The Little Friar

I've fielded this question often enough over the past few days, that I should go on record here with my response.  And in order to give my response, let me begin with a story.  On Sunday April 21, 1912,  Karl Barth preached a sermon entitled "On the Sinking of the Titanic ".  The "official" text of the sermon is Psalm 103.15-17, but the actual text of the sermon -- in terms of its homiletical focus -- is something else entirely.  Those who know me, understand why I'm tempted to lambast Barth's text.  And why I would be uncomfortable with this sermon in toto .  But before I go ripping his sermon to shreds, some historical context.  In the spring of 1912, Barth had been out of seminary for about a year and was about a year from getting married.  This is clearly not the Barth of his 1919 Romans commentary and he's decades away from his mature, voluminous, magisterial theological Church  Dogmatics  which remained unfinished when he...

I've often been struck by the way Jesus' parables are preached in the Church.  Several years ago, I taught a preaching class.  Since it was Year A of the Lectionary (as it has been this year), I had students preaching from Matthew's parables.  It didn't take me long before I noticed they all  had the same, basic homiletical structure:  First, they'd narrate the basic plot (historical context and such).  Then, they'd proceed, with lots of pastoral "sensitivity", to talk about the parable's moral dimension in providing us a "balanced" ethical vision.  Preachers gotta be careful to keep away from any aweful "extreme" applications, after all.   So when Jesus says to sell everything, it’s not about  possessions , it's about the state of your  heart  -- and so on.  I also very vividly remember my response.   A congregation's first response, I told them, upon hearing a sermon on a parable of Jesus, ought to be dread .  These...

Someone asked recently why I chose Bonhoeffer to spend so much of my academic career studying.  To respond is part biography and part theology.  I came to Bonhoeffer through his Discipleship .  But the story of being captivated by Bonhoeffer begins much earlier and in a different place.  It begins as a senior in high school, reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil .  Herr Fredrich's account if ethics as the attempt of others to control and lord over the weak explained a good deal of my world, in teen angst.  As Nietzsche maintained, it is only in moving "beyond good and evil" -- beyond the ethics of Kant's "categorical imperative" and Mill's "utilitarian calculus" -- that true human flourishing happens.  In college, then, I discovered the existentialist psychology of Paul Tillich.  Tillich's synthesis of Nietzschean ethic (what he calls "the courage to be") along with a very complex re-reading of Christian theology, made bein...