Marginal Christianity

Theological Journal – April 30 Why God is Not in Control – And It’s a Good Thing Too! (2) Here’s where we got to yesterday: -God created the world as a temple in which he would dwell in order to be with his human creature and share life with them. -God exercises his sovereignty through his human creatures, royal priests in his creational temple. Their proper discharge of these responsibilities manifests his sovereign rule over and love for his creation. -Humanity spitefully spurned God and rejected their calling as royal priests opting instead in making a bid to be god itself, no longer manifesting the wise sovereignty of its Creator. -Instead, creature and creation fell into chaos and disrepair, neither functioning as they were meant to. God’s intended creational home has been “subjected to futility” as Paul puts it in Romans 8 and must wait in groaning and tears to God reclaims and restores humans to their intended royal priesthood and practice of divine sovereignty...

When we say “God is in control” we usually mean something like “God has either (pre)planned or exercises such rule over human affairs that nothing happens that God is not ultimately responsible for.” There are lots of different variations and shades of meaning that have been developed around the discussion of this matter, complicated and learned discussions. I’m going to stick with the usual, rather straightforward expression of it noted above in these reflections. We all seem to have some sense over a larger power or force at work in human affairs. Some call this power God (of one variety or another), some do not. But instinctively when something bad happens we almost inevitably wonder -“Why did God/other power let this happen?” -“Why didn’t he/it prevent that catastrophe and loss of life?” -“Why did he/it do this to me?” In one Calvin and Hobbes comic strip Hobbes asks Calvin if he believes in God. Calvin replies that he guesses he does and adds, “It sure seems l...

“God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.” ( The Mediation of Christ , 94) This bold and bracing statement of Torrance’s may be too bold for some of us. It seems rather universalistic. Maybe not taking the biblical demand for f...

“ When the fear of death leaves us, the destructive craving for life leaves us too. We can then restrict our desires and our demands to our natural requirements. The dreams of power and happiness and luxury and far-off places, which are used to create artificial wants, no longer entice us. They have become ludicrous. So we shall use only what we really need, and shall no longer be prepared to go along with the lunacy of extravagance and waste. We do not even need solemn appeals for saving and moderation; for life itself is glorious, and here joy in existence can be had for nothing. ” In Heb.2:14-15 we read: “ Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” Richard Beck identifies death as the chief and most powerful reality motivating and shaping huma...

Three challenges facing a Post-Pandemic Church in America.   -Much has already changed for us as we weather this Coronavirus pandemic and the social distancing it requires. -Much will remain changed even after the pandemic is controlled and social distancing relaxed. -We cannot know or predict the full nature and scope of these changes. Two things we can say at this point with a fair degree of certainty. One is that we will not be returning to the “normal” of the Pre-Pandemic church (and difficult as it is to imagine, that is not a bad thing). And two, the changes coming will be larger (or “worse,” if you prefer) than we will be told; and our ability to cope with or “fix” them will be exaggerated. Given all this, I want to offer some reflections I first put forward in my 2015 book The Incredible Shrinking Gospel. They seem even more relevant today so I offer them again for your consideration. Given the theological marks of the church – Unity, Apostolicity, Cathol...

Three challenges facing a Post-Pandemic Church in America.   -Much has already changed for us as we weather this Coronavirus pandemic and the social distancing it requires. -Much will remain changed even after the pandemic is controlled and social distancing relaxed. -We cannot know or predict the full nature and scope of these changes.   Two things we can say at this point with a fair degree of certainty. One is that we will not be returning to the “normal” of the Pre-Pandemic church (and difficult as it is to imagine, that is not a bad thing). And two, the changes coming will be larger (or “worse,” if you prefer) than we will be told; and our ability to cope with or “fix” them will be exaggerated.    Given all this, I want to offer some reflections I first put forward in my 2015 book The Incredible Shrinking Gospel. They seem even more relevant today so I offer them again for your consideration. Given the theological marks of the church – Unity, ...

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. –  Orthodoxy Interesting that in a work titled Orthodoxy Chesterton valorizes mystery. Much of the modern project has been about eradicating mystery in life, and as an unintended side effect, imagination with it. Orthodoxy became doctrine and moralism replaced faith as life’s animating force. A doctrinaire moralism (of the right of the left) breeds only death because it sacrifices life’s depth for some supposed greater measure of control and manipulation of life and history. Life became constricted and narrowed. Understanding replaced mystery, prose supplanted poetry, we became infatuated with life’s glittering and glamorous surface and willingly traded life’s inexplicable, unmanageable, unconquerable, mysteries for it. Orthodoxy grows out of and is sustained by mystery. Worship is its proper home, life its dramatic stage, imagination its organ of meaning, and vitality its esse...

“Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly, Chesterton.” Us “To Whom It May Concern: Regarding your article ‘What’s Wrong with the World?’ YOU ARE! Yours ideologically, Me. And we think the Adam and Eve stories in the Bible are ancient tales we long since left behind! No such luck, friends. You made me do it, and you know it! May we some day reach Chesterton’s degree of honesty.  

The first in a series of posts on this extraordinary book!     After Crucifixion: The Promise of Theology                                                                                                                                                 ...

“There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.” I don’t know exactly what Chesterton had in mind here, but his sentiment seems appropriate to our ideologized, competing political correctness filled nation today. Are there any “real Americans” left? What might they be like?

“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 is now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, really one of us and with us.” This statement of Torrance’s leaves me speechless. I can add nothing to it or say nothing about it but “thanks” and “Amen!”

“There can be no theology of the incarnation which does not become a theology of the cross . As soon as you say incarnation, you say cross. God did not become man according to the measure of our conceptions of being a man. He became the kind of man we do not want to be: an outcast, accursed, crucified. Ecce homo! Behold the man! is not a statement which arises from the confirmation of our humanity and is made on the basis of ‘like is known by like’; it is a confession of faith which recognizes God’s humanity in the dehumanized Christ on the cross” ( The Crucified God, 205). “He became the kind of man we do not want to be” – there you have it in a nutshell! -Why we have the kind of Christianity we’ve had through most of Western Church history. -Why Christmas is far more important to us than Easter. -Why we cannot admit he is the measure of genuine humanity and opt either for a quasi- or even fully docetic Christologies, on the one hand, or an ethical, moral(istic) Jesus, on t...

From Letters and Papers from Prison (Kindle edition) “The Christian is not a homo religiosus but simply a human being, in the same way that Jesus was a human being—in contrast, perhaps, to John the Baptist. I do not mean the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the bustling, the comfortable, or the lascivious, but the profound this-worldliness that shows discipline and includes the ever-present knowledge of death and resurrection.” 6211-6219 Bonhoeffer is famous (or infamous) for his calls for a secular or non-religious Christianity. He makes it clear in this passage that he is not recommending that the church simply join in and go with the flow of wherever the prevailing cultural winds take us (though he has been [mis]interpreted to mean that). He characterizes that way of living as: -“enlightened” -“bustling” -“comfortable” -“lascivious” Or what we might call a middle-class or above way of life give to business, busy-ness, consumerism, and pleasure....