Author: David Opderbeck

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Justice Sunday II

The Christianity Today blog has a good story on the inaptly-named “Justice Sunday II” that recently was held in Nashville. (Hat tip: Mirror of Justice). I share the dismay of the CT and MOJ bloggers about this farce. Supreme Court nominees are important, and there no doubt are many problems with the Court, but these concerns are grossly overstated and miss the Biblical concept of “justice” entirely. Biblical “justice” starts with what we do in our daily lives. When the evangelical “leaders” who stage things like “Justice Sundays” present a deep and consistent picture of compassion for “the least of these,” then maybe I’ll listen to something they might have to say about the U.S. Supreme Court. For now, they haven’t convinced me that they’re capable of anything beyond serving as Republican Party shills.

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Spirituality

St. Patrick's Breastplate

I suppose I should have known of the St. Patrick’s Breastplate prayer before my Irish sojourn, but it’s one of many things about which I’ve become educated since then. It’s a beautiful prayer for guidance, protection and wisdom. I particularly like this section:

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ
when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

Amen.

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Spirituality

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

I’ve just begun reading Leslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society and, so far, it’s reminding me why I love Newbigin. Newbigin’s concern is to explain how we can proclaim the Gospel as normative in a world that denies the concept of normativity for anything but “science,” without falling into the trap of sublimating the Gospel to the demands of rationalism. Here is some of the flow of the argument from the first chapter:

We must affirm the gospel as truth, universal truth, truth for all peoples and for all times. . . . The Christian believer is using the same faculty of reason as his unbelieving neighbor and he is using it in dealing with the same realities, which are those with which every human being has to deal. But he is seeing them in a new light, in a new perspective. . . . [I]t is essential to the integrity of our witness to this new reality that we recognize that to be its witnesses does not mean to be the possessors of all truth. The dogma, the thing given for our acceptance in faith, is not a set of timeless propositions; it is a story. Moreover, it is a story which is not yet finished, a story in which we are still awaiting the end when all becomes clear.

This is so central to much of where my thinking is right now, as reflected even in the theme I chose for this blog. We’ve tried making the Gospel primarily about the propositions we’ve extracted from the story, and we so often insist that the propositional nature of truth is essential to defending “absolutes.” But this just isn’t so; it doesn’t reflect the Biblical witness or the witness of the Spirit speaking in and through the church in history. Propositions are valuable, but the story’s the thing.

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Books and Film

How the Irish Saved Civilization

My recent trip to Ireland has gotten me interested in Irish history and culture. I recently picked up Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. Cahill’s thesis is that the Irish monks of the 6th-8th Centuries saved Western Civilization by preserving latin and greek literature through the discipline of the scriptorium. If all you know of early Irish Christianity is St. Patrick, this book provides a lively introduction to key figures such as Columcille and Columbanus.

The book’s central thesis, however, seems overstated, and at times the author’s prejudices show through, as in this passage:

It is a shame that private confession is one of the few Irish innovations that passed into the universal church. How different might Catholicism be today if it had taken over the easy Irish attitudes toward diversity, authority, the role of women, and the relative unimportance of sexual mores.

Well, yes, and how different it might have been if Roman Christianity had simply adopted the mores of pagan Romans. Different, but not better.

On the whole, then, this is an engaging introduction to some important aspects of early Irish Christianity, but not a text to be taken too seriously.

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Spirituality

My Weakness, My Circumstances, My Questions, and Contentment

This week I attended a conference of intellectual property law scholars. I presented my current paper on peer-to-peer file sharing litigation, and heard presentations of many other interesting papers (see my SSRN page if you’re curious about my paper). It was the sort of thing I enjoy about academia. Yet, I was vaguely disturbed during the entire conference, until I had a conversation that brought my discomfort to a boil.

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Osama

No, not that Osama. This is about a movie filmed in Afganistan after the fall of the Taliban. It concerns a girl who must pose as a boy (taking the name “Osama”) to support her family. If you love foreign films that give you a glimpse of other cultures, as I do, rent this one. Its portrayal of the humanity of ordinary Afgans is touching, but even more moving is its picture of the Taliban. These are no cartoonish monsters. Rather, they’re all-to-human monsters. Their treatment of Afgan women, boys, and girls is rooted in their own lust and greed, cloaked with a twisted form of religion that they use to justify their consciences. There are lessons here about human nature that go far beyond the Taliban itself.

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Spiritual Smorgasbord — Good, Bad, or Indifferent?

We had a special speaker today in church, a guy who is now a professor at a Christian college but had long been affiliated with our church. His sermon, on the occasion of our church’s 80th anniversary, focused on carrying on the church’s solid legacy, and by and large was good. He made some offhand comments about “seeker sensitive” and “emerging” churches, however, that disturbed me.

Among those comments was a criticism of what he called a “smorgasbord” of spiritual practices. He was referring to the interest in the Emergent movement concerning ancient spiritual practices, such as contemplative prayer. Where’s the beef with a spiritual smorgasbord?

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New RSS Feed

For those who subscribe to my RSS feed, please note that I’m directing my existing feed through Feedburner. This will enable me to track feed statistics, and also will facilitate the feed for the soon-to-be-announced Through a Glass Darkly podcast. Here’s the new feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/throughaglass

Thanks.

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Humor

Guidelines for Christian Romance Novels and the New Testament

“The stories … may not include alcohol consumption by Christian characters, dancing, card playing, gambling or games of chance (including raffles), explicit scatological terms, hero and heroine remaining overnight together alone, Halloween celebrations or magic, or the mention of intimate body parts.”
Writer guidelines from Steeple Hill, the Christian imprint of romance novel giant Harlequin.

(Hat Tip: Christianity Today.)

I wonder how the New Testament would fare under these silly writer’s guidelines? Let’s see what a letter from the Harlequin editors to the NT authors might have looked like:

Continue reading “Guidelines for Christian Romance Novels and the New Testament”
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Spirituality

Pride of Grace

This week I’m with my family on vacation at Camp of the Woods in New York State. Our speaker is Haddon Robinson and his son Torrey. This morning, Torrey gave a great first person narrative on James 2:2. He mentioned three areas of pride that keep us from effective service: Pride of Place (wealth or status), Pride of Race (racism), and Pride of Grace. The latter point was particularly compelling for me: those who have been blessed with some good Christian training sometimes think they have been accepted by God because of their superior doctrine or knowledge. But this isn’t so — it is all a work of God’s grace alone. Excellent stuff.

Now, back to mini-golf and the lake.