Marginal Christianity

“This . . . reconciliation encounters me telling me that I am already reconciled to God in Christ, already died for, redeemed and forgiven. It tells me that already the great positive decision of God’s reconciling love in my favour has been taken, and it can no more be undone than Jesus Christ can be undone, than the incarnation can be reversed or obliterated, or the cross made as if it had never taken place. . . . I am already included in the finished work and already part of Christ, for it was my nature, my humanity, my flesh of sin, that he assumed and made one with himself in his one person.” T. F. Torrance, Atonement , 167. This is the great evangelical truth and one thing we can sure we know about any other person we meet: they too are all that Torrance affirms in the above statement. Before, beyond, and above anything else we may think we know or feel about another, this is true about them. This the message of Lent Jesus tries to press home to u...

The Christ mass, by contrast, is  “the feast of Nicene dogma.”                                                                                                                                                   Fleming Rutledge , Advent : 1164 Theology rests on the na...

The Meaning of Advent Micah 5:2-5a / Luke 1:46b-55 or Psalm 80:1-7 / Hebrews 10:5-10 / Luke 1:39-45, (46-55) Now we move to the end of Advent, threshold of the arrival of the Christ-child, the God who comes. With him comes the fulfillment of God’s plans and purposes. Source of unending joy and delight. Joy itself is the hallmark of God’s presence and power. Joy attended all Israel’s expectations and anticipations of this fulfillment. Yet when the Christ-child comes history does not end, everything is not brought into alignment with God’s design, sin is not abolished, nor are heaven and earth fully and finally harmoniously reunited. Instead, Jesus engages and defeats the powers of Sin and Evil in a battle climaxing in his resurrection from the dead. His victory accomplished, God’s Israel on this side of the cross lives out that victory going forth to spread and implement its fruits in reconciliation and new life. Christ will return to finally and fully put heaven and...

Our culture is often likened to whitewater rapids - ever-changing, unpredictable, dangerous. It would be hard to gainsay the analogy. Experienced rafters know the key rules for successfully negotiating the whitewater rapids. I suggest these rules give us some critical guidelines for navigating our cultural/social rapids. I've tried to translate them into biblical/theological guidelines for just such a purpose. The Nature and Purpose of Theology Theology is the work of the church that evaluates and directs its journey into and through the unpredictable and treacherous rapids. According to Karl Barth this means that theology -is contextual and conflictual : an instrument of the “ ecclesia militans” (Church Militant) , theology guides the Church of a specific time to address and/or contest the needs and hopes of that time. ( Church Dogmatics 1.2, 841) -is communal and missional : “...theology . . . can be put to work in all its elements only in the context of the ...

Is Lessons for American Christians from the Confessing Church in Germany. By Lori Brandt Hale , Reggie L. Williams February 2018 This article appears in the February 2018 issue of Sojourners magazine .    ARE WE IN a “Bonhoeffer moment” today? It is common to wonder what we would have done if we lived in history’s most challenging times. Christians often find moral guidance in the laboratory of history—which is to say that we learn from historical figures and communities who came through periods of ethical challenge better than others. Christians who wish to discern faithfulness to Christ often look back to learn how others were able to determine faithful discipleship when their contemporaries could not. With this in mind, Dietrich Bonhoeffer may help us out today. Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and pastor who resisted his government when he recognized, very early and very clearly, the dangers of Hitler’s regime. His first warning about the...

The great early church theologian Origen speaks for most of us today when he says: “If you read people passages from the divine books that are good and clear, they will hear them with great joy . . . But provide someone a reading from Leviticus, and at once the listener will gag and push it away as if it were some bizarre food. He came, after all, to learn how to honor God, to take in the teachings that concern justice and piety. But instead he is now hearing about the ritual of burnt sacrifices!” [1] Love Leviticus? Perish the thought! It’s in the Bible but most of us offer it only scorn or more or less benign neglect. Love it? We don’t even like it. All that holiness and purity stuff. Clean and unclean – who can make sense of all that? Who wants to? What difference does it make? No, we don’t love Leviticus. And we really don’t want to. It’s about a nation we don’t understand (biblically and theologically), in a time and place foreign and distant to us, full of...