The Little Friar

I think politics, to be understood Christianly, have to be approached spiritually.  Which means that oppression and idolatry, in under to be understood Christianly, cannot be separated. That seems hard for us to do that.  When it comes to evil, conservatives tend to spiritualize the issue, looking for demons behind every door and under every rock.  Liberals, by contrast, tend to politicize evil, reducing spiritual warfare to the political fight for social justice. Throughout the Bible the spiritual and the political are interconnected and woven together.  The political and the spiritual form a gestalt , a bigger picture greater than the sum of the individual parts.  That's what I want to explore over the next few days. One way to see the interconnection between the spiritual and the political is to examine the way demons develop in the Bible. Specifically, in various parts of the Old Testament we get the notion that when God created the world and set...

In the early hours of Thursday morning, I saw that a friend had shared the video of Philando Castile's shooting .  (I wouldn't watch it, unless you want to experience first-hand the graphic violence we, as a society, are capable of committing against black men and women.)  He was pulled over because he had a broken tail light and he ended up shot to death.  This comes on the heels of the Alton Sterling shooting which is just the latest in a seemingly endless list of black lives senselessly lost at the hands of officers who are pledged to protect them. I'm not the kind of guy you'd associate with #blacklivesmatter.  I'm white, middle-aged, brown hair and blue eyes.  I've been a recipient of so many graces from the good ole' boy system in the American South that I can't even keep track.  For example, I was pulled over in 1999 for a non-working tail light.  I've never had to worry about why I was getting pulled over.  I've never had to ask ...

Today is the Feast of the Holy Cross.   A good deal of my thinking and writing lately has focused there.  So some of what follows is drawn from the preaching that is today and next Sunday.  But even more comes from working on my book on the principalities and powers and preaching the good news.  In the cross,  Jesus triumphed over the spiritual forces of evil, winning the decisive victory over the principalities and powers.  In Colossians 2.15, this victory is described using distinctive military imagery:  "And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross". Think about that imagery.   Public spectacle .  The phrase in Greek is almost exclusively used to refer to the victory parade of a conquering Caesar or King returning to the capital city, displaying the spoils and prisoners of war before a cheering and adoring citizenry.  On the cross, Jesus is leading just such...

It's no secret that I'm writing a book on preaching grace and "the principalities and powers".   One of the most important lessons I've taken away from thinking through this set of theological ideas took hold the fall of 1995.  I'd gone to Duke Divinity primarily to decide if I had the intellectual and spiritual courage to commit to being a disciple of Jesus Christ.  Which is another way of saying, I went to Duke to study with Fred Herzog.  Fred was a warm, gentle, kind sort of person.  He was a man who embodied the academic discipline -- no doubt! -- but also  the love of Christ for everyone he met, especially the poor.  Fred was a man who lived by what he said about Jesus.  But that fall, Fred died.  The course of my studies changed dramatically.  And I was left, that Monday morning, to confront evil.  If the truth of Fred's life meant anything, I thought that evening as I prayed the Evening Prayer office, it meant that  the ...

I want to begin with a quote from CS Lewis' Mere Christianity :  "E nemy-occupied territory -- that is what this world is.  Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage".  I begin here because I think this captures exactly what the NT means by the notion of "spiritual warfare" against the powers and principalities of the world.  Too many Christians unnecessarily and wrongly envision this in spiritualist terms. Think Frank Perretti's This Present Darkness  or the movie, The Exorcist .  We lack a robust Christian faith that is engaged with the real world -- this  world -- in confronting the many powers that seek to diminish and destroy human thriving.   The weapon of our spiritual warfare isn't spiritual, either.  It's very earthy -- made of wood and stained in blood, forged in state-sanctioned violence and the death penalty: ...

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...

I have lately had two very different experiences of friendship that have involved very different expressions of power.  Those very different friendships have also left me wondering:   For friends of God, what's a proper exercise of power? First, there are friends of God who dominate.   My worldview is best summarized by a combination of  Deuteronomy 6.5 + Leviticus 19.18 + Matthew 5.44:   You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.  And you shall love your enemies .  So exercises of cold power, in which Christians attempt to "lord over" the weak and vulnerable and hurting (Mark 10.41-44), have me simultaneously grieving and writhing in the righteous anger of James 2.  How we treat the poor and vulnerable demonstrates how we Christians treat Jesus (Matthew 25.31-46).   Either Christian love is costly, or it isn...

A Facebook exchange recently in which I argued that the economic vision of Jesus was a direct criticism of contemporary capitalism has spawned some thoughts I have on Jesus and political economies generally.  It's rather unambiguous from the four New Testament Gospel accounts that Jesus was viewed as a criminal.  He was  crucified.  So this claim seems rather banal.   Of course  Jesus was considered to be a criminal.  But I want to push back a bit and claim that he actually was  a criminal.  My problem is with the notion that most folks have that Jesus "was considered to be" one.  Lots of folks envision Jesus as innocent.  He was crucified as an innocent, and his crucifixion was a miscarriage  of justice.  But I disagree.  Jesus was -- really, truly -- a disturber of the peace and a political threat.  I say Jesus was, according to the testimony in the Gospels, a criminal.  He wasn't just...

I posted a few days ago some of my reasons for disillusionment in modern American Liberalism.  That reference to labor may have struck some of you as odd or out of the blue.  It came to my mind because I've been reading a lot lately about the labor movement.  Why? Some of my reasons are summarized in this article by Henry Blodget in the Business Insider , "I've Always Hated The Idea Of Labor Unions, But It May Be Time To Reconsider". After noting many of the (very legitimate) problems with labor unions, Blodget brings to our attention a few trends, trends that I'm pretty concerned about. First, income disparity -- the separation between the proverbial 99% and the 1% -- is the greatest it has been in America since the Great Depression.  ( To explore more about these trends you can examine these charts in a separate article by Blodget. ) Second, corporate profits are at an all time high. Third, wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-tim...

I first read Phyllis Trible's Texts of Terror:  Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives when I was an undergraduate.  In it, Trible reads through four stories of Old Testament women.  But rather than picking your classic Sunday School "heroines" of the faith, Trible reads the stories of women who were subject to neglect, abuse and violence. What's more, from a literary perspective, these women are, as marginal characters, also tossed aside by the Biblical story.  So in reading their stories Trible attempts to give these women a voice.  The four women are: Hagar, the concubine of Abraham who, due to Sarah's jealousy, was sent into the desert with her child to die Tamar, the daughter of David who was raped by her brother The daughter of Jephthah, who was sacrificed because of an oath made by her father And an unnamed woman, a concubine who was gang-raped to death and then dismembered by her husband  These are difficult stories.  And T...

I've owned an iPhone now since last October.  It was a gift from Kendra for my birthday. Since then, it's become apparent to her -- and more and more to myself -- that I may bloody well be addicted to the device. It's possible that I have an actual psychological addiction to Facebook.  The sort of thinking that leads me to perpetual page refreshing seems eerily akin to the behavior of rats who want another seratonin shot and keep pumping that pedal.  In some ways, Web 2.0 is a tool -- that will suck out my soul if I let it.  It allows me a way to be "friends" without actually being friendly -- a key temptation for an introvert such as myself.  Then there's the added problem of apps -- stimulation vs. sensitivity.  Our culture is addicted to stimulation (Kurt Cobaine's "here we are now, entertain me").  However, the more stimulated one gets, on movies, gadgets , music, etc. the less sensitive they become.   Something, spiritually sp...