Marginal Christianity

Covenant Renewal (Mark 14:22-23) Despite centuries of reading this story as foundational for the church’s doctrine of the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper, Mark’s version stays focused on Jesus and discipleship rather than the church. In the middle of the Supper Jesus enacts what is best described as an act of Covenant Renewal. Jesus breaks and shares bread with his disciples. Do they understand about the loaves now? And do they catch the allusions in sharing the cup of wine? We’re not told. But what we can safely assume is that  “By eating the bread, the disciples are to know that they somehow become participants in Jesus’ own destiny, but this saying does not specify how this is to be. Receiving and eating bread that Jesus has somehow identified with his very self may be an enactment of what he had said in 8:34–38” ( Boring, Mark :10671-10673) . The bread reminds us of Jesus who used the leftovers of the two feeding stories to dramatize himself as the provider of cove...

March 11, 2013 by Scot McKnight 29 Comments Over the years my own thinking about legalism has become more nuanced but I want to map out what legalism is in the context of the New Testament. After years of teaching Galatians and pondering legalism in Paul’s mind, I’m convinced many get confused about what the word “legalism” means. Thus, folks say “That’s legalism!” So some rubble needs to be cleared out first. Recently I’ve seen the word “legalism” referred to the commands of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as if giving a commandment is tantamount to legalism, and on top of that as if the Torah of Moses is just a big bold case of legalism itself. Far from the truth. Time to think about legalism again. How do you define legalism? What is a good illustration of legalism for you? Legalism is not believing in the importance of law or rules or authorities; it is not rules themselves; legalism is not even following kosher laws. More often than not, this sort of definition...

THE FOUR SIRITUAL FLAWS: WHY CHRISTIANITY DIED IN AMERICA Spiritual Flaw #1: The Jesus We Never Knew                                                              The American Jesus looks something like this: Jesus as a 1 st century Middle Eastern peasant probably looked something like this: American Christianity forgets that Jesus is a Jew through and through. He cannot be understood apart from that Jewishness. To forget this and to try and read Jesus as an American is to misunderstand the New Testament almost completely. Americans also forget that Jesus is cross-eyed. He sees everything from the perspective of the cross which turns everything in our prude...

January 4, 2018 stephenmcalpine The church is always political. Always. The state is always religious. Always. In a fitting finale to his Cultural Liturgies series, James Smith points out in Awaiting The King what seems obvious once he’s said it, namely that: “citizens are not just thinkers or believers, but  lovers.”   The political institutions we live within are not simply seeking to shape our thinking, but to capture our hearts with a vision of the good life which they inculcate.  So in that sense they are rival cults; competing centres of worship to the church. This means of course, that there can never be separation of church and state, as if separation were merely a spatial reality.  No, for as Smith says, politics is a  project,  not simply a realm in which different stuff happens to what happens in church.   Laws that the state puts in place are what Smith calls “ social nudges ” that make us certain kinds o...

Posted on 1.19.201 So, how has Flannery O'Connor made me stranger ? Specifically, how has Flannery O'Connor interrupted my progressive Christianity? Many liberal and progressive Christians struggle with doubts. The forces of secular disenchantment strongly affect liberal and progressive Christians. Consequently, there is this impulse within progressive Christianity to make faith lighter, to believe less and less, to dilute faith. As a progressive Christian, over the years I've contributed my fair share to this impulse, doing my best to sing the praises of doubt. But a few years ago, I began to grow concerned about this trajectory if left unchecked. I began to worry about my spiritual health, as well as the health of many other progressive Christians. I am not the only one who has grown worried. After years of praising doubt and deconstruction, many progressive Christians have begun to speak about the need for a turn, a movement back toward reconstruction ...

Wat do we do with passages like this? Mark tells his story but it’s not what we want to know. Why did Judas betray Jesus? Ark doesn’t tell us. Doesn’t even make him out to be a bad guy. The devil didn’t make him do it. Not according to Mark. Nor are we told that Judas was disappointed by Jesus’ kingdom movement and thus offered to betray him to the chief priests. But maybe what Mark doesn’t tell us points us in the right direction anyway. What might Mark be saying by saying nothing we can claim a “reason” for this event. Eugene Boring claims “that Mark is only interested in the unseen hand of God at work in these events (Boring, Mark :10524-10526). That’s why he offers no “reasons” for it. My hunch is Boring is right on this. The same point holds for the arrangements for Passover. Boring again seems on target: “’The Lord needs it’ . . . This is the key to the Markan understanding of this scene. Historicizing interpretations have attempted to discern in all this some prearr...

Karl Barth, in my judgment, best describes the heart of theology and its work. According to him, theology is - contextual and conflictual : “theology is expressly an instrument of the  ecdesia militans (Church Militant) ,  in the conviction that the Church of a specific time cannot be anything but an  ecclesia militans,  i.e. the Church of a specific time with its needs and hopes. (CD 1.2, 841) - communal and missional : “...theology . . . can be put to work in all its elements only in the context of the questioning and answering Christian community and in rigorous service of its commission to all men.” (HG, 63) - scriptural and critical : Under the rubric of the  Hearing Church,  theology's role . . .   is to invite "the teaching Church to listen again to the Word of God in the revelation to which the: Scripture testifies" (CD 1.2, 798). - contested and tempted : After all that has befallen it, church dogmatics will not become "chu...

At-one-ment, Not Atonement – Richard Rohr ·          Brad Jersak The common reading of the Bible is that Jesus “died for our sins”—either to pay a debt to the devil (common in the first millennium) or to pay a debt to God (proposed by Anselm of Canterbury, 1033-1109). Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) agreed with neither of these understandings. Duns Scotus was not guided by the Temple language of debt, atonement, or blood sacrifice (understandably used by the Gospel writers and by Paul). He was inspired by the cosmic hymns in the first chapters of Colossians and Ephesians and the Prologue to John’s Gospel (1:1-18) and gave a theological and philosophical base to St. Francis’ deep intuitions of God’s love. While the Church has not rejected the Franciscan position, it has been a minority view. read more at: https://www.ptm.org/one-ment-not-atonement-richard-rohr

Is Lessons for American Christians from the Confessing Church in Germany. By Lori Brandt Hale , Reggie L. Williams February 2018 This article appears in the February 2018 issue of Sojourners magazine .    ARE WE IN a “Bonhoeffer moment” today? It is common to wonder what we would have done if we lived in history’s most challenging times. Christians often find moral guidance in the laboratory of history—which is to say that we learn from historical figures and communities who came through periods of ethical challenge better than others. Christians who wish to discern faithfulness to Christ often look back to learn how others were able to determine faithful discipleship when their contemporaries could not. With this in mind, Dietrich Bonhoeffer may help us out today. Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and pastor who resisted his government when he recognized, very early and very clearly, the dangers of Hitler’s regime. His first warning about the...

53. Mark 14:1-9: The Anointing The chief priests and scribes are plotting a quiet way to put Jesus to death. That’s the backstory here and for the rest of the gospel (vv.1-2). The Anointing at Bethany Jesus, meanwhile, King Jesus, Messiah Jesus, is dining among his people, Simon the leper and his friends in Bethany. Maybe he was a former leper who had been healed by Jesus. If his leprosy was active he could not have hosted this party in his home. The woman, likely a prostitute though not Mary Magdalene, enters the party. She goes directly to Jesus, bearing a vial of “costly ointment.” In an act of devotion she breaks the jar and pours it over his head. An impulsive act, perhaps, wasteful according to her critics, Jesus nonetheless accepts it, commends it, and recasts it as anointing of “my body beforehand for its burial” (v.8). Other members of this gathering are p.o.’d by her action and angrily upbraid her for not selling the ointment and giving the money to the poor. Whe...

The chief priests and scribes are plotting a quiet way to put Jesus to death. That’s the backstory here and for the rest of the gospel (vv.1-2). The Anointing at Bethany Jesus, meanwhile, King Jesus, Messiah Jesus, is dining among his people, Simon the leper and his friends in Bethany. Maybe he was a former leper who had been healed by Jesus. If his leprosy was active he could not have hosted this party in his home. The woman, likely a prostitute though not Mary Magdalene, enters the party. She goes directly to Jesus, bearing a vial of “costly ointment.” In an act of devotion she breaks the jar and pours it over his head. An impulsive act, perhaps, wasteful according to her critics, Jesus nonetheless accepts it, commends it, and recasts it as anointing of “my body beforehand for its burial” (v.8). Other members of this gathering are p.o.’d by her action and angrily upbraid her for not selling the ointment and giving the money to the poor. Whether this is a genuine co...

When he predicts the Temple’s destruction the disciples want to know when. This launches a famous and, in my view, widely misunderstood, discourse on this (Mk.13). Many think the disciples want to know and Jesus instructs them on what will happen at the end of history, the end of the space-time universe. This mistaken, I believe, and radically so. He is speaking about “the end of the world” to be sure. He tells them -they must not be misled by false teachers and leaders (13:5-8), -they must be prepared for persecution and betrayal and to persevere to the end (13:9-13), -they must flee to the hills when they see the “desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be” (13:14-23), and -wait for the return of the Son of Man accompanied by all manner of astral upheaval. Thanks to the kind of theology that inspired the Left Behind franchise, called Dispensationalism, many believe Jesus is describing events at the very end of human history. Without debating the parti...

Jesus impresses a scribe during these controversies with the religious leaders and he tries to cut to the heart of the matter: “Which commandment is the first of all” (v.28). Jews of Jesus’ day believed that if they kept the Torah for one day the kingdom of God would come. So this scribe honestly presses Jesus for what finally and fully matters to God for humankind. Jesus’ answer comes as a two-sided revelation. The first side, the Godward side, comes from Dt.6, the famous Shema: “ ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” This is not doctrine or philosophy, it’s life and ethics. To confess the oneness of God is not an intellectual conviction. It is a battle cry – there’s only one God, whatever any other peoples or nations may claim. This God we trust and live for! Then, from Lev.19 Jesus spells out the humanward side of this great commandment: “ You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This “commandment” (singular!) is greater than all the others (v.31). ...

The Sadducees are up next to challenge Jesus. They don’t believe in the resurrection. They were conservative both religiously and politically not liberals as we might imagine their disbelief in the resurrection would make them. -Moses didn’t teach it and Sadducees regard the five books of Moses the most authoritative   part of the Bible. -It was politically risky, as N.T. Wright explains. “It  had become popular particularly during the revolutionary movements of the second century BC, as a way of affirming that the martyrs had a glorious future  awaiting them, not immediately after death, but in the eventual resurrection  when they would be given new bodies. This belief was based on the fundamental  idea of God as the maker, and therefore the remaker, of the world. People who  believe that God is going to recreate the whole world, including Israel, and even  including their own dead bodies, are much more likely to do darin...