The Little Friar

Thus far, I've been articulating an understanding of the powers and principalities that hopes to reclaim living humanly as the heart of the NT vision.  What drives my theology is theodicy -- the problem of suffering, the problem of death.  Living Christianly, I've been trying to say, is nothing more than living humanly in the midst of death.  If Americans are dehumanized by the violence of babel and brutalized in the social chaos wrought by the demonic powers and principalities, how can a person live?   How can a person live?   How can a person live in the midst of death, in the face of demonic, dehumanizing forces? The answer, I think, comes in resistance to evil .  Resistance toward death is the only human way to live.  Resistance is what gives us hope.  The biblical response -- again, an answer which also has empirical authority -- is that hope is known only in the midst of coping with death.  It is a person's involvement in that crisis...

In my last post, I attempted to lay out a Christian response to the powers and principalities.  I've been talking quite a bit recently about how those powers -- be they the Satan, politics, economics or even religion -- strive to support death in all its forms in institutional ways.  In this post, I want to turn to the three essential spiritual gifts needed by the Church in fighting those powers.  What are the spiritual gifts that make small acts of resistance narrated biblically even possible? Here, I want to focus on three:  Discernment, speaking in tongues, and exorcism.  Discernment  is the foundational discipline.  In his little-appreciated theological project entitled Not Every Spirit:  A Dogmatics of Christian Belief , Christopher Morse lays out how discernment is at the heart of Christian being and thinking and praying.  For Morse, " discerning the signs and spirits" is learning to read the world biblically , which means apocalyptical...

Over the past few weeks, I've turned my attention again to the "principalities and powers" of the New Testament, in their varieties of forms.  Earlier this week, I began reflecting on the very nature of the powers.  Today, I want to look at our Christian response to them.  If I'm right -- if there are more powers than we might name -- our Christian response will also exist in varieties of ways.  If  the powers and principalities are legion, so are the means by which they assault, captivate, enslave, and dominate human beings.   In the end, all those strategies seek the death of the specific faculties of rational and moral comprehension which specifically distinguish human beings from all other creatures.  Whatever form or appearance it make take, demonic aggression always aims at the immobilization or surrender or destruction of the mind and at the neutralization or abandonment or demoralization of the conscience.  The goal is to morally incapacit...

Throughout the Bible, the satan is portrayed as being a creature ordained and directed by God, fulfilling his function of being an adversary.  In fact, the Hebrew word  satan  means "adversary", and in its earlier usage it carries the definite article ("the satan", or "the adversary").  Satan is portrayed as a courtroom prosecutor, and God is the judge; Satan looks for evidence against God's people (e.g., Job), and God even lets him use entrapment and sting operations.  Over time, however, the portrayal of Satan shifts from being God's servant to being God's enemy, as Satan takes his efforts to accuse God's people further, breaking the boundaries that God puts on him.  By the time we get to the NT, Satan is God's enemy, yet unwittingly or unwillingly continues to serve God's purposes by doing what he always does: entrapping and accusing people.  Satan's role, I think, is as God's servant, also seeing Satan's fall as the ...

A friend asked that I put together a few liturgies for Ash Wednesday and Holy Week.  Here's what I have so far .

My friend Prof Casey Cobb, associate professor of history at Roane State, asked this morning for some thoughts about teaching and parish ministry in Appalachia.  This is that reflection.  I grew up in Appalachia -- particularly in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Sevier County.  Most of my formative years were spent in Pigeon Forge, that "Mecca" of tourism.  My first job as a high school student was in one of the tourist country music shows in that area -- the "Bonnie Lou and Buster Smoky Mtn. Hayride Show".  I attended college in Appalachia -- just 45 mins from my childhood home, at Carson-Newman.  After seminary, nearly all of my formative years in ministry have been spent in Eastern Tennessee and Southwestern Virginia.  Whatever Appalachian  might be, surely I'm not only that , but this is my place, and these are my people.  Perhaps the most important principle for ministry was classically articulated by that Anglican priest-turned-...

I spent a lot of time here talking about the New Testament notion of "the principalities and powers".  Even this week, every post thus far has referenced them.  So perhaps a little primer is in order.  The "powers and principalities" play a distinctive role in how I articulate sin  and death .  They are mentioned throughout the NT and contribute to a theology that places death  (not sin) as the ultimate foe.  Take a few minutes to read these texts:  Romans 8.38-39; Colossians 1.16; Romans 13.3; 1 Corinthians 15.24; Ephesians 6.12.  At the heart of the powers and principalities in the NT is a theology of the Fall .  Bonhoeffer is right (in his lectures on Genesis 1-3, Creation and Fall ) to insist that our  conceptions of the Fall shape our vision of Christian ethics.  For Bonhoeffer -- and for me -- the Fall isn't just about human sinfulness, people doing bad things.  The Fall points to the moral disorder of Creation ...

Kendra and I are soon to participate in "Marriage 101".  At school, I was trained as a facilitator, so this will be a new experience -- participating rather than facilitating.   "Marriage 101", for those of you unfamiliar with it, was developed by Greg Vaughn in the late 80s.  It features gender-specific workbooks around 8 individual topics needed for newlywed counseling.  While Vaughn teaches most of the video segment topics, Dave Ramsey is brought in to discuss newlywed finances.  Over my years as pastor, it didn't take long for me to grow uncomfortable with Ramsey's economic advice.  Not because it's bad economics.   Don't spend beyond your means is particularly important and sound advice for families.  Take manageable baby steps to get out of debt once you're in it.  That's just good business sense.  There's nothing to oppose about it, but there's nothing really earth-shattering or "biblical" about it either, despite the...

My last post tried to lay out my notion that America is Revelation's Babylon.  For Dr King -- and for me -- any adequate biblical understanding of America must take seriously that America is a political incarnation of the New Testament's "principalities and powers".  If want to further that argument by offering its biblical contrast.  As America is Babylon, I want to articulate Dr King's "Dream" -- an incarnational theology that centers on Jesus and is expressed in a sacramental ethic.  Let me be clear from the start:   I'm a biblical realist .  There's  no other place actually known to human beings, except this world as it is -- the place where life is at once being lived; there are no other places for which to search or yearn or hope -- no utopia, no paradise, no otherworldly afterlife; and no limbo either. What Dr King expressed wasn't some "pie in the sky" pipe dream.  Dr King was a preacher.  And his criticism of America came ...

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day in America.  As part of our collective social memory, we set aside yesterday to remember Dr King's prophetic voice in demonstrating the evils of racism in our lives.  What we forget, so often, though, is that Dr King's prophetic voice also offered connected criticisms in economics and in violence.  Ultimately, that lack of memory is connected to our inability to grasp the unifying theme of Dr King.  He was, after all, a minister of Jesus Christ .  Which means his voice and work and life were attempts to understand America biblically . What does it mean to "understand America biblically"?   First, let's explore what it doesn't mean.  To understand America biblically doesn't mean to construe the Bible Americanly.  The goal of the prophet is to speak the word of The Lord.  But, more often than not, when Americans approach that word they do so with a radical violence to its character and content.  We find...