The Little Friar

I wrote a few weeks ago about the necessity for churches to relearn to lament in worship.  I want to pick up that theme again. I know why we do it -- why we resist lamenting in our churches.  I just think those reasons don't hold up to scrutiny.  So here I want to take those "reasons" and scrutinize them, in hope that churches will begin to offer a more healthy worship diet. Why?  Well, to be honest, it's scriptural.  "Grieve, mourn and wail.  Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom" (James 4.9).  In the popular (read: contemporary) worship scene, we simply don't do these things.  Substantial engagement with grief (even when that engagement does occur) feels like trying to move a Carnival Cruise ship's course with a canoe.  The ship is just too heavy and the music too loud to hear the shouts of those paddling furiously away from the boat -- the line taut between them.  Those in the canoe -- I probably should point ...

In her book Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's character John writes this:  "It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over.  Sometimes they really do struggle with it.  I see that in church often enough.  So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except laughter is much more easily spent". I think she's right on every point.  Laughter does take over the body; laughter does expel something; crying and laughter are similar.  The last point is probably the most obvious:  Laughter is more easily spent than crying.  We could draw this point out in a slightly different direction.  Laughter is more easily spent and it's also much easier to participate in -- it's "an amazing thing to watch" and, as the old cliche goes, laughter is contagious.  Crying, on the other hand, is ...

A friend of mine has been tapped to teach a seminar on theodicy in pastoral care and theology next fall, and he's asked me to think through what I believe a seminar like that should include. Theodicy (a.k.a. " the problem of evil ") is one of those theological digressions that take place in nearly every introductory class of theology that I teach.  I once was very reluctant about that.  These days, though, I think it offers the most fertile ground for getting pastors to think theologically, so I find it -- sadly enough -- one of my most exciting topics.  Particular suffering of the sort encountered in pastoral ministry problematizes theology's preference for neat answers.  Any pastor who's ever walked into a hospital room knows this. My classes on theodicy tend to be a mix of Simone Weil , Marilyn McCord Adams , John Hick , James Cone , Sarah Coakley , GK Chesterton , Augustine , Aquinas , and Barth .  A serious theological discussion about theodicy will...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that the Song of Mary (also called the Magnificat) is the oldest Advent hymn.  "It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung ...  These are the tones of the women prophets of the Old Testament now come to life in Mary's mouth."  This Galilean woman stands in the long Jewish tradition of female singers from Miriam with her tambourine (Exodus 15.2-21) to Deborah (Judges 5.1-3) to Hannah (2 Samuel 2.1-10), who gave away her own sons to build Jewish history.  Most biblical scholars agree:  The Magnificat comes out of the long history of political struggle of the Jewish people against oppressors. Galilee in the first century was a spawning ground of revolts against the oppressive Roman occupation.  So this victory song was at first a song of revolt. That's probably why missionaries in Africa were forbidden from teaching it to converts. The Magnificat is so poli...

1.   Certainly a great deal, if not all, human evil is a product of the inferiority complex.   Satan is the archetypal case.  He wreaks his havoc because, due to self-esteem issues, his "sense of injur'd merit" ( Paradise Lost , I/98).  He's soooo pissed off. 2.   The problem with writing fiction about Satan is that it's really hard to make him the minor character he is. 3.   Satan is the supreme intellectual.  Sexual sarxian vices are mere peccadilloes compared to the sins of feverish cogitation.  Of course, Satan may come on as a sexual predator, and boast of his amorous exploits, but remember, he is a liar.  In fact, the Devil is impotent. 4.   Being "spiritual" but not religious, and averse to the somatic, the material, and the quotidian messy -- these too are characteristic of the demonic.   Satan is OCD for sure. 5.  " Unforgiven Sinners" is any empty set.   If there are any sinners in hell, it's not because they ar...

"Nothingness had power over the creature.  ...  But it was impotent against the God who humbled himself, and himself became a creature, and thus exposed himself to its power and resisted it.  Nothingness could not master this victim.  It could neither endure nor bear the presence of God in the flesh.  It met with a prey which it could not match and by which it could only be destroyed as it tried to swallow it.  The fullness of the grace which God showed to his creature by himself becoming a threatened, even ruined and lost creature, was its undoing." -- from Karl Barth,  Church Dogmatics  III/3, p. 362.

Earlier this week I was diagnosed with an abscess growing just at the base of my skull, on the back of my neck.  I had presented with ear pain but when the growth went from golf-ball-sized to hockey-puck-sized, it was time for treatment.  Since that initial diagnosis I've had considerable pain, along with two additional growths -- one on the mirror side of my neck from the first, the other is a substantial 3-inch growth on the top of my head.  The pain is nothing short of excruciating. I have trouble sleeping and laying.   For those who know me best, this is particularly scary.  It's eerily reminiscent of cancer.  I've been "clean" for five years.   All of this puts me to mind of thinking theologically about illness.  Some Christians say we should celebrate our sickness; that it's a gift God is using to teach us God's will.  They try to emphasize  God's sovereignty by describing cancer as a "gift" and "blessing" which is "desig...

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...

Nietzsche famously proclaimed in The Gay Science :  "God is dead".  According to Nietzsche, by our very own actions, we have made God unnecessary in our world.  Science, so it seemed, had progressed to provide atheological answers to the origin, purpose and even end of the universe and all biological life.  Psychology began exploring the depths of the human mind with scientific detail, largely now dispelling notions of "free will" in neuroscience.  Economics and sociology began providing scientific responses to how humans emerge in groups and interact.  So as Nietzsche saw it, we had progressed to that point when we had killed off God.  " God is dead.  God remains dead.  And we have killed him.  Yet his shadow still looms." Thing is, Nietzsche, even as an atheist, was doing theology.   We're all theologians -- even if we don't believe in God.  Whenever there's a tragedy, we grope for answers.   How can children be sold int...

There have been many nights over the past thirteen years when I've turned to the book of Psalms to express what's otherwise been expressible.   I have an observation about dealing with suffering, pain, disappointment:  Some people like to "go high" while others "go low".  I'm part of that "go low" crowd.  Walter Brueggemann groups the Psalms under the headings psalms of orientation and psalms of disorientation .  Psalms of orientation are the psalms of unmitigated praise.  YHWH reigns supreme in these psalms and the world is well-ordered.  By contrast, the psalms of disorientation are the psalms of protest and lament where YHWH has gone missing and the world seems to be falling apart.   Folks who "go high" generally use the psalms of orientation.  Folks who "go low", psalms of disorientation.  So, I gravitate toward psalms of lament.  It seems lots of folks  go to the psalms of orientation -- psalms of praise which declar...

From Thomas Halik 's  essay at Religion and Ethics on two ways of reading the relationship between the Crucifixion and Easter, an argument he makes in his Night of the Confessor : The Easter story can be read in two quite different ways.  Either as a drama in two acts:  in the first act a just and innocent man is sentenced to death and executed, and then, in the second act, is resurrected and accepted by God.  Or as a drama in one act in which both versions of the story take place at the same time. In the first interpretation the "Resurrection" is the happy ending, and the entire story is a typical myth or optimistic fairy tale.  I can hear a story like that and think to myself that that was more or less the way it happened (which people confuse with "faith"), or I can conclude that it didn't happen like that -- or at all (which people confuse with "lack of faith"). Nevertheless it is the second interpretation, the "parallel" one, ...