Marginal Christianity

) Ascension culminates the achievement of God’s eternal purpose. Earlier I described God’s eternal purpose as his passion to have a world full of people to live over, with, for, and astonishingly as a human being, in intimate fellowship on a planet flourishing in beauty and abundance. Jesus Christ, fully human-fully divine, in his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension lived as God as a human being, and at the same time, the human being God intended us to be offering his life as the faithful rendition of humanity. In him we behold that interlocking of the realms of heaven and earth we spoke of earlier. In him we too have been lifted into that faithful rendition of humanity so we also may live life as God intended. Heaven and earth are united in another way in him. When he ascends to heaven he does so as the divine-human being he became in his incarnation. He sits today at God’s right hand as one of us. And again we share that position with him by his grace. It would be ex...

Ascension: The God Who Completes (Credit to Inherit the Mirth ) Sadly underemphasized but monumentally important Jesus’ ascension saves our faith from becoming “merely” Easter-centered (as if Jesus work for us is over) or “merely” Pentecost-centered (as if the Spirit’s work is somehow other or different from Jesus’). The ascension completes Jesus’ -journey from heaven to earth and back to heaven -work of salvation from womb to tomb to heavenly throne room -achievement of God’s eternal purpose Thus, the God we meet in the face and work of Jesus is the God who completes all he has desired and worked for. No stronger affirmation of divine faithfulness is available or needed. Mention of heaven and Jesus flying through the sky on way there account for much of the embarrassment and perplexity many feel about this part of Jesus’ story. Though the USSR cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is famously reported to have said that on his trip into space in 1961 that he looked around and did...

4. What in the Heck are “Principalities and Powers”? A famous and influential New Testament scholar of the 20 th century Rudolf Bultmann wrote: “ We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the  New Testament ” ( The New Testament and Mythology, 4). Perhaps over-intoxicated with the achievements and potential of reason and science, Bultmann took earlier and more primitive views of the world as “mythological” and to be treated as such, that is, non-realistically, in terms of our modern view of the world. We must interpret figures like angels, demons, principalities and powers, and maybe even deities, which ancient peoples believed existed in reality, as symbols to say something we think important about our world. We cannot however take as reality in our rational and scientific understanding. If we agree with Bultmann and his dismissal o...

3. Did You Know You Are a Royal Priest? I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet but I know who you are, all of you, and what you are to be doing in the world. It’s true. I do. Not because of my wisdom or insight, mind you, but because the Bible teaches it though we’ve often forgot or ignored it. Yes, it’s right there in Genesis 1-2 if we read them in the light of their cultural context. When people of nations surrounding Israel wrote up their creation stories they did not do so provide what we would consider a “scientific” record of their origins. They did so to announce to readers whose they were, who they were, and what they were to do in the world. Gen.1-2 do the same thing. -First, their creation story narrates God’s building a temple for him to dwell on his creation in (as do those of the surrounding nations). And where else would God dwell but a temple (which also is a palace, a dwelling for the Great King)? So Israel’s God is present amid his creation (remember ...

1.        No one reads the Bible without blinders; blinders make us need each other. Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart in their fine book God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives make the following crucial claims about the Bible: The Bible is a collection of very different types of writings written over a very long period by a large number of authors and editors. So, in the nature of the case we cannot expect it to provide us with ready-made summaries of its own teaching in all its component parts. -this for Bauckham and Hart is how the Bible is as it comes inspired from God. For the most part the task of discerning the general thrust and major components of the Bible’s treatment of a topic is a difficult task of creative interpretation. Without discountin g any part of the scriptural witness, the interpreter will have to make judgments about what is central and what is peripheral, what is relative and what is absolute...

1.        No one reads the Bible without blinders; blinders make us need each other. Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart in their fine book God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives make the following crucial claims about the Bible: The Bible is a collection of very different types of writings written over a very long period by a large number of authors and editors. So, in the nature of the case we cannot expect it to provide us with ready-made summaries of its own teaching in all its component parts. -this for Bauckham and Hart is how the Bible is as it comes inspired from God. For the most part the task of discerning the general thrust and major components of the Bible’s treatment of a topic is a difficult task of creative interpretation. Without discountin g any part of the scriptural witness, the interpreter will have to make judgments about what is central and what is peripheral, what is relative and what is abso...

David Brooks has produced another fine book. His skills of analysis and synthesis are on full display in this work as in all his others. Studded with insight The Second Mountain can be read with profit by many different kinds of people. That said, this book also shares a fundamental weakness with his other works, and, indeed, with all other works of social analysis/self-improvement (and I don’t mean that pejoratively), at least from a Christian perspective. Which is highly ironical because the book reflects Brooks’ own journey toward a more explicit and deeper grounding in an increasingly Christian faith. Every so often, Brooks notes, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They . . .begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant and were taught to climb: success, to make one’s mark, find personal ...

Let us stipulate that John Howard is correct to read the creation stories in a way matriarchal way. Women, he claimed, were the leaders of creation fresh from the Creator’s hands. Mike Skinner summarizes his argument: What if the world was originally created as a matriarchy? (*cue dramatic gasp*) John Howard Yoder often explored this possibility by laying out the following pieces of evidence [discussed in Nugent’s The Politics of Jesus , 26-28]: [1] The Word “Helper” Yoder claims that the connotation of subordination which “helper” has in English is not present with the Hebrew word. The other 5 times the word appears in the Pentateuch it always refers to God. It appears that Eve is the crown of creation, who fills in a gap in the original creation. The point seems to be that the man is dependent on the woman (not vice versa). The man was called to leave his family and build his life around his wife (Gen. 2:24). The Edenic culture depended on what Ancient I...