Marginal Christianity

“ 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...

Our day and time is one in which approaches to religious or spiritual faith tend either toward some experience they regard as religious or spiritual (and it doesn’t matter what it is) or toward a retrenchment to faith as commitment to a cause or as a specimen logged in a book). The former is open-ended with almost no boundaries; the latter quite specific with the specter of political correctness/purity always near at hand (Andrew Root following Charles Taylor). Neither events without a history nor history without events will do theologically, however. These legacies of the 19 th and 20 th centuries have left us between a rock and a hard place. Or better, following physicist Carlo Rovelli ( Seven Brief Lessons on Physics), between a stone and a kiss. What does this mean? Stones are objects locatable in space and time with which one has at best an impersonal relationship. Even of one worships the spirit or deity of a rock it is not the rock itself one relates to but t...

written by Gregory P. Floyd Share Christmas Morning, 2017 T here is a kind of theology that is not written in words, but written in lives. It is a type of religious reflection, not the reflection on religion of lettered men and women, but the reflection of religion through the performance of active love. If both are indispensable to the Christian tradition, it is also clear that they are neither equivalent nor, perhaps, equally important. It is the latter task: the daily, difficult, and often unremarkable practice of being in the world as a Christian that is the material of Christian life. Rosemary Therese was that kind of Christian. The oldest daughter of a Polish father and an Irish mother, she grew up in an age when that arrangement was not yet unremarkable nor, amidst cultural and financial pressures, unremarked upon. By certain lights her life was a humble one. As the oldest child, she was not to go to college, but to care for her parent...

Arthur McGill and William Stringfellow In his fine but sadly much neglected book Death and Life: An American Theology Arthur C. McGill offers insightful theological reflection on the place and power of death in middle-class American society. He does not use the language of the “powers” as Stringfellow does but treats death as every bit the powerful and profound threat that twists our lives out of their God-intended shape and function as he does. McGill’s account is thoroughly “indigenous” in that he wrestles with the power and dynamics of death as it actually impacts Americans. This is the kind of theology we noted in the Introduction that Karl Barth called for: contextual and conflictual, communal and missional, scriptural and critical, contested and tempted. McGill uses a wonderful image to picture the formative power of death in our culture. He calls Americans under the thrall of death as “bronze people” (26). These are folk who, according to McGill, “devote themselves...