Marginal Christianity

A passage not often mention in discussions of whether Donald Trump might be considered a godly ruler or not are the specifications for a righteous king God gives in Dt.17. According to them a righteous ruler: 1) is a native Jew and not a foreigner (v. 15); 2) does not trust in the size of his army or in alliances with foreign nations for victory (v. 16); 3) does not marry multiple wives, i.e., enter political marriages with daughters of pagan kings who might draw his heart away from trusting in Yahweh (v. 17); 4) lives modestly and does not use his office to accumulate wealth (v. 17); 5) keeps a personal copy of Torah by his side (v. 18); 6) reads and obeys the Law in the fear of God (vv. 18–19); and 7) acts humbly before the people and God so that his dynasty may prosper for many generations (v. 20). Trump passes #1,3 (in that his marriages were not so far as I am aware politically motivated or served to lead him into any idolatries he was not otherwise inc...

“Pandemic” – Lynn Unger “What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down. And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. (You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. (Surely, that has come clear.) Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart. Reach out your words. Reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch. Promise this world your love– for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, so long as we all shall live.”  

Again I interrupt my series on Joy for some further thoughts on dealing with the confinement most of us are and will likely for some time be dealing with. Here I offer ten things each of us can do doing this time. They all begin with “s.” I’m a preacher, so sue me! Slow Down  (Sabbath from Speed) Three-miles-an-hour is the speed at which humans normally walk. It is the “human” speed. But, as Brooks, a character in The Shawshank Redemption said upon release from prison after fifty years, “The world’s gone and gotten itself in a big damn hurry.” By becoming human, Jesus brought “God” to us at a “speed” we could understand and relate to. COVID-19 is forcing us to “slow down.” Perhaps instead of restlessness, anger, boredom, fretting, and anger we could begin to settle into a new speed of life and acclimate 0urselves to it and focus on getting to God at the speed he has chosen to reveal himself to us. If we could do that we might have in place our own “temple i...

“We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will.”                                                      Gideon Lichfield, Technology Review, Mar.17, 2020. One thing we cannot say at this point about the new world of worldwide pandemic we are entering is that once it is over we will return to normal. One reason is that “we” who say that today will not be the “we” who exit the other side of this crisis. We can’t help but think that now but it good to be alerted that it will not likely be the case then. And who can tell what “we” then will think of as normal or the d...

Well, pretty much everything, we’ve discovered. Imperial domination of our lives reduces us to a simulacra, a parody of the life God intends for his creatures. It robs us of our energy, strength, creativity, and power rendering us somnambulent unparticipants in our living. Joy restores all that to us and for us. It is a gift of God that often unexpectedly lays hold of us and reorients our lives back to their true north. This paragraph at the beginning of 1 Peter says it well: 3  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4  and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5  who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6  In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, 7...

“No merely theoretical understanding is possible, for abstract theoretic understanding does away with the essential mystery by insisting on the continuity of merely rational explanation. But that is just what we cannot give of the awful fact of the descent of the Son of God into our hell and the bearing by the Son of God of divine judgement on our behalf, for all rational explanation must presuppose a basic continuity here between man and God, but that is just what the atonement reveals to be wanting by the very fact that God himself had to descend into our bottomless pit of evil and guilt in order to construct continuity between us and God” ( Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ , 4). As we draw nearer to Good Friday and the horror at Skull Hill we begin to think again of what happened in the death of Christ. To often in the church’s history the metaphors and images scripture used as raw material to fashion a “doctrine” of atonement. In such a doctrine the images and metaph...

Theological Journal – March 16 (Lent 2020) Moltmann Monday – The Crucified God “The one will triumph who first died for the victims then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes when is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God.” ― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology , 178. Jesus’ cross scandalizes us, always scandalizes us, even his most faithful followers with its morality-ignoring, boundary-transgressing, propriety-busting, political...