Marginal Christianity

The Setup (26:1-5) The end near now. Very near. His final discoursed finished [1] (v.1), Jesus makes this portentous statement: “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.” His thrice predicted demise is at hand (16:21; 17:22-23; 21:18-19). His active obedience finished, Jesus now is the one acted on, seemingly at the mercy of others (his passive obedience). Three key terms punctuate this saying. -Passover : the great commemoration for the Jews of God’s great act of liberating them from slavery in Egypt. This puts his coming death in proper perspective. It is of that magnitude, or greater (as we have come to expect Jesus to say in this gospel). -Son of Man : Jesus’ favorite self-designation from Dan.7. It is the term he uses to indicate his (and his -people’s) coming rule. -crucified : here’s the twist in the kind of rule Jesus (and his people will exercise). Here Jesus combines Isa.53’s suffering...

We end the month with a brief final reflection of paying attention to God. Paying attention to God in the immanent frame of the time we live in requires two things: -intention, and -repetition Intention : paying attention to God won’t just happen because we believe in God. It requires a commitment to live attentively and practices that foster and support that intention. Such intention necessitates a break with or change in our usual patterns of living. Life in the immanent frame will shape us into inattentive and distracted people, people who can’t or won’t see the gorilla in the crowd of people. It’s got to become more than simply a good idea for it to happen. The break with our normal to create space and time for attending to God is essential. Repetition : repetition of the practices that foster attention to God is equally necessary. The haphazard or occasional will not shape a life attentive to God. Only a commitment to be attentive to God will build the...

Paying attention to God is the heart of Christian existence. Duh! Sounds like every Christian platitude, right? I hope by this point you can see that’s not true. Or at least not simple and easy. To counsel someone to undertake paying attention to God is actually to invite them on a harrowing journey into a reality we never imagined. Attention is not simply noticing something but attending to it, engaging with it, and entering into a mutually reciprocal relation with it. When that “it” is God the reality we encounter is personal to the nth degree and full of grace and truth like nothing else we know. We will not remain unscathed in this journey but the wounds we sustain are divine surgery for our healing. An early age in the West faced a world filled with gods and spiritual powers and faced the challenge of discern the right god and powers to attend to.   Later as Western culture changed and entered the modern age the challenge was to sustain faith in the face of on...

I wrote in the last post in this series “from a Christian perspective, any serious search for one’s authentic self has the potential to make contact with the self’s gracious createdness by God.” To that I would add today that our authentic selves are vouchsafed in Christ and we have been graciously included in all he has done for us. Creation is redeemed in Christ and it is there we find our authentic selves, our true identity. Paying attention to God entails saturating ourselves in this knowledge until it becomes our self-knowledge, until its reality shapes and reshapes us into its image, until we are able to “find the divine in the human, life in suffering, strength in weakness” (Andrew Root). That is, until we are sufficiently conformed to the image of Christ (which is God’s will for us, Rom.8:29) to find in him the God. We can do this in a number of ways I’ll look at in a future post in this series. The God we pay attention to is the One who comes to us as a minist...

Thomas Torrance was close to Karl Barth, studied with Barth, was a primary editor of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, and was asked by Barth to continue writing the unfinished Church Dogmatics (CD) after him. He has influenced many Anglo-American students to give Barth a fairer hearing than he was wont to receive in the Anglo-American world during much of the 20 th century. His book Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931 lists four traits that he believed made Barth a great theologian. #1 An Inquisitive Mind “Barth has the most searching, questioning mind I have ever known,” notes Torrance. He estimates that all the questions Barth raises would fill “hundreds of hundreds of pages.” Barth discovered that the liberal theology he had been taught had been exploded by him seeing many of his esteemed professors sign on in support of the Kaiser’s war policy in 1914. In reworking theology from the ground up he had to ask lots of questions! With them Barth sough...

Salvation means many different things to different people in different circumstances. And that’s as it should be, as far as it goes. But I don’t think it goes quite far enough. I often pose the following question to help get at this issue: “Do you know that Christ has no interest in making a difference in your life or mine? None. Nada. Not at all! Not even for a nano-second does he think about that. To put it bluntly, Jesus Christ has not, does not, and will never entertain the idea of making a difference in our lives!” Do you believe that? Really? I suggest that much of what we know as Christianity does not believe it and fancies Jesus making a difference in their lives as the essence of what being a Christian, walking with Jesus, is all about. And they would be wrong. And if they are wrong about that, about salvation, maybe that’s a big part of why the story of the church in North America has reached a dead end in America. So, do you believe Jesus has no interes...

Charles Taylor ( A Secular Age) , and building on his work, Andrew Root ( Faith Formation in a Secular Age) , detail the rise and significance of the “Age of Authenticity” in their respective works. We live fully immersed in that age so unless we are of sufficient age we cannot remember or imagine the age of conformity, civility, and obedience that preceded it. The Age of Authenticity began in earnest with the Youth and Countercultural movements of the 1960’s (though it had earlier precedents). The central tenet of this age is that the conformity, civility, and expectation of obedience of the previous era was repressive and oppressive in hindering us from realizing our true selves. With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius the youth culture revolted against the inauthenticity of the previous epoch and set out to “find themselves.” And we’ve been doing it ever since. There are plusses and minuses to this as with every shift of culture. The primary minus is that it centers...

I will interrupt the series on Attention today with this piece I hope might prove timely. In it I draw on two works: Michael Gorman’s Reading Paul and Andrew Roots, Faith Formation in a Secular Age. Saul the Culture Warrior The two main reasons Saul wanted to eliminate the church were (1) its preaching of a crucified, cursed Messiah and                                                                                 (2) its embrace of Gentiles in a way that polluted Israel. (13) His zeal in this matter found a precedent in Phineas who according to Numbers 25, was so zealous that he killed an Israelite man and his Midianite consort to purify the people from the immorality and idolatry brought into the community by non-Israelites. Phinehas was rewarded with divine approval a...

Matthew 25:1-13: The Parable of the Bridesmaids “In the Middle East, to this day, there are some places where the customs at a wedding are quite similar to the ones described here. In the modern West, people don't normally get married in the middle of the night! But in that culture torchlight processions, late in the evening, are certainly known, and it seems as though the proceedings might have several stages, with the bridegroom likely to be delayed at an earlier venue before he arrives for the banquet itself, to be greeted at last by the bridesmaids.” Thus Tom Wright sets the scene for us Westerners for whom this scene is unfamiliar and seems more than a little bizarre. [1] But what’s its point? It’s the difference between sleeping (v.4) and staying awake (v.13). The foolish and the wise (v.2). Readiness for a great event and being taken by surprise by it. By now it should be clear that Jesus refers here to the great crisis in Israel evoked by his coming ...