Marginal Christianity

What is J3-Joy? Joy of the J3 variety is a disposition or affection that grounds and sustains us amid difficult times. Affections are “the deep-seated dispositions, the settled and abiding postures of the heart, that qualify or color everything that we know or do” (Kendra G. Holtz and Matthew T. Matthews, Shaping the Christian Life: Worship and Religious Affections [ Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006], 14). Sam Storms adds “Affections are more than ideas or thoughts or intellectual notions in our heads. They are lively and vigorous passions, for example, of either delight, love, joy, and hope, on the one hand, or displeasure, hatred, grief, or despair, on the other. When we evaluate our response to someone or something in life, we use such terms as sorrow, happiness, revulsion, attraction, bitterness, anger, peace, fear, and delight” ( https://www.samstorms.org/enjoying-god-blog/post/peter-and-jonathan-edwards-on-religious-affections ). ...

The perhaps surprising dominant note in the New Testament is joy. All three kinds of Joy we looked at yesterday are present in it. N. T. Wright offers helpful insight into this matter in his article “Joy: Some New Testament Perspectives and Questions” ( http://faith.yale.edu/sites/default/files/wright.pdf ). He briefly examines the Old Testament and concludes regarding the reasons and character of joy, “The reasons include a mighty act of God to bring about victory over evil and the rescue of God’s people from its grip. The character of joy includes the vigorous and vibrant celebration of the goodness of the created order, expressed through the activities which signal and symbolize human well-being – eating, drinking, the joy of marriage, music and dancing” (2). Israel’s return from exile in Babylon is a threshold moment. The Lord has brought the people back to the land, to be sure. But something was missing. The great promises of Isa.40-55 and Ez.36-45 had not been fulfi...

Welcome to Lent 2020! I hope you have a “joyous” (in the sense we will exploring it from here on out) Lent! So, according to James, as a church struggles to be faithful to Jesus, their faithfulness will evoke opposition and rejection. To make it through we must set our minds and hearts that we are suffering for Christ in spite of it all and we will hang in there in the struggle. In this endurance we will find joy, the sure mark of God’s presence with us, and God’s work in us will continue moving us to good end he has designed for us. In the Bible three types of joy texts can be found: -J1: joy because certain events or occasions evoke it (here we find texts in which joy, gladness, mirth and the like are the expected or natural human responses to a variety of occasions, such as festivals, worship, or other occasions associated with the temple activities (Num 10:10; 2 Sam 6:12; 1 Chr 15:16; Ezra 3:12-13; Eccl 10:19), the naming of a king (1 Kgs 1:40), weddings (Jer...

I interrupt my ongoing series on joy for this not-unrelated poem titled “Ash Wednesday” by the late Brian Doyle. It’s not T. S. Eliot but it has a point worth hearing today. “Here’s your Ash Wednesday story. A mother carries her tiny daughter With her as she gets ashed and the Girl, curious and wriggly, squirms Into the path of the priest’s thumb Just as the finger is about to arrive On the mother’s forehead, and the Ashes go right in the kid’s left eye. She starts to cry, and there’s a split Second as the priest and the mother Gawk, and then they both burst out Laughing. The kid is too little to be Offended, and the line moves along, But this stays with me; not the ashy Eye as much as the instant when all Could have been pain and awkward But instead it led to mutual giggling. We are born of dust and star-scatter And unto this we shall return, this is The Law, but meantime, by God, we Can laugh our asses off. What a gift, You know? Let us snicker while we...

The Old Testament is in a rather bad odor in many Christian circles these days. That’s not news. “To reject the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the church rightly repudiated; to retain it in the sixteenth century was a fate which the Reformation could not yet avoid; but to continue to keep it in Protestantism as a canonical document after the nineteenth century is the consequence of religious and ecclesiastical paralysis....[T]o sweep the table clean and honor the truth in confession and teaching is the action required of Protestantism today. And it is almost too late.” So wrote Adolf von Harnack in his book Marcion . Recently evangelical pastor Andy Stanley promoted “unhitching” Christian faith from the Old Testament in certain respects (though not in Harnack’s thoroughgoing sense). And many other scholars, evangelical and non-evangelical), have claimed that the Old Testament is a mixture of divine and human words and ideas and we today must sort ou...

“Christian hope does not promise successful days to the rich and the strong, but resurrection and life to those who must exist in the shadows of death. Success is no name of God. Righteousness is.” — Jürgen Moltmann Success Here are some quotes from inspirational/success-oriented Americans: “Either you run the day or the day runs you.” –Jim Rohn “Mondays are the start of the work week which offer new beginnings 52 times a year!“ -David Dweck “ You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction.” – George Lorimer “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice.” –Wayne Dyer “Your Monday morning thoughts set the tone for your whole week. See yourself getting stronger, and living a fulfilling, happier & healthier life.” -Germany Kent “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” –Zig Ziglar “E...

Here are some of the thoughts of Orthodox theologian John Behr: In this interview at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, Father John Behr discusses the implications of a theology of joy for our living today. Indeed, joy, for Behr, is ultimately joy of life, the joy of being alive, a comprehensive intellectual, physical, psychical, and spiritual mode of being. As such, joy is much more than a matter of acquisition; it requires a work of cultivation, a work eminently figured in the life of Christ. God is the giver of life, and Jesus claims that he is life. Life is, therefore, not something we possess or try to grasp, but something to receive in joyous thankfulness, something in which we can dwell, the highest expression of which is to give life in return. We enjoy life by giving life, in living for others. For Behr, this sacrificial way of living was instituted in Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. The feast of Easter celebrates Jesus’s radical inversion of life, ...

“God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by him, his mark is deep within us. We have God’s joy in our blood.” (Frederick Buechner, “The Great Dance” in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons , 240) So far we have seen Karl Barth suggest the joy is the chief attribute of God, evoked by his glory. That joy is a chief mark of God’s people and that the New Testament makes some rather startling, intimidating claims about the place of joy in a Christian’s or church’s life. My focus in this series is to try and make sense of joy impacts or should impact my life with God. I suppose the place to start is to distinguish between happiness and joy. Simply put, happines...

Joy in the Bible One scholar offers this summary of joy in the Old Testament: “In the Old Testament, joy is most frequently mentioned in the Psalms. The Psalmists often exhorted worshippers to shout for joy, dance for joy, and sing for joy before God — in God’s Presence. While there is a place for silence and solemnity before God, from the scriptures it appears that God wants his people to be joyful in his Presence and offer exuberant (and sincere) praise to him. King David delighted in God’s Presence, and he wrote that in God’s presence there is fullness of joy ( Psalm 16:11 ; 21:6 ; cf . Acts 2:28 ) God also wanted his people to be joyful before him when they were celebrating certain appointed festivals, such as the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost) and the Feast of Booths (Tabernacles) ( Deut. 16:11 & 14 ). Joy is a godly attribute.” At the same time profound darkness and depression is an all too regular part of human life as well. Just read Psa.88 ...

One can parse the ills of the church in the West in many different ways and from many different perspectives. In this series I want to come at it from the angle of joy. I take my bearings from Karl Barth who comes nigh unto making joy the chief attribute of God: “It is (God’s) glory that awakens joy, and is itself joyful. It is not merely a glory which is solemn and good and true, and which, in its perfection and sublimity, might be gloomy or at least joyless… It is something in God, the God of all the perfections, which justifies us in having joy, desire and pleasure towards Him, which indeed obliges, summons and attracts us to do this.” (CD II.1, 655). “Obliges, summons, and attracts” – duty, response, and delight. The joy that God is and exudes is, shapes, and spices the life we live as his creatures. The question this raises for me is how such joy impacts life which, as Thomas Hobbes famously describes it, is “nasty, brutish, and short” in the state of nat...

“The stark actuality of Christ’s humanity, his flesh and blood and bone, guarantees to us that we have God among us. If that humanity were in any sense unreal, God would be unreal for us in him. The full measure of Christ’s humanity is the full measure of God’s reality for us, God’s actuality to us, in fact the measure of God’s love for us. If Christ is not man, then God has not reached us, but has stopped short of our humanity – then God does not love us to the uttermost, for his love has stopped short of coming all the way to where we are, and becoming one of us in order to save us. But Christ’s humanity means that God’s love of our flesh and bone of our bone, really one of us and with us.” ( Incarnation , 185) “The miracle of Christmas” Karl Barth called it, this event we call incarnation or God’s taking on human flesh and living his life among us as a human being. And well he might! Yet the church has seldom grappled with what this really means. Oh, we count it as a mir...

From Moltmann’s The Ethics of Hope (Kindle loc.72) we read: “The principle behind this ethics of hope is: -not to turn swords into Christian swords -not to retreat from the swords to the ploughshares -but to make ploughshares out of swords.” I take from this description of ethics that its sharp edge, its interface with the reality of the world we know, love, and anticipate is -to know it well enough not to be trapped in its reality (“not to turn swords into Christian swords”), -to love it deeply enough not to leave it to suffer, despair, and die from that reality (“not to retreat from the swords to the ploughshares”), but -to counter its reality with the strange but true hope of the transformation of the world through the Crucified but Risen Jesus Christ (“to make ploughshares out of swords). Reflecting on Moltmann’s insight in light of my experience as an American Christian, they say to me that: -culture wars (of the right or left) are wr...