro-life camps inhabit completely different philosophical and moral worlds. Both sides see themselves as struggling against tyranny. The two camps diverge by maintaining differing intellectual conceptions of the tyranny against which they are fighting.
Amid all of the stress caused by our uncertainties and conflicts over the abortion issue, the author wants the church to influence more surely the definition of life. "We too have something important to say about it. I don’t believe we have yet done so."
The difference between radical and conservative statements on abortion reflects the difference between relational and static views of humans.
There is no position on the issue of abortion -- and other just and good decisions -- that does not have highly objectionable consequences. Clarity and consistency are well-nigh impossible, no matter which of the many options we choose. Giving us all the more reason to think as clearly, coherently and deeply as we possibly can.
Being antiabortion is not synonymous with or equivalent to being “pro-life.” This is not to say that they are incompatible or contradictory. Rather, they are at different levels of abstraction.
(ENTIRE BOOK) God's calling is the ultimate context of our lives. This is the dimension of depth that is the proper source of our identity and community. This is the ground of our life. From that power we can never be separated. "In life and in death we belong to God." That is a good word we know in Jesus Christ.
Younger women should assume responsibility for and minister to elderly and widowed women.
There is a significant gap in the knowledge which media and most professionals, including the clergy, have about the aging process, particularly its emotional components. Even many physicians are relatively uninformed; and, surprisingly, psychiatrists and other mental health specialists seem particularly limited where the elderly are concerned, despite the fact that large numbers of older people experience depression and other emotional stresses.
The author deals with some deeply personal questions. What is it to age well? If adversity, loss and diminishment are inescapable parts of the human experience, how can I weave these things into the pattern of my life? How can I be realistic about the facts of death and still be a person of hope? Can one be realistic about the facts of aging, diminishment and death and still live with a sense of sanctity of existence and reverence for life? What is Christian wisdom on finding meaning in the midst of aging?
The author reviews a book about retirement. Retirement is worse than a heart operation, because there is no bypass for it.
The self can die only if and when it loses all wonder, either this side of the grave or beyond.
We tend to forget how important a church building’s physical structure is to religious experience.
A cross-disciplinary understanding that brings together a consideration of the brain-mind relationship and the symbol-images of Byzantine and medieval architecture. Buildings give us architectures of the mind, outward and visible images of inward and spiritual mind-sets.
A visit to Coventry Cathedral teaches the author to understand forgiveness in a new and deeper way.
The author selects eight examples of excellent contemporary church design, each embodying a particular community’s religious identity and mission in its context.
If beauty -- not a particular beauty, but any beautiful thing -- is a metaphor of the sacred, then there is no such thing as a uniquely “religious” or ecclesiastical idiom in architecture or in the other arts. Beauty evokes in us the sense of the holy. So artists and priests are companions in every religion.
Can churches build to reflect the idiom of a secular consumer society effectively counter the culture’s influences? This and other questions are pondered by the authors of the books here reviewed.
Donald Bloesch's christological hermeneutic emphasizes the need to go beyond the literal sense of the text to discern its larger significance. Theology must show forth Christ.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A clear and helpful explanation of the development of key ideas within the Old and New Testament including the idea of God, man, right and wrong, suffering, paryer and immortality.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A respected New Testament scholar indicates the impossibility of the nineteenth-century German quest for the historical Jesus, and describes a different kind of quest based upon new premises, procedures and objectives. This quest calls for a total encounter with the person of Jesus, and calls upon the seeker himself to make a radical decision.
For Robert Webber theology is an activity from out of the church's tradition. The standard for judging a theology's adequacy is not Scripture alone, for the thoughtful working out of much of theology took place in the centuries following the writing of Scripture. This is not to put church practice on a par with Scripture. It is only to recognize that the apostolic tradition did not fully emerge until the fourth and fifth centuries and, thus, it is the Church Fathers whom we must study if we are to theologize aright.
In this interview, Jonathan L. Reed shows that archeology helps us understand the words and deeds of Jesus more as his contemporaries would have. It gives a much better context to Jesus’ life and teachings. The world of Jesus was quite different from what we take it to mean in our times.
Jonathan L. Reed shows that archeology helps us understand the words and deeds of Jesus more as his contemporaries would have. It gives a much better context to Jesus’ life and teachings. The world of Jesus was quite different from what we take it to mean in our times.
The Literary Guide to the Bible suffers from too narrow. or at least too traditional, a view of the literary. In seeking to distance itself both from the theologians of past biblical scholarship and from the ideological controversies of current literary criticism, it risks promoting a disturbing provincialism.
The "letter" of the Bible versus the "spirit" of the Bible regarding slavery immediately before the Civil War are discussed. The author discusses the theological and secular arguments for and against slavery.
Rather than proclaiming loud, dogmatic slogans about the Bible, we might do better to consider the odd and intimate ways in which we have each been led to where we are in our relationship with the scriptures. What if liberals and conservatives in the church, for all their disagreement, would together put their energies to upholding the main truth against the main threat?
The recent wave of school-board hearings, legislative bills and court cases suggests that literalism is a persistent phenomenon. Indeed, we may be seeing only the top of the turnip.
All translators of the Bible must confront certain exegetical problems: Textual, lexical, grammatical, terms of kinship, and pronoun gender. The plain fact is that one cannot translate the Bible without doing exegesis and interpretation.
Most of’ Barbara Brown Taylor’s students profess to live by the Bible without ever having read more than 50 pages of it. Their knowledge of’ what is in it comes from their parents, their preachers and their Bible study leaders, as well as from movies such as Left Behind. When students are asked to read what is actually on the page, most see what they have been taught to see. The danger arises partly because many of them come from communities that censure nonconformity.
With only a few exceptions, too many study Bibles ignore contemporary biblical research. Recently, however, several high-quality study Bibles conversant with current scholarship have been published -- Bibles that by and large would interest mainline congregations.
Walter Brueggemann offers a series of 19 theses about the Bible in the church. The dominant scripture that permeates every dimension of our common life is the scripture of therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism. That scripture has failed.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Paul Ricoeur presents a hermeneutics of biblical interpretation from his position as a philosopher, aided by Lewis Mudge’s clarification of Ricoeur’s thought.
The author analyzes the evangelical's need to develop a consensus theology, one arising out of Biblical, traditional and contemporary data.
The author compares two opposite thinkers -- Gadamer and Derida, and how we read: How we read and understand texts has an impact upon the texts themselves. Rather than being static, texts are constantly in motion, since our interpretation of them affects their very being.
In this companion article to "Light in the Darkness" by Marcus J. Borg, the author, while holding that Jesus' birth gets far more attention than its role in the New Testament warrants and supposing that his own Christian faith or that of the church to which he belongs would not have been very different if the first two chapters of both Matthew and Luke never existed, holds open his historical judgment and asks, "If that's what God deemed appropriate, who am I to object?"
Three book reviews. Pagels, Ehrman and King suggest three ways in which the alternative scriptures can benefit Christians today: 1. They would show more developmental diversity, 2. This diversity would show that there was more than what orthodoxy presented and 3. It would help us understand the varieties of contemporary Christianity.
The Thinking Person’s Guide to the Bible as the Book of Faith: No thinking person wants to undo the work of critical scholarship which has freed us from a rigid view of Scripture.
Placker presents an appreciative summary of Hans Frei’s understanding of biblical narrative as neither moral teachings nor historical accounts, but rather as primarily narrative. Frei calls upon the Christian community to regain "its autonomous vocation as a religion" by telling its distinctive stories about how God worked in the life of Israel, and God’s self-revelation in the life of Jesus Christ.
What did the biblical writers know and when did they know it? The maximalist versus the minimalist approaches to the history of ancient Israel. The former starts with confidence in the historicity of the Bible, while the latter uses only the meager epigraphical and archaeological remains.
Jenks holds that a focus of scholarly work on the historical Jesus is essential for the health of Christianity. He gives an excellent short summary of what scholars know about the historical Jesus, and what these new insights mean for the future of churches.
William Dryness argues that to do theology properly we must begin not with a doctrine of Scripture but with our life in the world. "Scripture will function much more like a musical score than a blueprint for our lives. A score gives guidance but it must always be played afresh".
Study of the Bible that avoids facing issues of power, economics and social ideology becomes a justification of the status quo. Simply but quite precisely put, the historical-critical approach to biblical study had become bankrupt. Not dead: the critical tools have a potential usefulness, if they can only be brought under new management.
For Clark Pinnock theology must be hermeneutical theology. The current tendency to relate theology to present-day issues is a "recipe for Scripture-twisting on a grand scale." Only what is revelation, i.e., only Scripture, can "be made a matter of theological truth."
Modern Indian translators do not pay careful attention for the right selection of text any more than other modern translators. Translations and interpretations at anytime should be on the basis of textual critical approaches and must be centered on the reliable Greek/Hebrew sources.
James I. Packer argues that the "biblical texts must be understood in their human context."
Whenever there is a really intense fight among American Protestants, sooner or later it seems to turn into an argument over the truth of scripture. Nonfundamentalists' discussions of appeals to the Bible have often consisted principally in ridiculing fundamentalism, without defining any clear Christian alternative to fundamentalism. The author sketches an alternative way of saying, "Yes, the Bible is true."
Biblical prophets all across the land are indeed making "minute predictions about events in world history," that God’s climactic and decisive intervention in human affairs is about to occur. This recent explosion of aggressive millenarianism is biblically and theologically perverse and historically dangerous.
A review of The Elusive Messiah, by Raymond Martin. What should Christians make of the challenges New Testament scholarship poses to traditional Christian belief about Jesus? Martin delineates what he regards as the only three possible solutions: "Only Faith," "Only Reason," and "Faith Seeking Understanding," in which some sort of compromise is worked out between the historian and faith. He then proposes his own solution.
Fifteen scholars and pastors convened by the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1998-2002 as "The Scripture Project," have proposed "Nine Theses" in interpreting the Bible for our times. These Nine Theses are presented in this article.
If the transcendent is an especially rich dimension of reality which is humanly known by mediation, then it is only fitting that our talk of the transcendent be couched in metaphor, for such language allows one dimension of reality to be revealed in and through another.
If anything ties together the various strands of new approaches to biblical interpretation, it is a concern for the relationship of language, meaning and power.
When some law, whether from Moses or from some Leviticus priest, is unjust or oppressive to a minority, it has to be ignored or changed. That is what Jesus did, and he put his life on the line for it. And that is what the church that follows Jesus must do.
There are at least three questions to ask those who would use psychological models to interpret the biblical text: What is wrong with the old ways? How can psychology add to our insights? Why are some people so resistant to such attempts?
The Gospel writers think they’re talking about things that actually happened, like the resurrection If these things didn’t happen, N.T. Wright claims, he’s got other things to do with his life.
If the Bible is oppressive, how do we then relate to God? And on what grounds do we conduct our critique of scripture? We should indeed be suspicious when we read scripture—suspicious of ourselves, whose minds need to be transformed. Rereading scripture from a new perspective was as challenging for Paul as trusting God’s promise was for Abraham.
Russell Spittler argues for an exegetical theology. Only through a commitment to Scripture does he find validation for his tradition.
Learning by rote is no more useful in Bible study than in other fields, and it is often the Bible’s anomalous, even contradictory texts that lead us to deeper thought and strong faith.
A full appreciation of the Bible with all its resonances will emerge from a combination of approaches to it. The biblical scholar cannot avoid the question, “What does it mean for me?” For the answer he or she will need some knowledge of the lay world -- but also of the world within which the Bible and the first Christian communities took shape.
(ENTIRE BOOK) There is a way of reading the bible which opens the door to vital faith without shutting the door to critical thought.
Evangelicals are jittery, fearing that Lindsell’s book The Battle for the Bible might herald a new era of faculty purges and organizational splits -- a replay of earlier conflicts, this time rending the evangelical world asunder.
Biblical criticism can no longer ignore the charges that it has atomized the Bible in its own special way, then stuffed the pieces back into antiquity, while often acting irresponsibly about the nature of the Bible itself. The claim to objectivity and thoroughness rings hollow when the Bible as canon is ignored.
Dr. Brueggemann reviews Brevard Child's book on Isaiah. The nature of the biblical material itself makes interpretation inescapably theological. It has as its subject the theological claims made in and through the text and received by the church.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Citing the disconnection if not alienation that exists between the community of biblical scholars and the community of faith, the author calls for a serious reassessment of the driving forces in biblical scholarship, and suggests a new paradigm that holds promise of making the Bible more widely available and humanly applicable.
(ENTIRE BOOK) This book gives an overview of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, showing the consistency and organic unity of biblical thought – a harmony underlying the obvious differences between the two testaments. It is arranged by topics for easy reading.
This essay seeks to reach, with a layman's tools, a personal accommodation with a Bible that both repels him and attracts him.
Hanna-Barbera portrays the heroes as so mighty and good that they overshadow God. Instead of providing a generation with knowledge of the Bible, the Hanna-Barbera cartoons may be fostering the worst kind of biblical ignorance.
The Bible is not a moral tract. It may contain all that is necessary for salvation, but the glory of Easter is not a result of self-righteousness. I discovered that the Bible is a great deal more alive than the church establishment seemed to be.
In this companion article to God's Way of Acting by N. T. wright, the author thinks the birth stories of Jesus are metaphorically true, though not historically factual. He contrasts the functions of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke and offers reasons for their absence in Mark and John. The theme of remarkable births is part of the tradition of Israel. The story of the virginal conception is not a marvel of biology, but an early Christian narratival confession of faith in and affirmation of allegiance to Jesus. It points to the truly important questions: "Is Jesus the Light of the World? Is he the true Lord? Is what happened in him 'of God'?" The story of Jesus' birth is not just about the past, but about the internal birth in us in the present.
The following is Chapter Ten in Robert K. Johnston (ed.) The Use of the Bible in Theology: Evangelical Options (John Knox 1985
The author finds much to praise in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
Dream interpretation, so Jewish in its imaginative attentiveness, pertains to psychological matters and the reality of repression. But it is not limited to those concerns. Dreams concern larger realities and possible futures.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Professor Lampe states that the resurrection of Christ certainly was not a resurrection of the physical body and that the "empty tomb" story is as much a hinderance as a help to believing Christians. Professor MacKinnon examines the Easter Narrative in light of the the passion narrative.
Romney traces the "road" that runs through the entire Bible, a road which, if followed faithfully, leads to the heart of a living, loving God.
(ENTIRE BOOK) The situations out of which each of the books of the New Testament grew, and how each book met that situation.
Alternative visions of the word evangelicalism result in such different content that its use is confusing without consideration of those transformations of meaning. Understanding these differences is key to reconciling the core meaningof evangelicalism with the Wesleyan tradition.
For John Howard Yoder theology is an activity on behalf of the church. Its function is neither that of maintenance nor that of generalization. Theology is the church's servant through a missionary and aggressive "biblical realism." Theology protects against overly confident or overly relevant applications. It is meant to correct and renew the church.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A review of the place of the Bible in our culture, examining the crucial question of what is meant by its being the inspired Word of God. Excellent summary of the geographical, social and religious setting within which the Bible emerged, the stages of its development, the literary types in the Old and New Testaments, and the main themes.
(ENTIRE BOOK) There is a dilemma in understanding the meaning of the Kingdom of God. Various approaches to kingdom study are presented. Among these are included: 1. Dr. Harkness’ own understanding of the kingdom. 2. the Scriptural views of understanding of the kingdom. 3. a theological analysis of the message. 4. The message itself.
This essay is the introduction to the nine documents which follow, all derived from Johnston (ed.), The Uses of the Bible in Theology: Evangelical Options. Evangelicals are increasingly recognizing the need to ask methodological questions as they do theology. This growing hermeneutical concern is not a capitulation to modernity, but rather is evidence of evangelicalism's continuing commitment to the lordship of Christ and the authority of Scripture.
Despite the deeply embedded concept of hell, the perception seems to be fading from current talk in mainline churches. These commentaries on hell suggest many divergent views still exist about the value of this concept.
Will our attention to Jesus' return cause us to become indifferent to the care of the earth and to our sister and brother in need?
To reckon with Barth is to encounter one whose theology later inspired liberation theologians in Latin America and antiapartheid theologians in South Africa -- a theologian who felt that what you pray for, you must also work for.
Mozart teaches us the sovereignty of the true servant. In his music, “the sun shines, but without burning or weighing upon the earth,” and “the earth also stays in its place, remains itself, without feeling that it must therefore rise in titanic revolt against the heavens.”
There is a vast company of folk in stations high and low who find Barth’s paradoxes singularly satisfying and alive. Barth, like Schleiermacher, and unlike many of the book-theologians of the last decades, has enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a pastoral contact with real people.
In the past ten years I have been occupied approximately equally with the deepening and the application of that knowledge which, in its main channels, I had gained before. I have had to rid myself of the last remnants of a philosophical. i.e. anthropological (in America one says “humanistic” or “naturalistic”) foundation and exposition of Christian doctrine. My theological thinking centers and has centered in its emphasis upon the majesty of God, the eschatological character of the whole Christian message, and the preaching of the gospel in its purity as the sole task of the Christian church.
When most theologians were trying to adjust themselves to modernism, Karl Barth perceived that modernism was bankrupt. We should make use of "mythical" language, said Barth. Otherwise it would be impossible to bear witness to Christ.
Though Barth failed to see how completely God’s free love entailed human freedom, he did powerfully realize that human liberation is possible only if the God who creates and sustains this universe has the all-sufficient freedom and love to sustain that liberation. His greatness lies in his radical insistence that the God who humbled himself is the self-same almighty sovereign who created heaven and earth.
These six verses are about listening and accountability -- and about a larger vision of God’s kingdom.
Like Christians of times past, we are inclined to absolutize the values and mores of the age in which we live. Unless we live in some Hitlerian society, there is bound to be real worth in the dominant values of any moment in history.
Mindful of the ghosts of Herod’s excess, our business in this Advent season is to treat our own children as God’s gift to us, despite the overwhelming burdens and responsibilities of parenthood and child-rearing in our society.
How might your life be different if you were born again? How would you re-edit the narrative of your life?
The new life in the desert signals the presence and power of God. Water in abundance brings forth life, the barren desert blossoms with fragrant flowers.
The author is pleased that doubting Thomas didn’t let any of the disciples off the hook, for they still had a job to do.
John’s story of Jesus and Lazarus becomes another allegory about baptism.
Jesus is asking those of us who have been called, first to understand the nature of the kingdom that has been initiated with his coming, and then to be workers with him. We will be great only by becoming others’ servants; we will be exalted only by humbling ourselves.
Like all true poetry, the Psalms seem to be newly minted, disarming, to be an utterance that comes straight from the gut as well as from the heart.
This story is not just about what we do personally; it has implications for what we do together.
For Amos the connection betwen "profits" and "prophets" was more than a matter of literary elision. His words crackle with a telling contemporary ring.
Looking at Adam and Eve, I see a family resemblance: a picture of my own fear and shame.
By our very agreement with Jesus we stand accused despite our moments of righteous living. Given that we are rich when the world is poor, that we cling to our nuclear arms as if world extermination were a noble risk, destroy ancient forests, gouge the landscape, pollute the soil, water and air, that we copulate and abort with unrestrained abandon -- how then are we to interpret Jesus’ words, "It is what comes out of a person that defiles," so as to come up smelling like roses?
What it means to be an obedient servant of the Lord as in the example in which Mary asked a question of God’s angel in contrast to the way Zechariah asked one.
The move from Moses and YHWH in the Sinai to Jesus and Peter at Caesarea Philippi presents something of a role reversal. Now the "I Am," the God-with-us, speaks, and Moses the questioner becomes Peter the questioned. "Who do you say that I am?" asks Jesus. Peter’s confident reply of "Messiah" is quickly followed by Jesus’ command for silence about his identity.
We are afraid to waste time, but waiting takes time and if we model our lives after Jesus, time is a gift to experience.
Despite our frustrations and doubts, we have seen the intimacy promised by Jeremiah partially realized in the coming of Christ. In Advent we are impelled to look beyond the first to the second coming, when God’s covenant will cease to be only a hint and a promise, when it will become our eternal destiny.
It took more than a decapitation (of the head of John the Baptist) to stop the truth of God, more than a crucifixion to stop the Son of God, more than persecution to stop the mission of God.
What is really going on here is not only a family crisis in Bethany but the crisis of the world, not only the raising of a dead man but the giving of life to the world.
Lent requires a severe discipline on the part of the church. It is the discipline of waiting, waiting for Easter but knowing nobody gets in on Easter who was not here for Good Friday.
Our Western privilege is at odds with a faith that supposedly began in radical simplicity. Faith blooms in dispossession. When you don’t have anything else to hold onto, when you can no longer clutch lesser things, you hold onto your God, and your God holds onto you.
Baptism reminds us that God’s creative force is still birthing us, claiming us, renewing us.
Many of us find it hard to perceive the voice of the Lord.
Perhaps in our public prayers we ought to make room for yet another category: "prayers of encouragement," For it is our spiritual obligation to encourage one another.
As essential as lively biblical, doctrinal and liturgical catechesis is the desire to connect with God and people in ways that have depth and can last.
Jesus’ image of vine, branch and fruit is not about viticulture. It is about abiding. Loving is the highest form of abiding, of being present for another.
Even as the ascension leaves us here, in the modern world, ascension points beyond it. Jesus may have risen, but in another sense he remains on the ground.
After carefully watching guests do their subtle ballet of who should sit higher than whom, Jesus says, "Whoa. Why don’t you try this? Head for the lowest seat available; then your host will say in front of everybody, ‘Friend, come up higher,’ which would be a very satisfying experience."
The author uses the story of the man born blind to show what difficulty religious people have in acknowledging the power of God.
We join Isaiah and Jesus and Paul and all the rest of them, longing for the heavens to open, for justice to come for the living and the dead., for mercy to make right this damned and beloved world. We will not choose indifference or resignation.
The tension between our moment and the eschatological moment must be retained. For instance, when speaking eschatologically about the nuclear arms race, a preacher would refer to such things as the blasphemy of destroying God’s handiwork and the idolatry of the bomb, not simply to a nuclear freeze. And those eschatological statements are, in fact, more realistic about the nature of the present darkness than is any political solution.
Christians need to realize that the liberation struggle and a responsible love ethic must come together in our way of living.
The biblical message is that in the midst of all fearful events of our day, God is opening up a new future for us. He has given us this hope in Jesus Christ. The book of Revelation is about this hope -- the hope for the future which God is bringing about.
Psalm 51 is one of the seven classic penitential psalms used on occasions of confessing sin. Sin is acknowledged with frequent repetition for intensification of feeling; petition is made for divine favor; a vow to God is made; worshipers affirm what really matters between them and God.
The Galilean fishermen learned how to become fishers of men, even though they -- like us -- were amateurs.
When we are Christians in name only, we are invited to the wedding feast but we do not attend. Are others invited to take our places?
Jesus was laughing with delight when he prayed, "I thank thee, Father. . ."
If Jesus had answered only that "man must love god with all his heart, mind and strength..." when asked which is the great commandment and stopped there, the greatness of Christianity would not exist.
We have been given a foretaste of the righteousness and justice promised by Jeremiah, and we have some experience of the holiness and abounding love described by Paul.
We are anxious about many things: having enough money, having good enough health, being secure and safe. Perhaps the Eucharist addresses our need: "Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens…"
The 1 Corinthians reference mirrors the thoughts of Isaiah as does Paul when he addresses what it means to be God’s people.
A reflection prompted by viewing the movie, The Apostle, and a visit from a traveling missionary.
The route from suffering to hope can be a very winding road, but fellow travelers along that road can give the lost traveler direction.
The author confesses he doesn’t want to leave this body, to die, but when he is dragged out – kicking and screaming all the way – "at home with the Lord" is where he’ll be.
The mother hen has no fangs, no claws, no rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her babies with her own body. If the fox wants them, he will have to kill her first.
The Spirit gives us the peace to withstand the pain, loss and ridicule we will encounter on the way to discovering new life after being as good as dead.
The author writes of those dying in traumatic moments and how their struggle with their illnesses is also a struggle of faith.
The author reminds us that we have a home in God and that God abides also in us.
Going to church makes a difference in how we live and in how we die.
Jesus’ death is planned by Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin because he had brought forth life in Lazarus -- a double irony.
In the story of the blind man, John tells us the allegory that with completely good eyes, we can’t see the truth, that we aren’t worthy of the good things we get.
Jesus may have been making the point that nothing belongs to Caesar. In the conflict between the secular and the religious, how liberating it is to say, "No, I cannot attend, I will be at church."
The Beatitudes place our lives in the context of the whole realm and scope and community of God’s love and justice. More description than instruction, more report than directive, they compose a litany in which all promises point to the same reality.
That Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead is an article of our faith. Unfortunately, the mainline churches have left it to the sectarian groups to teach and preach on the second coming.
All families need access to adequate housing, a healthy diet, good education and security. But for huge numbers of people, those kinds of needs are fantasy. The answer just might lie in churches that are begging -- begging for the privilege of standing with those in need and applying a holistic gospel to the systems that deprive people of their dignity.
Trinitarian images ground Christian faith, love and hope by providing for the experiences of separation and distance in Christian life, while insisting on a unity with God that transcends all temporal and spatial boundaries.
Preachers seem to feel the need to explain the Trinity. But when you approach the mysterious feast of God, the direct approach simply will not work.
Our task "between the two advents" is simple faithfulness in our work and in our attitudes -- the kind of faithfulness that shows we are being drawn forward by the magnet force of the kingdom of God.
Jesus’ feeding of the loaves and fishes to thousands is a metaphor of Paul’s insistence that the gospel is to be fed to everyone, gentile and Jew alike.
What are our blind spots, what corners of the church and of society need serious reformation in the 21st century? What do we allow to go unchallenged today that will one day cause our grandchildren to shake their heads at how blind we were to the gospel?
In the season of Ascension we are asked to behold a beauty that until now has been only inferred, conjectured, dreamed.
This article appeared in The Christian Century, March 11, 2008, p. 20. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscriptions information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.
If we asked the question "who are we and what is our destiny?", and if we refuse to accept answers from the world, the question will not be what we ask but what is asked of us.
Things were fine in Nazareth until Jesus opened his mouth and all hell broke lose.
Exposing our hearts to God, we are "branded" by the word that makes us community. Pain, indelibility and identity are the hallmarks of God writing the covenant on the heart of the people.
John’s story about feeding the five thousand tells us that God wants hungry people fed. But the miracle, because it is also a "sign," teaches us that God wants more than stomachs filled.
The sign of the times, the clue to the breaking in of God’s reign, is the gracious and patient hand that reaches out to halt the ax, the merciful voice that says, "Let’s give this hopeless case one more year."
Christians should care for the afflicted simply because they are human and because the need us, because we or they will never again have this chance. Even if we can do nothing to mend or to prevent the tragedy, we can warm the night.
For some of us it is always time to start getting ready to worry.
Paul’s words are both instructive and troubling to us today. They teach us that there can be no such thing as community without unity of consciousness, collective action free of individual greed, humility and respect for the other and as much concern for the other person’s welfare as for our own.
The love Jesus shows his disciples is the love we are called to show others.
In our day, the word of the Lord is cheap, visions are widespread and telemarketers call us by name. How do we distinguish God’s call?
If the word turns out not to be true, or the prediction does not come to pass, then it is evident that it was not a true word of Yahweh, but only prophetic arrogance.
As the church continues to reflect on the gift of the Spirit and the challenge of our calling, it is time to once again take up the mantle of speaking truth in love and exposing the big and small lies that entangle us and threaten our undoing.
Many of Jesus’ teachings are not only hot, they’re revolutionary But when they become too hot to handle, we retreat into one passage -- "Blessed are the meek" -- and throw it over any sparks that might ignite into a reordering of the world.
John had prepared the way Jesus would traverse, though not in the manner the Baptizer may have thought.
In the eating and drinking the church becomes the eucharistic presence of Christ in the world.
Seeing the master go, made it clear that now it was up to Elisha.
e employ human terms to communicate who God is, and here is God in human form among us in Jesus Christ.
Pilate and all the other tyrants who have come after him for 20 centuries challenge Jesus and his way of living and dying. Some of the challengers think that they have come up with a new move to get the best of the champion. But they never will.
Paul said, "We were gentle among you." (RVS) James Howell points out the word could be translated as "infants," and he writes a commentary on the possibilities of this.
God shares the experience of terror and death and answers not in the language of hatred and rejection, but in giving us the Word made flesh, God with us.
Not all Christology fits the contours of our lives, not all Christology can be consumed without remainder in moral examples and ethical preachments. While Christ is as we are, and therefore will help, Matthew’s Christophanies remind us that he is not as we are, and therefore can help.
We have no scientific evidence or rational proof that Jesus is risen from the dead. But the church exists because of the Easter event. Because Jesus is risen, he has become not only our judge in whose presence all of our life is an open book, but also the source of our forgiveness, our healing and our wholeness.
Leviticus reveals a God who is Wholly Other.
Christian spirituality is liberation, it is freedom. It is freedom to participate in the suffering of God for the world. It is suffering love. In Jesus we are liberated from self-seeking to share in the agony and pain of others.
Disconnectedness is the greatest threat to our spiritual security, both in the here and now and in the hereafter. Paul was the embodiment of a "living sacrifice" as he shared God’s reconnecting love with peoples all across the Greco-Roman world.
Lost sheep and coins are parts of a whole, the search is a quest for restoration and wholeness. Thus, all of us are part of God’s creation and should be just as anxious as God until the lost are restored and are made whole.
The author believes that the Abraham-Isaac scripture comes to us not only to demonstrate how very arduous it is to have a true, abiding faith in God, but also to paint for us the magnificence of the Creator’s grace in our lives.
In God’s new world order, it is possible to be a widow and prosperous rather than poor. It is possible to be self-possessed rather than powerless. It is possible to be an agent of ministry instead of an object of ministry.
A major clergy killer is the gap between our momentary but stirring mountaintop visions of the kingdom of God and the grubby sociological reality of the church in the valley. How do we keep at it?
Jesus thanks the Father for revealing to the simple and unlearned what has been hidden from the wise and the learned.
The disciples were suddenly alone, and felt afraid and forsaken. Jesus was to have been the conquering messiah with an "In your face, Rome" attitude. What went wrong? More important, where would the disciples go now.
We are ordained and baptized for the tragic moments of history – a priestly ministry of liturgy, articulation, peacemaking, programs of comfort and renewal justice-seeking -- and a ministry of word and sacraments that embraces other faith journeys and a world hungry for a communal story.
There are difficulties in recognizing and knowing Jesus. He is often noticed only as a stranger, an alien. Perhaps alien isn’t such an ugly word.
How a cynic might delight in our liturgies that come stocked with prayers of confession.
A relationship to God does not remove one from but often places one in the line of fire.
Jesus goes beyond simply providing a model of charity, such as those who rescue abandoned babies. He also links acceptance of them with acceptance of himself.
Theologically, Christians must wonder why the only couples legally living under Jesus’ proscription against divorce are same-sex couples.
The poetic imagery of Jeremiah invites us to sit with this text’s recurring dance of reversal and triumph. In it we rediscover one of scripture’s principal themes: the story of God’s grace and compassion triumphing over God’s judgment.
Thomas’s caution makes him a more credible witness. Furthermore, after the invitation to touch the wounds of Jesus, he penetrates even beyond the superficial excitement of the moment.
Advent is a time for uncovering, for facing up to various cover-ups.
Nothing is more crippling to our souls than working at hiding shame. We think we are keeping the world out, but in fact we are keeping ourselves locked in. It doesn’t matter what you do, or how hard you try -- you are never going to have a better past.
Nothing is more crippling to our souls than working at hiding shame. We think we are keeping the world out, but in fact we are keeping ourselves locked in. It doesn’t matter what you do, or how hard you try -- you are never going to have a better past.
Preachers are always saying, "Bless, bless, bless" when they ought to be saying. "Damn! Damn! Damn!"
Regarding the Alabama judge carrying from place to place a two and three quarter ton monument of the ten commandments, it seems the ethical demands of that document have become burdens, weights and heavy obligations to him and to many.
The author comments on Mark’s gospel ending and what his intention might have been in the suggested shorter version. What might we make of the various possible endings?
Jesus, like Moses before him, was about to set God’s people free, only it was not bondage to pharaoh they needed freeing from this time. It was bondage to their own fear of sin and death, which crippled them far worse than leg chains ever had.
Physical deafness and spiritual deafness are alike; Jesus confronted one type in the man born deaf, the other type in the Pharisees and others who were dulled to his message. The writer shares out of his own experience some of the insights he has gained about both kinds of impairment.
It all starts when God says, "I will be your God; you will be my people." Israel doesn’t apply for the job; it’s God who takes the initiative. God chooses. But then the chosen are challenged: "Choose this day whom you will serve."
If we stop pursuing justice, peace, healing and wholeness for our lives and for our world, we become supporters of that which we oppose.
At the marriage in Cana Jesus shows that the destruction of carefully laid out plans can be changed by unexpected circumstances.
The vineyard, left to us by God, is to be tended and made productive. His gift was luxuriant, creative and beautiful. How have we tended this garden God has given us?
The academic language of distancing analysis and explanation also serves to obfuscate the clear moral dimensions of life and the need to choose between right and wrong. On some issues, analysis and explanation are themselves a form of collusion.
The text confronts stark and conflicting sayings of Jesus that sit poorly with contemporary images of God. Nevertheless, This gospel lesson calls us to witness to the good news and to the crisis that is God’s consuming and compelling presence.
Justice alone is cold and calculating. The heart gives justice some breadth of emotional engagement, some passion. And the heart of God, whose preference is for all of us in our mortality and our various poverties, hears our cry for vindication and comes close by, speedily.
With Paul, we only have the right for one boast, and that is for the Love of God as displayed on the cross.
Jesus loses the argument and changes his mind 180 degrees as he learns something new and different through the remarks of a pagan. What’s more it’s from a pushy woman who is dogging his track.
We do right when we understand our differences as gifts of God and not devices of the devil. We do the right thing when we publicly acknowledge that left to ourselves we can do nothing right. We do right when we keep Christ in the center.
The fullness of the Spirit comes only when we are emptied of all the ego and self preoccupation that promises so much and delivers so little; emptied of all that is foolish and dying and ridiculous.
As Jesus was about to descend the Mount of Olives to enter Jerusalem, Mark reports, he dispatched two of his disciples to fetch a colt. A seemingly minor matter of transportation it would seem, but surprisingly, over half of Mark’s story of Jesus’ entry into the city is occupied with mundane details about acquiring this animal -- where to go to find it, what kind of colt to seek, what to do, what to say.
God says, "You are forgiven." What are we to make of that?
Alas, we would strip the body off the cross, embalm it and cover it with cosmetics, render the cross in bronze, polish it, make it triumphant and clean.
Dreams have fallen on hard times in our jaded world. We should be grateful that a previous age preserved their legacy in Scripture.
What is the appropriate dress for a special occasion? Scripture tells us that our own righteousness is as filthy rags, so we understand that only God has the appropriate wardrobe for us.
The author reviews a book about the perplexing book of Job. The book concludes that questions about the world, human existence, and God necessarily remain open.
The author asks: what is more tragic than to be dead spiritually, yet be acting as if we were alive?
Appearing to two nobodies going no where is an interesting choice when you think of all the other possibilities for the debut of the risen Lord.
If we test for what we know or envision, then the god we discover will be only the size of our certainties, and as dead as our faith. Resurrection invites us into the mystery of creation and into the presence of the living God. In that place, even death itself is not a certainty.
Eavesdropping on others as a way of getting operating instructions from God.
It is somewhat reassuring to realize that the first Christian sermon ever preached did not register high on the Richter scale. When the women came back from the cemetery on Easter morning, they brought with them word of an empty tomb and astonishing news: "He is not here but has risen!" All Christian preaching begins here,
Having heard the invitation to follow so long ago, we need to hear it again, and then to act.
The rapturous beginnings and sufferings mean nothing if we haven’t entered by the right door. For Christians the door is the person of Jesus Christ.
After the resurrection, every time he came to his friends they became stronger, wiser, kinder, more daring. Every time he came to them, they became more like him.
Cynthia Campbell defends each generation’s scholarship in searching for the real Jesus providing the search is accompanied by the Holy Spirit.
The parables of Jesus demonstrate that sometimes we may be forced to change our standards to make traditions more accessible.
In Advent, dare we risk exploring the meaning of our longing for God?
Jesus finds himself in the middle of a kind of theological cross-examination free-for-all. Priests, scribes, elders and other assorted defenders of the letter of the law are swarming all over him in a frenzy of entrapment.
We’re not to be haughty or set our hopes on the uncertainty of riches hut instead rely on our richly provident God.
Through God’s graciousness, both Sarah and Hagar are blessed despite the fear they face -- Ishmael does become the father of a nation, and lo and behold, Abraham becomes the progenitor of both Jews and Arabs.
The author reviews four books which offer theological, ethical and empirical reasons to be indignant about persistent domestic and global poverty and inequality.
We are to address the bored and idle among us by gently fostering hope. This demands that we not rush to alleviate boredom, but that we negotiate true desire over hopelessness.
Without the grace of Christ, who makes God’s reconciliation a reality despite human sin, the devastation of relationships might get the best of us.
The death of Jesus only yielded three days of calm before the disciples came out of hiding claiming that he was raised to new life. By Pentecost the flames were beginning to roar. As the high priest’s frustration escalated, so did his attempts to deter Jesus’ disciples from teaching, healing and preaching.
Too much cheerfulness is displayed at many celebrations of the Pentecost. It is time to take Pentecost back from the celebrants of exuberant but easy triumph.
Every Christian struggles with the tensions of pragmatism and vision. But there is no one-time solution.
That Jesus can and does identify with the uprooted, the pursued, the victim, is in itself an encouraging and redeeming word. In Jesus, God has identified with those who suffer violence and with the homeless, those who have no place to lay their heads (Matt. 8:20).
Even a persecuted Christianity had a humanizing impact on the culture at large.
The flock that Jesus so lovingly describes in the Gospel of John is the same flock that is divided today, for when modern Christians cannot even agree on the date of Easter, it seems that something has gone terribly wrong.
We must confess that, by and large, we Christians prefer flood control -- God’s love tamed, so that we can have his blessings within the framework of the order we have created.
The author remembers meeting a woman in Russia who was not ashamed to be a fool for Christ's sake.
The news that some mainline Protestants have decided to recognize one another’s communion table means little to those who sit in our pluralistic pews. They’ve been bouncing around in their own private ecumenical movements for years, attending a wedding here and a baptism there. They have a growing sense that denominational divisions are a thing of the past.
Dr. Wall examines the meaning of I Corinthians 4:10: "we are fools for Christ's sake."
An eschatology without ethics is futuristic and irrelevant. Ethics without an eschatology is desperate and futile. But joined together, they can produce the power to wash feet and sustain Peter’s rebuke; to live fully today because God is in the present as well as in the tomorrow, and to work for the impossible because with God all things are finally possible.
Here is a message for grown-ups at Christmas that is an essential part of the feast.
The good efect of the righteous, though they are a minority, must have healing power in the community.
The parable of the unforgiving servant reminds us that to receive forgiveness, we must ourselves be forgiving.
Our varied approaches to scripture, our theories about depth versus breadth of coverage, and our work and worry over students with vastly different degrees and kinds of formation don’t matter nearly so much as the ways we practice and embody the virtues of a faithful lover or a religious reader.
The redemption of the body of Christ surely calls for the timely and literal adoption of every child who is waiting to be wanted, accepted and loved, be the adopting couple straight or gay.
After Easter, the disciples witnesses to the victory of God -- not expert witness, just witnesses -- witnessing to the risen Christ within them. We too are to witness to the risen Christ within us.
In the Christmas event, God confounds our claims of self-sufficiency and our self-image as generous givers by putting us on the receiving end of God’s love.
What does it mean to become a Christian? The text of Ephesians answers: You have been created again as God’s masterpiece for two purposes: to show what God can do through Jesus Christ, and to serve human need, engaging in good works which reflect the nature of God as gracious love.
God took upon God's self the wrath deserved by humankind.
Our calling now and always is not to sugarcoat the gospel as entertaining diversion from a writhing world but as the power from God for sharing in its convulsions as people of indestructible hope.
Instead of perpetuating a world of violence, Isaiah proposes a vision that demands a reality that requires peacemaking: doing good, seeking justice, rescuing the oppressed, defending the orphan and pleading for the widow.
There are no boundaries to Advent hope, because there are no boundaries to God.
The Pharisee has kept a precise record of his religious temperature and informs God of every change in degree.
We who so often feel powerless over the elusiveness of language, the scarcity of natural resources, the horror of world hunger, are thrilled to witness the unveiled, magical power of Jesus.
Like Jesus’ life and work, our marriages share in the same irony -- the full weight and glory of each appears only when death comes to part the bride and groom.
As always, God takes us by surprise.
Nobody likes prophets; there are other, more soothing, more entertaining voices uttering less demanding words. These are the voices of dreams, claiming to speak the will of God but not holding the dreams up to the light of the promise; few people ask if the dreams speak to love of neighbor. Instead they listen to voices of blame raised against whoever is not the listener and voices of painless solutions saying peace when there is no peace, but only cheap grace.
Maybe the only comfort we the comfortable can legitimately embrace lies in the realization that God cannot be forever mocked -- that his grace will not forever endure ridicule, that the mockery of easy American Christianity will not endure forever.
The voice of God can be heard outside the protective walls of the church -- but you might not like what you hear.
In the midst of our trivial moralizing, our scolding, supererogation, and scrambling for a few penitential brownie points, John reminds us of why we’re here. We are on the way of the cross not because of what we have done or left undone but because of what God has done.
The world is divided into the poor and the rich, those who long for freedom, and those who have freedom but don’t know what to do with it; those who long for God to come and bring justice, and those who fear that he just might.
Paul shows what the prophet Isaiah has in mind about "seeking the Lord while he is near." The interests of my neighbor are always near: But like the prophet and parable, he also reveals how far these thoughts are from being ours.
Unlike the gods and goddesses of the other nations and unlike the philosopher’s vision of a transcendent goodness, the God of Abraham has taken a stake in human affairs.
It was God’s eternal plan to make us what he himself is.
The Christmas story raises this fundamental questions: Did God act?
When we suffer together, God becomes present to us in the arm of the other resting upon our shoulders.
Analysis of an apparent contradiction between these two passages of scripture, indicating a "wicked sense of humor on someone’s part."
The world wants Christmas jingles and the church sings a lament! The world has visions of sugar plums dancing in its head and the church sees only angry Jews standing by the fence, wailing toward heaven: We Americans are doing better, better and better. And the old church had better get in step or it shall be left behind as our joyous parade of happy, successful, progressive, positive people moves upward, upward and ever onward.
Trying to get to God, the people of Babel ended up being scattered, for they had separated themselves from the people around them.
"Good Shepherd" to us means what we seen in a stained glass window, but in this country Good Shepherds come in all sizes, shapes, ages and colors -- Men in jeans, boys in cowboy hats, a Navajo with lamb in hand keeping it from the coyotes – to Ezekiel, all are images of God.
John is convinced that life is double-plotted, that ordinary events unfold around us but that hidden among all the mundane props are signs of the eternal .
It’s this standing in grace. It’s this having no other way to account for where one is. It’s this sense of having been held and fed and loved, as a child is loved, that drives us, as it certainly drove Paul, to a sense of grace universal.
When John the Baptist saw Jesus coming, he declared, "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." Talk about a grand introduction! What could Jesus have felt in that moment?
Our very struggle with Paul’s injunction to give thanks for everything has its redemptive benefits.
Walking in the light of loving behavior often appears to others as groping in the darkness.
Jesus is 12 years old and has been separated from his parents in a huge city. He has an encounter that changes him forever, teaching him self-awareness and, above all, knowledge of the One whom he will always think of as a loving Father.
The way to entertain strangers is to invite everybody, all the nobodies, the transgressors of class boundaries. Don’t lower you standards, have none – all of them angels – sent by God. Simple acts and words can be a welcome, civilizing social lubricant.
Epiphany, the feast of the shining, is here and we are expected to walk in his radiance as he guides us into the way of peace.
For someone to be simultaneously atheistic and optimistic strikes us as the dumbest of all possible attitudes. How can we have it both ways except through the most exaggerated effort at ignorance? For roosters, optimism comes easily.
The parable is not concerned about the conflict between the principle of good and evil. It is a story neither of fatalism nor of retribution. It suggests no philosophical system. It confronts us irresistibly, disturbing our conscience and urging us toward an ethic of social responsibility.
Mark did not need an appearance of the risen Christ to affirm his faith in the resurrection.
Easter is the Christian Genesis: death and despair displaced by life and hope.
We may or may not be cured by engaging and wrestling with God, but we will be healed. The difficulty is that engagement is hard work, and the vulnerability it requires is terrifying.
God’s favor is granted to those whom society regards as the ones left behind: the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourners, the merciful, those hungering for justice, the purehearted, the makers of peace, those mistreated for the cause of justice.
The transfiguration helps us see beyond Jesus of Nazareth, radically transformed into the Son of God, the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, fully human and fully divine.
Division is so much a part of human experience that we are often divided against ourselves. Paul seems to assume that the Corinthians will always have their differences, but he wants them to see that it is only the unity found in Christ that matters.
What is heaven like? -- uninhibited presence with God.
"The post-Easter blahs that most churches face": Freebairn sees Easter as a process. Two of Jesus’ followers meet a stranger on the road and their hearts are strangely warmed in an hour of empty coldness. Then they began the task that changed this world.
There is no way the disciples could imagine that, in the death and resurrection of the one they called Lord, God would defeat Leviathan?
We can never be certain that we are not among the false prophets.
Knowing you may die intensifies the mission. You risk, you love, you speak. How many of us, when facing death, have felt more fully alive than at other times in life?
As Simeon held the future in his arms, so we also have children now briefly intrusted to our arms for blessing and who will, we hope, live on after us.
This is what baptism is: God places a song in your heart. Your godparents’ role is to learn that song so well that they can sing it back to you when you forget how it goes.
If we want to be Jesus’ followers, we need to face both the public pain of humiliation and physical agony, and the private grief of losing our precious selves in order to be conformed to Christ.
The disciple who can fast, who can depend on God for sustenance for a whole day or two, will not be easy prey to purveyors of instant gratification and immediate solutions, or to advertising, which dominates the contemporary world, with its promise of rapid -- and empty -- reward.
We love to dream of the promised land. In Advent, however, we tread the wilderness, out where fiery John induces nightmares. In the wilderness, prepare a way! God has raised up children from stones. Swim along, singing!
Too much of our times are drowning in mutual holy hate—"You’re wrong, but I’m right." But even "you and I" need to pray a variation of what he whom they mocked cried out: "Father, also forgive me; for I do not know what I am doing."
Faith, the author reminds us, is a matter of the heart.
Of all the prophets ever slain in Israel, America or anywhere else, God raised this one, this healer of gentiles and friend of sinners, so we might know that God has forgiven everything, and continues to do so even today.
The imminence of death has a way of making things clear -- the uncertainties of life, the importance of love, the startling discontinuities and continuities between this life and eternity.
To keep our heads clear of the narcotic of war, we must cultivate an alternative power, an alternative source of meaning. Good Shepherd Sunday may be the time to recall that we derive our identity not from the prestige of our country but from the presence of our Lord.
Mourning elicits courageous, hopeful engagement, so be busy grieving and working on solid ground, not 17,000 feet in the air.
Hospitality is vital not because of the food shared but because of the word shared.
We cannot corrupt the memory of those faithful servants of God like Paul whose suffering is part of a witness to the gospel.
A display of the sinful excesses of the age upon the environment.
God feeds our deepest hunger with the bread of life, therefore we are to do his will.
An unexpected halt is a religious experience if it occasions a discontinuity in one’s identity. Discontinuity, whether spiritual or physical, presents a crisis, a moment of truth. Is not this what religion is essentially about?
To the writer, the important question, in a religiously diverse culture, is how does one maintain Christian identity and integrity? The answer is found in Jesus: love God and neighbor.
Too much like the Athenians, we want to engage God only as a concept, not as a God-man who lays a claim upon our lives.
But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. [Luke 14:7-14]
MIT requires all students take the swim test. The Rev. Christian Coon compares a student’s question: "Why is this test necessary?" with the same question we might ask of Jesus and his temptation in the wilderness.
If we are to find Christ in others we must exercise our imaginations.
How can Christians speak of about the purposes of God -- hence, in some way, God's nature -- when we have no knowledge of the divine timetable. The miraculous wonder of what we have been gifted to comprehend drives us to admit that we know nothing.
Hope is the one thing for which there is no acceptable alternative. The most difficult thing about faith is how much faith it requires.
James’ persistence and how it demonstrates the power to transform us and thereby our speech through the work of the Spirit.
The reign of God is a reign of compassion in which we are to participate.
Jesus ignored the details of life, yet the best news is that once we’ve learned to look for Jesus, we’ll find him in every detail of life.
One must fathom the mystery of death and resurrection in facing the trauma inflicted upon those who worked the edges of the New York abyss at ground zero.
It’s a sobering thought -- as surrogate parents, you and I are about as good as Jesus, on balance, is likely to find. If the love of God cannot be advanced through such as we, it is not likely ever to be advanced. It is time for us to grow out of our juvenile, neurotic absorption with our frailties and begin assuming our roles as God’s earthly parents.
It is the nature of Jesus--and of God--to keep showing up when and where we do not expect him.
Jesus had compassion on the crowed for they were hungry and thirsty. This is the immediate context of the feeding of the five thousand. It is not a demonstration of Christ’s miraculous power. He was not a magician or wonder worker. The feeding of the people was the natural outcome of his compassion.
It’s difficult for mortals to forgive totally but Jesus did. Mortals often fail, but to God all things are possible.
Why does Jesus a Jew, choose a woman--a Samaritan woman whom the Jews hated, a woman who had had many husbands, a prostitute living in sin, an outcast—as the first to receive the message as to who he really is?
A priest must not only be of God but also of the people. He must become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, tested through suffering in order to help those being tested, and Jesus is so qualified.
All the synoptic gospels record that Jesus spoke of Israel as God’s vineyard. The parables make it clear that God cared for his vineyard and how disappointed he was that it didn’t produce the expected fruit. In the fourth gospel, Jesus is the true vine and we are the branches.
We prefer the gentle Jesus, but how can we ignore that side of Jesus that is white-hot with righteous rage and impatience over the sinfulness and unbelief of the world? Indeed, in the Gospels the harsh sayings outnumber the gentle ones, but Jesus did not return from the grave casting his threatened wrathful “fire upon the earth.” In the cross, the fire of divine wrath had already fallen. Transposed by the resurrection, the threat of Jesus became a blessing.
The summary of the law, as simple as it may seem, is actually complex. Jesus ingeniously combined love of God (Deut. 6:5) and neighbor (Lev. 19:18). Jewish scholars had devised other summaries of Torah, but Jesus’ summary is unique, and his assertion that the two laws are inseparable is also distinctive.
Paul’s vision is that when Christians are joined together they find strength rather than distress. They will be stronger together because they are together in Christ. It’s when they split up that they get into trouble.
Lent calls us to return to the source of our power: the victory of Christ.
Judas’ attitudes parallel our own. We are so caught within the iron vise of our secular, materialistic, hedonistic perspectives that the God of Jesus is like an illicit mistress or lover whom we, like Judas, kiss in the dark.
Dr. Long agonizes between his rejection of petitionary prayer and his need for it in traumatic situations.
Speaking is not truthful if it does not also "build up" and "give grace." When we speak truth and love together, we give the riches of God’s grace.
The Magi represent forever for all of us the wisdom that recognizes human life to be a journey taken in search of One who calls us beyond ourselves into faithful service.
When we get it right, the work of love is hardly work at all.
Telling the thought in a story is far superior to simply thinking. It is not so much a matter of thinking as doing--and not doing so much as being and witnessing. Just come and see, and we might realize that Jesus came to make us both more holy and more fully human.
God sends patient caregivers, dedicated researchers and physicians, devoted family and friends to walk with the ill through their painful journey, whether it be a journey toward cure or a journey toward a fuller life. Such people are sent from God whether they know it or not.
We give Nicodemus a bad rap, reducing him to a foil, a cowardly dolt. But Jesus received him as a pilgrim, a sincere religious seeker. In truth, he is the Patron Saint of Seekers, a fellow traveler and a kindred spirit, someone to be embraced.
For the one who believes in the God who gives life to the dead, the Lenten journey is not only to Good Friday and Easter, but is also a revisiting of one’s own experience.
The Son of Man must suffer because he will reject every compromise with the authorities, the crowds, the Romans and even with his own beloved Peter.
Many of us have sung our own Magnificat without realizing that what we sing echoes Mary’s song.
Whether we look to the liberation of peoples living in lands dark as death, or to that inner liberation that comes by the discipline of grace, we must hear creation’s imbongis sing praise as the psalmist commanded, "Glory to God in highest heaven, and on earth peace."
When he spoke of what happened to him on the Damascus Road, Paul never knew whether to call it being born or being killed. In a way, it felt like both at the same time. Whatever it was, it had something to do with letting go.
Jesus proposes some very troubling conditions for discipleship. We are asked to "hate" our parents, spouse, children, siblings, even life itself. Jesus’ teaching must have surprised and confused the enthusiastic crowd, and quickly thinned out the ranks of his supporters.
Terrible things happen, and you are not always to blame. But don’t let that stop you from doing what you are doing.
Critical self-examination brings two painful revelations of faults: faults that are proud, even arrogant, strutting openly and defiant, in full view of all; and faults buried so deep in the heart that even the transgressor is unaware of them. But God knows. As nothing is hidden from the sun, so nothing is hidden from God.
Isaiah, Paul and Luke note an ongoing theological tension between the assurance of God’s kindness and the call to immediate repentance. God’s unaccountable mercy provides additional time for repentance. Yet there will be a reckoning, and human presumption can push even God’s patience too far.
To listen to Jesus, to be a disciple of Jesus, is to walk with Jesus to Golgotha. As we walk with him, as we talk with him, our human nature is being transformed into the likeness of divine nature.
Abram’s life was devoid of purpose or passion until he heard the word from the Lord. He needed this call to help him separate from his past and embrace God’s future for his life. He followed that voice to a place he had never seen before.
Advent invites us to live in hope and not in despair. The violent death of Jesus on the cross was not the end, for in Jesus’ resurrection we are assured of new life. Violence will not have the last word.
In the world of power politics, connections are hard-earned and easily lost; in the reign of God, power flows from a connection that is freely offered and must be freely received, for faith is grounded in a relationship, an encounter with the living God, who is the source of true and lasting power in this life.
Being able to confess Jesus as Messiah is a critical thing, but having a sense of what that means is an ongoing process. When confession is only knowledge, then the cross is only death on a tree and the resurrection is only reward.
Contemplation of nature is a reliable remedy for the worries that can paralyze and plague us. When Jesus points us toward the birds of the air or the lilies of the field, he is not just trying to get our minds off our worries; he is pointing us to a way of discerning the larger purposes of God.
Jesus’ miracles are not an in-your-face showcase for divine power. Instead, they herald Jesus' dying and rising, his relinquishment and resurrection. We who die and rise with Christ are lifted up even as we lift others.
Jesus’ miracles are not an in-your-face showcase for divine power. Instead, they herald Jesus' dying and rising, his relinquishment and resurrection. We who die and rise with Christ are lifted up even as we lift others.
The kingdom of god, the power of God, is like the leaven that works only when combined with flower. It is among us, permeating every aspect of our lives, changing, enlightening and transforming us.
Everything changes when we realize that the only rewards that matter can't be earned. Trying to earn the blessing causes much unhappiness and pathology. Our inner striving becomes insatiable and cannibalizes itself into a black hole of exhaustion.
Both passages suggest that this is a time of waiting, of letting things grow and unfold. But it's also a time of looking forward to some sort of resolution, an end time, in a not-yet time trusting that god’s promise will be fulfilled.
Through his death and resurrection, Jesus will save the whole creation. For Christians, this is the mystery of baptism, the paradoxical drowning that brings life.
Through his death and resurrection, Jesus will save the whole creation. For Christians, this is the mystery of baptism, the paradoxical drowning that brings life.
From words about Abraham, "He grew strong in his faith" we learn that faith is not only a gift from God, but also an aptitude that grows with use: we learn how to be faithful in the process of trusting God.
God's extravagant act of mercy toward sinners in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ should inspire hope and confidence in us sinners in all our dealings with God. The cross of Christ reveals that grace toward sinners lies at the very heart of God.
The waters of baptism offer more than explanations. They speak the silent, miraculous language of grace--the language that invites us, in rhythms deeper than words, to be buried, united, freed.
The first half of Romans easily subverts our faithfulness to the second half. If the first half had been subordinated to the second half, the past few years might have been quite different.
We may quite unconsciously speak a mixture of our own deceits and the word of God.
Jesus location far from Galilee and Jerusalem suggests that defilement and purity are not determined by physical, attributable or demonstrative components, but that purity is ultimately assessed by what one says and does.
In the economy of God’s grace those who are hired at the very end, those whom no one else wants, are the closest to God’s heart. In that economy the last are placed first in line.
The questions in the temple are still the questions in our communities. Too many of us believe that God's activity is all past tense, or believe that the Spirit has nothing new to renew in us.
These verses are a pep talk by Paul to the “body of Christ.” Remember who you are and who got you where you are and who is the source of your strength.
The goal of being together in the body of Christ is not to agree or get along. The hope is to help one another become more Christlike, to love God and neighbor in ever more praising ways.
Simeon and the Annas invite reflection on whether what we know of the story of God’s redemption shapes our lives in ways that keep us open and attentive to God’s presence and present work.
Jesus has universalized the worship of God and has moved away from the central place given to temples made with hands. While the Jewish high priest enters the earthly sanctuary in Jerusalem, Jesus Christ the high priest has entered the heavenly one -- a temple made without hands.
Jesus as host gives consent for troubled people to be filled with promise. We are to join them and be ready to put our whole selves to serve.
Christians are to encourage one another in faithful stewardship, challenged by the idea that we are stewards of much and owners of nothing.
We seem to have become complacent about our denominational and racial divisions. The pain of Christian division is rarely felt by any of us.
John thought that it was important to remind those who had never met Jesus in the flesh that Jesus was still present, but in a new way.
The first Christians were thought to be drunk with new wine, and Festus thought Paul’s defense of the faith merited a court-ordered psychiatric examination. By the world’s standards of what works, and who is greatest, and what is practical, the Christian faith can look foolish indeed.
Much of the training in nonviolent change consists of self-purification and the cleansing of hatred from the heart of those who would change the hearts of others.
Some speculations of cosmologists come tantalizingly close to being religious.. We know by our faith that the triune God is how the world came to be, the energy that keeps it going, and the future toward which it -- and we -- move.
Once in a while Christian congregations act like true communities.
There are many perils in the travels of life, but out of such darkness God’s glory appears in the midst of our journeys to the cross.
Mark 10:32-45 summarizes all the major themes of Mark’s Gospel. In a nutshell, it offers everything that is quintessential Mark: the journey toward the cross, suffering and death, wrongheaded disciples, the reversal of power and Jesus’ reflection upon the meaning of his mission. For Mark, this is the guts of the gospel: that we follow a suffering Christ, a crucified criminal.
In our baptism, we celebrate the incomparable gift we receive as creatures who are beloved of God. Baptism is also about the responsibility this gift requires.
As Christ surprised Mary in the garden, he may also surprise us in the routine of the liturgy, the lections and hymns, perhaps even in the preaching.
Neither Catholic nor Protestant tradition and practice have done Mary justice. Her story reminds us that the oddest, most inglorious moments are packed with the annunciation of God’s presence and God’s call to serve.
In the annunciation God waits in breathless suspense for Mary’s answer – and for ours.
Mary’s song sticks in our throats. But perhaps it can become our song.
Something deep and universal in the human person needs hope in order to live, and many things in our society masquerade as hope but are not.
We define ourselves by our belongings, by our consumption. However, the materialism Jesus calls us to requires not the accumulation of material goods, but an engagement with people, especially those in need.
Jesus takes issue with those whose spiritual focus is on the surface, who are concerned solely with outward actions. He is perturbed by those who have reduced religion to doing the "right things," to looking good, to maintaining outward appearances.
A narrative of a Lenten meditation in poetic form written from the standpoint of the apostle Thomas: And if it were not for his love, his grace that sought me out behind locked doors, called me to touch and then believe, I would not be here at your humble table ready now with you, to break the bread and pour the wine as he did years ago.
Nature surrounds us and we are a part of it. Yet we have a spiritual quality that transcends the dictates of nature. This quality must constantly be nurtured to avoid falling into a variety of idolatries.
The biblical meaning of faith cannot be reduced to individualistic voluntarism. Faith is the miracle of God-given trust, that willingness beyond willfulness that says, "Whoever I am thou knowest, O God, I am thine."
The biblical meaning of faith cannot be reduced to individualistic voluntarism. Faith is the miracle of God-given trust, that willingness beyond willfulness that says, "Whoever I am thou knowest, O God, I am thine."
In the violence and hatred we’ve made of our world, can mercy really be at the heart of God? There is room for God’s mercy if we will only believe that God’s patience is salvation for us all.
As did John, Jesus points away from himself and seeks to deflect the messianic expectations put upon him. Trying to evade his superstar status and the attributions of’ glory, he points instead to what is near and soon and already stirring in the lives of those to whom he speaks.
Christ is pulling us out of darkness into light that we might be a witness to that light.
We set the evidentiary bar so high for a miracle of healing that a dozen miracles happen to us and we don’t notice any of them.
The mystery of the incarnation holds our greatest solace and comfort, namely that wherever we go in suffering, in hurt and sorrow and despair, God has gone there first, goes with us, shows up (!), and is glad to be there with us and for us. It is amazing that the first great heresy in the church was not the denial of Christ’s divinity, but the denial of his full humanity.
Every model of inclusivity entails specific convictions -- which will exclude somebody.
Jesus tells the story of the owner of the vineyard to show that his listeners, members of the religious establishment of his time, have missed the point. The story is breathtakingly clear. Those who "get it" have to do away with him. They mock him, deride him and finally kill him.
The early church was quick to build a case against Judas. What would have happened if Judas had repented, recanted and re-joined the twelve?
One ought not be intimidated by the judgmentalism of religious people for it has very little of God in it. Jesus gets out of the Saccucess trick question by quoting Exodus: "…God is not of the dead, but of the living, for they are all alive to him."
The key to the politics of love, the key to that limitless imagination that sees only abundance, that desires only the things that are not in short supply -- that key lies in worship.
Charles Hoffman shows that to John, religion is not melancholy, but full of God’s grace mediated through Christ. God’s grace is more prodigal than it is miserly.
Forgiven much, this woman loves much more than good taste allows.
The author criticizes the tendency of Americans to gloat in triumph over its victories. He is saddened when Christians pick up a new sword of Constantine, a wicked instrument of triumphalism.
Most of the time, the ragged human convoy of divergent perceptions, piqued honor, high-minded posturing, insecurity, good humor and basic generosity will wend its way to insight and accomplishment.
Jonah, Prophet of the Lord, may or may not have accepted the counterintuitive morality so prevalent throughout the Bible. Samaritans can be good neighbors; stutterers can be lawgivers; theophanies are likely to be encountered in the still, small voice; and not even Nineveh is beyond God’s compassion.
The situation is bizarre: a hostile pagan king asks an impossible favor for his generalissimo, thereby setting the stage for disappointment and what might well be the next political disaster. Jesus plays with the politics implicit in the story, making good use of the perennial tensions between Jew and gentile, us and them.
The name "Legion" of the man from Gerasa is key to the story. It’s about Rome whose legions possessed Israel. This story is a coded identification of Jesus the liberator.
Paul suggests to Timothy that remembering his ancestors increases his faith, and more: it is a warrant for recognizing faith.
Those who know that they are owned by God recognize that their primary identity is not as cogs in the economic machine, for their baptism has taught them who they are and whose they are.
Jesus’ baptism is tied to a history that leads back from John the Baptist to Isaiah to the first words of Genesis. Our new life is bound to those who prepared us for faith, and through them to the history of the church, to the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to the affirmations and promises of the "First Testament" and to God’s kindness in creating the universe.
"Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times." This is strange language to us. We have mainlined grace so cheaply that we no longer understand the disconnect in our own spiritual lives.
The greatest songs often come out of a generation facing pain and suffering. Observing Zephaniah, Isaiah and Paul, it is salutary to look at the extraordinary music generated through the difficulties faced by these great men.
By worshiping its way to renewal and hope, the community of faith has something to offer a world full of weariness, faintness, powerlessness and despair.
After the resurrection, Jesus is in the room with the disciples. Jesus says a most ordinary but absurd thing -- "Peace be with you." Is this a joke in their fear and guilt? The words are neither a salutation nor an attempt at ironic humor, but the fulfillment of a promise.
We cannot tell someone who has suffered a great evil at the hands of others that God is bringing good out of the tragedy. If it is going to happen at all, the victims must discover for themselves that God has somehow created something new out of their suffering, that out of their survival God’s grace can even provide food to save someone else from famine.
Faithful to the unknown and unknowable, love not only transfigures the lover, but calls her by name:
Though we often don’t "stand firm" as Paul admonishes the Philippian believers to do, we long for Jesus to reach out and draw us to him in spite of ourselves.
If our hearts are closed to hearing the cry for justice, mercy and bread, the words of the resurrected One will not be convincing, but convicting.
A theology of grace does not negate the law, but it seeks to transform those aspects of human relationships which the law cannot touch and which may even make law a vehicle for hatred and sin.
Here is the agenda for the post-Easter journey -- joy and peace, mission and forgiveness, faith and proclamation, love and life.
How is our obedience to God mediated or intersected by loyalty to institutions and to our friends?
The life of Paul was an adventure of exploring the meaning of Christ for the Jews as well as for the Gentiles.
Bethlehem is nine miles south of Jerusalem. The wise men had a long intellectual history of erudition and a long-term practice of mastery. But they had missed their goal by nine miles. It is mind-boggling to think how the story might have gone had Herod’s interpreters not remembered Micah 2.
The disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration not only saw a vision; they also heard God’s voice coming out of the cloud, saying, "This is my child, my Chosen; listen to him." I hear that voice, too, when members of the church hear and heed those things Christ has said: Love one another. Forgive, as God has forgiven you. Follow me.
In a world that continues to "bend" women’s lives, we must follow Jesus in claiming that the lives of women are sacred, and that women are invited to be healed and flourish in the presence of the Holy One.
No stranger to the ways of the real God, Abraham would know that a mad, disordered, barbaric age needs more than a faith with no claim but that its god can be served without cost.
Should civilization’s survival be our only issue in the nuclear age? As Jesus walked down a road to a place of the skull, survival was definitely not the issue.
In Holy conversation with God we make known our needs, we learn to pray for the essential requirements and recognize God’s generous gifts providing our day to day necessities.
Yes, said Isaiah, they were being judged for their sins and the judgment was severe. But that was not God’s ultimate purpose in sending the Babylonians to drag the Hebrews away. The real purpose was to call them to a deeper understanding of the covenant.
To be at a beginning is to find that we are not prisoners of the past. We can always begin again.
Before the end-times, world problems will multiply. Problems in our times are climactic heralding the predictions of end-times. But Jesus indicated that no one knows when the end will appear.
The annunciation of the good news to Mary makes it clear that she was able to sing her song because she had listened well and said yes to God. We can trust that even in this violent, unjust and despairing world, God’s word of hope is true.
"He must increase but I must decrease." If we had heard nothing else from John’s lips, those seven words would assure us that he was no demagogue trumpeting an agenda of the self. Here is a sure way to assess the claims of anyone professing to have a message for us from God.
The belief that Christians have "superseded" Israel as the chosen of God -- that we have replaced the Jews as the apple of God’s eye, that we are the singular recipients of God’s election -- has led, in the extreme, to the Holocaust. It has also kept the church from an honest examination of its flawed relationship with God.
The early believers grasped on to an image of Jesus as the priest who is in solidarity with humanity at its most vulnerable.
An essential part of Christianity is that the truth is not to be found in denying or escaping the arena of natural and historical activity, but within it.
The author compares the "party" with the golden calf with the parables of the kingdom that describe a great party that God throws for the elect.
The world that is overcome by darkness and death is itself overcome by the light of Christ.
Our prayers will be answered, in God’s own time and God’s own way, and when they are, I hope we won’t brag about it, but rather be humbly grateful and give the glory to God Almighty.
An Advent meditation in which Goetz explores the abstract and paradoxical account of the advent of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospel of John.
Confinement can bring into being a bursting-out into wide expanses, can send the mind and the heart on journeys toward the most distant horizons.
Now that Pentecost has come, the primal divine command to have dominion over creation requires the church to get on with good stewardship of the earth. We do so not to the neglect of the gospel, but because we believe it and act upon it.
It is possible to pray for success in achieving such goals as weight reduction without being blasphemous as long as one understands the appropriate context of prayer. If we are prudent, we will never ask God to do anything for us unless we are prepared to pay the price in our own blood, toil, tears or sweat.
The only person who has ever been truly free of a messiah complex was the Messiah.
The meaning of conversion, with the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus as case study.
We are so shaped by modern skepticism that we may even be tempted to doubt the certainty of our own experience of Christ when he cannot be produced on command in a narrowly positivistic or rationalistic manner.
The church at large is not heeding the gravity of the message of the prophets. It cloaks itself in comfort, ignoring the politics of poverty, racism, sexism and homophobia that spreads oppression in the world like a fire out of control. The church thinks its task is to steep itself in spiritual exercises that have nothing to do with justice and righteousness in the world.
We know God is out there because the Logos became flesh. Now we’ve seen him; now we know.
Blessing and sacrifice are closely linked in Christian living.
Voices from all sides beckon us, but amidst all the noise of competing authorities, the voice of the Lord breaks the heavens open to deliver a word of love.
The popular view of the ascension should be changed. If the ascension is understood as not about a direction but instead about the place Jesus occupies in creation and in our hearts, it becomes a powerful counter to the economic and political powers of our day.
We may experience great religious heights, but it’s the valleys and deserts that tend to draw us nearest to God.
Times of silence of questioning are the prelude to new works of God in our lives.
The Rev. Rachel Srubas confesses she does not know fully how to pray as she ought. She trusts that the Spirit, who deeply sighs where words leave off, intercedes for her -- and for us, and for "all creation." And that is enough.
From the foundation of the world, God had a plan and purpose for his creation. It was kept secret, but now he was pleased to reveal it to us in Jesus Christ. It is about the unity of all things.
Who is Jesus? He is God become man. How can we say so radical a thing? It is because through his humanity, we are able to see the fullness of his majesty -- a majesty so sure that it can serve and die and still be the source of life.
How is what you say shaped by whether or not you are heard or valued in the hearing?
Awaiting with expectation and preparing to receive the Lord are two important aspects of the Advent season. We must prepare a straight path for the Lord, removing all obstacles which stand in the Lord’s way preventing him from coming. All the crooked ways in our life, in the life of our society need to be straightened out. Every mountain and hill should be brought low and every valley be lifted up.
Perhaps there are times when we need to be more aggressive than merely asking Christians to give. Sometimes a bit of Paul’s persuasiveness is needed.
Current articles and subscriptions information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.
Jesus teaches that those who are faithful in little are faithful in much, and those who are dishonest with earthly resources will be untrustworthy with more significant responsibilities. The small details matter.
Stock analysts were endorsing corporations even though they knew that the corporations would soon crumble into bankruptcy. Who can you trust? We can trust God. Our confidence rests in knowing that the promises God makes to us are connected to God’s presence with us.
Music can inspire glimpses of glory, the proof of the existence of God. The author gives illustrations of how music can make this happen.
Before the empty tomb, the disciples did not comprehend the words of Jesus, but rather were divisive in competition for seats of favor in the coming kingdom. But thereafter, they remembered and they understood, they regrouped and were faithful in continuing the work of Jesus, even in the face of opposition as strong as any Jesus himself had to endure.
Christians must never be taken in by worldly attacks on humility -- not only for our souls’ sakes, but for the sake of the world itself. A prideful Christian is perhaps the world’s most dangerous citizen.
Belief in the saving and redeeming work of Jesus Christ, in his incarnation and his teaching, guiding and redemptive ministries is the sine qua non of salvation.
He who is coming will not preside over us. He will teach us how to make peace from within and to learn how to make it possible, so that we will be saved from our own self-destruction.
In the midst of our celebrations we also listen to Rachel’s lament because today her children and her neighbors’ children are still dying with their hands on each other’s throats in blind rage over disagreements as old as her own jealousy of Leah.
The writer shares an epiphany experience.
They held all things in common. Despite the fear of being called communist, the reality is, that’s what they did—they shared all things in common. It was as radical as that.
A book review of Robert Jewett’s massive volume on Romans (1250 pp.). Jewett sees Paul’s concern with the individual rather than the group, and not with faith/works but with Jew/gentile. Romans is unlike the other Pauline writings.
We celebrate the coming of the power that is confident enough to be vulnerable, indeed, confident enough to be vulnerable to us.
Since Christianity has been such a civilizing success, it is doubly hard for us to return to the time when Christianity’s message was primed in the wilderness. But now this "prime time" has come again. As our exile looms, and marginality becomes our reality, is there any word from God? Any word for those streaming back into the wilderness?
The means by which John and Jesus meet their deaths should convince even the most hardened skeptics of the revolutionary nature of their ministries.
Both Marys and many others were there near the tomb watching from a distance. The writer suspects many people live their spiritual lives from a distance, in a threshold of silence, having not seen, yet believing.
The abrupt appearance of a soaring mountain in the transformation story is an invitation to scale its heights with Peter, James and John so that we too can see what we cannot see in the valley.
Too many Christmas songs are "warm fuzzies." If the Baptizer can be described as a killjoy, it is because the joy that he kills is the false joy of manufactured sentimentality and superficial jolliness.
All debts and sins and our unfinished businesses are dumped in the graveyard. What we bury there never comes back, but he does, not to judge but to forgive.
What is the problem and what is the solution? Psalm 51 does not offer popular answers: The problem is sin. The solution is repentance.
Prophetic ministry is most effective when it is engaged reluctantly, when it’s difficult and even frightening, and when the speaker is compelled by a power that will not be denied.
Who are we? We are at the same time entirely insignificant in the context of all creation and of utter importance to the God who created it all.
The readings for Ash Wednesday leave us with conflicting admonitions: to put on sackcloth and ashes, and to wash our faces and comb our hair.
All are sinners -- how did we forget this? It is not the offices we occupy or the structures of power that govern our common life that save us. It is God who saves, and God will save.
Neither repentance nor obedience is very high on the American scale of values. A culture that exalts individualism, self-affirmation, independence and assertiveness has a hard time digesting repentance and obedience.
Christian loves demands that we become involved in the political processes and social movements advocating the elimination of poverty through the economic restructuring of our society? This means Christians working for and advocating the redistribution of goods and services so that poor people can experience a positive, productive quality of life.
In the times we most need to worship, we find it most difficult.
Although Christmastide is a time of praise, we must no forget the whole narrative is beset by danger—by risk, flight, conspiracy, treachery and violent rage.
It is not the fragility of goodness that stands out in these texts but the sturdiness of righteousness.
The story of the road to Emmaus is not about Cleopas and his companion and their disappointment, but about life, the universe and everything in it.
Few texts are more subversive than Paul’s words at the end of his letter to the Ephesians.
God, who is terrible in glory, stoops to our need.
Some of my African-American slave ancestors tried to leave me and my people a message about compassion that defies what many of us want to hear. We do not want judgment to equal compassion and compassion to equal judgment in our relation to those who have so seriously sinned against us.
The experience the disciples had with Jesus on the Sea of Galilee preceded the cross, the resurrection and Pentecost. No wonder they asked themselves who this man was -- this man who could rebuke the wind.
As we remember the strong shoulders of the saints on which we stand, we are challenged to strengthen our own shoulders.
This is the standard New Testament designation for saints: the forgiven who know it, act upon it and live by grace without angling for stained-glass-window status.
The Christian’s task is to be the salt of society, preserving, reconciling, adding taste, giving meaning where there is no meaning, giving hope where there is no hope. We are called to be the light for the world. Jesus Christ is the real light which enlightens everyone.
The lasting mark of conversion is not one date circled in red on the calendar, but the whole story of one’s life.
No one is ever ready to encounter Easter until he or she has spent time in the dark place where hope cannot be seen. What the Gospels ask is not "Do you believe?" but ‘Have you encountered a risen Christ?"
How complimentary is it to refer to the members of a church as a flock of sheep, and how appropriate is it to speak of clergy as pastors? Is that Jesus’ point in John 10?
Power always protects itself. Those in religious leadership are just as venal as any in the world. We speak sanctimoniously of peace and unity and shut out those who challenge our authority.
Simon the rebuker is rebuked, while the rebuked woman is named the perfect hostess and is forgiven her sins even though she seems never to have confessed them, at least not in words. Unconditional love has a way of pulling one to grow to be more worthy of it.
Out of the obscurity of these verses in Mark and James, there seems to be the challenge of those on the margins, to be drawn by the generosity of Jesus closer inside the circle of disciples. Believers must not allow each other to wander away.
When Jesus entered Jerusalem, he did so as a king, but his royalty was not pomp and power but humble obedience. Thus, he entered the city to make peace with the offering of his own life.
Jesus is unimpressed by the disciples’ tidy argument about their need to know who is the greatest. He calls a child to their presence to teach a lesson.
Jesus seems to care inordinately about the ones who aren’t here. This interest in the absent may seem unreasonable to those of us who show up and keep the institutional church humming, but it is the gospel.
vIt was the self-emptying Christ who was the attraction for the Hindus. Jesus emptied his life utterly that he became the transparent medium in which.
It was the self-emptying Christ who was the attraction for the Hindus. Jesus emptied his life utterly that he became the transparent medium through which people can see God.
Vouchers to beggars -- "not valid for alcohol, lottery tickets or tobacco" --.but what if this stranger wanted to rent The Sound of Music, or tour the city in an air-conditioned bus?
John is portrayed here (John 1:19-4) vastly different from the one we met earlier in the synoptics.
When the world did not end as Jesus himself had said it would, his followers stopped expecting so much from God or from themselves. They hung a wooden cross on the wall and settled back into their more or less comfortable routines, remembering their once passionate devotion to God the way they remembered the other enthusiasms of their youth.
The author tells how two small children helped him to understand the doctrine of the Trinity.
These texts shatter the "structure" of my unbelief, my idolatrous hold on my own interpretation of the world, my own despair at the lack of the world’s possibilities. They say to me: this is not a closed system but one open to its creator, whose possibilities are endless.
What's wrong with the title "pastor"?
The reason both the psalmist and Jesus spent so much time describing us as lost was not to judge us, but to help us find our salvation. Confessing that we are frightened and lost is the first step.
The trust of the sheep with its shepherd is a radical trust empowering us to believe life has Christian meaning even though immediate experience may seem otherwise.
The mission is everywhere, and we must drop the language of home church and mission field.
The Pharisees knew it was easy to say "Lord, Lord," but not so easy to do what God asked. Most of us know the first son did the right thing, but we are more like the second son.
Jesus offers more commentary on how to deal with wealth than on how to handle sex -- a fact ignored by today’s church, which is preoccupied by matters of sex while it says very little about money.
Although comfortable about rescuing a farm animal on the Sabbath, the religious leader has trouble rejoicing when a bound woman is freed. But for Jesus, Isaiah, the woman, and the crowd, the healing of the broken does not distract from delighting in the Sabbath, because it is a way of delighting in God.
What a difference in plants and people when someone tends their needs! Their growth is not stunted. They not only survive but thrive.
Would it not be better, in the time of grace in which we still live, to proclaim to all people the good news, to confess and bear witness that Christ died for all, that Christ suffered also for them?
None of our ideas reflect God’s concept of kingship (human or divine) completely.
God’s steadfast love, the basis for Moses’ plea, David’s hope, and Paul’s ministry -- all these are available to each person because God’s abundant mercy continues to find us and make us new.
Sin means being separated from the ground of life; it means having a disturbed relationship to ourselves, our neighbor, the creation and the human family.
Allowing ourselves to experience gratitude to God for the good we can do may truly provide some healing for our scornful souls.
Acknowledging sin entails the happy assessment that nothing wrong with us is finally beyond forgiveness.
Commentary on Lectionary Texts, Deut. 18:15-20,I Cor. 8:1-13, Mark 1:21-28
The lesson we learn from Deborah is the need to "sit." She was a wise, powerful woman who lead, counseled advised, preached, and sometimes just sat in silence.
If you choose the right one to whom you are a slave, Paul believes rich benefits can be produced. Those who become slaves to God reap the benefit of holiness, the results of which are eternal life.
May God forgive us, his churchpeople, for using our social capital to attract to our churches those who are powerful and rich while we ignore those who might seem a burden -- those whose humble worship surely pleases God.
Injustice, immorality and inhumanity need to be changed into smooth paths so that everyone will see God’s salvation. That is God’s plan, and it is not wishful thinking to proclaim it.
The author argues that the doctrine of the Trinity is a useful unifying tool for witness. It has been called a great hinge, this day of the Trinity. It stands between the two halves of the church year. The first half on the life of Christ, the second half on the life of the church, While some call it a great hinge, others call it a great pain!
From love comes glory, not vice versa. Glory which is not rooted in love tends to be a false glory.
In scripture, being called by one’s name is a rich gift. Names tell us we are loved and call us into accountability.
Where ambition exists, it can be redirected and purified. But where it is entirely absent, mediocrity takes hold, the status quo hardens, and professors and committees debate endlessly about methodology and procedure.
Jesus seems to be prefiguring his death with phrases about his "hour" which was to come, and the temple of his body to be destroyed, about the kind of love that leads one to give one's life for a friend and a shepherd to give his life for the sheep.
Even though God has revealed himself fully in Jesus Christ, there is a sense in which God remains hidden.
Jesus challenges us to choose to live free and close to God -- the word of life. This living word from God bestows freedom upon us to live the lives God intends.
What the Samaritan woman sees is Jesus the Living Water who summons her from her ageless racisms and divisiveness into eternal life. We do not walk this path of love and righteousness under our own power. The Living Water is reaching out to all in love.
Are we blessed people, standing in God’s favor when we have devastated God’s creation with war and willful misuse? We hear from a prophet, a psalmist and the writer of an ancient epistle that no matter what befalls us, God is faithful, and God’s promises are true.
When we approach the waters of baptism we remember Noah and the flood. Both the flood story and a baptism remind us that we stand in need of God’s cleansing.
Jesus does not say, "follow me" to every one. Sometimes he says, "Return home and be a witness."
People will be found turning away from solid teaching, filling up on spiritual junk, seeking catchy opinions, turning their backs on truths and chasing mirages. Keep your eye on what you’re doing and keep the Message alive, doing a thorough job as God’s servant.
The author, diagnosed with breast cancer, sees gratitude as bringing buoyancy, as an antidote for fear. It flips despair on its back and says, "You’re not robbing me of today!"
Everyone preaches about an "Emmaus road experience." Nobody preaches about a "stayed-in-Jerusalem-and-waited-to-see-what-happened" experience.
The ground beneath us may be no more substantial than water. The challenge in Peter attempting to walk on the water toward Jesus is that Jesus holds his hand toward each of us grasping us if we should fall.
Though we are tempted to hide behind barricades, guns and bombs, the stories of the martyrs remind us of the one who overcame evil not by defeating the enemy but by loving the enemy and thus defeating death itself.
The story of Elijah and his successor comforts us with the realization that while a good man is hard to find, there is always an Elisha to prove the rule with a glorious exception.
If we struggle with Jesus’ being "fully human and fully God," it should not be surprising if the child Jesus wrestled with his identity too.
We may think we cannot endure what the future is thrusting upon us, but when that future arrives we have strength enough to sail in peace even across a sea of troubles.
May the stories of faith refresh us along the way, for they are the word that is near us, on our lips and in our hearts.
The author exposes the many ironies in John's account of Jesus' meeting with the Samaritan woman.
There’s a deep human tendency to idolize one’s own perspective on the world.
.What is it like to be stretched out in a wrathful world in expectation of the arrival of an incommensurable power who is not wrathful?
We must learn to see adversity as a sign pointing us toward the fullness of communion.
Because of Paul’s relationship to Philemon, he could have turned his request into a simple command, but Paul uses persuasion rather than the imperial imperative, for Philemon owes Paul his "very self" because he has won him for Christ.
Jesus Christ is the coherence of creation. He is not only "before all things," but "in him all things hold together." He is the glue that never dies, the bond that never fails, the togetherness of the complex world we inhabit.
Face to face with God catches us by surprise and interrupts our regular patterns and challenges our assumptions.
If we prodigals see the father running in our direction with open arms, we should know in our souls that this as an event so unexpected, so undeserved, so out of joint with all that life should bring us, that we fall down in awe before this joyful mystery.
The church is not a full realization of the New Jerusalem, but the citizenship of those whose primary loyalty is there, already alive in it’s transforming light.
People saw him eating and they knew who he was: someone who had lost all sense of what was right, who condoned sin by eating with sinners and who might as well have spit in the faces of the good people who raised him.
Ah, to be free from time’s tyranny, measuring time as our ancestors did -- by the gentle passage of seasons, by sunrise and sunset, not by seconds, minutes and hours. But to live as if there will always be a tomorrow is to live like a fool.
Jesus’ program continues today.
We, like Peter, still find it inordinately difficult to believe that the Christ of Easter is the same Son of man who must suffer, be rejected and killed. Even more than Peter, we resist the notion that the cross is the definition of what it means to follow Jesus.
Nature, for the great 17th-century scientific pioneers was God’s Book, inscribed with holy laws every bit as valid as the laws of the other book, Holy Scripture.
Temptation is deceptive, not obvious, and it definitely is not a caricature. The tempter often looks and sounds like a friend or relative, offering no debauchery often associated with temptation. Personal, social and professional ruin is in the small print at the bottom of the temptation.
It was this serving, suffering, dying Jesus whom God vindicated by raising him from the dead. A church too fond of power, place and claims would do well to walk in his steps.
The apostolic messengers would proclaim one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, in whom all those made new in the Easter Lord are no longer male or female, slave or free, Jew or gentile, but one in Christ Jesus.
Israel’s sin was not unlike the sin of which our nation has been guilty: the sin of supporting the wealthy and ignoring the poor.
The traditions of both Paul and Peter were driven to say things about the universal implications of Christ’s death that the historical Jesus as a first-century Palestinian Jew would not and could not have imagined.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A simple and clear analysis of the nature of the Bible. What is the Bible? How do you approach it? The Old Testament. The New Testament. Revelation. The Bible and the modern historical view. History and the Individual.
All of us struggle in the battle between good and evil, right and wrong choices, thoughts and actions. Who can see us free? Paul could not answer this question.. All we can say, with Pau,l is "Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord."
It is easy to assume that relationship with God translates into entitlement.
Will we need all our body parts at the resurrection? "I must say that something is terribly missing from the Christianity of anybody who is more concerned about what happens to a liver after death than about what happens to somebody who needs a sound liver while still alive."
Jesus’ language in all its vigorous overstatement still reflects a sense of divine fury over the failure of the divine purpose to work itself out in the actions of human beings that does not compute with our urbane, 20th-century middle-class liberal Christianity.
Without the cross, our faith wouldn’t be a comfort to anybody. What would you say to the terminal cancer victim? The mother of a starving child in an Ethiopian desert? The 80-year-old resident of a shoddy nursing home? “Smile, God Loves You!”
A religious community can pressure us not to think outside the lines of its doctrine. We must, of course, make commitments and honor allegiances. But Paul’s experience warns us that even religious commitments can defeat the purposes of God. We must examine all our allegiances for their capacity to distort our integrity.
Commentary on the Lectionary Texts for the 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A.
Jesus proves that perfect obedience to God is perfect freedom. Sin is not freedom; it is a malignant pollution of freedom. Sin is death. Sin thereby brings the very possibility of freedom to an end.
We don’t have to live as if God is angry with us. The God does not need anything from us. Our baptismal covenant reminds us that to be incorporated into God’s mighty acts of salvation is a gift from God, offered to us without price.
We must testify of the God who willed the cross of Christ, that this selfsame God is love. God has taken up into himself, through the person of his Son, our human outrage. God himself has turned the other cheek. He has not rejected that outrage; he has endured it and has answered it with the risen Christ.
The Gotcha game still goes on. Every time it does, Christ is crucified anew.
The season of Easter reconciles times and dimensions, exercising the substance of love within us to see into the reality beyond.
The recognition that God was in Christ is both a statement about God’s doing and a summary statement of the whole of human destiny. To say that God was in Christ is to say that it is within the power and promise of God to make us "partakers of the divine nature" (II Pet. 1:4).
God as Trinity had happened in the experience of the early church before it was formulated into a doctrine. The challenge which the theologians faced was how to express the faith that God is one and at the same time affirm that Jesus Christ was divine, and the Holy Spirit was divine.
The author imagines a committee of congress set up to report on the disquieting events on the Jerusalem-Jericho road and their aftermath: The good Samaritan loses.
Too often we are exhausted by the busyness of plans and preparations, instead of being exhilarated by enjoying the bread of life.
The careful reader will notice that Matthew casts the religious experts of the day (those robed in canonical or clerical dress) in the role of "them," a move that supports a tongue-in-cheek, foot-in-mouth reading of the disciples when they claim to understand it all.
The author discusses Lent as a journey of faith.
Judas portrays the tragic story of a fall from the heights to the depths. It is a fall that all of us will make sooner or later. But the greatest tragedy was that Judas was not at the cross to hear Jesus say, "Father, forgive . . ."
In the perspective of the kingdom, those who are powerful and influential will not get more. A society is just only to the extent that the underprivileged, the disabled, the poor and the oppressed receive special care.
Our sense of the inevitability of suffering compels us to affirm dimensions in the cross of Jesus that Paul might not have found.
The wealthy and the mighty of this world trust in their wealth and influence. The poor are favored in the kingdom not only because injustice is done to them in this world, but also because they trust in God.
The kingdom does not operate according to human calculations. The little things we do will bear fruit in their own time. We trust in God to bring about the result. We wait in hope.
Luke leaves it at "he breathed his last." The ultimate question is not "What happens when I die?" but "In whom can I trust to the end?" The Christian is called to trust in God who sides with Job, who will not let his people go, who dies alone.
In this Gospel, different metaphors are used to describe the person of Christ: living water, life giving water; living bread, bread which gives eternal life; light of the world, light of life; good shepherd, shepherd who gives his life for the sheep. Whatever metaphor we use, he is the true source and giver of eternal life to the individual as well as to the world. He is the source of true and authentic human existence.
Christ rules those who have received the redemption, reconciliation and forgiveness that result from his death on a cross.
Who better than Mary illustrated the fact that every one of us is a passive and indeed virgin recipient of God’s purpose and calling?
The meaning of the kingdom of God, which is the central message of Jesus, is the unlimited love and mercy of God.
As prophet, teacher and champion of God’s dominion, Jesus bid us see not himself but the will of God. So it is with the gift Mary holds on Christmas morning. In desire for us, God has forgotten himself. The words and implications come later; but now, first, the Word is an infant and cannot, need not, speak.
The same Jesus who in Mark 9 says that it would be better if child abusers had never been born, in Mark 10 points to his own abused body as a sign of hope for all.
Paul exhorts the church at Philippi to look to Jesus and follow the same mind we find in him and which we can also receive from him. Then Paul in a sentence or two very graphically describes the person of Christ: What is he, what is his mission, and what it is that we learn from him?
I am nervous and uncomfortable on Ash Wednesday because I must confess publicly that I am a sinner; not only that, but I must stand within the faith community and witness while others confess the same.
The biblical themes of scattering the proud, putting down the mighty, and elevating the lowly are an important part of the symbolism of comedy and the repertoire of clowns and fools. The uplifting of the lowly is particularly evident in the story of the nativity.
Though driven by the Spirit to speak and act, our expectation of the perfect freedom of the reign of God can be uttered and our praxis realized only in terms of particular metaphors, projects or cultural prejudices.
Jesus' parable of the two sons points to the radical obedience of Jesus himself, which is a model for Christians.
Impatience can be a healthy sign of life, part of the yearning to cast off old ways.
Hospitality was a strong aspect of Jesus’ teaching, and the church could use more of it today concerning homosexuality, race, disability and women.
What should we be doing in the face of the violence portrayed to us on television as well as in the real world?
Our first calling, the baptismal call, is the one that simply loves and names: You are my child. I delight in you. Anointing is a sign of blessing, but it is also a commissioning. As for Jesus, so for us.
The mature Christian utilizes the mystical ability to be "awake" to things kept in the dark and thus has a new perspective and an alertness to the passing day.
One of the many things this story tells us is that Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix.
The Bible contains more warnings about the dangers of wealth than about the pitfalls of poverty.
Laws that treat offenders as subhuman are certainly sinful. Violence sanctioned by the community begets more violence.
Jesus proclaims that the words of the prophet are not about some distant future, nor even about the near millennium. The jubilee year, the good news for the poor, the release of captives, the recovered vision, the liberation of the oppressed: these are proclaimed now, here, this day.
If Catholics and Protestants in these enlightened times share any belief, it is that God and the word of God are not constrained by the cultural context and prejudices in which we have been accustomed to operate.
The Biblical writers talk about bodily, physical characteristics of life (heart-flesh-pulse-being born). The resurrected body is at the heart of the Easter proclamation.
Jesus’ parable requires discernment beyond human ways of thinking, discernment of the new creation that compels the ministry of reconciliation.
It is important for our children to see us and to help us be involved in tending the soil beyond our own little vineyards -- to see and help us work in the larger society to make a better and more just world for all people. This kind of involvement introduces our children to goals not inspired by the greed of our capitalist culture gone wrong.
The Bible reminds us that the word of the Lord is accessible, perhaps even too close for comfort. God may ultimately be unknowable, but loving the Lord and walking in God’s path are possibilities open to anyone.
Generations of believers have found hope in the notion that someone (or something) is coming to relieve them of their burden.
The darkest fear of all, the fear that has the power not only to shape a life for death-dealing, but also to distort an entire community, is the fear that lurks beneath the pretense of power and privilege, the fear which crouches behind the doorways of prejudice and preys upon the least of those in the community.
Why do we assume Zacchaeus was short? Maybe he couldn’t see Jesus because Jesus was short. How easily we become trapped in unrealistic cultural ideals of the perfect being.
Doubts and uncertainty frighten us. That’s why we reject Thomas -- he dares to bring doubt into our lives of faith.
Sound doctrine has deep social roots, not merely the ephemeral ones in wealth, strength, prestige and power -- though, thank goodness, the church as its share of those -- but also in humanity’s awesome diversity.
The United Methodist Bishop’s pastoral letter on peace, In Defense of Creation, is theologically flawed and focuses too much on mere survival. Resisting the historic Wesleyan emphasis on sanctification -- making better people -- they take up a more acceptable activism -- doing effective politics. Jesus called us to a change of heart and life -- but now it’s enough, it seems, simply to be politically effective. Politics has become our only means of transcendence.
The fish story thus becomes not about luck, but about blessing. It becomes personal, and Simon’s wonder turns from simple and greedy pleasure to deep awe at the unearned gift. The translation from luck to grace is what makes a miracle of what might otherwise have been just another fisherman’s tale.
Ascension recognizes the separation of the Risen Lord from the disciples as He goes to dwell at the right hand of the Father.
Did Abraham leave his homeland because the older generation refused to change. Is the membership decline in our older churches caused by the alienation of the younger aged members?
People still fear sin, death, and the devil.
Jesus does not urge the Samaritan woman at the well to repent or change her behavior.
Without the word, there would be no human race, no civilization. If you take from me the ability to speak and to record words, you take away all that is. Without the word, there is nothing. If it is true that nothing exists without a word, then everything that is, is the speech of God.
The Bible and the desert land of Arizona both offer the author a foundation laid out for her by the solid rock of faith.
God criticizes his own people, for the God of Moses and of the Israelites is a unique God. No other Gods are impartial.
How dependent we are upon the Holy Spirit to get anything right.
If there is to be peace in the Middle East, in Afghanistan or in the United States, it will come about through peacemakers whose grace and power flow from some explicit or implicit anointing by the Holy Spirit.
These things are written not that you might have the facts, but that you might believe.
Paul declares that the revelation of Christ makes a real difference in at least three different dimensions: the personal, the communal and the cosmic.
When we decide to follow, we are called to lay down some of our most valuable possessions: our understanding of the world, our view of right and wrong, our assumptions about whom God favors and whom God despises, our ways and our thoughts.
Christ is born in a manger and not in a palace. This is why the religious leaders, the rich and powerful of his as well as our day failed and fail to recognize him. Only the poor shepherds could recognize him, and only to the poor and the frightened does Christmas comes as a message of good news.
We are there for each other but why are we reluctant to tell each other that we will be there in their need?
Those of us who are not ill or elderly are busy living in the middle of things. But what if we all needed to prepare for the end? End times call for alertness, sharpness. They tingle with expectation. They are times of uncertainty and fear only for those whose faith is thin.
By proclaiming the invisible and the unknown, Paul refuses to let God become just another novelty, just another idol.
Acceptance, encouragement, trust and hope come through in the touch of hand upon hands as the risen Lord touches us through others.
The word "talent" for the Greek word talanta, is really a miss-interpretation. It probably means a whole "bag of gold." According to the author, this huge amount gives the parable an entirely different emphasis.
Joshua’s willingness to affirm what he believed challenges, but how do you do it without damning other faiths? How does one retain the essence of Joshua’s covenant without its exclusivity?
Jesus’ followers are still tested in offices and cubicles, at school desks and cafeterias, at the boundary lines between nations, races and cultures, around breakfast tables and family rooms.
Paul’s traumatic experience on Damascus road is not the only way one can be transformed by Christ.
The power of intercessory prayer.
To cling uncritically to the past is to purchase security at the price of denying that God is a living God, continually doing new things among us,
The trouble with liberation theology is not Jesus’ death and resurrection and sending of the Spirit, but his earthly life of solidarity with the oppressed is normative. Paul’s attention to the life of the spirit is not taken as a "fulfillment" but at best as a distraction, at worst a distortion. Paul’s puzzlement over God’s "inscrutable ways" in a crucified Messiah is replaced by a simplistic "preferential option for the poor."
Christian theology has always seen Jesus’ terrible, degrading death as a victory, indeed the victory by which God vanquished the power of evil once and for all.
The Scriptures have always used the widow and orphan as symbols of society’s most vulnerable and defenseless people. Both justice and compassion require that Christian churches make the gospel a real word of good news by reaching out to such people.
More than anything else, the unwillingness to perform the difficult task of forgiveness and reconciliation in the love and spirit of Christ is what robs the church of that quality of life that first attracted outsiders.
Love must have been hard to come by in this beloved community which I John addresses; 29 times in the space of 15 verses the author uses one form or another of agape.
Not only is she a woman, but a divorced woman with a shady past and a Samaritan. By custom, Rabbi Jesus ought not even speak with her in public, let alone drink from her Samaritan bucket. But what transpires between these two is nothing short of miraculous. These strangers, these enemies, discover at the well that they need each other.
The church is commissioned not to proclaim the advent of hell to all who are on their mad way there, but rather the advent of Jesus Christ. He has come, as John promised. Alone and abandoned he descended into the depths of hell. Thus, there is absolutely no possibility for us that is beyond the reach of God’s inexhaustible grace.
In God’s family, all of us are adopted and none has a birthright. Whatever our experience of family loss and brokenness we will always belong to God.
Dr. Chapman fears that many churches have relegated primary concerns to the background by pushing secondary matters up front, so that what is central to the gospel is lost.
The most insidious thing about being a "parson" (the person), who agrees to be on display as an example of what the gospel actually does to a person, is that an insidious, largely subconscious form of compensation begins to produce a kind of "virtual virtuosity" The performance becomes the product.
Christians wait for the feast to come with grateful hearts even though in the interim their minds are set on unresolved troubles and unreachable horizons.
Jesus reminds us that life is far too precious to allow us to put up with business as usual.
We want to think of ourselves as good and others as bad. Jesus continues his work of tearing down walls and extending God’s mercy to those who are scattered and alienated.
To say that Jesus is risen from the dead is not to say he has returned to his earthly life, but to say that God lifted Jesus up to new life. It says that God will do the same thing for us.
We are even more driven than our predecessors by the demand for visible results and achievement.
Mark’s purpose, not just in this story of quelling the storm but in all of his Gospel, is to tell us "who this man is" and how he may be trusted. Not only is he the Savior of the world, he is also our close, storm-proof companion, our fellow traveler.
"Whom do you say that I am?" Dr. Hawkins suggests the answer is most difficult, but suggests: "We have come to know and to believe that you are the Holy One of God," is an affirmation to stake a life on, a Lord not to explain but to follow.
The author identifies with Zebedee, who stayed in the boat when the others jumped out in response to Jesus’ call.
Pay attention to your dreams. Joseph’s dream named his son, but he did not own him any more than we own ours.
A reflection on the significance of the palm branches with which Jesus was greeted on his entry into Jerusalem. The tradition of waving the fronds is not what we think.
From the perspective of the biblically illiterate, the final question may be, as one student put it: "Why read a book telling about a kingdom coming when technology has already created paradise? And it’s getting better every day."
Can we expect an ethical God to punish us for our injustices through vengeance upon the innocent with a surging tsunami or a ravaging cancer encrypted into human tissue?
Some of the difficult verses of John’s gospel, those words that are often contested, are confronted, discussed and given broader and more meaningful interpretation.
In John's time, Israel practiced proselyte baptism -- that is, gentile converts had to be bathed as a sign of radical change, purity in the new faith and birth into the people of Israel. John makes the shocking assertion that even Israel must be washed. Remember, our Lord comes not only to save us but also to change us.
The scriptural command to die to self has been used for centuries to reinforce social systems that limit the ability of women, people of color, poor people and other oppressed people to claim their full human dignity.
Even after the response of the Greek woman to Jesus who had compared her to the dogs, Jesus does not hold his saving power in reserve, but expands the circle of God’s mercy to include those once considered outsiders.
The lesson from Revelation contains words for those who strive to be faithful, but who are ground down by life.
What must we do to inherit eternal life? We must let go of all that we have and all that we do that gets in the way of seeing that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves.
So much of Mark’s gospel seems to be some kind of joke. The defining moment of our ministry may leave us feeling foolish too. It comes when we, like Jesus, realize we are near the end of our journey; and we finally face up to evil, bringing nothing in our hands but what he had: peace and truth and love.
In a risky but effective homiletical strategy: Isaiah proclaims the greatness of the Lord in contrast to the insignificance of the people. Who are they to question God’s ways, God’s abilities? He is a master at putting God and humankind in perspective.
I don’t know that the Holy Spirit has ever been compared to a babysitter. But if you can imagine Jesus as a mother, then it may not be so hard to imagine the Spirit in this other role, as one who cares for the church in the interim between Jesus’ departure and return, as one who comforts, teaches, reminds and, yes, sometimes even romps with the sons and daughters of God.
Christ’s living bread is quite adaptable to all kinds of circumstances. He feeds us anywhere, anytime, in all ways, for Christ is our constant benefactor.
The changes that have taken place in relations between Roman Catholics and Protestants since Vatican II.
Because we follow a crucified Christ, we enter into solidarity with the world’s suffering masses. We experience the power and love of God through the vulnerable and suffering.
The issue is not how much we have in the bank, but what that money is for us. Is it our heart, our security, our source of power, or is it a tool for our stewardship?
Perhaps we should feel insecure in making the claim that Christians are called to suffer, but consider the vision of Job, who sees God only "after my skin has been thus destroyed." And so we must claim that we are called to suffer if we want to see the living God.
John Killinger speaks of the Holy Spirit, it’s miss-use its value. He is led to say that the more eloquently and confidently we discuss the Holy Spirit and commemorate the Spirit in our high holy days, the less we are truly in touch with the Spirit.
John Killinger speaks of the Holy Spirit, it’s miss-use its value. He is led to say that the more eloquently and confidently we discuss the Holy Spirit and commemorate the Spirit in our high holy days, the less we are truly in touch with the Spirit.
The wind is blowing. God is at work through the church and beyond the church. Political systems resist anything beyond themselves and the elite class they serve, while at the same time the country’s churches may be poor, weak and helpless. But Jesus demonstrated that there is always room for surprises.
In today’s world, especially in our anxious Western culture, we seem hell-bent on happiness and on any shortcut that can get us there. Generally we seek a happiness that is a far cry from what went on that day of Pentecost.
Christ invites us beyond the ruts we’ve worn, the truncated lives we’ve settled for. Embrace the new; relish God’s continuing creative energy, and find a way to modify priorities so that all benefit!
The cross is central to all accounts of Christian wisdom. The crucified and resurrected Christ is the standard by which that wisdom is measured.
Who wants to be wise anymore? People want to be right, rich, popular and in control. Information is fast, loud, superficial, numbing. We can’t get away from it. Wisdom is slower, deeper, lasting, more elusive.
Jesus’ prayer for unity among his followers has not been answered. We are not all one.
God does not declare unto us our sin in order to destroy us. In the very moment he accuses us as sinners, we are already forgiven.
Jesus takes the risk of doing something more pertinent and more useful than complying with the crowd's misguided agenda. These people followed Jesus for the wrong reasons. This should not surprise us; today it's still common practice.
It’s possible the mundane words of the street are closer to God’s Word, then some of our pious words from the pulpit.
The public message of Pentecost is a challenge to all the peoples of the earth to discover their unity as children of God. It does not support isolation in Christian sects, which claim an exclusive monopoly on the Spirit and demand conversion to the language and mores of their tribe as the price of salvation.
Walls are needed to keep out the predator and to protect against the elements, but literal walls and spiritual ones can lead to grief, division and violence. All walls have a purpose, but not all walls serve the purposes of God.
Prodded by Jean-Luc Godard’s provocative film Hail Mary, Janet Karsten Larson meditates on the annunciation to Mary and the theme of embodiment.
God’s tenderness and generosity is fundamental to the Christian faith. The holy God is a tender and generous God. This is the heart of the Christian sacrament.
Scripture is not meant primarily to fit or foster individual inner lives -- not in the modern sense, anyway. It is meant first for shaping, celebrating, instructing, warning and vexing the life of a people, a community chosen to show God’s glory to the world.
At the baptism of Jesus God has declared to the world that Jesus is the Son of God in whom he is well pleased . Therefore, in our baptism, our identity as sons and daughters of God is established.
Our self-understanding is challenged by a God who prepares a table -- a feast, not a fortress with guns! -- for us in full view of our enemies.
One’s life is not to be determined by friend or foe but by God, who relates to all not on the basis of their behavior or attitude toward God but according to God’s own nature, which is love.
A fair wage for an unfair days work? God is being merciful, not fair, and this is what mercy looks like. God is truly love, and wills that all may be saved.
The Christmas story calls us to be willing, like Mary, to take the words in, to treasure and ponder them, because so much is possible when we do.
The black church needs a practical theology that can help liberate it from social, political, and economic oppression.
There is a need for a new ecumenism among black Christians as a task more pressing than that of an ecumenical rapprochement between black and white churches. The future of the black-white ecumenical movement must be based upon the commitment of the white church to Christ and liberation.
Black preachers are socially bilingual. Their ability to communicate across racial lines and the cultural expectation that they do so has given them social and political clout disproportionate to their numbers.
Black churches are called to actualize their potential as agents of social change without abandoning their traditional role as communities of faith. The most significant development in recent years has been an increasing awareness among blacks not affiliated with the churches that religious institutions are as critical to the survival of Afro-Americans in the present as they have been in the past.
White students seem deeply interested in the study and practice of religion, but religion apparently holds little or no appeal for black students. Black religion is a survival tool that can be (and is) discarded when the individual no longer feels in need of the emotional reinforcement it can provide.
The narrowness of the black conservatives’ viewpoint reflects the narrowness of the liberal perspective with which they are obsessed. With more rational debates among conservative, liberal and leftist voices, the truth about the black poor can be more easily ascertained.
There can be little doubt that Bonhoeffer’s legacy has had a major impact on Christianity since his martyrdom 50 years ago. The surprising, often risky elements of both action and thought in a life profoundly marked by consistency of faith and hope keep interest in Bonhoeffer alive.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A helpful understanding of the major themes in Bonhoeffer’s works that cover not only theology, philosophy, Christology, ethics and sociology, but also the mystique surrounding his opposition to the Nazi state, leading to his execution.
Christ is the person for others. And his divinity lies precisely in that, and not in the glory of total power.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A brilliant analysis of Bonhoeffer’s theology as a corrective of Karl Marx’s Critique of Religion.
A poem written from prison in the summer of 1944—"Who am I?...Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!"
Our consumption-based society’s basic assumption: all needs require instant gratification. What we see in our country today is a perfectly good economic process -- the mechanisms for producing and consuming goods -- made into a religion.
Third World poverty is caused chiefly by kleptocratic governments and private interests in league with governments that make market exchange unprofitable. This is achieved by private wealth at the cost of other people’s wealth instead of by working, saving and inventing.
The churches have determined wrongly that modern political economy is incompatible with biblical religion and thus to be dismissed from Christian consciousness.
In the author's view there is no economic theory no matter how farfetched which can justify a CEO’s pay increase in twenty years by a factor of ten. He believes that is grotesquely immoral.
Communism is "the secularized remnant of a transcendent ideal... " There is a better alternative to that now-fading ideology than the hedonism and practical materialism of the West.
Capitalism, consisting of heavy doses of free markets and private capital, coupled with a pluralistic democratic political order, may be the only game in town for creating wealth in ways that satisfy the masses. If this trend is indeed the case, the need for the churches ministry to the corporate world is only magnified.
The author defines economic systems -- Socialism, Communism, nationalization, the welfare state, consumerism, the welfare state, the global economy. He concludes that today's economism is "the most powerful and successful idolatry of all time," and examines ways in which economism destroys both community life and human values.
Economism is leading us into catastrophes even worse that the religious wars of the early seventeenth century and the Second World War in our own. Christians emphasize the positive value of human community, the principle of subsidiarity, preferential option for the poor, and the integrity of creation and the human use of the environment should be sustainable. The policies implementing economism, such as the globalization of the economy through free trade, are diametrically opposed to all of these Christian principles.
Large agribusiness corporations are replacing the world’s agricultural diversity which was useful both to farmers and local consumers, with bioengineered and patented monocultures that are merely profitable to corporations.
How the permissive capitalism of the boom of the late 1990's destroyed American equality.
A review of two books on the financial market and morality. The real debate is not about whether the market economy is desirable or not, but about how citizens should harness the market system to serve ends that they consider fundamental. What goods and services are necessary for genuine well-being and quality of life?
The author reviews a book on the life of Michael Harrington written by Maurice Isserman: Isserman corrects some often-repeated exaggerations about Harrington’s bad relations with the New Left. Harrington never lost his access to the saner leaders of the New Left, and his fame as author of The Other America, which appeared in 1962, gave him an identity to a mass audience.
Norman Thomas’ thought and action was an outgrowth of the 19th-century Social Gospel theology as developed by Walter Rauschenbush. His pacifism had some limitations, and his socialistic stance violated all traditional images of normal socialist behavior.
In its attempt to keep the church from identifying itself with the Nazis the German church distanced itself equally from all social theories and political systems.
A great number of social ills of our times can be laid at the door of capitalism and nationalism, and at the door of the church for failing to teach how to be critiques of capitalism and nationalism.
Boycotting a product made in a sweatshop with unhealthy conditions, underpaid workers and long hours needs to be challenged. But the workers may be doing tasks they prefer over their other options. Public pressure might be better than boycotting.
Socialists believe that there is a fundamental moral distinction to be drawn between a system that encourages people to be greedy and one that instead encourages them to acquire only what they truly need. Capitalism is designed primarily to prevent the objectives which socialists seek, and its adherents will strongly resist the measures necessary to adapt private enterprise to anything seriously approaching a socialist program.
Capitalism must generate a little love and human kindness in order to function in the human interest. At the same time, if an all encompassing socialism has proved too cumbersome, inefficient and corruptible, that does not mean that disaggregated forms of socialism are unworkable.
There is a long standing history of misappropriation of Christian concepts for capitalist ends. The church needs to have a more critical conversation about which parts of economic life contribute to freedom and which do not.
The prevailing attitude in corner offices seems to be ‘grab all the money you can while you can, and don’t worry about little things like ethics, morals or the law.’ The soul of a company should not be the result of a creative public relations campaign; rather, it should be the collective result of the souls of every individual within the company.
McCormick discusses areas in which his thoughts have shifted: The nature of the church; the church as the people of God; the church as servant; the church as collegial; the church as ecumenical; the ecclesiological nature of the church; importance of lay witness; the teaching competence of the episcopal and papal branch; the church and moral truth; the place of dissent; birth regulation; ecclesial honesty; the dynamic nature of faith.
Realizing the gifts he brings us, I find it both dismaying and disheartening to see Gustavo Gutiérrez once again under attack by heavy theological artillery from within his own church. Not only Catholics but all of us need his words, his witness and the example of his life.
Jason Byassee analyses the theological arguments of a number of well known scholars who have converted to Roman Catholicism. For those in mainline churches these converts raise the question of what it means to be evangelical, catholic and orthodox.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A collection of Professor Rahner's speeches and radio talks, dealing with the relationship between grace and freedom as understood in the Catholic Church. Chapters include the Catholic's responsibility after Vatican II, the nature of the Christian faith, ecumenical perspectives, the church and personal freedom, the nature of "God," and the nature of freedom and morality.
Ecclesiastical differences have to do with the Catholic willingness and the Protestant unwillingness to submit to an institution’s opinion or order even when it contradicts one’s own convictions. There’s just too much Aquinas in Catholics and too much Luther in Protestants.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A famous Catholic theologian deals with the position of Catholic theology in regard to hominisation, the theory of man’s evolutionary origins.
Protestant responses to the "Declaration on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church" recently issued by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Office for the Doctrine of the Faith have been mostly pained surprise, sometimes anger. However, this controversial statement should be understood as a catechism for Catholics.
(ENTIRE BOOK) The author deals with revelation from within a Roman Catholic perspective. Revelation comes in the form of a divine promise which upon reflection turns out to be nothing less than God’s own self-donation to the world. It is the gift of an image of divine humility which renders reality intelligible in an unprecedented way.
Lost within a constantly shifting boundary between knowledge and faith, the author proposes a flexibility which accommodates reverence in the evolving God of our ancestors and humility before the Power which we infer lies behind Him whom we reverence.
It is obviously very difficult for the hierarchical teaching office, with its understanding of benefiting from the assistance of the Holy Spirit, to recognize that its teaching might be in error.
Pope John XXII, even deeply committed Catholics severely criticize the church's central administration, the papacy included. The Catholic Church is struggling today towards a new model of church. The Petrine ministry too is evolving. It has an indispensable role in shaping the new ecclesial model.
Koinonia and communio describe the form of Christian unity; dialogue and reception describe the way to unity. The effort to achieve a more complete reception of one another in Christ through dialogue in truth is precisely the way that will lead to a full communio among sister Churches.
Dr. Rausch looks at the views of Thomas P. Haight who argues that pluralism in our times demands that we can no longer claim the superiority of Christianity over all other religions.
A debate between three ethicists about the state of Catholicism in America.
An editor of a Protestant journal of opinion recently stated that one of the current tasks facing a Protestant religious journalist is to tell American Protestants that America is no longer a Protestant country.
The author of the book reviewed suggests several views that might salvage the Catholic church: retain celibacy and call for heroic holiness; remove required celibacy and eventually ordain women; restudy and change the very idea of priesthood.
While there has been substantial dissent among Roman Catholics from the bishops’ pastoral letters, "The Challenge of Peace" and ‘‘Economic Justice for All," dissent on sexual matters such as abortion, homosexuality, priestly ordination of women and even birth control has become increasingly less tolerable to church authorities.
The Vatican’s new restrictions on theological teaching at Catholic colleges and universities -- including the reinstatement of loyalty oaths -- will isolate Catholics and work to the detriment of the church.
The Catholic church’s admonitions to young women to preserve their virginity at all costs consisted chiefly, at least in the past, of dramatic warnings, what one might call "spiritual terrorism," in that all Catholic girls should be willing to die to preserve their virginity, because Catholic educators told them so and because the alternative was unthinkable. A new appreciation of virginity informed by church history and feminist theology is needed.
There are four churches of Catholicism in Latin America: 1. The escapist faith of nonhuman magical ritual. 2. The traditional church. 3. The progressive church of Vatican II. 4. The church of the liberation theologians: José Míguez Bonino, Juan Segundo, Gustavo Gutiérrez and the rest -- the church of the poor and the dispossessed.
A critical eye is cast on the "apparition" of the Virgin in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia. "…I wonder what kind of God would heal the aches and pains of rich Americans while turning a deaf ear to the cries of starving children elsewhere in the world."
The author reviews two books about Pope Pius XII. One is quite critical of the so called "Nazi" pope, the other strongly defense. There is no middle ground between the two authors. Both volumes are part of the current struggle over the possible beatification and canonization of Pius XII.
The author criticizes the Curia and the pope himself for an attempt to return Catholicism to a pre-Vatican II authoritarian church.
At the dawn of the 20th century, Catholics finally learned that the First Amendment gave the churches wide latitude to influence public policy.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A reflection on the nature, limits, and possibilities of change taking place in the Roman Catholic Church during and since the Second Vatican Council.
James Carroll, George Weigel and Garry Wills all agree that the sexual-abuse crisis is symptomatic of a deeper cultural war in Catholicism, but they differ -- often diametrically -- on what is at stake.
Walter Brueggemann challenges the commentators who call the terribly destructive Hurricane Katrina a storm of biblical destruction and suggests some categories that give it some genuinely biblical terms.
Those who believe that voluntary charitable giving can be a substitute for adequate tax revenues deny the effects of the fall and our dependence on God’s grace to help us fight the sin of greed.
Naysaying is ubiquitous, rooted in all our lives. Dissent, in the biblical tradition that commends fidelity to God and neighbor, is a universal alternative to it.
Building on the observations of H. Richard Niebuhr, Bellah shows how the gap between the religious pluralism of Ernst Troeltsch and the absolute distinction between the revelation of God in Christ versus other religions can be bridged by the Christian without being unfaithful. Both Niebuhr and Troeltsch talked in terms of "the truth for us" in the context of historical relativism. That, plus the fact that as central as the community of the church is for us, it is not our only community, enables us - paradoxically - to be home and not at home in a religiously pluralistic world. This article is adapted from a presentation made at Yale Divinity School marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of H. Richard Niebuhr.
The kingdom of God that Jesus announced was not for people who never did anything wrong. It was for "sinners," for those who -- mostly -- tried their best to do the right thing, often failed, but accepted the forgiveness of God and of others, forgave others and themselves, and started over.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Dr. Harkness has applied Christian ethical principles to the major issues of contemporary life. From the starting point of the revelation of the nature and will of God that has come to man through Christ, she has dealt first with the biblical foundations of Christian ethics followed by their application to specific contemporary problems, including self and society, marriage, economic life, race, the state, war, peace and others.
One does not have to be a Marxist to understand that ethical questions are often determined by economic considerations. As examples slavery has been abolished not only because of Christian conscience, but because it became unprofitable, and nuclear-fission has reached its nadir primarily because its economic balance has been found wanting
The author reviews four books on ethics by Herbert Mcabe: The job of ethics is to aid us in discovering and living out the deepest desires of our fleshly, human hearts. And that deepest desire, the end of all our lives, turns out to be nothing other than sharing the life of God available to us through the body of the man Jesus and the Spirit whom he sent. A great mystery, yes; nonsense, no.
Sixty years after the war’s end, we are still waiting for the reconstruction of society for which Bonhoeffer dared to hope, but we have more resources for understanding his vision. The new translation of Ethics takes its place at the head of that list.
If Christian teaching of universal human dignity was so central and so thoroughgoing, why has Christian practice so often violated the dignity both of Christians and of others? We need a post-liberal Christianity that relativizes the Enlightenment. We need to assimilate its gains in a wider context. This requires listening carefully to the voices of outsiders, especially those whose dignity it has repeatedly offended. Hence, interreligious dialogues are of the greatest importance.
Spohn outlines Richard B. Hays' attempt in his book The Moral Vision of the New Testament to discern a coherent moral stance in the wide range of New Testament witnesses by offering a synthesis of the varying and divergent canonical voices through biblical paradigms and root metaphors.
Although there is a conflict between our love and our fear of justice, for those who love God that conflict is absorbed by God’s purity.
Growing religious diversity and the loosening of confessional orthodoxy have meant that Americans can no longer expect to deal with public political questions from a common theological perspective.
Perhaps the greatest gift anyone can give is unconditional love. Too often love is part of a bargaining process for getting what one needs at the expense of another. Prostitutes, like all human beings, deserve respect and a chance to live life to the fullest.
Susan Neiman uses father Abraham as a model for focusing attention on action rather than person. Have the courage to judge actions, rather than the presumption to judge the individual. Leave it to the Lord to judge the agent.
The only way of coping effectively with the kind of world we live in is to deal seriously and constantly with the questions that point toward at least relatively satisfactory answers to why we are what we are and do as we do.
An intriguing debate took place on the pages of The Christian Century in 1932 between brothers H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr. The immediate occasion for the publication of their articles was Japan's invasion of Manchuria, and the concrete issue that the brothers addressed was the proper response of the United States to that invasion. Both appeal to the tragic character of human history to support their views, yet each draws a radically different conclusion.
Where are the Nathans who will speak to us, even at personal risk, about our failures to be honest with ourselves? Nathan reminds us of who we are before God.
The sentimental hatred of the evil that is in others may blind one to the evil that one bears in himself and to the gravity of evil in general. The overly facile condemnation of the wicked man on the opposite side may conceal and favor much inward complaisance toward that very wickedness.
A visitor to our shores would probably come to the same conclusion at which St. Paul arrived in regard to the Athenians, namely, that we are "very religious." But the judgment might not imply a compliment any more than Paul wanted to so imply when he called attention to the worship of many gods in Athens, including the "unknown god." Our religiosity seems to have as little to do with the Christian faith as the religiosity of the Athenians.
The disease model of understanding alcohol abuse confuses moral thinking with moralizing and jugmentalism.
The one art most needful of restoration is the ancient art of moral reasoning, of wrangling not about personalities or policies but about the moral propositions and values underlying them.
China and India are adding more people to the planet than the U.S., but it’s the Americans who put more strain on the environment. Isn’t there something selfish about not having children? The notion cannot be easily dismissed.
Novak identifies the United States as a liberal society in the process of maturing, and proposes that the liberty of this society has and always will be dependent upon vigilance of mind with regard to such concerns as free speech, terrorism, and freedom of the press.
The Christian church has not dealt seriously, according to Biblical standard, with the violence and destruction brought by the principalities and powers. By and large, the churches have lived by adapting themselves to the reality of the power rather than transforming it.
We do not like the thought that it may be our own unconvertedness, our own unregenerateness, that causes racial tension within the church. A Christian may still like his own race better than others, but it is getting very hard to think that God agrees with him. And even if he does think that God agrees with him, it is getting very hard, almost impossible, to say it out loud.
Ethics is at the heart of theology because the grammar of Christian discourse is fundamentally practical. The most appropriate means to arrive at a practical ethical theology is to articulate how Christians have understood, and do and should understand, the relationship between Christ and the moral life.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Can the church help citizens of the emerging postindustrial society be more "saintly" in their "scientific" endeavors? What does it mean to be a morally responsible citizen in a complicated world?
A review of two books on eugenics. How many children people should have, and how parents (and society) can ensure that only genetically fit children are born, have been enduring questions in American culture. Christians must disentangle the fundamentally "utilitarian considerations" that have come to define procreation in the United States.
Review of Raising the Dead: Organ Transplants, Ethics, and Society, by Ronald Munson. Munson seems to imagine that there are no human goods more valuable than the continuation of physical life, and nothing to hope for beyond earthly existence.
We sell ourselves cheap, so that work can demand always more of our time, and families can claim always less. The sin most abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of widow and orphan, the oppression of the poor.
Not only is the widespread emphasis on winning over others less than Christian, argues the writer, but even the concept of "doing one’s best" is easily perverted into workaholism and pride.
Life in the global village requires a global ethic that is more than empty rhetoric.
Havel wonders at the tremendous strength of an oppressed people who "seemingly believed in nothing," yet who cast off a totalitarian system within a few short weeks, "in an entirely peaceful and dignified manner."
What do we do in a republic when my virtue does not match your virtue, when my discourse, metaphysics, ethics, theology, history, views and kind are or seem incommensurate with yours? We do not have to resort to strategies of ignoring present realities, overwhelming minorities, or inventing fictional homogeneous pasts.
An analysis of Peter Singer's ethics, as seen in his writings. Singer wants the best for all humankind. But if, by some chance, he’s found the way to get it for us, it’s despite not understanding us at all.
A conversation with Andrew Lloyd Webber, the prolific and popular British composer who frequently employs religious themes in his work. Lloyd Webber has demonstrated in Requiem that he can also write beautiful serious music in the English choral tradition – while still holding on to his more rock-inspired identity.
Cats appeals to those latent religious impulses through dance and dramatic ritual, interwoven patterns of words and music, archetypal motifs and other intimations of a deeper order at the heart of things. It celebrates with equal intensity the word and body of the world.
The field of contemporary Christian Music is diverse -- ethnically, stylistically and theologically. One can list problems -- triumphalism, commercialism, individualism, a dearth of inclusive language and an uncritical approach to scripture. Such dysfunctions are also endemic to American popular religion today.
It was the note of incarnation that was missing in that contemporary "gospel" concert. The sounds and the technology were the latest, but the heresy was the oldest -- Docetism. Christ was off in heaven, waiting. Resurrection and ascension had completely superseded incarnation.
Turning to music, Trotter provides a challenge to increased openness to diverse forms and styles of music. He provides careful analysis, following Tillich, of what constitutes "religious" music, then suggests that most believers consider that music to be religious with which they are familiar, in both content and style. Unwillingness to be open to new ways of expressing faith seriously restricts the possibilities of growth in our faith.
A biographical sketch of Robert Shaw and his thoughts on music and religion. "Worship is an art . . . in that it has a certain amount of time in which to consider matters of worth."
The classical hymn and choral music people, as well as those loving the good old gospel songs, register their dismay at the level of "pap" in praise-oriented songs and choruses. Yet the mainliners are offering at least some "blending of worship styles," or in larger churches, multiple worship services "cafeteria-style."
Sound patterns are well suited to draw us into God’s purposes through music’s power and sound patterns. The author discusses music from a Christian perspective.
Explanations of Contemporary Christian music. The author takes a look at the "spiritual adventuring" of a rock band named The Call.
The author challenges us to be brave enough to be moved by a song that’s "not our style." Whatever that style, its authenticity should bring us into the presence of the Holy Spirit.
A brief history of the First Amendment and Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s role in the Supreme Court’s defining the separation of Church and State.
Religious bodies should seek to reclaim the original rationale of nontaxation of nonprofit organizations in general for the sake of freedom of association for everyone. Tax exemptions are not the same as a governmental subsidy.
A democracy that believes in religious freedom should be willing to live with tension between the two; so should a religion that believes in democracy.
The right-wing faction has promoted the school prayer amendment to the Consitituion and similar initiatives to declare America a "Christian nation;" it is workingintently to bring about a constitutional convention at which its representatives could propose curtailments of various freedoms; is drafting laws to confer official favor on specific religious establishments.
If clergy are forced to reveal a confession, people will refrain from penance or counseling. Therefore, clergy should not violate their sacred and moral trust involving child abuse.
An analysis of the pros and cons of the Bush Administration's "faith-based" solution to social problems.
The law prohibits public officials from discriminating against religious social-service providers that seek to compete for government contracts. It also protects the religious integrity and character of faith-based organizations that accept government dollars.
The various denominations will not agree on the response to what may be the most divisive social-action issue of the coming decade. This struggle will split long-established Protestant alliances and will be another blow to Protestant-Catholic cooperation on issue-centered ministries.
We must urge the schools to let religion compete on an equal footing with secular extracurricular activities. But at the same time, we must be wary of any attempt to make the schools transmitters of religious beliefs and practices. It is the place of churches and families to guide us in the ways of faith. The schools must not be given the power to tell our children when, where, or how to pray.
A defense of government financial support of private schools. The success of such support can be found in France.
The separationist interpretation of the religion clauses of the First Amendment has shackled religious liberty and pluralism. This is challenged instead with "the ideals of neutrality and accommodation."
The foundation has been laid for taxing church property and perhaps even church income. The power to tax religious institutions must be construed as the power to limit the free exercise of religion. Levying property taxes upon churches would have the effect of closing the doors of thousands of small congregations that operate on a shoestring.
The Supreme Court has explicitly encouraged “teach about religion” as part of a curriculum of secular education. In the landmark Schempp-Murray decisions, it often has been overlooked that although the justices forbade worship in the schools, they encouraged “teaching about religion.”
The case of Paul Boe -- a minister found guilty of contempt of court for refusing to testify about what he saw at Wounded Knee -- poses some significant legal and theological problems with some wider implications of the clergy confidentiality issue.
The founding fathers ordained in the first article of the Bill of Rights that "Congress shall pass no laws respecting the establishment of religion or the suppression thereof." This constitutional disestablishment of all churches embodied the wisdom of Roger Williams and Thomas Jefferson -- the one from his experience with the Massachusetts theocracy and the other from his experience with the less dangerous Anglican establishment in Virginia -- which knew that a combination of religious sanctity and political power represents a heady mixture for status quo conservatism.
Dr. Barrett challenges the "Christ and Culture" typology of H. Richard Niebuhr, and suggests an alternate four models of how people and their churches relate to the culture. She then outlines five normative tasks of the church in relationship with government.
We need a definition of constitutional religious liberty that preserves the protection of separation without stifling religious choice.
A poem which grew out of a Pastoral Reflection Group in Guatemala City, reflecting on the the relationship between the words of the New Testament and life in a country full of repression and a world full of fear and false gospels.
We are probably all murderers, thieves and sadists, but we have done little or nothing to stop the evil, and beyond all, we, that is the Church, have failed, for we knew the wrong and the right path, but we did not warn the people and allowed them to rush forward to their doom.
The resurgence of religious orthodoxies has brought to the fore the issue of the religious ground of democracy and its role in social policy. The critical tasks of our time: teaching us how, while loving freedom, to mandate high standards of behavior; and how, while maintaining God’s truth, to accommodate variety and dissent.
(ENTIRE BOOK) This book makes no direct reference to the religious and political conflicts of times in Germany (the book was written in 1938), but its purpose was to strengthen Christians in their resistance to ideological tyranny according to the author. Hence, much of this material needs to be understood as satire.
Review of Separation of Church and State by Philip Hamburger, who argues that it is not true that our constitution and the First Amendment protect us from the entanglements of church and state.
The best strategy for churches may be to again make the inner city a staging area for upward and outward mobility.
The Air Force Academy must clarify itself on questions central to democracy -- the separation of church and state and the free expression of religion.
We are lapsing into well-defended ecclesiastical narcissism. We take care of ourselves -- tending our sick, stabilizing our marriages, providing a much-needed community for our members, worshiping enthusiastically on Sundays -- but about the “sickness of Joseph,” the tyranny in our land, we care not at all, or so it must seem to those outside the church.
The revolution that has taken place in the last decade in our capacity to speed up technological change has confronted the Christian churches with an ethical dilemma of no small proportions.
Although "a useful antidote to secular optimism," Glenn Tinder’s Political Meaning of Christianity takes too narrow a view of human possibilities, says Robin W. Lovin in a review of the book.
One striking accomplishment of the recent Presbyterian Study Catechism is that it deliberately draws out the political implications of fundamental doctrines. In doing so, it takes a significant step toward erasing the false opposition between traditional faith and progressive politics.
"Christ has been killed again. But he will rise again."
The Bush Administration misunderstands congregations: 1. It has unrealistic expectations of what a congregations is and what it does. 2. It gives a model of competition where the alternative service provider idea pits the secular against the faith-based non-profits.
There is no other nation that has a dual identity -- religious and national -- as does America. Dr. Sittser reviews three books that address the confusions in America and religion.
An analysis of how American Christians have both interacted with and transcended liberal culture.
John Dart shows how many Christian symbols and actions derived from their counterparts in the Roman Empire and the deification of the emperors, and that today is not much different.
American virtuosos like Lincoln and King knew how to invoke prophetic biblical texts and ancient moral injunctions and join them to calls to action.
Bellah reviews a book that asks, "What does it mean to call our age secular?"
The author reviews a book by Martin E. Marty. "….the goal of the conversation is to help people envision and practice ways…..for good intentions to be true to themselves, their faith, their causes -- and do little damage to others along the way." His book reminds us that in public life difficult decisions must be made.
Abused children can be found in every city, in every neighborhood, in every congregation. To deny this or to ignore the warning signs is to help perpetuate the cycle of abuse.
We have all become atheists, in the sense that God no longer matters absolutely in our closed world—if God matters at all. To survive as a genuine believer, the Christian must now personally integrate what tradition did in the past. Christians are responsible for the culture in which they live, however unlike-minded it may be.
The nation state is giving way to cultural pluralism. The author looks at the U.S. forms, lists two promising models, and suggests the church's contribution and responsibility to furthering pluralism.
If the Church is faithful, it will not be the same in the future as it is today. It will not use the same forms of organization, teach the same way, relate to society in the same way, or worry about the same issues. In a word, the church will be transformed.
It is always too dangerous for men to grasp the real import of the New Testament -- any time, anywhere, in any society. This is because the gospel always lays bare elements of tyranny which society regards as necessary for its own security.
(ENTIRE BOOK) The authors see Christianity threatened not only by the rival religions of capitalism and nationalism, but in America it is becoming a purely national religion, unintelligible to Christians of other lands, as their Protestantism is becoming unintelligible to us. This may be the beginning of a process, which in Germany resulted in a new national religion. The chapters speak about ways of dealing with this threat to the Christian religion.
Mounting criticism of the church’s role as critic of the prevailing order brought John C. Bennet, the professor of Christian theology and ethics at Union Theological Seminary, to write a spirited defense of that role and a challenge to the churches to serve not only as healer but also as prophet.
If one says of a particular political position that it and no other is the will of God, one is implicitly excommunicating those who disagree. The effortless linkage between reactionary religion and reactionary politics is most troubling, especially in terms of an aggressive and at least potentially bellicose nationalism.
Today the free-church tradition is called to reclaim and recast its heritage. By engaging itself in the world it helps prepare the world for Christ. And in Christ we not only enhance human rights; we find, finally and fully, what is truly human and what is most right.
Religious differences in the United Sates are numerous and varied, yet they rarely lead to extended violent conflicts such as happens in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the subcontinent of Asia , and in many other places. Determining the reason for this realative tolerance could prove useful for future civil crises.
(ENTIRE BOOK) To say that no one solution is a panacea is not to deny that some approaches to a problem come nearer to the center of the difficulty than others do. To say that we shall not make a perfect society in the next century or the next millennium is no excuse for failure to do our best to create an order relatively better than the one in which we now live. It is the gospel that can save our decaying society and the gospel alone.
If one considers Elk Grove Unified School v. Newdow theologically, with the conviction that God ultimately refers to the Creator-Redeemer met in Israel and Jesus Christ, then the "God" Americans are to pledge their nation to be "under" is at worst an idol and at best the true God’s name taken in vain.
Few leaders have been more central and visible in the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement than William Sloane Coffin. He made many of the events of that era happen and inspired hundreds of young people to be involved.
In the years that have passed since The Secular City was published much has happened to the cities of the world, including American cities, and most of it has not been good
Historian/journalist/political scientist Garry Wills notes how some scholars -- including such eminent historians as Henry Steele Commager and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- and public figures, including Michael Dukakis (whom Wills has called "the first truly secular candidate we have ever had for the presidency") have undervalued, ignored or maligned the role of religion in American life.
Nothing is more clear in the light of history than this: new political, economic and ecclesiastical machinery does not alone solve problems; it creates problems, and, above all, it puts a strain on moral foundations, on spiritual resources, that must successfully be met or the best-laid plans come down in ruin.
Lifers released prior to the truth-in-sentencing rules in which they had a hope of parole had the lowest recidivism rate of any group of offenders. With the strict rules continuing and no possibility of restoration, only punishment, there is no hope, especially for the young.
It is vital for the urban church to take seriously its teaching function as a self-conscience Christian Community. These churches are essential to the urban life and must be given the utmost care. Their structures need to shine as centers of beauty, as symbols of hope, as signs of the Kingdom.
What roles should Christian churches now play in the dialogue about democratic participation, discursive civility, and moral responsibility now emerging in diverse political cultures across the globe? The Christian vision of the people of God, understood as an inclusive company of human beings transcending the borders of churches and other religious institutions, offers a model whose intellectual reach and cogency is enhanced when it is allowed to underlie and transform our whole notion of what "communicative action" between human beings and human communities can mean.
What makes running a soup kitchen and food pantry such a tough job is that so many others want us to do it differently. Some want us to “save their souls before we warm their bellies.” Some want us to help the hungry, but to “keep them in their place” while we do it. Some want us to screen people according to income and possessions before we feed them, and some want us to close down before we lower property values.
A major figure in Christian ethics describes the elements of hope for our society.
Social science is a moral science and economics is political economy. Questions about dogma or even faith shrink to insignificance in a world in which the very existence of humanity is threatened.
This paper asks what contribution the Protestant experience in the United States can make to the envisioning and shaping of a world order in the coming century. Part I describes three patterns that have emerged in this experience. Part II argues that the most fundamental Protestant principle requires that the economy be subordinated to broader human values in a way that is not now the case. Part III identifies other principles and considerations that should guide our quest for a new world order. Part IV sketches that system that seems most likely to implement these principles.
Eschatology is a line stretching out to the distant, possibly infinite, future. That is the horizon of hope, of possibility and becoming. Apocalyptic, on the other hand, is a detour, caused by an immediate crisis threatening whole societies.
Where is the church of Stanley Hauerwas’ theology that calls for a radical, nonviolent discipleship?
Probably the main influence of the church, one that can be malign or benign, is on the attitudes of people, especially its more active members. The author believes that in quite basic ways, the oldline Protestant denominations in this country are contributing positively to the attitudes that are now needed. He points to some of those attitudes, but suggests that if society continues to worship Wealth, it is hard to imagine how God can save the world.
The New Testament church could not escape the suspicion that it was a subversive movement, and its appeal was clearly to the socially restive poor. Its teaching was biased in favor of the poor. One is hard-pressed to find a good word about the rich, either in Jesus’ sayings or elsewhere in the New Testament literature.
There are academics affiliated with churches in China, both registered or unregistered, who perceive Christianity as the impetus for the greatness of Western science, politics, economy and freedom.
It is difficult, on theological grounds, to disagree with those who would discipline a politician who strays wantonly from church teaching on a key moral issue.
Seven myths about foreign aid are listed. Before we can sustain a commitment to reducing hunger and poverty around the world, we must debunk these myths.
Christianity, long identified as primarily a Western, European religion, is so no longer. It is now predominantly a religion of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans, and of the descendants of these regions who now live in the North Atlantic world.
The Church must act seriously as a public body, for in reading Isaiah, the Christian sees that God has redeemed history.
The divorce between the public and private spheres of life is painful and debilitating for both men and women. We have tended to view the home as the proper place of woman, where as in the public sphere, the role has been given exclusively to men. Especially in the church, new ways of looking at power and leadership are needed.
he 21st century will demand that we attend to what it means to be creatures, and to what is the true vocation and chief end of human beings.
A major Christian thinker of the 20th century examines the practical steps of Christian witness in today's world. Only through complete refusal to compromise with the forms and forces of our society can we recover the hope of human freedom.
For better than two decades the consensus in theology and ethics has been that we have no consensus. That is changing.
Occupying the middle of the spectrum, mainline believers can bridge the gap between secular liberals on the one side, who share their politics but not their faith, and caring but conservative religious believers on the other, who share their faith but not their politics.
Some forebears in the faith spent an uncommon amount of time in encounters with political leaders. In our time, we have a duty to maximize our effectiveness in influencing governmental decision-making. Ultimately the coming of God's Kingdom is in some way related to our sociopolitical achievements.
Sound teaching is what God wrests from us in the struggle for holiness and justice. The issue is to see how shalom is tied into the fight against drug addiction, carnage on our highways due to alcoholism, ecology, commercial sex, oppression of women, racism and the whole range of evils that fills our news on the airwaves and in print.
The author asks whether universal human rights will remain only unreachable ideals without religious underpinnings.
We have not worked out a vision of the social embodiment of Christian faith adequate to a post-Enlightenment world. Ironically, though today we possess more factual knowledge about humankind than ever before, we still have no universal symbols of what it means to be human.
The most important contribution of the churches, called for by those who newly look to it with hope, is to affirm the values of our tradition. But, it is important that these values be taken seriously, and that means that they inform individual and corporate life. The tension within the churches is between values based on caring and service and values based on the economic paradigm.
If Christians don’t get Christian amendments, anti-secular humanist court decisions, the right to write the textbooks or to post the Ten Commandments on the schoolhouse wall, that does not mean that Jews and Christians are silenced. No law keeps them from prime-time media, literary and intellectual life, the decision-making institutions of a free-enterprise economy -- board rooms, foundations, advertising -- or the public sector, including the gallery, the concert hall and the town forum.
When we look at the contemporary Latin American world, we see an oppressed people bearing an affliction as painful as that of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. They need our response. Only through concerted church, agency and individual leadership can that response be effective.
Review of a book by Laurie Garrett, one of the nation’s premier science writers and a specialist on HIV/AIDS. She explores the failure of public health systems in a selected group of nations and in global health groups such as the World Health Organization.
Douglas Hicks reviews three books on globalization. The faces of globalization that matter are not technology, economics, politics or rapid social changes. They are the 6 billion people who are affected by those factors. Globalization should neither be welcomed uncritically nor dismissed as wholly deleterious.
The author discusses Von Balthasar’s Christian humanism and suggests that it is a Christian spirituality, that Christian humanism is not Eurocentric but Christocentric.
William Sloane Coffin’s Once to Every Man (Atheneum) recounts the rich career of an activist clergyman who served as chaplain at Yale University for 17 years, during which time he was involved in civil rights demonstrations in the south, student work camps in Africa, Peace Corps training in Puerto Rico, and antiwar protests in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Of the two excerpts from that book, the first is an account of Coffin’s own student days at Yale; the second concerns his activities as Yale chaplain in support of draft resistance.
James Findlay reports that his survey of many of the 300 ministers who participated in the National Council of Churches' black voter education drive in the summer of 1964 revealed that it was a life-changing moment vividly remembered after nearly a quarter of a century. In addition Findlay comments that it was also a culture-changing time when an outpouring of support from outside the South in the struggle for racial justice forced this issue toward the beginning of a resolution.
The author reviews Branch's Parting the Waters, a history of the civil rights movement.
It is possible to kill a human being but not an idea. Let us confess to God how often we destroy dreams with our apathy, violate visions with our sophisticated arrogance, and prevent prophecy with our politics of pragmatism.
King believed that a community of love, justice and solidarity would eventually be actualized. That is why he worked unceasingly for the realization of his dream.
The aftermath of non-violence is the creation of a beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.
While proponents of reparations for blacks present their case in the clear-cut language of a legal claim for damages, the issue is really political and moral, and this sets certain limitations.
Why have many social critics and reformers, including both conservatives and liberals, found fault with the ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr.? His conviction was that only love can truly unite men and women of diverse cultures, religions, races and classes, for we all possess equally the dignity and respect that the God of love and power conferred upon us.
Whether they were learned 40 years ago in Warsaw, or 20 years ago along the hot and dusty roads of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, the lessons of righteous resistance are universal. They belong not to one but to all people who struggle for their dignity.
All Americans owe Malcolm a great debt. He was not a racist, as many misguided observers have claimed. He was an uncompromising truth-teller whose love for his people empowered him to respect all human beings.
Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the now deceased James Earl Ray, the man sentenced for the crime.
No monuments or celebrations commemorate the 1964 invasion of Mississippi. Instead, there are dedicated people living and working here, resolved to carry on the way begun then -- and largely abandoned by the rest of the country.
Conversion to global survival concerns did not uproot Dr. Cobb from his Christian faith. It did make him view the historical forms of faith more critically, for he could not doubt that Christian doctrine had contributed to the insensitivity to the nonhuman world that now threatens to destroy the human world as well.
The author writes of happiness from a process theological point of view emphasizing how our industrial age has led to happiness only for the one in a thousand who is in control, and that the whole commercial system, now intrinsically part of our world, has been a mistake.
Dr. Cobb believes we should appreciate and respect all religious traditions, but opposes the idea that the various religious traditions are more or less equally effective means of arriving at a common end or meeting a common need.
The essayist compares Christianity and Buddhism, suggesting both can learn from each other.
Dr. Cobb indicts the church for substituting the service of wealth and death against service to God and life.
Dr. Cobb gives specific ways in which we as Americans can overcome our desire for empire -- the imposition of our will on others militarily and territorially.
Modernity has left us in a state of intellectual confusion and chaos. It thinks of nature in materialistic terms, but in these terms it can explain neither the natural world nor how it is related to human beings. It can provide no notion of substance, yet matter is inherently a substantialist notion, since matter is understood to take on different forms without ceasing to be the same matter.
John Cobb discusses the issues of poverty and possessions, escape through asceticism and his rejection of consumerism and economism. An alternative is presented: economics for community.
In analysis of Paul, especially in the book of Romans, Dr. Cobb along with David Lull’s translations, discusses how much we misunderstand Paul’s legalism and it’s impact on church doctrine.
The essayist describes the impact upon his thinking about civilization, imperialism, modernity, education, colonialism, ecology, economy by three thinkers: Paolo Soleri, Paul Shepard, and Ivan Illich.
There was a time when the West took great efforts to protect the poor and weak, but today the rich and powerful work to advance their interests, rather then seeking justice for the poor and week. What is possible for those who survive is to live locally and in community with others who have the same values rather than those of the self-destroying society around us.
This lecture outlines the periods of scholarly greatness throughout the history of Christianity and tries to understand what quality marks today especially in European theological thought. Dr. Cobb believes that maybe Europe has the cultural and scholarly resources to respond to the present intellectual need.
This lecture discuss two levels of caring: 1. The need to care for others. 2. But what is the goal of that caring, the common good? American history has not been clear on what is the common good.
The author appreciates the thoughts of both Whitehead and Marx but defines the deficiencies of both.
Dr. Cobb criticizes three positions -- materialism, Humean empiricism, and Kantian dualism -- and considers a fourth -- nonmaterialist naturalism -- with which he identifies Whitehead. He then clarifies one of Whitehead's key concepts: "prehension", that is, the way in which one momentary experience incorporates or takes account of earlier such moments, and considers its implications for process theology and the ecological movement.
Dr. Cobb lends processes theological concepts to those who systematize the teaching of the Bible, to those who consider contemporary thought as normative and access the Bible in that context, to those who give simplistic traditional understanding of the Bible, and to those searching the perplexities and mysteries of quantum thought.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Dr. Cobb applies process theology to the relevance of the world in expressions of hope, liberation theology, political theology and issues facing the global environment.
The author examines aspects of economism, including greed, industrialization, capitalism and consumerism and suggests a Christian alternative.
John Cobb reviews the history of the relationship between science and religion focusing on how Western science and Christian theology are both influenced by philosophy. He believes God's role in the world has nothing to do with violating otherwise well-established laws of nature.
ven though Jesus made it clear we cannot serve both God and wealth, our government, our society and our personal lives are sucked into a life where wealth is the primary value. If we choose God, we will become part of the solution of the world’s problems rather than part of the problem.
Modern economics is not an empirical or historical discipline making globalization of the economy harder and harder to ignore.
Our shrinking planet cannot afford the continuation of the view of individual people or individual nations competing for scarce resources. It can only survive if the movements toward cooperation for the common good gain dominance.
Dr. Cobb uses process thought both broadly and narrowly, discussing it in terms of speculative metaphysics, as assumption criticism in general and as assumption criticism in physics, along with alternative assumptions in economics and theology.
While the dominant economic theory supports policies that are destructive both of human community and of the natural environment creating a global situation becoming less sustainable daily, nevertheless, the writer believes, there are helpful signs.
Dr. Cobb suggests that Christianity needs the actual adoption of already-developed ideas as well as new ideas: "It is as important to liberate theology to pursue saving truth wherever it can be found (scientists, philosophers, Hindus…) as to liberate particular groups of people from oppression."
Because we have inherited, in the old-line churches, a vague belief in the reality of God, the church has declined. Dr. Cobb challenges the diverse group of the American Academy of Religion, to work in complementary ways to a commitment to a "real God."
Should we continue to follow Jesus today? Cobb professes to be among "progressive" Christians -- liberals who have broken with the dominant strand of past liberalism but have continued to remain open to developments in the culture and presentation of reasons for the Christian faith without any appeal to supernatural authority. To follow Jesus means to hope and pray for a world structured on principles that would turn present society upside down, create countercultural communities, nonviolently, and to do this while remaining open to ideas and ways of being of quite different sorts.
Cobb examines secular alternatives to following Jesus, especially Buddhism, then gives reasons for choosing to follow Jesus. He concludes that the response of Jesus to the Roman Empire of his day is deeply needed in our time. We must demonstrate in our communities that "another world is possible." And we must so present that other world that hundreds of millions of people will gravitate towards it and create the context in which that other world will replace the present one.
Dr. Cobb examines an option to which Western Christians commonly turn today, namely the University, and enumerates its failings. He then suggests that we need to resist the imperial order in which we, like Jesus, live. A large part of that resistance consists in demonstrating that another order is possible and far superior. The vision of this other order has practical implications for the reordering of the world system for the sake of all of its inhabitants instead of the exploitation of the many for the enrichment of the few. We have much to learn from the university. But we must learn it as disciples of Jesus and not as promoters of the university’s mentality.
Both the East and the West have largely abandoned their religious traditions. There are severe limitations to these traditions, but their abandonment is not promising. Dr. Cobb discusses the challenge in terms of Process Theology. Following Jesus today requires complete openness to the best thinking of our times, both religiously and scientifically.
Dr. Cobb shows how misinterpretations of Jesus as God has done great harm to our history. It’s not authentic Christianity and has separated Jews and Muslims from Christians far more than they should be.
Dr. Cobb presents the process theology view that the exclusion of God in our universal experience is contrary to that very experience, that God plays a role in human life and in the whole of history and nature.
Insistence on ‘free flow’ of information is seen by the Third World as the freedom of the fox in the chicken coop. “We don’t have a free press; we have a press imprisoned by commercial interests.”
The author examines the cultural significance of media campaigns. He concludes that The Electronic Marketplace, as it has come to be manipulated, is destroying the promise of technology to deliver honest truths to those without the sophistication to explore the more elite channels in print and film, and even of television itself, where they can still be found.
Modern advertising is not unlike total high-tech nuclear warfare. Both carry on practices from the dim past but each has so industrialized the process with advanced technologies that the fundamental activity is transmuted into something new that raises questions beyond standard discussions of right and wrong.
We live in a world of confrontations in need of reconciliation. What are the grave problems that beset us? What are the possible ways of resolving them?
The electronic media industry that shapes consciousness has become the pacemaker for the social and economic development of societies in the late industrial age. The author discusses this modern media development with the classical dissemination of information before the modern technologies.
In the information revolution, the most immediate challenge for national governments and the international community is the insight that the use of Information-Communication Technologies (ICTs) for sustainable development will not be determined by technological developments but by political decisions. The most perplexing question ICT-strategists may face is whether people-centered ideals can be achieved in a global order that is increasingly directed by market-centered realities.
Communication is basic to community, and the right tocommunicate a basic human right.. It is a precondition of a just and democratic society. It is necessary if ever peace is to be achieved. This policy statement first reviews the biblical and theological basis, then looks at the role of the church, the influence of communication technologies and resources, regulation of a public resource in the public interest, the proglrm of concentration of media ownership and control, and the impace of global media on indigenous cultures. A Call to Action lists specific next steps.
The author explores whether the current international human rights regime can provide us with meaningful moral and legal guidance for the solution moral choices. He asks how relevant are the basic human rights standards relevant to cyberspace? He proposes a People's Communication Charter to assure human rights in the cyberspace environment.
Public Broadcasting is an essential ingredient in maintaining an informed electorate in America.
The author outlines various approaches to media study. He points out that the most recent model leans away from the concern for concrete mechanical effects characteristic of the transmission model and leans toward what is loosely termed the ritualistic model more akin to anthropology and other cultural studies. He distinguishes between moral and ethical issues that arise within the context of the media and those that are raised by the nature of the system itself.
Television is taking over the traditional role of teacher and preacher in our culture, while at the same time becoming controlled by a few who limit the points of view. We need to extend First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free exercise of religion to the broadcast media.
Against the context of three recent media investigations in Australia, the author asks what should policy makers do in response to genuine expressions of community concern? He suggests that what is needed is a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between media and society, and proposes reconceiving the problem in the context of media as the creator of our symbolic environment.
A leading Canadian mass communication scholar analyzes what is required to achieve truly free and open communication in today's world.
Flows of words, images, text and data across the globe have become the arena of a major commercial activity. A multi-billion dollar world communication market has developed that is still expanding. The key trends on this market are: digitization, consolidation, Liberalization. Globalization increases the mega-corporate control over the provision of information and culture. There is a very realistic chance that the Lords of the Global Village will, before the turn of the century, control most of the world's expression, creativity, and instruction.
Studies show that Americans are full of misperceptions about the war in Iraq and especially about three issues -- the link between Iraqu and al-Qaeda, the existence of weapons of mass destruction, and the nature of world public opinion. These misperceptions are closely related to the news sources.
While films and television are certainly not the only cause of a climate of violence, they bear a considerable share of responsibility. The NCC objects to what they see as the misuse of the First Amendment, by commercial interests, as a cover for a quest for profit. They hold media industries accountable for what they produce and distribute, and propose critical analysis of the cultural, social, political and economic influences on media messages, the development of creative production centers that create community, and taking personal and public action to challenge government and industry abuses.
The mass media are brainwashing all of us into being priests and Levites on the Jericho road. Instead of love and compassion, they teach us distrust and fear. They face incredible competitive pressures to grab the most dollars and the largest audiences. The demands of topicality and of instant journalism make reflective insights almost impossible. Collective cynicism among media people sees nobler impulses only as an aberration -- if it perceives them at all.
Congress has not found a way to handle email, this new means of communication, which swamped congresspersons with 80,000,000 messages during the past year. But the Web may yet make a huge difference in giving citizens a more effective voice in government.
Theology is a statement that tries to make sense out of our lives. This essay is intended to provide a viewpoint from which to understand the workings of communication. It attempts to say what communication is all about, in the context of what the world is all about.
Fore explores the unusually tight control the United States military had over Gulf War news coverage in general and television coverage in particular. He suggests that there is no simple answer as to how and why this could have happened, that it involved a combination of technical, economic and cultural forces, and that everyone who views such events uncritically is asking to be controlled.
Bono of U2 musical fame may be one of the most important Christian activists of our time, for through his humanitarian efforts he has demonstrated a responsibility to the larger struggles and issues that burden humankind.
Why is access to communications a basic right? Information is the key word. In an information society, access to information equals empowerment. When large numbers of people are nodes in a communication network, the messages cannot be controlled. This communication pattern empowers groups.
On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland. Two hundred people died. The concepts reported in this paper represent the author's attempt to analyze the impact, upon general audiences, of constant media disaster viewing, rather than focusing on victim's families.
A field trip during July and August of 1983 took the writer to all the major cities and many of the towns and villages in every province of the Republic of South Africa. Here he reports on the communication structures and processes which supported and maintained apartheid: the concept of "banning," the Publication Act, forced "relocation," and the influence of the mass media system, particularly radio.
Cyberspace is a new field for old dreams. It is the latest meeting place for both doing things together and trying to figure out, as we never cease to do, where we really are. Where the word comes from will help us to understand where we might be going with it.
A media and religion scholar examines the effects of the Internet today in comparison with Martin Luther's use of the printing press in the 15th century.
The authors examine the development of public policy about religion content in broadcasting -- policy that has implications for the treatment of religion in the society.
How does the variable of communication interactivity offer potential changes to relationships among individuals, small groups, and nations at large? Computers are the printing presses of the twenty-first century. Whereas radio, television, and film are usually linear, many aspects of network interactivity find expression in new media technologies that are two way. This circumstance calls forth a new focus for communication analysts.
A review of Charles E. Shepard’s book recounting the rise and fall of Jim Bakker and PTL. The book is surprisingly objective though it fails to probe very deeply into the meaning of the PTL phenomenon.
The majority of popular Christian Web sites seems to be lost in the digital ether, with no sense of their own location in religious time and space. They reflect the entrepreneurial spirit of popular religion -- pragmatic and creative, even if historically disconnected and theologically unsophisticated.
The concern of public relations professionals, advertisers, and politicians with image and appearance as an instrument for persuading people about important matters in the real world of events and decisions is matched by the growing scholarly and intellectual interest in signs and symbols as makers, not merely conveyers, of the world we live in.
The author addresses some of the key issues in the relationship between the mass media and religion. First he indicates trends in the study of mass communication; then applies these to three areas of religious faith: hermeneutics and proclamation, church practice, and religious experience. He concludes by suggesting some possible courses of action.
It is wrong to attack the media as if they were being manipulated and mishandled by greedy people at the top. In reality, the media reflect our own greed and weaknesses far more than we care to admit or to analyze.
A writer looks for something concrete to interest readers and to illustrate a point. Sometimes the illustration sweeps away the point.
A plausible case can be made that the technology of the Net, the Web and television is more compatible with evangelical than with mainline understandings of theology and worship. Like the 16th-century Catholics and their delay in the use of the printing press while the Protestants were using it with great effect, today’s mainline needs to assess the positive educational potential of the Internet and Web and put it to use for its own faithful.
This book helps us look closely at the values of our "mediated" culture in light of the Christian Gospel.
If Jesus had communicated via television, Christianity might never have survived. The old-time street-corner evangelist symbolizes both what the media most desperately try to accomplish and how they most dismally fail -- especially in evangelism.
Confession is the signature of Oprah’s TV show. According to Oprah, talk is crucial, even salvific.
The author looks at the pluralist character of modern society, the place of media within it, and the nature of the media. He describes the way the churches have tried to use media, then the way media have usurped many traditional religious functions. Finally, he suggests three responses to the media's challenge to religion.
While the evangelical broadcasters have demonstrated an aptitude for using innovations, nevertheless, they have not yet demonstrated a corresponding aptitude for justifying theologically the validity of their enterprise. Some of the compromises which have been made in order to adapt to the demands of these new technologies have fallen victims to its awesome power.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A comprehensive study of religious television. History of its early development. Who views religious TV, why they view, and how the experience affects both viewers and the local church.
The phenomenal success of the electronic church is in part a result of intelligent application of revolutionary technology, but a more important factor is America’s cultural drift toward conservatism.
ENTIRE BOOK An examination of the values and cultural significance of secular television, and the role of mass media in shaping our lives. The author provides a theology of communication, a critique of the Electronic Church, and concludes with practical suggestions for those who are concerned about the impact of American television worldwide.
There have been at least three major explanations for the presence of the ugly in art: 1. The transformational theory. 2. The educational or didactic theory. 3. The pleasure theory. The electronic church so often both depicts evil and implicitly denies its seriousness, the pleasure theory best articulates the core of the electronic church’s aesthetic and sensibilities.
(ENTIRE BOOK) We are addicted to images, a wholesale abuse of language, a dangerous addiction to surface trivia, a fixation on the unimportant, an obsession with the insignificant. Ellul’s solution is to discover a "new language." It is the only way understanding can begin to flow again, so that we can communicate the gospel in such a way that it "penetrates."
Dr. Long believes that Bono, of U2 fame, in his efforts in public education, communication and mobilization, makes an intriguing case of celebrity leadership. But his true measure is if his efforts can deliver political and economic change.
The author argues that the electronically transmitted image will become the medium of greatest authority. This poses ethical and moral problems of profound dimension because of the medium's divorce from the language base of all ethical traditions, which themselves flow from spoken oral traditions and written canons. It is significant that at a common stage of development, religious traditions are suspicious, if not condemnatory, of images, graven or otherwise.
Technology, and the new information technologies in particular, reveal the underlying nature of our culture today, and thus act as a kind of sacrament of our civilization. Therefore we must critically engage our technology to see how it shapes our values, our epistemology, and our rationality.
The author discusses two alternates to the more fundamentalist video, "Alpha:" "Beginnings" and "LTQ" ("Living the Question"). Both have their strengths and weaknesses from the liberal point of view.
A communication era ended in the U.S. Catholic Church when American bishops voted to close down the church's satellite system and to begin a strategic planning effort to discern current telecommunications needs. How can the church utilize these dazzling new technologies to respond to human need? The author suggests guidelines.
The Christian Gospel is a matter of decision. It is to be accepted or rejected. All that we who communicate this Gospel can do is to make possible a genuine decision. Such a decision is one based on understanding and on partial participation.
Dialogue
as a Model for Communication in the Church, by Hermann J. Pottmeyer
The
transition from a style of authority that was part patriarchal and part authoritarian
to one that is exercised in the form of dialogue creates difficulties for the
Church. The new awareness that 'we are all the Church' creates fear in some
people. The author looks at the process of communication-reception-in the early
Church, and concludes that the bishops must also be listeners and seek guidance
in Holy Scripture and in the tradition of the faith of the People of God.
The author examines one specific kind of technological forum -- the teleconference -- reflecting on its history and its future potential as a mode of "assembly" within the Catholic Church. These concepts have new meaning as use of the Internet and the World Wide Web explodes.
The Second Vatican Council we are called to communion and community. The author proposes ideas which relate to aspects of communications and the theology of communio.
Television, not the church, now communicates what is going on outside the parish, telling us how to behave, what to wear, who has power and who is powerless, what to believe about the world and what is of ultimate value. In this sense, general television, far more than religious TV, is the church’s real competitor.
Churches must take care to avoid efforts to use TV, video recorders and cable TV in place of people-to-people relationships.
David L. Glusker outlines the major problem faced by mainline religious radio and television ministries - namely, how to raise enough money to stay on the air while avoiding offense by stressing fund-raising during broadcasts. That such programming uniquely reaches significant audiences - the homebound, the unchurched, as well as some regular churchgoers - seems valid reason to continue to search for solutions to the funding difficulties. Glusker suggests several options.
In community one learns that the problems we pose for one another are not obstacles blocking our progress but ways of refining our understandings, and if we can embrace the problems (and each other) then the possibilities appear.
Two projects operated by Ade Realty Management of Chicago are giving attention because they have traveled the road toward ruin and have returned to solvency. Their stories can provide a guide to the methods of turning near-failures into successes. A diversity of tenants is the key to success for low-cost housing projects.
Recent major media articles on congregation-based inner-city ministries give a false impression that much is really known about these saving enterprises. Farnsley asks, "What kinds of churches and pastors are involved in community development?" and "What resources are available to urban congregations?
Readers whose last contact with organized community action groups occurred in the 1960s and ‘70s may miss two important characteristics of the Industrial Areas Foundation-related new-style outfits. In the first place, IAF-related groups do not organize around issues; they organize around churches and other solid organizations for the benefit of people in the neighborhoods.
There is a need to stimulate the proliferation of Jewish-Christian dialogue groups based on realistic and honest premises.
If Eastern Orthodoxy’s patriarch of Constantinople and the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem a can convince their fellow Eastern Orthodox that they belong together with Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims in one family of faiths fathered by the God of Abraham, they will have awakened a church more that 500 years dormant.
Amida is Christ, and Christ is Amida. The author states the respects in which this claim is clearly false and then explains how it is possible to claim that, nevertheless, at a deeper level it can be true. He explores the implications and consequences of this claim, especially with regard to the way it opens the door for Christians to learn from Buddhists and perhaps for Buddhists to learn also from Christians.
Can it be that through the festivals of non-Christians, Christians are prepared by God to worship and adore the true Light which enlightens everyone?
The author deals with the place of Asian religions in the study of world history. When we study the history of Europe and America we can assume at least a minimal knowledge about the influence of Greek, Jewish, and Christian religious thought and practices, but for the study of the history of Asia we must prepare ourselves by gaining a sympathetic understanding of the quite different religious ideas and practices of that part of the world.
The general Buddhist lack of interest in Christianity gives us no reason to abandon dialogue. Buddhism grasps some aspects of “ultimate reality” which Christianity does not explicate as fully.
One of the fastest-growing denominations in the U.S. in the past two decades has been the Assemblies of God. Sociologist Margaret Poloma believes the key to this growth has been that AG churches offer intense religious experiences. But the more prosperous and institutionalized the AG becomes, she suggests, the more it is in danger of diluting the charismatic spirit that has been its lifeblood.
The odium once bestowed on Afrikaners in South Africa has been shifted to charismatics. But after interviewing more than 150 charismatic church members and more than 40 pastors, the authors were astonished by their openness and desire to end apartheid. Also surprising was the fact that the charismatic congregations generally are 20 to 60 per cent black. Nowhere else have they seen such real integration.
If redemption has occurred in Christ, why is the world still so obviously unredeemed?
How should one evaluate the healing efforts of a denomination which has been committed to Christian healing for over a century and which endeavors to practice it amid a secular climate in which medical assumptions are axiomatic?
Without gaining a comparative world perspective, Christian theology can neither fully know its own strengths nor strengthen its weaknesses. Indeed, it cannot know itself. It is thus for its own sake that Christian theology needs to be grounded in the comparative study of religions.
The highly hierarchical -- and highly Americanized -- Seventh-day Adventist Church has reached a turning point, says Ronald Lawson. It is having to confront its growing international character and certain leadership issues that won’t go away -- including women’s ordination. Lawson reports on the changes wrought by the denomination’s most recent General Conference Session.
Shintoism gave its wholehearted support to the Japanese during the war, providing its very rationale, that the emperor was a descendant of the very gods who had created their islands, that Japan had a mandate to rule the world. In a good many churches in America it would be easier to remove the cross than to remove the American flag from the sanctuary. Are our temptations much different from that of Shitoism? Shitoism now regrets that they became to tool of the state.
Reumann outlines the historical hardening of theological categories between Lutherans and Catholics arising out of the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith, and the convergence toward a common understanding on justification and related doctrines through Lutheran-Catholic dialogues over the past thirty years.
Christians have entered into serious dialogue with people of other faiths only very recently. The question of what Christ means in our encounter with others inevitably raises the even more basic one of what Christ means for us as Christians.
Our recognition of the mystery of salvation in men and women of other religious traditions shapes the concrete attitudes with which we Christians must approach them in interreligious dialogue.
We must continue gently to insist that those who feel that a saving truth can be grasped only in Christian categories are mistaken. Jesus was not a Christian, or were his first disciples; Jesus’ faith, and his disciples’ allegiance to his cause, were, for them, a way of being Jewish.
Christian Scientists do not claim that their practice of spiritual healing should be accommodated in law simply because it is religious, but rather that it should not be proscribed by law simply because it is religious, and there is not clear evidence that it is ineffectual.
(ENTIRE BOOK) These essays in methodology are concerned with the need to establish the history of religion and comparative religion as a leading scholarly activity at the modern university. There is a danger that the history of religion and comparative religion will be totally absorbed by certain other fields (philosophy of religion, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history and theology). This book demonstrates that it is not merely ancillary to these other studies but is a discipline in its own right, drawing upon, yet making unique additions to, these areas of knowledge.
In an extended review of Edith L. Blumhofer’s two-volume history of the Assemblies of God, D. William Faupel highlights the restoration motif in the denomination’s history.
(ENTIRE BOOK) The scriptures of the world's great religions are not easily available to students. This book is an attempt to bridge the gap. Actual quotations from the great religions are quoted and discussed.
There are certain deceptions being practiced in Transcendental Meditation which are troubling: claims to originality, claims to compatibility with all religions, claims that TM is not a religion, claims that it is best not to tell an initiate where he is being led.
The problem of writing about evangelicals, liberals and fundamentalists in today’s world of religion is one of undisciplined squads of definitions.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A short, concise and helpful guide to understanding Hinduism.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Cassels provides a useful guide to understanding the beliefs and unique characteristics of the different religious groups in the United States.
An elaboration on the reasons why Wangerin, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, found it easier to speak of God with religionless people than with the religious. "I find myself ‘reluctant to mention God by name to religious people’ for fear I may get it wrong."
The author is encouraged by the vision of a truly missional church, both relevant and resistant, that incarnates a real alternative to mainline "maintenance" churches and evangelical "megachurches."
Herzog describes a new process of forming and teaching Christian doctrine based on dogmas arising out of discipleship rather than vice versa. Its origins are in the attempts of clergy and laity to meet the evils of the world as coworkers with God in the struggle for God's justice.
We need to learn that small size in churches might be an asset for mission. This article is about how a small church let go of the myths about size and without a fulltime professional minister converted its members into ministers.
The New Monastics are present day communities of Christians, living in the corners of the American empire, living and hoping for a new and radical form of Christian practice.
The origin of some of the unhealthiness that afflicts congregations is a lack of theological clarity, confidence and conviction. We are not autonomous, self-created individuals. We belong to God, who has created us for fellowship with the divine self.
In the view of even the most faithful and sophisticated church members, including those who are close friends of the clergy, the theological seminary and the seminary professor are mysterious and awesome -- familiar only to the privileged and spiritual elite, speaking an esoteric tongue, and no place for the laity. So a seminary professor was invited to spend his sabbatical at our church.
Especially in mainline churches, the percentage of members who are 65 and older is increasing. How can churches meet the needs of graying congregations?
Technological achievements such as computers may increase efficiency, but they often do so at the expense of community. "If I see one more article extolling the virtues of computers for churches or telling us how the computer can help us organize our sermons, I’ll blow a circuit."
From the ethos of economic life to the chatter of talk radio, our society is busy promoting the appetites and fantasies of the individual more than it is encouraging an investment in the larger aspirations of a community.
Hall deals with the meaning of the central belief that "Jesus is the Christ," and the Cross as God's act of solidarity and reconciliation.
(ENTIRE BOOK) James F. Hopewell provides a definitive study of congregational life. His thesis: we must understand each congregation's unique story that catches up and gives pattern to a church’s local culture -- its beliefs, its mission work, and its everyday administrative transactions, because it also reveals God's intention for that community of believers.
The author describes how his congregation moved to helping inquirers become faithful disciples of Christ.
Here are many reasons to be suspicious of organized religion, as well as many reasons to support it.
Addictive behavior robs Christians and churches of their full spirituality. Confronting these addictions offers the possibility of recovery and grace. It is a long process; as the Twelve Step Program of Alcoholics Anonymous states, addiction is cunning, baffling, powerful and patient. The first step is naming and facing the addiction.
The proclamation "Jesus the Christ is Lord" is the very Church of Christ and points to an ever-occurring happening in which a people find their self-understanding, an aspect of which is the very proclamation of this happening, which proclamation is both deed of concerned involvement in life and witness in the face of the life questions that such involvement provokes -- through which the Christ-happening happens to others and, in turn, becomes their life meaning.
Korean Americans are far more religious than Americans in general. The author reviews two books on the subject discussing the cultural patterns and problems of first and second generation Koreans, how they are different from other ethnic groups and the problems of assimilation into American culture.
The multiethnic pattern of the Mosaic church as seen by Gerardo Marti after being a participant-observer offers a "theological haven," in orthodox beliefs though quite unconventional, an "artistic haven" attracting all kinds of "mavericks, rebels or freaks," and an "ethnic haven" attracting a large and diverse immigrant population from Los Angeles.
Christians tend to "let individualistic preoccupations take over when Lent rolls around." Community can only be created around a faith; faith can only be creative within a community.
If a Christian congregation is faithful and effective it will make a difference. What does such a congregation look like?
St. Paul’s Central Park United Methodist Church serves a unique congregation of people who are broken with addictions. It is know as a Recovery Church, informing and defining its Christianity through 12-step principles.<
Church leaders have not given adequate attention to the local congregation as a vital context for addressing social issues. Unless these issues are placed in the context of worship or of debate on the budget, members are effectively educated to regard them as unimportant.
(ENTIRE BOOK) There is need of a much closer connection than we have had thus far between theology and evangelism. The Christian faith is both something to be believed and something to be lived.
What modernism sought to escape can help us find direction for social and congregational life.
Christian churches exist to worship God, to teach and nurture people in the faith, and to spread the Good News. They do not exist to establish "strictness" and clear church-culture boundaries or to claim the church’s "success" by the world’s standards.
Research into "the new paradigm" congregations, which have discarded many of the attributes of establishment religion.
Sabbath observance is not simply a moment of a week. It frames our attitudes, focuses our desires and helps us shape the pace and direction of our daily walk. It inspires and enables us to greet life with care and delight.
What intrigues the author is that certain specific oldline congregations do manifest vitality and show the marks of transformation. Perhaps that is where the leaders of the oldline denominations should begin in their search for a strategy of change.
A warehouse is a temporary place where you hold things. Stuff comes in and out. . . . Like churches should be, bringing people in, equipping them for life and sending them back into the world.
The author refutes some assumed grief counseling through his own grief. Longtime grief, especially for a close family member, is more normal than assumed and has its value.
It isn’t true that the loss of any single thing will destroy us. Everything in life has some value and life is full of valuable things, things worth living for, things worth doing, things worth becoming, things worth loving again.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Prof. Oden offers a critique of contemporary pastoral counseling that notes the advantages of modern clinical psychotherapy while pointing out its limitations for pastoral counseling which he asserts has all but ignored the classical Christian pastoral tradition exemplified in the work of Gregory of Nazianzus.
The author deals with our feelings when confronted with a situation in which we want to care but find it difficult or almost impossible. She offers suggestions for how one can deal with those feelings in ways that show care for both self and others.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Thirty-three authorities, representing both the clergy and professionals active in mental health programs, respond to the challenge to church and temple made by the community mental health revolution.
Those who sin and who harm others must be confronted with their deeds so that they might repent. Therefore, confidentiality should not be regarded as a sacred cow. The need for mandatory reporting and the need for pastoral confidentiality may not be as contradictory as they at first appear.
What determines whether a communication is confidential? That is a pastoral as we as a legal question. Although it’s awkward, sometimes it is necessary to explain to a parishioner that every disclosure cannot be treated as confidential.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A survey of current psychotherapy methods, including very helpful summaries of the views of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Ottor Rank, Eric Fromm, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, Carl Jung, and Carl Rogers, as well as behavioral, transactional, gestalt and other therapies.
(ENTIRE BOOK) This book is not primarily about counseling theory and technique. Rather, it is an attempt to describe the important connection between good counseling and consciousness raising.
The recovery of the type of evangelism practiced in the third century, adapted to 20th-century circumstances, could meet the evangelistic needs of the mainline church.
Drawing on his experience of nearly a half century of ministry - much of it connected with retreats - Raines gives a rationale for the offering of retreat experiences to clergy for purposes of sanctuary, nourishment, study, silence, healing and encouragement.
Grief is a helplessness that does not cry for help. One cries -- and hopes that help will come unbidden. Consolation is an art. It is the art of active love.
The author deals with turning destructive conflict into a constructive experience for change and growth.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Dr. Clinebell provides practical suggestions and programs to make good marriages better, to turn crises into opportunities for growth, and to activate congregations of faith as communities of caring.
(ENTIRE BOOK) You have more going for you than you think you do -- probably lots more! Here are tools for discovering and using the rich potentialities of the mid-years, for personal renewal and for the enlivening of marriage. The author states that this book grew out of his own struggles and his experiences in enriching mid-years marriages, including his own.
(ENTIRE BOOK) This handbook addresses marriage and family enrichment, creative singlehood, human liberation, youth work and social change. These qualities of the human potential movement are brought together in a concise, clear and comprehensive way.
Reviews of two pioneering studies into patterns of marriage and divorce in American society.
Some commentators on nuclear arms miss the mark. The author discusses such arguments as "nuclear madness," "death wishes" "the wrath of God," and the like. We must intervene in the cultural subconscious not just to understand but to change it.
Increasingly, pastoral counseling centers are more like churches than like mental-health clinics. They are extensions of a central function of the church -- the preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments.
The author describes the experience of being an assistant chaplain in a New York hospital for mental and physical illnesses.
Mentally disturbed persons need a simple, step-by-step method to move from where they are toward health, community and usefulness: first, to tell others the truth about themselves, and second, to list the people they have harmed and make amends wherever possible. Then they have an obligation to work with others seeking the same help, insuring their own recovery.
American society is driven by competitive economic forces that cheapen and exploit the personal dimensions of human relations and community life. Our major academic and religious institutions must support disciplines of inquiry into the nature and practice of care-giving, and into the human needs and problems that prompt this care.
The jogger who says ‘I’m going to run till I die’ is seeking to still a peculiarly modern angst. The church must try to deal specifically with the environments of the terminally ill and the terminally aged. As hospices make their way into abandoned maternity and pediatrics wings of local hospitals, churches can push for their acceptance and church people can serve on boards of directors and aid in ministering to dying patients and their families.
Fasting, prayer and meditation blend easily together and improve the author's ability to pray “Thy will be done” with wholehearted commitment. Proponents of fasting say that this discipline is an effective means of improving one’s mental, physical and spiritual health.
The role of intimacy in marriage. Includes practical steps for group discussion.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Mental health is a central and inescapable concern for any local church that is a healing-redemptive fellowship. A local church today has an unprecedented opportunity to multiply its contributions to both the prevention and the therapeutic dimensions of mental health. A church can seize this opportunity most effectively by allowing mental health to become a leavening concern, permeating all areas of its life.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A theologian’s perspective on the issues involved in the pastoral task.
A review of approaches to mental health care in the last couple of centuries. Every step forward in the health care has usually been followed, sooner rather than later, by at least a half-step backward.
In these last years scarred by AIDS, by the dominant culture of greed and violence, and by personal loss and pain, the author has come to see more distinctly the vital link between the healing process (traditionally the prerogative of religious and medical traditions) and the work of liberation (assumed to be the business of revolutionary movements for justice).
The popular works of Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls and Eric Berne are being embraced as major therapeutic systems, useful in pastoral-care work, but these thearapies, although popular, are demonstrably inadequate. They are no more scientific, or validated, than Emile Coué or Dianetics.
(ENTIRE BOOK) This book is written for the person, professional or lay, who wishes to apply religious resources more effectively to the problem of alcoholism. It deals with what to teach concerning alcoholism and how to handle the alcoholic who comes seeking counsel.
People create games and pass on through their games the rules and values and dreams of their real lives. Perhaps the real message of the Christian game is that as in every other age Christ is the one who exposes the violence and exploitation of our crassly commercial game of life and through his subsequent rejection by the powers-that-be dramatically illustrates his message of freedom to those who couldn’t see or hear it any other way.
The best response to the Religious Right is to acknowledge that it is correct in believing that secularism does not deserve to be our enforced national faith. But a fundamentalist and parochial Christianity is not the answer to our quest for a moral center.
The author analyzes the cultural and symbolic aspects of our lives which are deep sources of political motivation.
Fashion, entertainment and possessions are identity markers for the youth of our times. Churches need critical perspective on the influence of contemporary media and values of consumer capitalism. The authors of these three works document the pervasiveness of this consumer capitalism and media in defining young peoples' experiences.
The origin of Mother’s Day and its past, present, and future role in local churches.
It is precisely because these magazines are anti-sexual that they deserve the most searching kind of theological criticism. They foster a heretical doctrine of man, one at radical variance with the biblical view. For Playboy’s man, others—especially women—are for him. They are his leisure accessories, his playthings. For the Bible, man only becomes fully man by being for the other.
External graces seem to have guided young Dan Wakefield on his path from Indianapolis to a remarkably creative community in New York in the ‘50s.
Societies which cannot combine reverence for their symbols with freedom of revision must ultimately decay.
The projection of the Peter’s map shows all parts of the world in proportion to their true areas, while the Mercator Projection greatly distorts relative areas so that Europe, the Soviet Union, Canada and Greenland are shown as far larger relative to South America and Africa than they really are. Much controversy has surfaced over Peter’s map.
Media coverage of religion is not biased against religious faith; it is biased in favor of Enlightenment rationality.
In the late 20th Century, churches face a situation unprecedented since the Church's formation (comparable in magnitude to the era of the Christian apologists and the Reformation), in which most churches' thought and practice - and by implication God's revelation - are framed within and associated with communication and modes of thought of a past stage of cultural development. The author suggests implications for the church.
Brasher observes that media technologies play a formative role in human socialization such that the term "cyborg" is an apt metaphor for contemporary humanity. For traditional religions, whose canonical texts emerged from pastoral and agricultural societies, the challenges this change in the locus of human identity brings with it are profound. Yet the `cyborgs’ who fail to connect with the meaning goods of traditional religions show scant sign of abandoning religion en masse. Instead, they are fashioning popular culture religions out of the ingredients of their hyper-mediated environment. Brasher concludes the article with an examination of the insights and dangers that these emerging popular culture theologies present.
Society needs criticism that aspires to transcend immediate practical and political considerations. But today the rule "No conflict, no news" governs cultural criticism.
The story reviewed here is about the repudiating of vengeance. It is about matters of mystery, death, disorientation, incongruity, and the importance of a name.
The Christian knows that the dichotomy between "truth" as a linear narrative and "truth" as shaped by images and the "pictures inside our heads" must be bridged.
Starting from the proposition that the whole history of Western culture can be seen as a history of demythologization, Lane reviews Joseph Campbell’s espousal of what could be called a remythologization of culture. While critical of Western theology for its neglect of myth, Campbell’s irenic spirit encourages theologians to treasure their metaphors, their poetry, their universal stories.
Protestant cultural dominance has given way to a bland secular voice that offends no one but also fails to provide a religious worldview to help shape public discourse.
Campbell’s appeal derives from the unashamed romanticism of his theory of myth. His message is far more mystical than individualistic.
There is a remarkable sense in which the Super Bowl functions as a major religious festival for American culture, for the event signals a convergence of sports, politics and myth. Like festivals in ancient societies, which made no distinctions regarding the religious, political and sporting character of certain events, the Super Bowl succeeds in reuniting these now disparate dimensions of social life.
There is a close relationship between violence and sexism in our culture, as lived out in family life, the world of sports, and the economic and political scene.
Pac-Man is based on the biblical narrative, its story the same one Jesus told in a different way. Pac-Man is existence, captured in the bleeps and blips of the electronic board. It is, in short, life as we hear it in the Judeo-Christian tradition It is the most thoroughly theological of all the video games.
In opposing historic assumptions about mainstream Christianity, Willimon may be kicking an already comatose form of Christianity.
Patriotism of the type popularized by the fictional John Rambo and the real-life Ollie North is gravely threatening to a constitution democracy. What is required now in our society is to combine zeal with understanding, a process that calls for discussion, argument, debate and clarification.
The Travancore Pulaya mass conversion movement to Anglicanism in the latter half of 19th century was an expression of social protest. For thousands these conversions were protests heralding exit from the inhumanity of the caste system. These oppressed also saw the doors opening for them as a way out of the misery with the success of the anti-slave campaign championed by the missionaries.
There is both need and possibility for finding and documenting the rich resources from dalit culture that can help in theologizing. The author finds liberative motifs and highlights their utility for this challenge.
A probing of the religion of the Paraiyars in one community of the Dalits in India. This article is an investigation of the collective experience and voice of the Dalit community.
In the nineteenth century, the Indian "Tribals", such as the Malayarayans and Pulayas of Kerala, were called upon to face radical change. Issues related to preservation of their identity and space on the one hand, and dealing with the new world-view on the other, were vital to their sustained and meaningful continuance.
The emergence of Dalit Theology in the Indian context and suggestions for its future directions. The term "Dalit" comes from the Sanskrit "dal". It means burst, split, broken or torn asunder, downtrodden, scattered, crushed and destroyed. In popular parlance "Dalit" refers to the "untouchable" population of India.
Dalit-liberative hermeneutics is scientific and praxis-oriented. The Psalms of Lament enhances and empowers the Dalits in their struggles.
Dr. Clarke discusses the problems facing the cultural outcasts (Dalits) of India, giving a Biblical perspective concerning their plight.
Dr. Clarke discusses the problems facing the cultural outcasts (Dalits) of India, giving a Biblical perspective concerning their plight.
The author reviews a book on Darwin by John Haught, who seeks not simply to provide a theology in dialogue with evolutionary theory, but a theology of evolution. Haught takes a middle path in the dialogue between science and religion.
John Polkinghorne believes that classical Darwinian, despite its great insights into the struggle for survival, goes too far in its explanatory principle of almost universal scope. Theology can lay better claim to being the true Theory of Everything.
A new generation of anti-evolutionists has arisen based on the perceived inadequacies of Darwin's theory. Although certain elements of the positions of the three books reviewed here may warrant further consideration, they are neither very convincing nor particularly original.
What the liberals do not see is that the neo-Darwinist account of how we got here is not much stronger than that of the evolutionists. Neo-Darwinism has unfortunate psychological consequences. Yet it is being taught as “gospel truth.” The lip service being paid to science’s fallibility does little to lessen neo-Darwinism’s impact. The upshot is that the civil liberties of those who disagree with the theory are being compromised.
Science has tried to cover up thoughts about purpose, or teleology. In Darwin and Design Michael Ruse argues that biology should not turn its back altogether on "final causes."
God, we hope, will one day emerge triumphant over evil -- though, on the way to that glad day, God sometimes takes a beating.
Our need to be there in the future, to be "rewarded," vitiates our acts and turns them into ego trips instead of experiences of loving and living. We need not only to affirm death not only as inevitable but also as a valid and joyous part of the natural process of which birth, living and death are equally important.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A reformulation of the conventional notions of life after death. The author asserts that in God, the value of human existence is guaranteed and the worth of all those for whom one has cared is assured and becomes an abiding and unshakable occasion for joy.
Review of a series aired on PBS: On Our Own Terms. Bill Moyers’s series offers poignant portraits and many helpful suggestions about ways in which our dying and the dying of those around us can be grace-filled.
Clergy are often among those guilty of making comments to patients and family members that are more harmful than helpful, the most maddening of these is "What has happened to you is God’s will." Clergy must become much more involved in the healing ministry.
A person with a progressive terminal disease faces a unique situation -- one which calls for a new look at traditional assumptions about the motivation for choosing suicide. There is no explicit prohibition of suicide anywhere in the canonical texts of Christianity. This choice might be found to be reasoned, appropriate, altruistic, sacrificial, and loving.
Unpopular though the message is -- especially in our death-denying culture -- it is important to be aware of one’s own mortality. The message of eternal life in God should not be proclaimed in such a way as to obscure death as the teacher of wisdom.
The author reviews and evaluates three recent books on assisted suicide.
The author reviews a book on suicide. A persuasive argument is given that "most suicides, although by no means all, can be prevented." How? Through the proper diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. Our failure to provide this care shows "how little value our society puts on saving the lives of those who are in such despair as to want to end them."
The presence of the dead at their funerals ups the existential, emotional and spiritual ante in a way that virtual or symbolic memorials fail to do.
Review of a book that ranges from a light-hearted survey of myths in which mortality is preferred to endless eternity, to a serious study of Locke and Spinoza.
It appears that we indeed can hasten or delay death’s call. But should we? Does our dominion extend over our entire body? Death is the bittersweet end which is beginning, that judgment which is mercy, that terror which is peace.
Unlike Dr. Kübler-Ross, the Christian pastor and chaplain must accept death for what it is -- the implacable foe, "the last enemy to be destroyed."
During the past two decades there has been a steady increase in America's support for the right of persons with incurable diseases to end their own lives. Greeley's research implies that religious imagery, whether persons see God as a "spouse" rather than "master," results in the former seeing morality as a personal matter and the latter seeing morality as a matter of moral law. Another reason for the shift in attitudes is an American increase in tolerance for the moral views of other persons. In this 1991 article, Greely does not address the current debate on physician-assisted suicide.
To take one's own life before life involuntarily leaves us is a decision we are free to make, but it is a choice that is ultimately selfish.
Is it "right" for a Christian, under any circumstance, to take her or his own life? If there are such circumstances, how does one go about identifying them? How can we go about preventing such circumstances from occurring?
Complex moral decisions made with the counsel of family, friends and medical professionals are of quite a different order from the lonely judgment reached by someone for whom life is "no longer worth living."
(ENTIRE BOOK) This book gives important insights into the theology of death. It deal with the impact of our death upon God, and how God in turn impacts our death with profound meaning.
The mainline churches have not, in code language, recognized the expiration of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment rationalism. The evangelicals have not noticed its expiration either -- an irony.
The carefully nurtured fiction that the locus of authority in the ABC resides in 6,300 autonomous’ congregations has become increasingly difficult to maintain. The author gives some "bare bones" suggestions concerning what the local associations of churches should do.
Russian Orthodoxy is deeply suspicious of people who promise social transformation.
The Unitarian Universalist church body’s Web site upholds a belief that "personal experience, conscience and reason should be the final authorities in religion. Underlying its actions is the belief that "ethical living is the supreme witness of religion."
The Disciples and the Churches of Christ’s seemingly separate futures will in no small measure depend on evaluations of the vitality and limitations of their diverse legacies.
America has been undergoing some sort of religious revival, but one that has not led to prosperity for most of the denominations. The challenge to churches, both left and right, will be in finding the balance between institutional self-preservation or self-assertiveness on the one hand and the act of living with open hands and hearts in service of others to interpret the surrounding world on the other.
Within such denominations as the United Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church, there exist important and influential groups going counter to denominational leadership.
For all of us to be church, we must be clear in theological terms about why we must separate or why we should stay together before we determine how to separate or how to stay together.
The United Methodist Church has traditionally accepted pluralism, but the acceptace of a diversity of view is now under attack.
Southern Baptist conservatives won key presidential elections year after year, and after a final conservative presidential victory in 1989 in New Orleans, moderates gave up the battle and began taking steps toward forming their own moderate organizations, such as the Cooperative Fellowship.
Rather than disappearing, denominational boundaries have been reconstructed in ways that seem to keep them open and connected to a larger world. Rather than a strict denominationalism, distinctions are based more on ritual and doctrine than on social divisions.
Despite the problems confronting the Russian Orthodox Church today, and the issues that cloud its past, many positive things are happening.
Holiness and Pentecostal folk are busily engaged in creating all those agencies and patterns of church life that their maverick forebears found too confining.
While the West has struggled to come to terms with the relationship between modern forms of inquiry and ancient church dogma, the Orthodox seem to march on, untroubled by modern historical consciousness.
The author looks at Methodism as an international enterprise but at the same time, he penetrates beneath the surface of the Methodist institutions to grasp it’s heart, something that is elusive and important.
The Mormons inhabit a radically different world from the rest of Christendom. Never-the-less, without accepting the work at face value, it is possible to regard the Book of Mormon as the product of an extraordinary and profound act of the religious imagination.
The Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church of America must address themselves seriously to the schism which has marred the lives of both for more than a century. The great thing that has happened in the Reformed churches recently is a new awareness of themselves and of their responsibilities and their possibilities.
There is evidence that the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA)’s very real stylistic freedom is accompanied by a homogenous substance of beliefs and values. The most striking fact about the denomination is that nine out of ten of its members are “converts,” having grown up religiously somewhere else. Given the lack of membership growth, it is clear that UUA churches are in some sense “revolving doors.” Most of the newcomers have left some kind of liberal Protestantism behind, but we do not know where those who leave go next.
Transcendental Meditation is not a compromise with one’s own personal faith or religious convictions. It gives additional release from pressure and stress which allows our minds, bodies and spirits to soar to greater heights than previously experienced.
An overview of the origins and beliefs of New Thought, a religious movement growing out of 19th century Transcendentalism and mental healing practices. New Thought emphasizes the practical application of spiritual principles to support personal health, happiness, and enlightenment, and an increasing commitment to social justice issues.
In the past several decades there has been an increase in conversions to Orthodoxy. Although migration is small, the author looks at some of the reasons for this among both liberals and evangelicals.
Review of a book on the differences between Catholic and Protestant thought. The reformation sprang from a theological disagreement so fundamental that schism was inevitable and of which no amount of good will could have settled.
An Episcopal Church quarrel over the ordination of women, the Book of Common Prayer, who gets the property in separation and the division of memorial gifts.
The author considers the schisms within the Presbyterian Church. He urges the different sides to continue to talk to each other, and even to argue passionately with each other about crucial issues, but within the framework of a commitment to God.
As long as Presbyterians continue to club the other into submission with constitutional amendments, judicial cases and economic boycotts, we have no word for a world full of murderous divisions, most of them cloaked in religion.
It is not drugs but drug laws that have made drug dealing profitable.
The church and its leaders are among the afflicted, if not the addicted. Turning to the church for help, people affected by substance abuse have often put their trust in dysfunctional people and places.
The author argues that we should not address the problem of illicit drugs as a war to be one, but as an epidemic to be checked, a disease to be cured.
The destruction of the earth is prompting churches to explore their role in protecting the environment. This article explores the theological and active roles of several denominations involved in ecological activity.
An overview of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement. The author,"Dick B.," covers the biblical roots of the movement, its Twelve Step recovery program, and its emphasis on God.
The author reviews a book about sex, drugs and cheap labor and concludes that if Christians are to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves, some of that wise innocence needs to be used to critique what the market is selling, to expose its false promises and to return to practices of faith that offer more.
Garrett Hardin and the "lifeboat moralists" fail to see the connection between affluence in the U.S. and starvation in Third World countries. Hardin incorrectly holds Third World nations themselves largely responsible for their desperate plight.
A sacramental approach to material reality, such as found in the sacraments, can give us a deep respect for the environment and its fulfillment of the divine purpose.
The author shows the intimate relationship between wilderness and spirituality.
It seems doubtful that faith mandates a system of life that appears to require inhumane slaughter of creatures, uneconomical and exploitative uses of land, disregard of personal health, and ignorance of the probability that the key to world peace lies in the conscious cultivation of a practical philosophy of reverence for all that lives.
In Genesis 1:1-2:4, God first creates the heavens and the earth, then the plants, fishes, birds and all the other animals. To repress our sympathy for animals leads to an all the more destructive disrespect for them and for all of creation.
This is primarily a religio-historical essay, not "biblical theology." Both the New Testament and the Old speak the same message, that the whole created order is God’s work and thus is good. God’s care extends to the most insignificant of animals, and to all living things.
Nations have surrendered much of their power to transnational corporations. These TNCs have opposed the growth of the developing nations in favor of growth of a world-wide market. . They are constituted for the purpose of making a profit for their stockholders. Leaving the consequences for the environment entirely in their hands appears dangerous, and thus far the effects have in fact been very bad . The author believes that power instead should be in the hands of those who have othergoals than economic gain in view as part of their primary job description. Governments, including both legislators and administrators, are supposed to aim at the common good. Cobb advocates a massive effort to return power to the people and their elected representatives.
The author argues for what he calls "the agrarian point of view" as regards the creation: It means taking seriously the Biblical mandate to care for the creation.
Christians must offer practical, workable guidelines for the value of some lives over others. The interests of different organisms are often in conflict.
The author takes an absolute stand on the unethical treatment of non-human animals. For him it is categorically wrong to use animals in such areas as science, sport, recreational hunting, trapping and certain uses in agriculture.
The author makes the argument that in the struggle to save and preserve the environment, the church's leadership is absolutely mandatory.
The mechanistic world view, imported to Africa, has been largely responsible for many eco-crises faced by Africa and has led us to the global crises we face today. Community must be based in a consciousness that all creatures are part of all others, that humans share a common destiny with nature.
God’s covenant as depicted in the Bible consists of promises not only to humans but to all of creation. By showing the relevance of the concept of covenant to the crises now faced by life on earth, Granberg-Michaelson calls for preserving the integrity of creation.
Our inability to conserve energy is likely to destroy the earth’s ecosystem. As the future of food, energy supplies, capital goods and mineral ores grow increasingly scarce, the idea of taking resources by military force will be on the minds of many nations. What kind of world do we want to leave to our children’s children?
If you drive an SUV for one year, it’s equivalent to leaving the door to the frige open for six years, or you bathroom light on for three decades. There’s no symbol much clearer in our time than SUVs. Stop driving global warming. If we can’t do even that, we’re unlikely ever to do much.
Pinches reviews a book by Larry Rasmussen in which Rasmussen proposes "sustainability" as the correct goal for human interaction with the earth. But he also notes that this description is prone to abuse, for it has been too easily twined with expansionism.
French approaches the ecological issues facing the world from the theological position that the ecological destruction occurring is evidence of God's judgment on our misuse of creation. Citing books by Al Gore and Bill McKibben to support his critique of our consumer-oriented culture, French emphasizes the crucial role churches can and should play in sensitizing us to the need for sacrifice if we are to reverse the destruction.
The economists believe a prosperous future awaits all our descendants, if only we will be patient and stay the course. The ecologists believe that continuing on our present course is a sure recipe for disaster. Perhaps China can help us find a way through this dilemma.
The religious impulse of the ecological movement explains both its popularity -- it satisfies a basic human need -- and the uncertainty of its future. Since we can’t even guarantee that enlightened egotism will save the world from a nuclear doomsday, what will prevent the earth from turning into a gigantic feedlot for 40 or more billion people?
Ecological theologians have, as a rule, taken seriously the predictions of crisis advanced by responsible scientists. Political theologians, on the other hand, have tended either to ignore ecological problems altogether or to regard them as expressions of unresolved political or economic problems.
Seldom are the complexities of energy issues seen in moral terms, and seldom does energy appear high on the church’s ethical agenda, especially within the local congregation. The Energy Study Process of the National Council of Churches has been a fortunate exception to this lack of attention.
The massive problem of global warming will be helped only by massive action. We need to make it clear that any politician whose plan doesn’t call for cutting carbon by half’ or more simply hasn’t understood the situation -- or has understood it and sold out.
Human dominion over the natural world must not be taken as an unqualified license to kill or inflict suffering on animals.
The struggle for an ecological theology that is both biblical and fully in keeping with our cultural and ecological crisis is outlined by the author and the books reviewed.
The rise of corporate farming and the disappearance of the family farm are destroying local communities and economies. These developments also cause soil erosion, and reduce the quality of the food we eat.
McFague identifies four images that ecologically attuned Christians might find helpful: God as mother, as lover, as friend, and finally, God as embodied by the universe itself.
What is needed in theological reflection about environmental issues is neither reconstructionist nor apologist, but rather is a "revisionist" approach in the tradition of orthodox theology.
The greatest strain on the environment and, hence, one of the major factors in the growth of world poverty, is the still-increasing rate of consumption and environmental degradation taking place in the rich countries of the north.
The value of non-Christian perspectives of the created order of nature. An Indian Orthodox point of view.
Dr. Williams writes about the violence accompanying the production of electricity -- past and present -- and insists that ways apart from that violence must be found.
Much theology rejects the earth as our hospitable habitat, our home, but the environmental needs of our times require us to accept this very earth and universe as hospitable habitats and our home.
The relevance of a dialogue with other religions -- in this instance a dialogue with Zen Buddhism -- to a deepening of Christian ecological consciousness. Buddhism can stimulate us to imagine that the world is our body and that, even more directly, it is God’s.
Dr. Cobb reviews a book about global warming: Christians are called to worship God, not wealth. Surely we should put the long-term wellbeing of the earth and all its inhabitants above the enrichment of the rich.
Any ecological ethic which takes into account both God and humanity must begin with the rejection of unbridled human sovereignty over the earth. Here are a few ethical considerations: the obligation not to exhaust nonrenewable resources, the imperative to provide accessible replacements, the necessity to improve our heritage modestly and carefully, the greater responsibility of the advantaged to improve that which exists and to share, and the obligation to refrain from excessive consumption and waste.
The biblical understanding of nature inheres in a human ethical vision, a vision of ecojustice, in which the enmity or harmony of nature with humanity is part of the human historical drama of good and evil.
No mere dreamer, Soleri has planned -- and has begun to build -- cities that do not sacrifice our relation to nature for the sake of urban values. He calls his elements of architecture and ecology Arcology.
Where will nuclear waste go? It will have to be buried in somebody’s backyard. The bigger question is whether we should allow contemporary affluence to become dependent on fission power. If we fail to come up with a satisfactory disposal program, the answer has to be no.
It is the author's thesis that God created a world of great abundance. If we share, there is enough for all.
The earth, in a very real sense, is our mother. We are born from this mother, from Gaia; we are extensions of the earth and the cosmos of which it is a part. This means that our conceptualizing and our spirituality also extend from the spiritual dimension of the cosmos and the earth.
(BOOK EXCERPTS) The introduction and three excerpts from The Splendor of Creation, A Biblical Ecology by Ellen Bernstein. The book is comprised of 31 ecologically oriented essays inspired by the 31 verses of Genesis 1:1- Genesis 2:3, the first Creation story. The excerpts are on the Mystery of Creation, The Gift of Time, and Genesis 1:28: Dominion.
In perverse imitations of God the creator of life, we have become potential uncreators. We have the knowledge and the power to destroy ourselves and much of the rest of life.
The seriousness of the ecological crisis creates major new theological challenges. Dr. Cobb summarizes the features of the inherited theology that block attention to what is going on in the natural environment, then suggests how these obstacles can be removed. Finally he inquires into whether Christianity not only can cease to be an obstacle to the needed response but also can become a positive contributor.
The vision of lions lying down with lambs represents a gross misunderstanding of harmony in nature. Nature provides self-limiting factors which we must take into account.
Is the human species viable, or are we careening toward self-destruction, carrying with us our fellow earthlings? Can we move from an anthropocentric to a biocentric vision? How can we help activate the intercommunion of all living and nonliving members of the earth community in the emerging ecological period?
Redeeming the land and redeeming humanity are not separate tasks; they are interdependent. When people are brought back together with the land, there is a possibility of a careful, loving, productive and saving relationship between them. So long as the land is held by corporations and machines, this possibility does not exist.
Several theological models in response to the ecocrisis are worthy of our attention. This article was written in anticipation of an "Earth Summit" that took place in June of 1992.
The church has often seen nature as a window to God. But with few exceptions it has been tamed nature -- the pastoral and bucolic that humans have fenced and framed. The wilder corners of creation, bearing no imprint of humankind, have been allowed to slip into disrepair.
It is incumbent on those of us who are in position to influence the thinking of faithful people to make clear that the neo-liberal economic thought that informs most current top-down development, riding roughshod over communities, and reshaping the lives and thinking of hundreds of millions of people, is based on assumptions that are antithetical to ours. We should articulately and unequivocally withdraw moral support from these practices.
The commitment of corporations to short-term profits, and of ordinary people to get ahead economically, are facts of life with which those of us concerned with the sustainability of human society must contend. This is largely a moral issue, but not entirely so.
A declaration by an international conference held April 12-24 , 2005 in Kericho, Kenya, regarding globalisation and ways to promote ethical, moral and spiritual values for the common good.
While our nation’s elite have celebrated the prosperity brought by globalizing the economy, working-class wages have declined.
The author suggests several economic policies that Christians might well pursue during this time of prosperity.
In embarrassment the churches have lapsed into silence about the Protestant work ethic.
Economics should serve the good of all people, and should be based on and reflect the moral values upheld by the great religions. If these moral values are to have a practical impact then religious thinkers and economists need to work together on policies which embody these moral values.
Stackhouse reviews John Cobb, Sustainability: Economics, Ecology, and Justice, and challenges Cobb's activist pro-ecological stance as overly naturalistic, pessimistic, nostalgic and anti-development. He proposes instead that the central demand of our time is to use the technology that is now on the horizon to transform nature in ways that enhance the global structures of a "graceful, cosmopolitan civilization able to serve the whole of humanity."
If the Christian church has something helpful to say to the present, complex economic world, how can it put together needed words and ideas that are more than cliches? Roger Shinn, writing from personal experience, responds to criticisms of the process, demonstrates the pitfalls of the bargaining that goes on in drafting groups, shows how hard it is to move from conviction to relevance, and tells why the Catholic bishops have often been more effective in creating documents that lead to lively controversy and educational excitement.
Among the causes of poverty in the U.S. is the concentration of land and resources in fewer and fewer hands. There is growing awareness that neither private nor public charity is sufficient in dealing with poverty, joblessness and homelessness.
The tragedy of unemployment can devastate families. Wife and child abuse increase. Divorce rates go up. Patterns of family authority break down. Watching their unemployed fathers or mothers, children give up on their own futures. The work ethic and its hope are crushed, and street crime flourishes.
The Biblical history of the Old and the New Testaments, and church history testify that the people of God live within the process of history. Furthermore, our faith that God created the whole world and all its peoples therein dictates that they are all people(s) of God. Therefore, it is necessary that theology discern the political economy of the people of God. We cannot relegate the Christian faith to an other-worldly life.
Dr. Cobb claims that economism causes social and environmental violence. It does so by creating a society oriented to the increase of economic activity through the market, which tends to concentrate wealth among a few while destroying many small players. For example, the economic policies that drive millions of people off their land and out of their traditional villages are violent ones. Cobb suggest several remedies, including the idea is that when we purchase anything, we should pay the full cost, including all human, social and ecological costs.
The author critiques the assumptions underlying the dominant market-place economic theory and proposes different assumptions which take into account the fact that people live in communities.
In this book review, John Cobb argues for an "earthist" rather than an "economist" approach to poverty by the World Bank.
As the negative consequences of free trade become more evident, ethicists can begin to ask more critical questions. What does "free trade" really mean? What are its positive values? Are these so important as to justify support despite the losses it entails?
The author reviews two books on foreign aid. Though the public wants the government to help end poverty and injustice, it increasingly doubts that aid really helps, and believes that sometimes it hurts..
The World Trade Organization gives too little attention to: 1. the historical change of the nature and role of trade; 2. The excessive power and influence of corporations; 3. The costs of growth.
The churches like to take what they call a "prophetic stance" toward economic and political issues. denouncing injustice and calling for change. But perhaps their first order of business should be repentance for having helped to foster a national moral environment that features a laissez-faire approach to moral decision making, that serves in turn to perpetuate economic irresponsibility.<
'Poortalk’ -- that peculiar affliction that shows up whenever middle-class conversation turns to economic issues -- focuses our attention on ourselves blinding us to the needs of others. Although our standard of living has doubled in the past three decades, we bemoan the near-impossibility of trying to make ends meet at today’s prices.
Although it is difficult to explain how moral decisions are made, responsibility and accountability for them cannot be assigned to the institution of business in general or to any particular business. Responsibility and accountability are part of the process of judgment, and judgment is a characteristic reserved for real people. The personal value systems of all those who are involved in business are, then, crucial.
The author asks: what place is there for religion and religious values in the global economy, and what should be the relationship between economics and theology? He emphasizes the importance of religion in our quest to find solutions to the deepening crises of injustice and inequality in the globalized economy.
A review of Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, by Kevin Phillips. Carefully scripted public relations campaigns orchestrated by the White House will not undo the damage done by wealth’s undue influence over the nation’s political processes.
The author analyzes the ethics of international trade and concludes that we should withdraw support from the move toward transnational trade and seek to strengthen the ability of nations, especially in the Third World, to control their own affairs. He believes that what Christians value can be attained better when national governments, more or less representative of their people, make their own decisions about trade.
The author argues that simply forgiving the debts of Third World countries may be healing the wounds of their peoples too lightly--and just putting money in the hands of corrupt elites.
What is the biblical view of God’s will for economic relations among his people? For an answer, we shall look at the jubilee passage in Leviticus, at the new community of Jesus’ disciples, at the first church in Jerusalem, and at the Pauline collection.
Economy cannot be separated from government and society. Political economy is thus a moral and institutional as well as a technical term. The democratization of the economy would limit the harshness of the labor market, give everyone who works a stake in the enterprise he or she works in and even in the economy at large, thus reducing both the anxiety and the cynicism that are rampant in our present economic life.
The churches’ ability to teach the ethic of eco-justice to the public depends on the assessment we make of the religious and ethical significance of our public traditions -- in particular, the civic tradition of participatory democracy.
A disturbing new economic study sees a coming confrontation over the distribution of wealth. Fred Hirsch, in his book, Social Limits to Growth, gives successful insight in fixing the limits beyond which most people should not expect to improve their lot under a market economy.
The present form of globalization is not sustainable. In some areas it cannot last more than a few decades. The transition from an unsustainable to a sustainable form of globalization will not be easy. The longer we wait to begin that process of transition, the more painful the change will be.
Both efficiency in production and fairness in distribution are necessary values for an economy, but neither is sufficient in itself. Clergy need to help business people see that it is they themselves, with their tax-deductible mortgage interest payments and low-interest student loans, who constitute America’s great welfare class.
Economics is perceived as a science concerned with scarcity, competition, production, consumption and the satisfying of unlimited desires. There is no reference to abundance, co-operation, sustainability, justice, compassion, humanity, morality or spirituality. No wonder it has brought us such a bitter harvest!
The cause of poverty is an inevitable consequence of the maldistribution of wealth and the lack of a true sense of the common good.
If we as Christians are serious about justice, the time to talk about Zambia’s debt and interest dilemma is past. Zambia’s massive debt is contributing to its death. I hope our voices will be heard on the side of life.
To be for free trade is to be for the transfer of power from the political sector to the economic one. When put in this way, it becomes clear that the issues are complex. It is not evident that in all cases and in all respects governments should surrender their powers.
Since even the critics of GATT and of the agreement with Mexico have accepted free trade as an ideal, the real issue has not yet been discussed. Few have asked the fundamental questions: Is free trade desirable in general? When trade is "free," who is "free" from whom? What are the results of free trade, and do we favor them?
The author shows that the GNP is inadequate as an index of real growth. Instead, he proposes an Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, and dvocates a new kind of economy, one based on the needs of the community, and suggests several steps to bring it about.
Economic history makes clear that openness to the global marketplace is a significant determiner of a nation’s economic well-being.
Cobb describes the shift from nationalism to economism and his criticisms: people do not have an adequate role in determining the system and policies that shape their lives; the aims of corporations to grow and make more profits are inimical to the wellbeing of the natural world, and they have not reduced poverty. The solution lies in the development of what the author calls Earthism, which began to take form at the International NGO Forum near Rio in 1992. Since then at every United Nations meeting, the NGOs have built on that platform and enriched it. He believes this is God's work, and Christians have a responsibility to take part in it.
Christians must seek unity for intrinsic, not strategic, reasons.
The traditional ecumenical goal of ‘organic Unity’ has fallen on bad days -- largely because it is thought to call for a needless suppression of diversity, achieved through a generation or more of ecclesiastical self-preoccupation. Considering the infinite complexities of the problem, a covenant to accomplish conciliar unity rather than the actual realization of the goal might be the most likely accomplishment.
Ellingsen notes that numerous ecumenical breakthroughs resulted from the Second Vatican Council, but mutual respect does not always bridge the gap between the mainline churches with their primary commitment to contextual theology, and fundamentalists as well as evangelicals with their prevailing commitment to biblical authority. Both sides, however, have been coming to a growing appreciation of each other's concerns, with mainline denominations placing more emphasis on biblical hermeneutics and theological conservatives sounding the call to contextualize theology.
This essay provides a perspective for a new ecumenical movement as a movement of ONE in the OIKOS TOU THEOU. It requires discernment on the signs of times, and a renewed biblical reflection, taking the Biblical vision as the sources of our messianic imagination.
The appearance of the Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry agreement of the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission, the theological consensus statement of the Consultation on Church Union (COCU), and the proliferation of local ecumenical efforts in countless places offer new possibilities for effective unity during this decade.
Dr. von Sinner explores the significance of the Ecumenical Movment from the perspective of the Commission of the Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches. He discuses the dialogue with the trinitarian theology of two eminent theologians from two very different contexts. Leonardo Boff and Raimon Panikkar.
Consolidation and centralization would serve to reduce costs and increase productivity in urban church life as well as in the business world, but denominations have long resisted this trend: they continue to maintain numbers of small, weak churches -- "loss operations" that drain the financial surplus from larger, healthier congregations.
Responding to God in the midst of this world includes public praise and thanksgiving that Christ is served in every place where people are clothed, housed, fed, and enabled to lead more dignified human lives. God is intensively at work in antireligious China, Cuba and Mozambique.
The ecumenical movement calls us not so much to find a common denominator as it does to join hands and to pledge ourselves to walk side by side, to enrich one another by all that can be brought out of our separate pasts, and to ask forgiveness for the blindness that for so long has kept us divided.
Dr. Long suggests that Protestants need the Papacy. 1. Because we must have something to protest against. 2. For the sake of the unity of the church. 3. For the sake of truth grounded in love.
When the peoples of the world cry out to god, are there Christian grounds for supposing they are addressing the true God?
This article appeared in The Christian Century, December 14, 2004, pp. 28-32. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscriptions information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.
Today social and ethical issues, such as racism, poverty, hunger, ecology, education, sexuality, seem to many people to be more important than "unity". Contextual theologies, justice causes, the voices of women and of the global South enrich, but also challenge, traditional theological thinking and styles.
Ecumenism is now in the hands of the evangelical and Pentecostal movement on the one hand and the Roman Catholic and Orthodox on the other, the polar opposites of the mainline folks, yet there is a measure of agreement on where and how the apostolic tradition is to be located and retrieved in the affirmations regarding the Trinity, or that Jesus Christ is true god and true man.
Amy Frykholm reviews a successful high school curriculum that teaches students how to build strong dating relationships in marriage preparation.
Using a Girl Scout survey of the moral and spiritual perspectives of American youth, Heischman cites data that indicate youth are quite religious and moral in outlook, but have difficulty connecting their faith with issues of character. He suggests churches need to help youth develop a moral language through discussions of character and more effective modeling directly with young people by youth leaders and especially pastors.
To a family and children inescapably caught in literalistic Biblical interpretation: Children are amazingly resilient, even to stories of violence, especially when from a secure home. Stories are part of our culture and need to be known -- especially Biblical stories -- even in their violence. Your (liberal) presence in such an environment will have an impact, even if totally outnumbered.
No longer can we assume that the educational understandings that have informed us, or the theological foundations that have undergirded our programs are adequate for today. The author suggests some major modifications in educational assumptions.
The Da Vinci Code -- both novel and the movie -- even though false, offer an exciting story which is a big help in understanding Christianity.
The consequences of much of theological education are found in the dispersion and fragmentation of the curriculum and an individualistic understanding of the ministry.
The authors provide a "work session" to help the reader identify what theology is, why it is important and how it is done. Case study illustrations.
The author hears in current serious fiction a whisper of that still, small voice for which our faith has taught us to listen.
We must help teens think about, practice and experience the theological details that make Christianity distinct. Living these details of the gospel is not supposed to be easy, or necessarily safe, but it’s what Christians do.
The Sunday school must be freed from five stereotypes: 1. The Sunday school is an organism with a life of its own that cannot be changed. 2. “Sunday school,” is only for children. 3. The intellectual level of Sunday school content is superficial. 4. The Sunday school is characterized by the use of mindless methodology. 5. The purpose of the Sunday school is to teach the Bible.
The authors summarize the apologetic stories of a number of writers including Collins, D’Souza, Keller and Wright. These operate from very different disciplines and social roles, and in all of it, character precedes argument, for it seems all arguments fail if Christianity does not create generous-hearted people.
A Christianity without Christian formation is no match for the powerful social forces at work within our society. If it is to fulfill its function as the place where Christians are formed, the church must acknowledge its changed status and must now compete, in an open market, with other claimants for the truth.
The author shares vivid recollections of experiences in Vacation Bible School and Sunday School from her girlhood in a Methodist church.
It is wishful thinking to believe that the educational system can assume the responsibility of passing to the next generation the central and binding values, as well as the moral and ethical concepts, that set us free to be who we can be.
A new look at the purpose and method of confirmation, along with some appropriate suggestions that Willimon has put into practice in his own ministry.
Coming from the position that doing theology is not so much a matter of picking a system of thought as it is acquiring a way of life and a perspective for understanding all of life, Anthony B. Robinson reports on his experience of teaching a class on theology for his parishioners based on the idea that the main business of theology is to make sense of one’s life.
Truthiness – the notion that what "feels true" must be treatd as true – helps account for the extraordinary success of The Da Vinci Code.
Some educators think it is too late, that the church school is dead, that the church itself may be dying. Others are convinced that the positive signs point to a future of enormous potential. The question is not which point of view is true, but which one we should accept, and then, with God’s help, try to make it come true.
Youth ministry will become what it should be when the churches start asking what the gospel means in our time, in our own neighborhoods, and starts practices that build a distinct way of life.
ENTIRE BOOK The problem of communicating Christian teaching -- especially the use of language in bible study. How can we say what we mean about God so that our assertions will be understood, accepted, and responded to?
Despite all evidence to the contrary, the author does not see a place of significance for the Sunday school in the future. It is too bound to the past to meet the needs of a new age. He has a different vision of the future of the church and religious education.
If there cannot be three cheers for the Sunday school as a thriving institution, or two cheers for its record, let there be at least one cheer for the ways the grace of God lives on in it.
This article reviews three teaching orders: 1. Progressive Lectures and teaching materials by James Efird. 2. The Web-based curriculum, The Thoughtful Christian, written by an enormous diverse group of respected scholars. 3. The work of the New Monastics which cuts against the grain of conventional wisdom.
Education, like physical growth itself, is the product of two dissimilar aspects: 1. Experience -- in the form of words, actions, sights and sounds -- to be collected and funneled into an individual. 2. Time -- in which to sort out and reject and organize the information, to select and integrate what is significant and relate it to the previous integrations in one’s life.
That churches are not doing what it takes to make faith mature is the sobering finding of an important new study of mainline denominations. ‘Nothing matters more than Christian education. Done well, it has the potential -- more than any other area of congregational life -- to promote faith and loyalty.
Ecumenism as viewed by one who served as President of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.
Review of a new book by Randall Balmer. Balmer is ambivalent about evangelicalism; he criticizes it while defending it against unjustified attacks by others.
Christians may have to reconcile themselves to a growing misperception that Christianity is but one among the many living religions; worse yet, they may see their commitment to it increasingly detested and persecuted.
The central biblical doctrines is that God is on the side of the poor and the oppressed. Tragically, evangelical theology has largely ignored this doctrine, and thus our theology has been unbiblical -- indeed, even heretical -- on this important point.
William C. Placher’s Unapologetic Theology is an impressive analysis of revisionist and postliberal theologies.
Pentecostals emphasize the charismatic and missiological components of Luke’s theological vision particularly as found in the book of Acts. The gifts of prophecy, tongues and the interpretation of tongues are of particular importance.
Evangelical involvement in the present public dialogue must be characterized by a kindness and gentleness that is fitting for creatures who are on their way to the eschaton. Theological reflection requires that we relate all the information we have about God to all that falls within the scope of human concern.
Nothing can more securely anchor our commitment to the struggle for peace and justice than the presence of the risen Jesus in our life. The risen Jesus is powerful evidence that even that last terror, death itself, will be but for a moment.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A straightforward exposition of the basic concepts of traditional Christian faith, divided into thirty-five brief chapters.
To the post-conservative evangelicals, liberalism and conservatism are both unfruitfully obsessed with "the modern mind." For post-conservatives, God is not an equal-opportunity savior, but he never leaves himself without a witness in nature and culture. The post-conservatives are critical of their conservative colleagues' fascination with "epistemological certainty" and "theological systems."
Animal protectionist groups lobby for the banning of wildlife trapping because of its perceived cruelty and harm to the environment. This paper evaluates those claims and suggests that Christians carefully consider all the data before adopting an anti-trapping stance.
Oden tells how his fascination with modernity has been replaced with a fascination for the thought of the early church fathers. He is a proponent of what he calls paleo-orthodoxy.
The connection between modern fundamentalism and popular culture becomes evident in the language of those who boast that they have met the Lord, that they have a personal relationship with Jesus. The “700 Club” and its members are very much in and of the world. But they should be warned that if religion becomes a hit and God becomes a pal, then the world will cancel the one when it becomes boring and snub the other when he becomes demanding.
A certain hermeneutical naïveté mars the otherwise admirable consciousness-raising that is now occurring among evangelicals in the social and political arena. One of the paramount tenets of the fundamentalist movement in the past was its individualistic piety, its stubborn withdrawal from the social and political concerns.
How can one deal firmly yet humanely with those people who feel called to push doorbells? They ask: "Do you believe in the inerrancy of the scriptures." How can the scriptures be inerrant when it contains so many errors?
There appears to be an inherent incompatibility between Christian evangelicalism and the idea of a university, for only an "open" style of Christian commitment can affirm a university's commitment to free inquiry.
What is needed is a quantum-jump in the sanctification of the minds of mainline Protestants, involving repentance after 200 years of drifting from the Reformation response to the Bible. We also need a repentance among evangelicals, dealing with their rejection of genuinely biblical values upheld by their theological opponents.
A review of a book on fundamentalism by James Barr. Barr writes of the "religious basis" of fundamentalism, surveys its attitudes toward such diverse phenomena as politics, science, culture, Zionism and Roman Catholicism; catalogues such variations as Pentecostalism, Calvinist and Arminian conflicts, and millennialism; and probes its anti-ecumenical and anticritical ethos. He considers fundamentalism a pathological condition of Christianity.
Behind evangelical support for Israel lies a long tradition of Christian thinking about the millennium. Not Muslim persecution but the brutal Israeli occupation is causing Palestinian Christians to leave the Holy Land.
The very individuals who have done so much to renew the social conscience of the evangelical community have also been those who have rejected politics as a means of fulfilling social obligation. The evangelical community seeks to leap from piety to practice with little reflection on guiding principles and practical goals.
Something’s happening in the religious corner of the book world -- something that reflects religion’s prominence in public life, and the generating engine is the evangelical community.
Genuine dialogue, leaving open the possibility of mutual change, is by definition unknown to fundamentalists. "We will talk to you, but never actually with you." It is that incipient sect mentality that has tended to plague evangelicalism, and which has often kept it from building bridges with mainstream Christianity.
Evangelicals who promote a warped view of American history in an effort to undo the court rulings on church-state affairs ignore the fundamental point that no country can be called Christian, even though Christians are in it. The theism of the founding fathers and framers of the constitution was vague. From civil faith they drew up the ideals of theism, but it is wrong to assume therefore that the country was founded on Christian beliefs and thus is a Christian nation.
As evangelical Christians emerge as leaders of our society, they can find in the despised and ignored liberal theology important resources for relating the legitimate concerns of Christian faith to the pressing problems of our time. But as they emerge as leaders of our society, they can find in the now somewhat despised and ignored liberal theology important resources for relating the legitimate concerns of Christian faith to the pressing problems of our time.
The "Holiness" movement is perhaps best viewed as a synthesis of Methodism with the revivalism of Charles G. Finney, as it found expression in pre-Civil War America in a reaffirmation of the doctrine of "Christian perfection." It differs from fundamentalism and evangelicalism in that it is more oriented to ethics and spiritual life than to a defense of doctrinal orthodoxy.
Evangelicalism, as described by Marty, is a grouping of diverse religious denominations and movements that have difficulty in defining "evangelicalism" to themselves. While not increasing in numbers of recent decades, they have grown in public awareness through aggressive moralizing on issues like abortion and school prayer. Marty outlines the evolution in various evangelicals’ theology and rhetoric, and suggests some of the hurdles they face in an increasingly religously-diverse nation and world.
The desire to impose a preconceived pattern on other’s thoughts and actions, though not biblical, is a dangerous temptation for many evangelicals.
A review of a book about the rise of Evangelicalism as a separate movement within Protestantism.
We would like to know how evangelicalism’s drastic shift in what its self-critics call "cultural accommodation" has affected the lives and souls of evangelicals and the soul of evangelicalism(s).
A segment of the religious population has claimed the term ‘evangelical’ for itself and has read the rest of us out of its circle of definition. However, the author is both a liberal and an evangelist.
Alpha training is not an "evangelism solution on tape" or "evangelism in a can," but an effective tool of education and evangelism that can rejuvenate longtime church members and encourage them to share stories of faith and doubt. It is drawing skeptics and seekers to the Christian faith and into the church.
Once pejorative labels like "brainwashing" have been affixed to conversion, any church is fair game for claims of damages.
In the era of the electronic church and the born-again media blitz, the message comes through loud and clear: evangelical ministry is such that whether the preacher really believes in it or not doesn’t matter! The mass-culture media religion is so superficial that it scarcely matters whether its adherents are cynically being "taken."
A church that talks of salvation but does not battle for social justice will be dismissed as phony. A church that shuns controversy for fear of upsetting its membership has ceased to be the church and has become a club. No program of evangelism will save it.
Most Christians in Israel do not proselytize among the Jews; but a few high-keyed evangelists have created in the minds of Israelis the illusion that many Christians are actively seeking to convert Jews.
Something happens to the converted alcoholic or the converted charismatic that brings about change, sometimes a quick illumination, but often a rather gradual and increasingly insistent spiritual awakening. The spiritual conversion experienced by both of these groups is intended to carry the individual along in a "new" way of life, and it does for those who stay with it.
There is a need for thoughtful people to make some discriminations between and within religious groups -- to look for curing impulses that are latent in the faiths that so easily can spread disease.
The most pressing issue in the world today -- political, economic and moral -- is the fact that a minority of human beings pursue without limits their own pleasure, while the majority pay for that privilege with their very lives.
The churches have moved toward a new paradigm for expressing what we do in sharing the gospel with others: storytelling. Churches do not seem to be responding in two areas: 1. In the relationship of the family to evangelism. 2. No questions are being raised in the area of communications.
The spiritual hunger of present day teens is remarkable, but the challenge is to channel this free-floating, often nebulous, ethereal religiosity into genuine religious commitment.
Divorce is not an unforgivable act. In some contexts divorce may be a creative, positive and affirmative response, ethically justified as that option which best approximates fulfilling the Great Commandment in the midst of limited alternatives.
We need to be honest about the effects of divorce on kids, and knowing more about what children are living through, perhaps we can do more to help.
Those human relationships that promise the greatest joy also hold the potential for the deepest hurt. In the searing pain of human brokenness there is redemption, forgiveness, hope and the opportunity to seek a new fulfillment along a new path.
Ministries that have assumed a two-parent, intact family structure may not work well for people who did not grow up in such families. In order to welcome young adults -- to teach, counsel and comfort them -- the church must do a better job of understanding and including their distinctive experience and perspective.
If mainline churches want to thrive and remain true to their deepest theological commitments, they must reach out to America’s growing ranks of unconventional families.
(ENTIRE BOOK) The Clinebells bring reassurance and professional guidance to parents trying to help their children grow--especially as they deal with personal and family crisis.
Joining forces with child-care professionals the churches can help protect both the best interests of children and the rights of parents against profiteers who are concerned for neither.
The author believes that the church's greatest contribution to marital stability and growth will come from living a conviction that flies in the face of American individualism -- namely (in the words of the Heidelberg Catechism) "that we are not our own, but belong body and soul, in life and death to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ."
A review of From Culture Wars to Common Ground: Religion and the American Family Debate. Families are in crisis and there is an urgent need for church and society to respond.
The question to ask if we want to improve the quality of family life is this: Why are families changing? They aren’t changing as much as we might think, for the good old days were not as isolated from many of the modern problems of our technological age as we like to think.
A review of two books on the family which emphasize the need for a more compassionate, gender-conscious and tradition-aware understanding of marriage and the family.
Review of a book on the child. Jesus’ vision of compassion, blessing and service of the poor is simultaneously a vision of compassion, blessing and service of children.
How American Protestantism shapes the behavior of modern husbands and fathers.
Augustine reminds us that loved ones are mortal and that they are not ours. One of the essential characteristics of all idolatry is the notion of possession: we possess our idols as objects.
With Huck’s Raft, Steven Mintz indicates that children are extremely vulnerable to the fates of their parents, and he understands with clarity the history of families in this country.
Wall reviews a book on postmodern marriage. Marriage and the family are valuable social institutions, especially important for children, but they need to be newly understood in nonpatriarchal and egalitarian ways.
The profound pressures which marriage faces are a spiritual and not a psychosocial matter. The gospel provides few answers about how we should live or what decisions we should make. It is not a recipe for right living. The gospel transcends the law only to name a more difficult law -- that of love, first of God and then of each other, even ourselves.
The author reviews a book on marriage. Marriage as an institution entails public commitments not only between the husband and wife but also between them and their friends, extended families, the state and the church.
We elders may well have to face the millennium on our knees, because we surely didn’t teach our kids how to get down on theirs.
The author reviews three books on motherhood, and comments that through a holy blend of social criticism and spiritual fortitude, women with children might be able to resist the guilt and perfectionism that, if these authors are correct, are now the signatures of motherhood.
There may be the necessity of a divorce, but there’s no such thing as a good divorce.
A review of The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America's Beleaguered Moms and Dads,by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West. Against liberal claims that it is only economic factors and not fluid family forms that predict child out-comes, they come down firmly against the culture of narcissism and sexual freedom.
We need a national vision that unifies the many and complex issues facing families, that understands that human need always exists in the context of relationship.
The author reviews how three different authors, each with a different perspective on the hold that the consumer society has over kids.
Lawyers help people negotiate divorces. Can they be equally effective in shoring up support for marriage? ). This article is adapted from the essay "Is the Genie Out of the Bottle?" in the newly published book Marriage, Health, and the Professions, edited by John Wall, Don Browning, William J. Doherty and Stephen Post.(Eerdmans Publishing Co.)
Research shows that none of the alternatives to the intact nuclear family (first marriages) performs well the task of rearing children. Neither the state nor the church can be a substitute. If the church is interested in helping society raise strong, healthy and self-directed children, it must help produce as many intact first marriages as possible.
Child care -- provided to preschool children outside of their homes -- once was considered to be remedial care for children of pathological or needy families. Today it is America’s way of raising its children. The church’s close association with so many providers (70% are held in church buildings) gives it a unique opportunity to stimulate a long and much-needed national dialogue about child care.
The author of the book reviewed here believes that the institution of marriage is about to collapse and there’s little that can be done about it. Dr. Browning refutes this and proclaims that both society and the church need to be more supportive of marriage.
Mainline churches need to say something relevant to the family debate. Before speaking up, however, they need to face squarely the disturbing trends in family life that are fueling the debate.
The church has failed to recognize that adoption is a paradigm for the church -- a "family of faith" made up of people who are not biologically related.
If marriage involves a creative, courageous, demanding and risky act, then it also contains the possibility of failure. Our word to divorced persons must be that the failure and evil inherent in divorce (or any other human separation) would destroy us were it not for the fact that God keeps his promises and continues his love even when we break our promises and our love fails. The past cannot be erased, but it can be forgiven.
The authors identify the characteristics of an optimal family in terms of control, power and intimacy.
A survey on teens challenges us to stop defining adolescence as a social problem involving strange and menacing beings, and instead understand adolescence as responses that reflect our own adult problems.
The author reviews four books that examine leaving fundamentalism and reorienting one's faith. Religious gifts and meaning as well as the flaws of fundamentalism are depicted.
Jason Byassee makes a first hand visit to AiG (Answers in Genesis), the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The exhibit is a spectacular failure, yet they can hardly be faulted for their attempt at an impossible task.
Review of a book about Jerry Falwell. The author shows the myriad ways in which fundamentalist rhetoric creates and transforms both the fundamentalist community itself and the wider American culture..
Fundamentalism essentially applies to those who have split off from modern Christianity’s mainline developments. These dissenters hold to inerrancy of Scripture, see both the faith and the world as caught in a militant struggle between the faithful and the secularizers (or compromisers), and understand history in terms of a dispensational premillennialism. These features differentiate fundamentalists from other evangelical and conservative thinkers.
In his review of Fundamentalism Observed, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Wuthnow describes the commonalities and distinctions among various religious fundamental movements in the world and corrects numerous myths and misunderstandings about fundamentalism with scholarly research.
(ENTIRE BOOK) An excellent brief analysis of fundamentalism in three major faiths -- Christianity, Islam and Judiasm.
Dr. Robeck contrasts the differences between Pentecostals in Korea, Central and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Latin America and Africa. Their independent, entrepreneurial spirit will continue to be both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness as they seek new ways to connect with one another.
In an era in which confidence in traditional institutions is low, evangelicals have spawned a diverse collection of nontraditional ministries that are generally more efficient and effective than denominational bureaucracies.
There is an intensity in the power struggle in reactionary Protestantism and the dilemmas of leadership within that faction. The many groups within this struggle are competing for a finite cohort of American prospects, a certain number of millions who make up the outer limits of their market potential.
Dr. Olson loves the Pentecostal moement that taught him to love "Jesus and the Bible." Yet he exposes serious instances of its "dark side" and appeals for its maturity.
While experience shows that the Catholics’ answer to the fundamentalists lies in the base communities, only a minority of bishops have strongly pushed for them because of the Vatican’s frequently voiced concern that they are too "horizontal" -- meaning that they are a democratic influence on a hierarchical church -- and liable to become involved in social and political issues.
Our society, which no longer feels the need to disguise (let alone control or subdue) its aggressiveness and materialism, finds in the various fundamentalist versions of religion an imprimatur for its anti-intellectualism and indifference to human needs. Fundamentalism is a faithful expression of the goals that seem to dominate our age. That may well prove to be its epitaph.
Fundamentalist broadcasters have greatly leverage their cultural and political power in the U.S. due to the failure of the FCC to require their radio and television stations to meet the public interest standard.
Wuthnow explores Fundamentalisms Observed, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, to outline a scholarly-acceptable description of American, Christian fundamentalism. Instead of discovering a monolithic movement, he concludes that it is group of diverse yet specific theological movements related to particular times, places, events and figures, clarifying the word "fundamentalisms" in the title.
How unorthodox is dispensationalism? Two books give a vigorous engagement with the heresy of the "rapture."
The author defines Christian theology as reflection about important questions from a Christian perspective. These include not only questions about God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, but also questions about the social, political, and economic order in which we live, including cloning. He believes humans have pressed our dominion too far. Like the builders of the tower of Babel we are exceeding acceptable limits, and that we need to draw some boundaries and stay within them. Dr. Cobb examines possible ethical boundaries.
Sooner, not later, we’ll know how to tweak the stretches of the genome that produce the proteins that make us tend toward whatever we wish -- prayer, piety and devotion for example. A kind of literal brainwashing will have taken place, and the free will that makes you real would have been, if not eliminated, then perhaps overpowered.
Genetic screening of embryos may lead to a world in which children born the old-fashioned way are scorned. Procreative liberty should be presumed. Those who would limit choice must show why choice is harmful.
The authors discuss the awesome philosophical, theological and ethical questions regarding genetic manipulation that are being raised by research on the human genome.
Do the findings of molecular biologists threaten to replace biblical anthropology with the idea that human behavior is entirely genetically determined? It is possible to maintain a biblical view of human freedom and responsibility while acknowledging the power and significance of genetic coding.
At what point does genetic engineering violate the mystery of the human person? Gilbert Meilaender contends that a line should be drawn when altering germ cells becomes a way of exercising control over future generations.
The author describes the changes that took place in her experience of God when she became aware of the insights of quantum physics.
The author proposes ethical guidelines for research into human cloning.
A review of Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge of Bioethics, by Leon R. Kass. Kass ably led the President’s Council on Bioethics in a long debate on cloning. But for Kass, cloning of either kind is a fundamental assault on our humanity and our dignity. However, the author believes that Kass presents a distorted, out-of-date picture of the present field of bioethics, which has changed much over the past three decades.
As medical knowledge about infertility has increased, the ethics of reproduction is no longer the sole concern of the church.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Globalization has created a crisis. The root of the problem is "world apartheid" promulgated by the Western superpowers (white European). Meanwhile, globalization has become a religion of "money-theism." To counter this, this the author calls for all the world religions to work together to realize a spirituality based on the core values of love and sharing.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A highlighting of globalization’s impact on human rights, assessing it in the light of ethical theological considerations and helping the churches to identify concerns that address the adverse impact of globalization and the search for alternatives.
A critical review of Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization.
The author takes issue wtih two leading Christian ethicists, Max Stackhouse and Dennis McCann. Because of the continuing suffering of industrial labor and the vast wealth accumulated by some capitalists, there arose a conviction on the part of many that industrialization should be controlled by the state and its products distributed equally. This vision is associated especially with Marx. But despite its obvious appeal to Christian ideals, it was always founded on erroneous assumptions. It calls into fundamental question the process of global industrialization. Cobb holds that our task is to find a way between the Scylla of ecological holocaust to which our present policies are leading us and the Charybdis of degrading poverty that would follow from deindustrialization.
(ENTIRE BOOK) "Davos" is the town in Switzerland where the International Economic Forum met annually for almost twenty years to rethink and re-orient the world economy according to the interests of capital. This book is a radical rejoinder to that effort. The authors believe that it is imperative to discover viable alternatives to the unilateral globalization which pretends to link and unite, but actually separates and imprisons. They urge us to construct a new form of globalization, joining forces to build alternatives based on human diversity and creativity.
The author views the problem and challenge of globalisation partly from economic but primarily from ethical, spiritual and theological points of view. Globalisation will need to combine economic efficiency with social justice and environmental sustainability.
The author questions the assumption of world leaders that globalization would be benevolent thereby eradicating or reducing poverty. He calls for an ethical critique of the politics of globalization.
Although H. Richard Niebuhr claimed to present various theological points of view with no bias, his critics claim otherwise. His biases, they say, are often reflected in the very way in which he presents his materials.
The author looks at Niebuhr's typology of various possible relations between Christianity and the culture and shows their relevance for our present time.
We are always responding to the will and activity of God, Niebuhr contended, whether we realize it or not. A radically monotheistic faith resists devotion to lesser gods and critiques our loyalties to values that are less than universal.
What appears to happen in fellowship with Jesus is that our distrust of God is turned somewhat in the direction of trust.
Dr. Niebuhr spells out the nature and scope of the Churches' responsibility for society and challenges the churches to be both shepherds of the lost and social pioneers.
Many Christian colleges have become secularized. Others have made new efforts to reengage their heritage. Roanoke College in Virginia is one.
Theological schools are looking for teachers of the ministry arts who are both practitioners and trained research scholars, but there is presently an extreme shortage. New initiatives in Ph.D. programs in this area are needed.
How is campus ministry changing? Is it still a vital institution? What characterizes today’s student generation? How is campus ministry being received by students? What does the future hold for ministries to college and university communities? These are some of the questions addressed by the five participants in our symposium. The writers represent a variety of religious traditions and styles of campus ministry.
Can an educational philosophy true to the Christian ideals of love, truth and justice -- and one that helps people in their daily lives -- actually work? The author presents eight ideas in helping students face the underlying philosophy of education.
The heart and soul of its Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary (United Methodist) in Washington, D.C is founder and director Catherine Kapikian, a practicing visual artist and a 1979 Wesley graduate. Kapikian proposed the idea for an art studio and an artist-in-residence program to the school’s administration. What she desires is for all Christians to share the joy of realizing how an understanding of art can heighten religious perceptions and vice versa.
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as a whole has never formulated a plan for relating piety to learning and pastoral care to theology.
Our culture faces a spiritual crisis:. Faculty and students continue to operate in a spiritual climate where even the best are filling merely the outward requirements of their roles and suffering the malaise of aimlessness and false consciousness. The "worst," having no such tender sensibilities of mind or spirit, are zealous to fulfill whatever careerist goals are set for higher education by our technetronic and industrial society.
Mainline church colleges intentionally designate themselves "church-related," seldom using the term "Christian". And members of the flourishing Christian College Coalition have established a number of criteria for the "Christian" label, of which church-relatedness is not one.
The baccalaureate service is an effective way for institutions committed to educational objectives emphasizing human values to focus on that fact. Such rituals also serve to strengthen the sense of community among faculty and students.
(ENTIRE BOOK) For Kelsey, "Athens" (based on the Greek paideia , "culturing," "character formation,") and "Berlin" (based on the German Wissenschaft, "orderly," "disciplined critical research," "professional") represent two very different -- and ultimately irreconcilable -- models of excellent education. It is the case de facto, says Kelsey, that modern North American theological education, for historical reasons, is committed to both models, resulting in ongoing tensions and struggles. Kelsey shows how a variety of significant thinkers -- Newman, Niebuhr, Farley, Stackhouse, and several others -- fit in the Athens-Berlin framework.
A review of what has happened to the campus ministry in recent times.
We have understood higher education to be the untrammeled search for truth. But to be a Christian is to be already convinced as to some of the answers. Can answers that organize the institution and determine its goal be examined with the same openness as others? There is, thus, a profound tension in the idea of a Christian college or university. Either it must compromise its Christian commitment or it must compromise the ideals of higher education.
Theological schools can provide solid and effective professional education only if it is clear to the students that their school studies and experiences are pertinent to their future ministry.
Money problems seem to be the first concern of seminary students followed by the gap between church and seminary, the lack of time in seminary to learn all that is needed to know, the shortage of "practical" learning, the need for seminary to change with the times and other items are discussed by seminary students.
The author offers the Lutheran understanding of "Christ and culture in paradox" as the proper rubric for looking at the relation of Christianity and higher education.
Whom does the intellectual work of today's academics serve?
What are the obligations of the student and teacher in the seminary classroom studying justice, ethics and fairness to the pickets outside the seminary who are demanding a fair wage?
Much theology in both liberal and conservative seminaries is abstract and unpreachable. Such theological intellectualism cannot be translated into the language of pulpit and worship and into the decision-making that must take place in the life of the churches.
Christianism led Western Europe to the catastrophe of the religious wars. Nationalism led to the catastrophe of two World Wars and the Holocaust. Economism is now leading to both social and ecological catastrophes of global proportions. Those who are already experiencing these catastrophes, along with others who see them coming in more massive forms, are forming alliances not only to protest but also to push for change before it is truly too late. The author calls this Earthism, and he holds that that seminaries and church-related colleges and universities must give leadership in the greening of higher education. He describes the challenge.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Professor Phenix purposes a new curriculum centered around the concepts of intelligence, creativity, conscience, and reverence. There is a distinction between the life of desire, self-satisfaction narrowly conceived, and the life of worth, goodness and excellence, conceived in terms of a moral commitment. Around these concepts come the human characteristics and values essential for a sound education.
These provocative reflections excerpted from Joseph Sittler's book, Gravity and Grace, (Augsburg Publishing House, copyright 1986) express with pungent language and metaphors his lover's quarrel with higher education in general and with theological education in particular, focusing on the continuing education of clergy, college and university faculties, as well as the laity.
The feminist practice of theological education features the themes of justice, dialogue, and imagination. Justice is central to the braiding together of ethics and epistemology in the formation of new meanings and functions of symbols. Dialogue is a process of concrete encounter, a conversation entailing risk and leading to transformation. Imagination, the ability to think the new, may well be one of the most crucial requirements of forming new ways of knowing and new ways of learning. Theological education is about the relationships formed, the style of teaching, and the extracurricular activities as well as the curriculum.
The curriculum of the seminary should be determined by and reflect the liturgical life of the church, for the most promising way to reclaim the integrity of theological language as the working language for a congregation is for seminaries to make liturgy the focus of their lives.
Because the individual congregation is such a rich expression of the church, studying it can focus theological education. The traditional disciplines of the church -- Bible, church history systematic and practical theology -- continue to function but at the same time, are coming apart.
The author suggests alternatives to existing models of higher education. Liberal arts colleges should develop curricula directed to making future professionals historically, culturally, politically, and socially aware. Study and research should be organized around problems., such as the following: How can we feed humanity in the future; What would further human fulfillment? How does work contribute or take away from human well-being? What can the economy contribute? What is physical health, and how is it attained? Universities should be focused on the common good of humankind.
Colleges and universities face ethical difficulties primarily because they are reflections of the moral aimlessness of our society as a whole. Children are mirrors of their parents.
In his review of George M. Marsden's book The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Tinder agrees with Marsden's argument that Christian scholars should stop being merely Christian in private and endeavor to break down the antireligious bias in our predominantly secular college and university facilities. However, Tinder suggests the Christian claim of revelation will render this change unlikely in the arena of scholarly discourse with its insistence on rational objectivity.
There remain the differences among those who advocate a faith above learning, those who simply place faith and learning side by side, and those who affirm a faith for learning.
The current task of biblical interpreters of women’s issues should begin in the theological seminary. In the past, women were advised to enter religious education. No adviser would have thought of suggesting a Ph.D. in theology or New Testament. Women should be encouraged to explore the full range of academic offerings -- especially those that would strengthen skills in theology and/or biblical languages, for example.
Fifty years ago almost all seminarians in North America where white young men. Today women, ethnic and minority groups, all older, constitute the majority of students. Has this change been good or bad for theological education and for the churches’ ministry?
Life at "Mainline Seminary" is a choreographed battleground with affinity groups hunkered down in the trenches. There is no doubt that students are shaped by seminaries. The real question is: Toward what end?
Theological education ought to be about forming people for ministry, not simply conveying information.
Like public schools, higher education now functions in the service of the capitalist market. Whereas public schools are designed to produce workers for the market, higher education is designed to produce engineers, scientists, accountants, managers, consultants, and executives for corporations, as well as the teachers, doctors, and lawyers required for the market society.
Seminaries, whether large or small, conservative or liberal, have more in common with each other than with the churches they serve. Their internal lives--how they construct their curricula, select their faculties and set expectations of their students--are based more on the models of other seminaries than on the mission of the church.
The author portrays three periods in Western history -- Christianism, nationalism and economism -- and examines the implications for higher education. He proposes Earthism as a viable next step in our cultural development.