• On May 17, 2009 by

    Veritas

    Veritas. Truth.

    Your first allegiance must be to truth.

    You must love truth before you love God.

    For without a primary love of truth, how do you know that the God you love is the God that is?

    Without primary allegiance to truth, you may just love your own ideas which you call God.

    If you don’t love truth enough, you will sell it cheap.

    Without a costly commitment to truth, you’ll trade truth for certitude.

    Certitude is a poor substitute for truth.

    If all you want is cheap certitude, that’s easy enough to come by. Just land on some opinion one way or the other, tell yourself you’re certain, and that’s that. No wrestling with doubt, no dark night of the soul, no costly agonizing over the matter, no testing yourself with hard questions. Just accept a secondhand assumption or a majority opinion or a popular sentiment or an inherited tradition as the final word and settle into certainty. You don’t have think about it ever again. Ignorance is bliss. So is certitude.

    But… Read more

  • On April 24, 2009 by

    A Whisper that Can Change the World

    We live in a loud culture.
    Religious rhetoric.
    Political propaganda.
    Commercial cacophony.
    People can grow deaf to a constant din of shouting.
    They shut it out as annoying background noise.
    That’s when a whisper can be heard above a roar.
    A whisper that is a revelation of a real secret.
    A whisper that belongs to a hidden mystery.
    A whisper that people want to hear.
    A whisper that can change the world.

    No doubt, there is a time and place for a shout.
    But there’s something to be said for a whisper.
    God’s voice in the garden whispering like the wind.
    God’s whisper to Elijah in a voice still and small.
    In a culture grown weary of angry rhetoric,
    I hear the Holy Spirit say…

    Truth can change a man in the wisdom of his days,
    It whispers soft, but constantly,
    You cannot live this way

    I know a secret.
    A beautiful secret.
    But some secrets are too holy and too beautiful for buttons and bumper stickers.
    Some truths are only desecrated when they are turned into slogans.
    But once you believe something beyond being a slogan—
    You believe it more, not less.
    Like this… Read more

  • On April 19, 2009 by

    As I Was Saying. . .

    The problem is I’m trying to say something with words, and that is by no means a precise medium; and it should not be assumed that words are anything more than an approximate representation of reality. What is the spoken word but puffs of air? What is the written word but a series of symbols? A-P-P-L-E is not an apple. And so trying to communicate what you are feeling, sensing, thinking with puffs of air and inscribed symbols. . . well, let’s just say it’s not an exact science. And what if what I’m feeling, sensing, thinking has to do with G O D?

    (Sigh.)

    Trying to use puffs of air and cute little symbols to say something about The One who is transcendent to the universe itself seems almost arrogant.

    But then again God is not only transcendent to the universe (though he is that too), but he has chosen to be a participant in the universe; and not only in the universe but in that curious species that is the human race. For God entered the human race through the most human event of all—conception and birth. And he continued his human journey all the way into death and clear through to the other side—resurrection. Incarnation and Resurrection. Everything that is genuinely Christian is in one way or another a manifestation of or a reflection upon Incarnation and Resurrection. If we understand Incarnation and Resurrection reasonably well, there is a reasonable chance we might get Christianity somewhat right. But if we don’t t do good thinking on Incarnation and Resurrection there is no chance at all of getting Christianity right. Instead, we’ll cook up some religious this or that and call it Christianity, but it will be nothing of the kind. Read more

  • On April 15, 2009 by

    A Tax Day Prayer

    On this day of internal revenue
    some of us are paid up,
    some of us owe,
    some of us await a refund,
    some of us have no income to tax.

    But all of us are taxed,
    by war,
    by violence,
    by anxiety,
    by deathliness.

    And Caesar never gives any deep tax relief.

    We render to Caesar. . .
    to some it feels like a grab,
    to some it is clearly a war tax,
    to some—some few—
    it is a way to contribute to the common good.

    In any case we are haunted
    by what we render to Caesar,
    by what we might render to you,
    by the way we invest our wealth and our lives,
    when what you ask is an “easy yoke”:
    to do justice
    to love mercy
    to walk humbly with you.

    Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.

    –Walter Brueggemann

  • On April 5, 2009 by

    Life Made Livable

    So I ask you for the umpteenth time, dear blog reader, what does it mean to be saved? Does it mean some part of you, your spirit let’s say, is saved to exist in a non-spatial, non-temporal existence following your death? That your spirit is “harvested” for a “spiritual” postmortem existence? A saved ghost preserved in a heavenly museum? If so, small wonder that some think we’ve got heaven and hell all rolled into one.

    Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
    Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while

    Yes, I know the Bible can be read in such a way that salvation looks like this — part of you is saved for another time and place — but it’s a tragic misreading. And, sadly, it’s a common misreading. Which, I suppose, is to be expected, thanks to the massive doses of Platonism and Gnosticism which seem to be the very religious air we breathe. The “vapors” of Gnostic Platonism have caused popular American Christianity for the past two centuries to be unabashedly dualistic; to the extent that a dualistic reading of Scripture seems to be orthodox, when in fact it is entirely unorthodox.

    It’s frustrating.
    Read more

  • On March 19, 2009 by

    The World and The Dance

    “And in the distance the Jesus-lovers sat with hard condemning faces and watched the sin.”
    –The Grapes of Wrath

    Thus John Steinbeck depicts the world-denying Pentecostals in The Grapes of Wrath as self-righteous , self-appointed morality police who take perverse pleasure in condemning the Saturday night square dance in the California migrant camp. Steinbeck’s terse portrayal of the “Jesus-Lovers” is unflattering, but not an unfair invention of fiction. Unfortunately, such people do exist, and in their existence they horribly distort the good news of Jesus Christ.

    The worst way to define ourselves as Christian is in the negative: What we are against. Steinbeck’s migrant camp Jesus-lovers were against dancing (and most other expressions of humanness). Of course, it is a caricature, but only in that it is perhaps an exaggeration. There remains the misguided tendency to identify ourselves by what we condemn.

    And we have made this quite clear to the wider society. Ask a non-evangelical to define what evangelicals believe and odds are they will not speak in terms of a personal salvation experience (the classical marker of evangelicalism), but will give you a summary of political positions and a list of items evangelicals are opposed to. And that these items may indeed be real evils and not the innocent dance of Steinbeck’s novel is beside the point. The question remains, do we really want to be primarily identified by what we are against? Don’t we have some good news to identify us?

    Here’s the question: What do we think of the world? Are we part of the world or not? Do we love the world or not? Do we have hope for the world or not? Read more

  • On March 9, 2009 by

    Brueggemann’s 19 Theses

    Walter Brueggemann is an Old Testament scholar who has spent so much time studying the Old Testament prophets that he seems to have turned into one. He scares me. He’s the Steven King of the authors I read. I remember reading The Prophetic Imagination on a flight from India and writing in the margin, “I wish I hadn’t read this…but I have and I am now responsible.” Walter Brueggemann scares because I think he’s right—that our society is far more distorted than we have supposed. But in this time of economic catastrophe, when Bel bows, Nebo stoops and the false gods of Babylon are shown to be incapable of providing the peace and security they promise, we may be open to a critique of our idols that could lead us to the truly radical alternative of hope in the living God. My prophetic declaration concerning 2009 has been that it is a year of falling idols and rising hope. May it come to pass. So without commentary, other than to say I agree with this prophetic perspective, I offer to you my adaptation and modification of Walter Brueggemann’s 19 Theses..

    1. Everybody lives by a script—whether implicit or explicit.

    2. We get scripted through the process of nurture, formation and socialization, and it happens without our knowing it.

    3. The dominant script in our society is one of technological therapeutic military consumerism.

    4. That script enacted through advertising, propaganda and ideology, especially in the liturgies of television, promises to keep us safe and happy.

    5. That script has failed. The script of technological therapeutic military consumerism cannot make us safe or happy.

    Read more

  • On March 5, 2009 by

    Credo

    Credo.
    I believe.
    I believe the Bible.
    I believe in Holy Scripture inspired by God.

    By why?
    Why do I believe the Bible?

    I know very few Christians who can adequately answer this question. If they are challenged by a skeptic at work as to exactly why they believe the Bible they find themselves on uncomfortable ground; their hands break out in a sweat as they fumble for a defense. Perhaps they go home, dig out a Josh McDowell book , cram for the “test”, try to memorize a few apologetic facts, and then head back to work the next day ready to explain why they believe the Bible…based on the arguments they read and tried to memorize the night before.

    But the problem with this defense is that it is disingenuous. As true as the apologetic arguments for the veracity of Scripture may be, it is not why they believe the Bible. The truth is, they believed the Bible before they knew a single apologetic argument. I doubt that one in ten thousand Christians believes the Bible because of historical, archeological, textual, literary, philosophical evidence. They believe in the Bible for a completely different reason, though they probably have never consciously understood this reason.

    I believe the Bible because I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and because I believe in the Church.

    Here’s how it works… Read more

  • On February 26, 2009 by

    Engaging Orthodoxy


    Last month I was riding on a train from Rome to Assisi. Peri and I were going there to explore the stomping grounds of “an Italian poet from the 13th century” — Saint Francis, the remarkable “friar minor” who brought profound spiritual renewal to his generation by creatively preaching a return to the simplicity of the gospel. As I rode on the train I was reading about the development of the Apostles’ Creed on Wikipedia which I had googled on my iPhone, all the while listening to Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace by the Foo Fighters on my iPod.

    A synchronicity of centuries.

    1st century faith & gospel
    2nd century confession & creed
    13th century poet & prophet
    21st century culture & technology
    On the train from Rome to Assisi

    Engaging Orthodoxy
    Read more

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