Marginal Christianity

We live between the good news of the past (Jesus’ death and resurrection) and the good news of the future (Jesus’ return and new creation). And that has tremendous implications for the value and urgency of embracing this good news for the present.   This is paradigm Wright has set up for us in the first two chapters (Part 1 of this review).   Chs.3 and 4 (Part 2) explored the good news of the past – Jesus, the good news of his life, death, and resurrection and influences that have distorted that good news through the centuries. His next two chapters take up the good news of the future and various distortions that have bedeviled it. We live between history and hope. These give our present meaning.   Or they should. However, the default gospel Wright outlines in the first two chapters often leave the present vacant and of seemingly little value by its twin convictions that the purpose of Jesus’ saving us and our ultimate destination is heaven where we will dwell w...

                      How fragile the belief of an Islamist must be if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a weekly satirical newspaper, says the Slovenian philosopher. by Slavoj Zizek Published 10 January, 2015 - 21:31   French police at the Jewish supermarket in Paris where several people were taken hostage. Now, when we are all in a state of shock after the killing spree in the Charlie Hebdo offices, it is the right moment to gather the courage to think . We should, of course, unambiguously condemn the killings as an attack on the very substance our freedoms, and condemn them without any hidden caveats (in the style of " Charlie Hebdo was nonetheless provoking and humiliating the Muslims too much"). But such pathos of universal solidarity is not enough – we should think further. Such thinking has nothing whatsoever to do with the...

http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2015/01/09/walter-brueggemann-church-gospel-bible/35739 The Old Testament scholar says the “military consumerist mentality” is one of the most pressing problems facing churches today. by Marlena Graves Dr. Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential contemporary theologians. His dozens of books and hundreds of articles have shaped American sermons, as Brueggemann’s work — especially on the Old Testament and the Psalms — has been widely utilized by seminaries and pastors across the country.   Recently, I caught up with Dr. Brueggemann during a lectureship series sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at the University of Findlay. What’s your main message for young church leaders today? We in the United States live in a deathly social context that’s marked by consumerism and militarism and the loss of the common good. Younger people that are committed to the gospel have to think carefully about...

In chs.1-2 Wright lays out a general outline of his understanding of the gospel and some of the challenges presenting the gospel to the world today encounters. In chs.3-4 he focuses on Jesus, his relation to the gospel, and the ways and influences that have distorted this. Jesus   Jesus both announces and enacts God’s greater New Exodus.   He is God’s good news, his Gospel, in person. The central theme of the good news that he is is the kingdom of God. But he was not alone.   Many dreams and visions of this coming kingdom pervaded the Judaism of the first century.   But his vision of the kingdom differed from all the others in that he proposed a kingdom that would come and be practiced in a way no one else expected (Kindle Locations 550-551). As the gospel in person Jesus busied himself inculcating a kingdom perspective by telling strange riddling stories about it and enacting kingdom practices.   The former were the parables we find in the gospe...

JAN. 5, 2015       David Brooks                           Not long ago, a friend sent me a speech that the great civic leader John Gardner gave to the Stanford Alumni Association 61 years after he graduated from that college. The speech is chock-full of practical wisdom. I especially liked this passage:   “The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent but pays off on character.   “You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You ...

N. T. Wright has played a major role in the rethinking of the gospel (among other things) by and for the church in the last 25 years. In Simply Good News he pulls together various threads of that rethinking of the gospel, the good news, in a popular presentation.   The first two chapters considered in this post lay the groundwork for the rest of his presentation.   In the first section of this blog I’ll summarize Wright’s content and follow that with a brief reflection. Content (chs.1-2) What do you mean when you say the gospel is “good news”? Surprisingly, perhaps, not all Christians mean the same thing by this phrase.   -Some mean a new set of religious ideas about God, humanity, and the world.           –Others mean a new way of living, a new morality that will improve one’s life.                      –Yet other...

Wed, 07/01/2015 - 16:23 Goaded by a comment to the effect that my Christmas story “doesn’t preach as well” as the traditional sentimentalized God-in-a-manger version, I want to try to develop in a few posts some thoughts about preaching from a narrative-historical perspective. The basic problem is this: the more we confine the biblical narrative and its associated theology to its own historical context, the less direct relevance it has for the modern reader or congregation. Usually the historical distance has been overcome by reducing the complex narrative of scripture to a universal argument about God and humanity and allegorizing as much of the detail as possible. The basic error of interpretation made by modern evangelicalism is to think that the story of scripture can be translated into a sequence of theological abstractions —creation, fall, redemption, final judgment—which then provides the frame for every personal story: we are sinners in need of Christ’s atoning death...