Categories
Spirituality

Book Review: A Faith and Culture Devotional

I picked up A Faith and Culture Devotional:  Daily Readings on Art, Science and Life, by Kelly Monroe Kullberg and Lael Arrington, with high expectations. Unfortunately, it’s mostly the same old evangelical-fundamental half-baked stuff. 

Take this from Kullberg’s introdution: “How did [the Bible’s] ancient writers know that electromagnetic energy preceded visible light (Genesis), or that “darkness” resided somewhere (Job) as physicists are now pondering….” Um, earth to Kelly: they didn’t know anything at all about electromagnetic energy or dark energy / matter, and its just silly to read the Bible as if they did. 

And so, on and on go the rationalistic arguments, such as Walter Kaiser’s eye-popping “if Sodom was not razed, could it be that our faith is also in vain?” (P. 44). Well, historical referent in the OT narratives is a tricky and interesting question, but if you’re stuck asking this kind of question, and if this is your idea of what belongs in a “faith and culture devotional,” I’d submit you have some big problems on your hands. 

Can we get an evangelical-oriented devotional on faith and culture that isn’t just mostly a thinly veiled apologia for inerrancy as it was understood by Francis Schaeffer? Please?

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Spirituality Theology

Hauerwas on Matthew on Kingdom

“Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'”  — Matthew 3:1-2.

John [the Baptist] was not offering a better way to live, though a beter way to live was entailed by the kingdom that he proclaimed was near. But it is the proclamation of the “kingdom of heaven” that creates the urgency of John’s ministry.  Such a kingdom does not come through our tryin gto be better people.  Rather, the knigdom comes, making imperative our repentance.  John’s call for Israel to repent is not a prophetic call for those who repent to change the world, but rather he calls for repentance because the world is being and will be changed by the one whom John knows is to come.  To live differently, moreover, means that the status quo can be challenged because now a people are the difference.

Stanley Hauerwas, Commentary on Matthew, Ch. 3.

Categories
Epistemology Spirituality Theology

Bloesch on Epistemic Humility

“The Christian does not pretend to know all the answers to life’s questions, but he does claim to know some of the answers to the final questions, those that determine the direction of one’s eternal destiny.  Yet he makes this claim not on the basis of his own ingenuity or intelligence but on the basis of God’s revelation in the Scriptures.  Moreoever, he does not boast that he ‘possesses’ these answers, for they reside in the mind of Christ which is made available to him time and again by the Spirit.” 

Donald Bloesch, The Ground of Certainty, at p. 76.

Categories
Spirituality Theology Uncategorized

Hauerwas on Herod and Babies

“Then when Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he became very enraged, and sent and slew all the male children who were in Bethlehem and its vicinity, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the Magi.”  Matthew 3:16.

Herods must be resisted, but we must also not forget that the fear that possessed Herod’s life is not absent from our own lives.  “All Jerusalem” was also frightened by the news of this child’s birth.  And the same fear continues to possess cultures — our culture — that believe they have no time or energy for children.  Abortion is one of the names for the fear of time that children make real.  Children rightly frighten us, pulling us as they do into the unknown future.  But that pull is the lure of love that moves the sun and the stars, the same love that overwhelmed the wise men with joy.  It is the love that makes the church an alternative to the world that fears the child.

Hauerwas, Commentary on Matthew, Chapter 2.

Categories
Spirituality Theology

Hauerwas on Matthew 2: Patience and Nonviolence

“The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatient violence by cross and resurrection.” — Hauerwas, Commentary on Matthew Chapter 2.

Categories
Theology

Bloesch on Recovering Evangelical Distinctives

For a contemporary evangelical theological perspective that is rooted in scripture and the great tradition but is not captive to modernism, it’s hard to do better than Donald Bloesch.  Recently I’ve been reading Bloesch’s Essentials of Evangelical Theology.  Maybe Bloesch is a little too harsh on human reason, but there are many gems like this one:

In calling for a rediscovery of evangelical distinctives, we need to be aware of heresies on the right:  perfectionism, dispensationalism, religious enthusiasm, and hyperfundamentalism.  The great evangelical doctrines of sola Scriptura, solus Christus, and sola gratia contradict the synergism and anthropocentrism in conservative Christianity as well as in liberalism.  Even the doctrine of sola Scriptura, understood in the Reformation sense, exists in tension with the current evangelical stress on personal religious experience as well as the fundamentalist appeal to arguments from reason and science is support of total biblical reliability.

Some “third way” folks won’t like Bloesch’s strong Calvinism (I happen to appreciate it, for the most part), but his effort to develop a method that is essentially pre-modern seems spot-on.

Categories
Biblical Studies Theology

Michael Bird on Biblical Studies and Theological Education

Michael Bird at Euangelion reviews a recent book on theological education.  Bird’s comments here caught my eye:

in the more conservative circles in which I move, certain theologians are given to constructing a doctrine of Scripture that contains many a priori assumptions about how they think God should have given us Scripture, and then you end up with a doctrine of Scripture that will not survive contact with the phenomenon of the text (i.e its origin, transmission, reception, and interpretation). Or else, it is demanded of us biblical scholars that we re-write or even invent a history of the text to line up with theological articulation of what Scripture is, how it came into being, and how it relates to its own context by some theological magisterium. Third, meaning is arguably created by fusing together the horizons of author-text-reader which justifies a modest reader-response hermeneutic in my mind…

Categories
Spirituality Theology

McKnight on the Third Way

Scot McKnight starts a series on a “third way” between “liberal” and “conservative” versions of the Christian faith.  Good and important stuff.

Categories
Spirituality Theology

Quote of the Day: Wagering on Mission

“Christian mission is participation in the liberating mission of Jesus, wagering on a future that verifiable experience seems to belie. It is the good news of God’s love, incarnated in the witness of a community, for the sake of the world.”

-David Bosch

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Humor

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