Marginal Christianity

  Two well-known books written in the first half of the last century expressed what kind of fools their authors believed we Westerners would become. Their proposals appeared to be diametrical opposites, and for a long time it seemed they were. However, in one of those ironies history is full of, in our day both have become true of the same people at the same time. Do you know these authors and their famous books? -One feared those who would ban books. One feared there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. -One feared those who would deprive us of information. The other feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. -One feared that the truth would be concealed from us. The other feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. -The first feared we would become a captive culture. The second feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the f...

“The crisis of the church in present-day society is not merely the critical choice between assimilation or retreat into the ghetto, but the crisis of its own existence as the church of the crucified Christ . . . for only by Christ is it possible to tell what is a Christian church and what is not. Whether or not Christianity, in an alienated, divided and oppressive society, itself becomes alienated, divided and an accomplice of oppression, is ultimately decided only by whether the crucified Christ is a stranger to it or the Lord who determines the form of its existence . . . As far as I am concerned, the Christian church and Christian theology become relevant to the problems of the modern world only when they reveal the 'hard core' of their identity in the crucified Christ and through it are called into question, together with the society in which they live . . . Faith, the church and theology must demonstrate what they really believe and hope about the man from Nazareth who...

We didn’t get far into the 21 st century before America joined the rest of the world. Almost before the confetti stopped falling on our new cente4nnial parades and parties 9/11/01 happened. For the for time we were attacked by foreign hostiles on our own land. They used jet planes to do it and attacked chief symbols of our power and strength. Americans have been afraid and wary ever since that day. We can no longer afford to think it can’t or won’t happen here. It has and continues to do so on smaller scales. We now know how the rest of the world lives, fearful and vulnerable to assaults and attacks from ana untold number of directions. America is not invulnerable any longer! Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 with horrific force devastating the Golf Coast and overwhelming our best (and not so good) efforts to deal with it. Parts of the area have still not and may not ever recover. A Superdome filled with sick and scared peoples unsure what tragedy would next befall them is an endur...

  The move to digital communication as a surrogate for the gathered fellowship and worship we cannot and ought not share at present is very appropriate under the circumstances. But it is only a surrogate. If it were an adequate form of the community’s worship, then why don’t we do it all the time? But there is something in our bodily, gathered community that alone reflects what God wants for us as we wait for his kingdom to come in its fullness (which will be intensification or even more real experience of our bodiliness). After all, it was God’s dream to take on a body too so he could be one with us in our bodiliness. We don’t become more “spiritual” (that is, less bodily, immaterial) to be more like God, it’s the other way around. And God in bodily form, present in the bread and wine of communion, is the center of Christian life and worship. And it’s as one body, his body, that we gather, and his one body that is broken and his blood shed that he shares his life with ...

Shrouded in secrecy, awash in symbols, punctuated with ironies, and ended in shocking fashion, Mark’s story of Jesus, once thought the simplest, most straightforward, and least theological of the canon’s gospels, is believed to be such no longer. Now considered a theologian the equal of at least Matthew and Luke and a storyteller of no little subtlety, his gospel repays careful and close reading to mine its riches. Mark is likely the earliest of the gospels we possess. Matthew and Luke each follow his general outline of Jesus’ life and use substantial portions of his work in their own compositions. The problem of their order and relations to each other is a long-contested and still unresolved matter. But I will not be saying much about all that here. I intend to focus on how Mark tells his story, the symbolic meanings he encodes into it as he tells the story of Jesus as the climax and culmination of Israel’s story and God’s new creation he brings into being. An Apocalyp...

“If the people in a city were to show themselves bold in their faith when a neighbor’s need so demands, and cautious when no emergency exists, and if everyone would help ward off contagion as best he can, then the death toll would indeed be moderate. But if some are too panicky and desert their neighbors in their plight, and if some are so foolish as not to take precautions but aggravate the contagion, then the devil has a heyday and many will die.” -Martin Luther’s response to a pastor during the 1527 plague in Wittenberg. From fine piece on this issue in Commonweal, “To Quarantine is Christian” by Jared Lucky ( https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/act-service?utm_content=buffer8ab15&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer&fbclid=IwAR3PfnlqIrC6kH3AkPsKvBaC1RXp19r7X2Xn5QdasdxOygldt60RhqdQZZM ). Well   worth the read!

What Does the Church in America Do in the Coronavirus Pandemic? "The notion that the elderly should give themselves over to infection so that millions can return to their subsistence existence while the disparity with the wealthy can continue to increase is not a rational proposal. If protecting the economy as it is presently organized is a reasonable proposal, I’m sure they’re taking volunteers in hospitals across the country." - Barry Harvey One thing the church does not/must not do is support proposals that privilege the American (or any) economy over people. To so fetishize the economy is idolatry and participation in the larger idolatry of American exceptionalism. The church stands with and under this crisis with its people (of both church and nation). The church shares God’s view that the health and well-being of a community depends on its care for the victims and the vulnerable in their midst. To so care is to meet the needs of those at the margins and t...

Theological Journal – March 24 (Lent 2020) Torrance Tuesday – Atonement “One day a student called Harold Estes came into my rooms in the Dormitory to discuss an essay he had written on the atonement. He was a very gentle kindly person. It is he had spoke of the death of Christ simply as a demonstration of the love of God. He had been expounding something like what was known as a ‘moral influence theory’ of the atonement favoured by liberal thinkers but theological quite inadequate, as H. R. Mackintosh had shown us in Edinburgh. To help Harold I showed him a reproduction which I had of Grünewald’s famous painting of the Crucifixion , at Colmar, which is incredibly starkly vivid. I also showed him some of the enlargements of the painting, reproduced in a book I had with me, which focused on the fearfully lacerated flesh of Jesus which he suffered from the flagellation with thorns inflicted on him by the soldiers, deep wounds now blackened by the sun. Harold shrank back in horro...

  “The cross is not and cannot be loved. Yet only the crucified Christ can bring the freedom which changes the world because it is no longer afraid of death. In his time the crucified Christ was regarded as a scandal and as foolishness. Today, too, it is considered old-fashioned to put him in the centre of Christian faith and of theology. Yet only when men are reminded of him, however untimely this may be, can they be set free from the power of the facts of the present time, and from the laws and compulsions of history, and be offered a future which will never grow dark again. Today the church and theology must turn to the crucified Christ in order to show the world the freedom he offers. This is essential if they wish to become what they assert they are: the church of Christ, and Christian theology.”( The Crucified God , 1) Moltmann once called the theology of the cross a minority position in the church and a teaching “not much loved” by it. It was, perhaps, understandabl...