Marginal Christianity

written by Gregory P. Floyd Share Christmas Morning, 2017 T here is a kind of theology that is not written in words, but written in lives. It is a type of religious reflection, not the reflection on religion of lettered men and women, but the reflection of religion through the performance of active love. If both are indispensable to the Christian tradition, it is also clear that they are neither equivalent nor, perhaps, equally important. It is the latter task: the daily, difficult, and often unremarkable practice of being in the world as a Christian that is the material of Christian life. Rosemary Therese was that kind of Christian. The oldest daughter of a Polish father and an Irish mother, she grew up in an age when that arrangement was not yet unremarkable nor, amidst cultural and financial pressures, unremarked upon. By certain lights her life was a humble one. As the oldest child, she was not to go to college, but to care for her parent...

christiancentury.org /article/publisher/guns-are-americans-golden-calf Ancient Assyrian mosaic (Thinkstock) The death-by-gun crisis in America is not just a political issue. It’s a spiritual issue of the highest order. Having all but enshrined the divinity of guns, our culture has created an elaborate public liturgy for every mass shooting. Flags go to half-staff. Counselors turn out. Thoughts and prayers pour forth. We continue to make a sorry mess of the distinction between loving God and being charmed by idols that seek to thwart the glory of God. Our national infatuation with firearms has reached crisis proportions that should trouble every believer. All of us get sad, of course, when bullets eviscerate the joy in innocent victims’ families. If our eyes don’t water up when a tearful dad on the evening news alternatingly weeps and screams because a gunman senselessl...

Arthur McGill and William Stringfellow In his fine but sadly much neglected book Death and Life: An American Theology Arthur C. McGill offers insightful theological reflection on the place and power of death in middle-class American society. He does not use the language of the “powers” as Stringfellow does but treats death as every bit the powerful and profound threat that twists our lives out of their God-intended shape and function as he does. McGill’s account is thoroughly “indigenous” in that he wrestles with the power and dynamics of death as it actually impacts Americans. This is the kind of theology we noted in the Introduction that Karl Barth called for: contextual and conflictual, communal and missional, scriptural and critical, contested and tempted. McGill uses a wonderful image to picture the formative power of death in our culture. He calls Americans under the thrall of death as “bronze people” (26). These are folk who, according to McGill, “devote themselves...