Marginal Christianity

 AUGUST 21, 2017 BY  LEAH D. SCHADE    14 COMMENTS 147      Psalm 137 is rarely ever used in worship. Why? Because it is a dangerous psalm.  But we need to read it, study it, and listen to the voice of anguished rage.  Because God is listening to those voices as well. I remember the first time I heard this music from  Godspell .  What a beautiful, mournful song, I thought to myself.  And I know I’ve heard those words before . . . “On the willows there we hung up our lyres.”  Such beautiful, haunting words.  Where have I heard them before?  And then it hit me – Psalm 137.  But I noticed that the song’s lyrics stopped short of the last verses of the Psalm:  “Happy will be the one who does to you what you did to us, O Babylon.  Blessed will be the one who dashes your little ones, your babies against the rock.” What an awful image! It’s hard to believe a Psalm like this is in the Bi...

December 30, 2015 by Preston Sprinkle 1 Comment   It’s fascinating (one might say disturbing) to see how each person’s political context shapes his or her understanding of Romans 13. Christians living in North Korea or Burma tend to read Romans 13 differently than Americans do. Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, and other “Christian” dictators have celebrated the passage as their divine ticket to execute justice on whomever they deemed enemies of the state. Not more than a generation ago, Romans 13 was hailed as the charter for apartheid in South Africa. American Christian leaders did the same during the years of slavery and segregation. If the state mandates that blacks can’t drink from the same water fountain as whites, it very well has the divine right to do so, according to certain interpretations Romans 13. Most people today would see such a view of Romans 13 as going a bit too far. But only a bit. Theologian and scholar Wayne Grudem, for instance, says that the “sword in t...