Marginal Christianity

Sin is a multifaceted reality and requires an illustration that captures that multifacetedness. I suggest the image of a Russian nesting doll adapted having a string emerging from the top of the largest, outermost doll. We pull on the string a lo and behold the whole series of inner, smaller dolls emerge connected to each other by that string. -The larger, outermost doll is cosmic sin; attached to it and coming out of it next is environmental sin, sin against the creation, our necessary habitat and home. Emerging next and connected to the cosmic and environmental sins, is systemic sin, the patterned/habitual/institutional/political/social/economic ways we oppress and repress one another. A final pull draws up the smallest, innermost doll, personal/individual sin. -This doll as a whole is named Idolatry and the interconnected nature of sin is the string that binds them, together. Every sin is always and at the same time implicated in some fashion at each of these levels....

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...

Notes -though an individual’s experience, it is for the music director to set it to music for worship (see superscription). Thus it becomes a part of the communal memory of God’s saving work on their behalf. -this psalm is best understood as a commentary on 2:12: “Happy are all who take refuge in him” (Grogan, Geoffrey W.. Psalms (The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (THOTC)) . Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition: 1154). -the point of the psalm is in vv.7-8. The “wake up” of 3:5 and the “lie down and sleep” of 4:8, along with numerous verbal connections between the two psalms, make them a pair, a morning psalm (Ps.3) and an evening psalm (Ps.4). -the NIV is probably right in reading “Give me relief from my distress” ( a plea) rather than the NRSV’s taking the phrase as reference to a past act of God. Exposition 4:1: Prayer for Grace With no delay or pleasantries the psalmist cries out in a demanding tone “Answer me when I call.” Some such chutzpah is in...

christiancentury.org /article/publisher/guns-are-americans-golden-calf Ancient Assyrian mosaic (Thinkstock) The death-by-gun crisis in America is not just a political issue. It’s a spiritual issue of the highest order. Having all but enshrined the divinity of guns, our culture has created an elaborate public liturgy for every mass shooting. Flags go to half-staff. Counselors turn out. Thoughts and prayers pour forth. We continue to make a sorry mess of the distinction between loving God and being charmed by idols that seek to thwart the glory of God. Our national infatuation with firearms has reached crisis proportions that should trouble every believer. All of us get sad, of course, when bullets eviscerate the joy in innocent victims’ families. If our eyes don’t water up when a tearful dad on the evening news alternatingly weeps and screams because a gunman senselessl...

A Bonhoefferian Take on Evangelism Evangelism, under the sway of the 16 th century’s emphasis on the individual person’s (sinner) relation to God (judge and forgiver), saw people as needing to know they were miserable sinners in God’s sight and that they ought to avail themselves of his gracious forgiveness. Evangelism calibrated to this theology sought, then, to find others’ weaknesses and sins and bring them the good news of the gospel (as they understand it).   As long as the sense of guilt before God was strong in our culture, this approach seemed effective. I say seemed, because whenever we met someone for who life was going well, were decent people, successful, good marriage, children doing well, etc. we discovered our gospel has little to say to them. And as the sense of guilt before God ceased to be potent culture reality the gospel was speaking a language fewer and fewer people could or wanted to understand. The world had changed. The 20 th was no longer the...

Because our loves are disordered our feelings are often unreliable indexes to what is true about us. Feelings are real, and powerful, and must be dealt with. Sometimes they sync up with what is true about us, many times, they do not. They are treacherous, temporary, and tangled. Treacherous because they reflect the disordered loves we all have. At points, then, which we cannot easily identify, feelings lead us to internalize, articulate, and respond to our lives in distorted, that is, idolatrous, ways. Temporary because changeable. Their fleetingness betrays any claim we may have on them as a foundation for morality or life’s direction. Tangled because, following from fleetingness and the disordered loves each of us experiences, feelings enmesh us in a never-ending maze of perspectives and possibilities from which we cannot extricate ourselves. The struggle is to bring our (rebellious) loves into sync with our creation as God’s beloved creatures bound to the freedom of servi...

13.       I started this series with no order or end in mind except for this last one. I left out much that could rightly have been included (hence, the “some” in the title). And the discussions are intended to be suggestive and provocative, not exhaustive. I’ve included matters that seem to me important for the church to wrestle with in this time and place. But this final post I always meant to close with because it may be the most important of all I have or could have included here: “the fear of the Lord.” We don’t hear much about this topic today. We’re all about getting the “fear” out of our relationship with God. And in one sense that’s a good thing (see my post on “forgiveness” above). Yet in another equally important sense, loss of “fear of the Lord” may be the most debilitating loss we could sustain. While God does not want us to live in fear of him because we are uncertain of his love or forgiveness or acceptance of us, God does want the awe, wonder, a...

Ch 4: The Covenant of Vocation            The Heaven and Hell scheme the reformers brought forward from the late Medieval church congeals into a “gospel” that Wright claims is: -Platonized: accepts the material (earth) – spiritual (heaven) dualism and favors the latter over the former. -Moralized: believes the “sin” and its punishment/forgiveness is the basic human problem. -Paganized: the solution is seen as an angry deity who has to be pacified by human sacrifice.         The biblical gospel, on the contrary, is about heaven and earth reunited in the new creation which will host God and humanity in living fellowship through the ages. The problem is not morality but idolatry. And the solution is a loving God who goes to the uttermost to reclaim and restore his lost creatures and creation.         While some versions of reformed theology teach tha...

The Book of the Twelve for Lent 2016 The Problem with Idols – Habakkuk (3) “What use is an idol once its maker has shaped it— a cast image, a teacher of lies? For its maker trusts in what has been made, though the product is only an idol that cannot speak! Alas for you who say to the wood, “Wake up!” to silent stone, “Rouse yourself!” Can it teach? See, it is gold and silver plated, and there is no breath in it at all. But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him!”                                        (Habakkuk 2:18-20)             The inimitable and late-lamented David Foster Wallace glosses Habakkuk’s analysis with his own luminous insight. “Because here's something else that's weird...