From Kazoh Kitamori’s Theology of the Pain of God.
Get it.
And yeah, those are my markings. Welcome to my brain on a page.
Seminary
Crazy thought of the day: God Died. [QUOTE]
“The task of witnessing to the gospel is to vitalize the astonishing fact of the gospel. The message “the Son of God has died” is indeed most astonishing…. God has died! If this does not startle us, what will? The church must keep this astonishment alive. The church ceases to exist when she loses this astonishment. Theology, the precise understanding of the gospel, must be seized by this astonishment more than anyone else. It is said that philosophy begins with wonder; so theology begins with wonder. The wonder of philosophy pales before the wonder of theology. The person astonished by the tidings “God has died” can no longer be astonished at anything else.”
Kazoh Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God
Why my soul is glad to have feminists around me
This is for those of you that subscribe to the blog by RSS feed or through a WordPress subscription. Earlier, I put up a new post, but because I had started writing it several days ago, the date on the post is from then, not today. So….I don’t know that it went through on your subscriptions. You can find the post here. Let me know what you think!
Gospel “Content” vs. Gospel “System”
… it has increasingly become my conviction that the primary task of theology must be concerned with ‘substance’ and ‘content’ rather than mere ‘system’ of thought. The splendor of the content of the gospel makes everything else lose color.
–Kazoh Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God
Why my soul is glad to have feminists around me
This is a post in our on-going series on Women in the Church.
As I wrote last week, I was at my in-person seminary intensive the past two weeks. While there, I met a woman who is about to be ordained a minister in my denomination. We were all sharing our stories and I told her I was raised a Southern Baptist. Having been raised in area where they have little to no foothold, she had only had one experience with a Southern Baptist.
She was working a table at a conference where an older gentleman carrying a large briefcase approached, telling her how excited he was about the next speaker–a “fellow Southern Baptist”. Not being familiar with the speaker’s work, this woman asked the gentleman what the work was on. He put his briefcase on the table, opened it up and pulled out a large tome, saying “this is his book, and it is wonderful.” He almost began to summarize its contents, but stopped short, instead pulling out a much smaller paperback, saying “but that book may be too hard for you to understand. Here, look at this one. It’s much simpler.”
He then realized he had no idea why a woman would be at this conference in the first place. He asked, “and so what do you do?”
She told him that she was at seminary studying for her Masters of Divinity.
This gentleman quietly put the books back in his suitcase, shut it, locked the clasps, looked at her, and solemnly said, “you know you’re going to burn for that, right?” And he walked away.
Dispatches from the Snowy Midwest (Seminary Daze)
For the next week-and-a-half more, I find myself in Holland, Michigan. I’m here for an in-person intensive in my otherwise distance seminary program. It’s two weeks of Hebrew for over 5 hours a day and two other classes in the afternoon and evenings.
I’ve been here since Sunday and it really has been amazing. There was tons of snow here causing travel hiccups for a lot of people, though I came in just before the worst of it. I’m staying with some guys from the program in a house right on Lake Matacawa (see picture above).
I still don’t know how to relate to these sorts of times. Going into it, I expected it to be a time appealing to my introverted self; mainly sitting and staying to myself (and happily so), keeping my nose in books. I wasn’t looking forward to taking this much time off from work, and I wondered why these classes couldn’t continue being online. I didn’t need to know these other people in the program. Why was I being forced to spend time with them in person?
Instead, it’s been hard to get a moment to myself (and–surprisingly–happily so). These guys I’m staying with are all amazing men, and the classes have been learning experiences unlike anything I’ve seen before. I get to have conversations that are so refreshing compared to my previous seminary experiences. Yes, the talks are still all about those things most normal people don’t (and shouldn’t) spend much time in thought over (theories of lapsarianism, the mutability of God, the influence of Western philosophical models on classical theology, etc.).
And yet, these talks have been marked by two big differences from their prior college and seminary iterations. First, few of these talks have stayed there in the ether for their entire duration. Eventually they get to talks about how it affects how we do ministry, serve others, how we communicate these ideas in helpful ways, and how we can peaceably coexist with others that disagree with us on any particular niche issue. It has challenged my pastoral sensibilities and has really connected high theology with the mundane in really beautiful ways.
And that leads to the second thing. In my particular program, there is so much diversity in opinion on even major parts of theology and church life. This school is a denominational school with lots of beliefs about lots of things–and they don’t hide it–they’re anything but wishy-washy on doctrinal issues. And yet, those that are here have such a beautiful sense of what’s essential and not. To see the most theologically conservative members of our group joking around with and living life with those that would be considered some of the most rebellious “liberal” theologians in the Church today truly is a beautiful thing.
So many of our theological conversations have simply been exploring what one another thinks, why they think it, what led them there, and how it affects their lives. It’s not debate or argument. Just sharing and, in a sense, playing in the playground of theology.
And when theology becomes that–not a battle ground with God as our theological General, but a playground with our loving Father watching on, kissing boo-boos, and bandaging scraped knees–theology becomes an exercise in freedom, worship, beauty, and invitation unlike anything the rest of the world has to offer.
Would that all of our brothers and sisters felt the same way.
A Biblical Critical Advent: Luke’s Cosmic Christmas
For Advent this year, I wanted to put up a few posts looking at Matthew and Luke’s Nativity stories as they were meant to be read: as two separate stories with their own purposes and themes. We often just mush them together, and I think we lose something in that process. Last week, we sat with Matthew’s Nativity story. Today, we turn to Luke’s Christmas.
Matthew’s Nativity focuses on how Christmas plays right into Israel’s own story; how this is exactly how the Jewish Messiah should be expected to have come into the world. Luke’s Gospel, on the other hand, emphasizes Jesus’ significance to the entire world, all parts of society, and the entire cosmic order.
In other words, Jesus’ mission in Luke is much larger than simply Israel. These and other Lukan themes are brought out quite strongly and explicitly in his Nativity narratives. Today we’ll see how he does this through signs of the universal mission of Jesus, the story’s emphasis on the lowly and powerless, and his stories of Spirit-filled joy.
A Biblical Critical Advent: Matthew’s Old Testament Christmas
For Advent this year, I wanted to put up a few posts looking at Matthew and Luke’s Nativity stories as they weren’t meant to be read: as two separate stories with their own purposes and themes. We often just mush them together, and I think we lose something in that process. Today, we look at Matthew’s Christmas Story.
It’s well-known that the Gospel of Matthew portrays Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish messianic expectations. But the path Matthew takes in doing this moves against the way most messianic expectations played themselves out at time. Matthew recalibrates these expectations to show how even in Jesus’ infancy and birth, his “Messiah-ness” includes a retelling of Israel’s own history, both good and bad.
You can see this especially clearly in the way Matthew crafts his version of the Nativity story. Today, we’ll look at three particular aspects of this story that show his unique thematic and purposeful crafting of the birth story: his use of people and names, geography, and the fulfillment of the Old Testament.
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Have yourself a biblical critical Christmas
Sorry, this post isn’t about the pessimism and critical irony that can sometimes mark how we engage in this time of year. When I use the phrase “biblical criticism”, I’m referring to (as Wikipedia says) the “[scholarly] study and investigation of biblical writings that seeks to make discerning judgments about these writings”.
Last year, I wrote about how the story of the Wise Men can inform our doctrine of the Bible. This Advent, I want to do a brief series where we use the tools of scholarly observation to look at each of the two Nativity compositions (yeah, only two out of four gospels have them) and see each of them on their own terms.
For millennia, the birth narratives of Jesus Christ in the Gospels have captivated readers both within and without the Christian faith. Their reading and meditation form the beginning of the Christian Church calendar, and their theological implications of Incarnation form the foundation of nearly all of the distinctives of the Christian faith.
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What is the Proclamation of the Word?
For a class recently, I had to read a bunch of items on the part of a worship service in which the Bible is front and center. This “section” of the service is called “The Proclamation of the Word”, or more generally, the “sermon” or homily”. I ran across this great quote:
The very act of preaching, in fact, sets up questions and problems. Most people no longer understand the difference between preaching and other types of public speaking…. Many people think of a sermon as an occasion for being entertained, instructed, or inspired in matters of religion — hence the customary comment at the church door, “I enjoyed your sermon.” Nowadays, it is only congregations who have been engaged in a new way of thinking for a long time who are going to sit expectantly waiting for the Word of God to be spoken — for preaching, properly understood, is the good news that God preaches through human beings. Astonishingly enough, this is the method of communicating that God has chosen. This is an offensive idea; there are a hundred complaints to be brought against it. Most common is the objection, “How can anyone presume to speak the Word of God?” Or to put it another way, “How can any human being be so arrogant as to think he is a mouthpiece of God?” How indeed? It is a very good question. The validity or invalidity of preaching rests on such issues as these. (Fleming Rutledge, Not Ashamed of the Gospel)
I think Rutledge is right (and not just because she is an incredible preacher–all you complementarians could learn a thing or two from her!): people don’t seem to really see preaching as fundamentally different than any other lecture or other public speaking. Preaching is often (subtly and unspokenly) seen (or at least treated) as “mere” personal edification–similar to a book discussion or philosophical lecture or self-help conference.
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Father Abraham, had many sons; and many sons, Moses did not.
So…I had my mind blown this past week.
I’m taking this class on the idea of “worship” in all its dimensions, and we read a few pieces that gave me an entirely new framework to understand the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, and how God works in those stories. And no, I’m not exaggerating.
In Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with Abraham, and it’s a little weird, mainly because it’s entirely on God. He promises that he will be Abraham’s God. He promises he will give him many descendants. He promises to make those descendants a blessing to the world. And, most importantly, he takes all of the potential negative consequences of breaking the covenant on Himself. In essence, he makes this covenant with Himself on Abraham’s behalf.
What’s Abraham’s part in this whole thing? “He believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness”, the text says (and he’s supposed to circumcise his kids as a visible mark of his belief). This is one of the earliest and clearest depictions of the unconditional grace-driven nature of God’s relationship to humanity and the world–a relationship that would later be called “The Gospel”. In fact, the Apostle Paul would look at this moment in Genesis and say:
Just as Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.” For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.
Okay….so what?
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The Church: Being in Becoming (a Sunday pre-game)
For my Gospel, Culture, and Church course this past week, we had to read the opening chapter of this book on the Church as mission, rather than seeing the Church as something that does mission. We also had to read some mind-blowing pages from Hans Kung’s epic work The Church. It got me thinking a lot about what precisely the “church” is and how it is that thing. I just wanted to share some disjointed thoughts today.
Throughout the readings, the (perhaps over-used) term “Being in Becoming” kept coming to mind. (For my more philosophically-trained friends, forgive me if I’m simplifying this term too much; My main exposure to this has been cursory, in the context of the Trinitarian theology of Karl Barth and how he describes God).
In others words, the Church’s very Being is in its efforts to more faithfully “Become” what it is. It is not and cannot become a static entity into which we invite people. As we are caught up in the missional plan of the missional God, it propels forward into places where the old notions of Christendom and privilege are not relevant and are shown to be the anemic frameworks they are.
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A Brief History of Christian Thoughts on Discernment
This is a post in our series exploring the ancient Christian Practice of Discernment.
In the last post of this series, I went through the short history of how decision-making had been done outside of a church context. I said that the main thing that unified all of these approaches was that they were all fairly impersonal. They appealed to abstract “forces”, “principles”, chance, or even technology help make difficult decisions. I concluded by saying that Christianity gives a very different approach to Discernment and decision-making; one that is personal, intense, risky, and terrifying.
Today I want to talk about that. The history of Discernment in the Christian Church has had a very interesting story. Hopefully you’ll see, along the way, the incredibly different ways Christians have approached this; but hopefully, you’ll also see the deep ways in which it has stayed constant throughout our history.
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Urban Lessons: Why cities will save our souls. [VIDEO]
Yesterday I started a brief little series going through some lessons I have learned from my first semester back in seminary. I first talked about how (at least in my mind) cities had to be taken off their pedestal. There are desires and needs of the human soul that can’t be met in cities. We need other types of livable environments as well.
And yet, through this semester I was re-grounded in my belief in the essential importance and centrality of urban settings. Above, you’ll find a video reflection I had to make in which I give my perspective on this question: Why should Christians engage in cities? In it, I speak about some of these dynamics that are in greater detail below. (Sorry for the poor video quality.)
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Urban Lessons: Why cities will kill your soul.
I just completed my first trimester of seminary (round 2). I took a class class on Urban Christianity that, while it may not sound like a difficult and comprehensive graduate course, really was demanding at every level. So much so, in fact, it has really changed a lot of the ways I’ve thought about the city and how humans relate to it (especially Christians).
The class really caught me at just the right time. To a certain extent, even before coming to this class, I “got” it. I had imbibed enough Tim Keller and Church Planting material to understand the centrality of the city in the story of the Bible. Further, my church is now my fourth urban church plant, I go to church and live, literally, in “Center City” Philadelphia, and I work in the midst of the brokenness of the city, seeing the extremes of its beauty and brokenness in ways that few people do in their everyday lives.
And yet, especially due to the rural roots of “certain people” extremely close to me (haha), I felt I needed to engage in this class to develop a far more nuanced view of the city. And I think I got that. Over a few posts over the next couple of weeks, I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve learned through this time. I think some of these things are lessons that all of us cool urban twentysomethings could do well to internalize.
the long way home 