The Little Friar

This week, for our Friday's Finds series, I've selected Geoffrey Wainwright's For Our Salvation:  Two Approaches to the Work of Christ .  It brings together two lecture series that Wainwright gave in the 90s.  "Senses of the Word" is my favorite.  In it, Wainwright teases out the ways in which the Incarnation transforms the human senses in order to experience revelation, particularly in the liturgy.  Given the reality of sin, Wainwright holds that the liturgy is where we are training our senses to have a proper role in relationship with God. Wainwright's is one of the most important approaches in systematic theology, and this book is one of the places where you see him engaged in a constructive theology.  It's well worth the read.

This week I'm highlighting two books together -- Jennings' The Vocation of the Theologian and Jones & Paulsell's The Scope of Our Art:  The Vocation of the Theological Teacher .  Both are a collection of essays meant to highlight the various ways in which theologians approach teaching as a theological act.  What has always stood out at me is how these essays together feature two primary truths about teaching theology:  The transformation of the student (which is obvious) and the transformation of the teacher (which usually isn't).  Teaching theology is composed of a number of different disciplined formative practices, like prayer and meditation. I first read Jennings' book at Duke, in a seminar entitled "Thinking Theologically".  While that class was frustrating at the time, it's come to mean a great deal to me over the years.  And The Scope of Our Art features essays from a couple of different teachers over the years (I still pick up the bo...

I (Still) Believe is this week's Friday's Finds selection.  I became a scholar (or teacher, or pastor) because of my professor, Professor x.  Now I imagine it wasn't difficult to fill in the x.  Now imagine spending an extended session with them, to hear how their scholarship has affected their faith. That's what I (Still) Believe actually does.  This is one of those deeply personal yet prolonged conversations about how several note-worthy scholars have had their faith enriched by scholarship.

This week's selection for the Friday's Finds series is my copy of Barth's Epistle to the Romans .  While it's certainly not a commentary in the usual sense of that word, this important book is also not a textbook in Christian doctrine, politics, or philosophy -- in the way that lots of Barth's later books might be construed.  Instead, Epistle to the Romans is a pastor's attempt to allow the "strange new world of the Bible" to transform the Church's life in this world, for the sake of the Kingdom. I suppose if one were to start reading Barth, this is the place to begin, because so much of what Barth has to say is said here in a way that will preach.  (Not that Church Dogmatics won't preach -- but it will be more of a struggle for pastors who preach Sunday in and Sunday out.)  This is certainly the first of Barth's book I ever read, as a college sophomore.  And it made all the difference in how I learned to allow the biblical text to n...

This week's Friday's Finds selectin is Richard Lischer's A Theology of Preaching .  Lischer, Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Duke Divinity, was one of those profs who taught me to preach, and this book more than any other impressed on me -- twenty years ago now -- how risky preaching is.  This is one of those preaching books that every preacher should re-read every few years.

I've selected Barth's Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century for this week's Friday's Finds.  It's a theological history book about the liberal protestant theologians from 1700-1900 written by an expert of this era including the most influential liberal Protestant theologians of the Enlightenment:  Rousseau, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Novalis, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Wegscheider, De Wette, Marheineke, Baur, Tholuck, Menken, Feuerbach, Strauss, Schweizer, Dorner, Muller, Rothe, Hofmann, Beck, Vilmar, Kohlbrugge, Blumhardt, and Ritschl (all with dedicated chapters).  And many others appear throughout without explicit chapters, most notably Kierkegaard, Goethe, Louis XIV, and others.  This isn't a history of all Protestant theologians, but those in the long chain of Pietism and the Enlightenment. It's impossible to understand Karl Barth without understanding Friedrich Schleiermacher, and this  book is an excellent read and very accessib...

This week's Friday's Find is John Cassian's Conferences -- just the edited version from the Classics of Western Spirituality series, but still one of the best monastic books ever produced.  I first read Cassian at Duke, with Susan Keefe guiding us through it.  It's been an amazing re-read several times since.  Here's perhaps the most important spiritual advice Cassian has given me:  " The journey to God follows many routes. So let each person take to the end and with no turning back the way he first chose so that he may be perfect, no matter what his profession may be" (p. 158).

This week's Friday's Finds is a book that is part of my Karl Barth collection and one that, sadly, isn't as well known as his other words:  God In Action .  It contains five addresses Barth gave between April 10 and September 12, 1934.  The pressure of the Nazi government on the churches in Germany during this period was fierce.  The Barmen Declaration -- written mostly by Barth -- was adopted during that previous May.  Repeatedly in God in Action Barth refers to the "remarkable apostasy of the Church to nationalism".  Each of the five lectures attempt to pry off Nazi fingers from the Church:  (1) Revelation, (2) the Church, (3) Theology, (4) the Ministry and (5) Witness are only rightly conceived as primarily what God has done and does.  Barth urges the Church to take its orders from God rather than human authorities.  The title of the work comes from his statement, "What is done to us, God in action for us, is a divine miracle"...

This week's selection is one of Bonhoeffer's lesser-known works:  Spiritual Care .  I first read this work in seminary and it shaped so much of what I think and practice around pastoral care.  In it, Bonhoeffer begins with an important affirmation:  "The mission of spiritual care falls under the general mission of proclamation.  Caring for the soul is a special sort of proclamation".  He then goes on to connect that proclamation -- of the Risen One's reconciliation of the world to God -- through the variety of practices that make up the pastor's "spiritual care":  Home visitation, conversations with the indifferent, caring for those who are sick and tempted, hearing confessions, visiting another's deathbed, and ministering in funerals, weddings, and baptisms.  This is an important little book that every pastor should re-read every couple of years.

I have lately been thinking quite heavily about returning to parish ministry (at least on a part-time basis) and have, therefore, begun to think a lot about the regular practice of preaching.  To that end, this week's Friday's Finds selection is the essential three volume collection of Preaching through the Christian Year .  Edited by the great preaching teaching, Gene Tucker and features work by Fred Craddock and others, this series is a must-have for those who will regularly work through the Revised Common Lectionary (you'll notice the Handbook just next to them, that brings together hymn and prayer resources for each day in the RCL). Preaching the RCL keeps my preaching fresh and doesn't allow it to fall into the rut of preaching those texts I'd love to preach regularly.  It therefore allows the congregation to receive a balanced diet of preaching from the full swath of biblical texts over a three year cycle.  And preaching week in and week out is hard stuf...

Geoffrey Wainwright's Doxology:  The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life.  A Systematic Theology is this week's Friday's Finds selection.  Wainwright's is a systemtic theology written in the frame of other liberation theologies (that is, with experience as its guiding metaphor), except that Wainwright chose liturgy as that guiding metaphor.  Doxology is essentially a conversation between liturgy and systematic theology; liturgy is not only the data for theological reflection for Wainwright, but also offers the most faithful way of articulating systematic questions. That makes Doxology one of the most important systematic theologies out there for understanding how I think theologically about anything.  As a young theologian, who parrotted more than spoke with my own voice, Geoffrey's was the way I learned to speak theologically.  And that helped me to preach and offer pastoral care in a way that made me a better theologian.

This week, I want to highlight a lesser-known collection of essays from Eberhard Bethge from 1995 on Bonhoeffer, Friendship and Resistance:  Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer .  It contains a beautiful essay on Bonhoeffer's "Theology of Friendship" that I wish were more well-known and widely-circulated.  That essay offers, I think, lots of fodder for the contemporary lack of dialogue in the Church towards those whom Christ has called his "friends".  For Bonhoeffer, friendship was an important theological category precisely because Bonhoeffer's particular approach to friendship which emphasizes concrete, personal encounter with "the other" in community is uniquely suitable for Christians in an increasingly pluralistic, politically-polarized and techno-social world. His theology of friendship is deeply grounded in the paradox of what God is doing in Jesus Christ.  That I-Thou relationship (which he highlighted in his initial dissertation, Communio S...

This week's Friday's Finds features one of the more recent additions to my library:  The classic Christian Ethics:  Sources of the Living Tradition textbook from H. Richard Niebuhr and Waldo Beach.  Beach, of course, taught Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity for 40 years.  An accomplished musician, he also wrote two lesser-known works on Christmas carols.  But it was this textbook that helped train scores of ministers and scholars to see the social implications of the Gospel for race relations, ecology, technology and economic issues.  Beach's classes on the church and state, social ethics and technology and ethics were very popular, and he left an indelible mark on the character of Duke Divinity that, once you know where to look, you can still see it.

This week I want to highlight a small book that really deserves a wider reading, and is a fine book for small church groups as a discussion piece:  Leslie Weatherhead's The Will of God .  It's been in continuous publication since it first appeared in 1943, and helps to answer some of the more important questions (particularly the young) might ask about what God desires for our lives.  Weatherhead divides up "The Will of God" into three components: The Ultimate Will -- what God will ultimately accomplish in Jesus Christ The Permissive Will -- the things God accepts given our own choices in life The Intentional Will -- the desires God has for our lives It's an amazing little book that deserves to be re-read occasionally.

This Friday for Friday's Finds, I want to highlight Alan Lewis' masterful Between Cross and Resurrection:  A Theology of Holy Saturday .  This book is a challenging read -- a lot like Barth, pay attention to the footnotes.  But if you're willing to invest the energy, it's a rewarding read.  Finished just a mere months before Lewis' death from cancer, Between Cross and Resurrection is ultimately a word about the Good Word of the Resurrection:  That death is not the last word.

This has been a long week, and weekend, so I'm going to keep my Friday's Find to a book that I've discussed a number of times on this blog before:  St Gregory the Great's Book of Pastoral Rule .  This is one of those books that I believe pastors should read at least once a year while in ministry, and certainly a book that seminary students should work their way through at least once before graduation/ordination.

This week's selection comes from my Christian life/spirituality shelf.  And the book that stands out to me today?  Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God .  Early in his vocation, Brother Lawrence decided that "our only business in this life is to please God".  He worked in his order's kitchen for fifteen years and is most known for the following quotation:  "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament". This, of course, gets at the core of everyday spirituality.  There are no times and no places where we cannot commune with God.  Brother Lawrence even takes it a step further when he recommends:  "Get a habit of entertaining yourself often with God".  That's a good practice for ou...

This week's selection of my Friday's Finds series comes from the Christology section of my collection.  And I want to highlight the modern classic, Wolfhart Pannenberg's Jesus--God and Man .  I first read this massive book as part of an undergraduate readings theology seminar, when we paired it with Martin Kahler's So-Called Historical Christ and the Biblical Jesus .  Over the years I've deleted Kahler's book from my collection (while his little book is a theological curiosity, it's not really that significant in terms of his argument), but I've hung onto Pannenberg's book because of its scope and lucidity.  Pannenberg (rightly, I think) argues that the resurrection of Jesus is the event from which Christian accounts of who Jesus is and what Jesus does take their beginning.  Pannenberg sympathizes with Kahler's desire to resist reducing Christology to history (which any number of theologians have been doing since the Enlightenment) but he reje...

I've taught New Testament introductory surveys a number of times, and each time I've used different texts.  In college, Metzger was the choice of the faculty from whom I learned.  Johnson was the standard at Duke.  But today I want to focus on a text that probably isn't as well known in popular circles:  DeSilva's Introduction to the New Testament .  Coming in at 930 pages, this resource offers one of the most accessible -- and useful! -- introductory texts for pastors and church teachers and leaders.  Just the title of chapter 1 is enough to make me smile:  "The New Testament as a Pastoral Response".  Without knowing it, DeSilva's approach in this book has been the approach I've taken in my own lectures over the years and draws upon some of the best in socio-rhetorical reading.  If you're looking for a good reference on the New Testament, DeSilva's Introduction to the New Testament is the one you can't do without.

This week's selection comes from among my library shelf on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Readers to my blog will already know of my intellectual and spiritual affinities for Bonhoeffer, and of my dissertation on him.  Today, though, I want to highlight something on my shelf that isn't actually a book -- the dvd, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Memories and Perspectives.   I first discovered this dvd as an undergrad writing my first major paper on Bonhoeffer, on his Ethics for my coursework in Christian Ethics under Dr Brewer.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Memories and Perspectives is a haunting biographical film on Bonhoeffer that brings interviews from his closest friends and relatives.  Narrated by Oliver Osterberg, this documentary examines Bonhoeffer's life, from the history of his birth -- along with a twin sister, on February 4, 1906, in Germany -- to the time of his death, by hanging, on April 9, 1945, at the age of 39.  Lots of those familiar with Bonhoeffer admire ...