The Little Friar

I'd written yesterday on how I read the Bible.  I've been writing quite a bit lately on my political theology.  Most of what I've had to say involves the ways in which the American "we" is not the same as the Christian "we".  That confusion, I think, is at the heart of the issues that surround being a Christian in America.  Then yesterday, I posted this video to my Facebook feed: The book of Revelation is one of those widely-read but also widely-misunderstood books.  All that bad eschatology around makes it misunderstood.  It isn't about the end of the world.  It doesn't speak to a "rapture" of the faithful out of suffering.  There's no "Anti-Christ" coming to take over the world.  Instead, the book is fundamentally a call to hope in the midst of suffering and persecution. Of course, there's the problem.  American Christians aren't persecuted.  So we have to misunderstand this book in order to make sense ...

Bonhoeffer, at Tegel Prison Courtyard, Summer 1944 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in 1945, might be the most famous theologian of the 20th century.  Of all the theologians from the previous century, Bonhoeffer has had the most influence upon my own Christian faith -- I devoted a considerable amount of my academic career to reading and writing on him.  On the surface, based strictly on his written output, this may be a bit surprising.  He wrote well, and was prolific given his short and amazingly eventful life -- but his writings on their own don't explain the extent of his fame.  It was also his life, or, maybe more specifically, the events surrounding his death. Bonhoeffer was put to death by his own government, executed by the Nazis in Germany just weeks before the end of World War II, at Tegel Prison.  Bonhoeffer's fame owes itself partly, for sure, to his wonderful books, especially Cost of Discipleship , to his witness to Christian faithfulness in his...

I readily admit, I'm a strange duck.  On the one hand, I'm an Episcopalian.  I stand in the long line of tradition that seems, at least to most folks, to be a liberal one.  On the other hand, I have a very high view of the Bible, as the location of divine agency -- something you don't see in liberal Episcopalians (or even other mainline Protestants).  Let me be clear:  I'm not a fundamentalist.  I don't endorse reading the Bible literally all the time -- as if a solely literal reading were even possible.  I characterize my own reading as pneumatological -- with the Bible's Spirit is breathing life into our deaths -- but I know lots of folks will argue it's really a Christological reading (I've been hugely influenced by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer ).  So I encourage folks to read the Bible, a lot even, and listen and wait for God. Listening, I think, is the primary act of love.  In any relationship, when we're given a person's wo...

Edwin Mellen Press has sued a librarian for a bad review. That's right.   Let that sink in for a moment.  The facts of that history being uncontested, let me lay out a few of my responses off the top of my head. (1) It does not speak well for the professionalism of Edwin Mellen Press that it responds this way to a single bad review. (2) What does the Press think it's doing?  Academic librarians are the lifeblood of the academic publishing industry.  The whole industry is structured precisely in order to market and sell to college libraries, its primary customers.  How can they possibly think that suing dissatisfied librarians will improve their position with their primary market? Academics -- and this includes academic librarians -- judge presses not only on the quality of their catalog but also on their treatment of academics -- and, again, this includes academic librarians.  They tolerate a lot because there is a never-ending need, but t...

I was talking with a friend earlier today about my Ash Wednesday liturgy.  One of his peers thought the assurance of forgiveness -- particularly its "pardon" tone -- was too much for unordained liturgical leadership to offer. My response centered around "the priesthood of all believers". This is, after all, a fairly significant theological tenet for protestants. But it's also something that has, over the years, seen less press in protestant circles.  The idea itself is built upon 1 Peter 2.9 and Rev 5.10. Understood in one way, the idea is that new covenant believers (unlike old covenant Israel) were all priests so we needed no priests (implied:  what the flip are those Catholics playing at!). But, of course, 1 Peter 2.9 is actually a quotation from Exodus 19.5-6, in which God calls Israel a kingdom of priests.  So the notion of the community as a priesthood is hardly a way of contrasting the old and the new covenants.  Old covenant Israel was just as ...

Several years ago, I led a class that talked about a theology of the ugly.  In that class we spent time thinking about how judgments of righteousness are often captured by aesthetic judgments, where what is beautiful is deemed good and what is ugly is deemed to be bad and sinister. This is a bias that psychologists have studied.  For decades psychologists have studied what is known as the what-is-beautiful-is-good effect .  In these studies we observe that beautiful people are consistently rated as more intelligent, more able and more virtuous than the less attractive. Think about that for a minute.  The beautiful aren't simply judged as smarter and more talented, they are also judged as being better human beings .  And because of this the beautiful gain a variety of social advantages.  For example, the beautiful are more likely to get hired or get the promotion.  Let alone the advantages in social popularity and interpersonal attractio...

A few unorganized comments on Gregory's Unintended Reformation . In Europe and America, universities were originally Christian institutions intended to expand knowledge within the framework of a Christian worldview. I n the twenty-first century they're secular institutions from which a Christian worldview has virtually been expelled.  For years the pressure has been on Theology departments because they remain within the model of "faith seeking understanding" and no longer fit the ethos of the secular university.  Many universities would prefer Religious Studies (the supposedly neutral, scientific study of religions). In the medieval period, Theology was the "Queen of the Sciences", the subject that served to integrate all the other disciplines.  Now the knowledge generated within Theology departments is not even considered to be knowledge by the university.  Theology is no longer Queen; she is a beggar that at best gets pitying glances from passers by. ...

A few years ago, I participated in a panel discussion on sexuality in the Church at Emory & Henry College.  At that time, I tried to point out that using human sexuality as the criteria for defining who we are is rather flawed.  Perhaps, I tried to demonstrate, there's a way of being sexual that is also compatible with being Christian. The problem, of course, is that Christians are far from a unified mind about human relationships generally, and sexual relationships specifically.  Sure, we have a base-line (what I called yesterday "righteous relationships"), but that base-line requires a lot of working in order to arrive at a biblical understanding of being human. Which set me to thinking. I'm aware that certain moral, doctrinal and theological accommodations may create too much of a rupture for the interpreting community.  But does my claim that human sexuality is too thin a category for defining who we are meet that standard?  You'd think so, based o...

I've come by two very ancient photographs.  This is a kindergarten class photo: And this is the class photo of a first grade class: I wonder what they hold in common.

From Bonhoeffer's Life Together (emphases are Bonhoeffer's): Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community .  Such people will only do harm to themselves and to the community.  Alone you stood before God when God called you.  Alone you had to obey God’s voice.  Alone you had to take up your cross, struggle, and pray and alone you will die and give an account to God.  You cannot avoid yourself, for it is precisely God who has singled you out.  If you do not want to be alone, you are rejecting Christ’s call to you, and you can have no part in the community of those who are called ... But the reverse is also true.  Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone .   You are called into the community of faith; the call was not meant for you alone.  You carry your cross, you struggle, and you pray in the community of faith, the community of those who are called.  You are not alone even when you die, a...

A friend asked that I write a bit about pornography from my Christian perspective.  So reader alert:  What follows is a meditation on pornography.  It's something lots of folks -- especially those of us in the Church -- never talk about.  But it's something that deserves to see the light of day in a reasonable way.  What follows beneath the fold may or may not be of interest.  Read at your own discretion.

I wrote earlier today on the biblical relation of the political/economic with the spiritual.  This morning -- as I was watching an old episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? , I recognized a pattern for the show upon which I want to reflect. Each episode featured Scooby and the four teenaged members of the Mystery, Inc. gang:  Fred, Shaggy, Daphne, and Velma, arriving to a location in the "Mystery Machine" and encountering a ghost, monster, or other supernatural creature, whom they learned was terrorizing the local populace.  After looking for clues and suspects and being chased by the monster, the kids come to realize the ghost is anything but, and -- often with the help of a Rube Goldberg-like trap designed by Fred -- they capture the villain and unmask him.  Revealed as a flesh and blood crook trying to cover up crimes by using the ghost story and costume, the criminal is arrested and taken to jail, often saying something to the effect of "...and I wo...

One of the problems of American Christianity is that it's gotten too spiritual.  That is, the concerns of the Church have gotten other-worldly, with Christians focusing their affairs on where they're headed (heaven or hell) and with the state of their individual souls upon death.  (See NT Wright's critique of this mentality in his Surprised by Hope .)  Such a focus tends to miss the political, social, and economic implications of the Kingdom of God and how the "Kingdom come on earth" might come into conflict with the way Babylon does business. What strikes me about this other-worldly mentality is how foreign it is to the New Testament itself.  The biblical writers consistently conflate the political/economic and spiritual.  That conflation is what they call " the principalities and powers ".   Those powers can be religious structures (especially the religious undergirdings of stable ancient and primitive societies), intellectual structures ('ol...

Continuing my political theology posts of late, here are some thoughts on Christian anarchism. First, in an important sense, all Christians are anarchists.  The word anarchism comes from the Greek αναρχος ( anarchos ) which means "no rulers" or "without rulers".  For the Christian such a description, obviously, refers to the ultimacy of human rulers. An anarchist strain runs throughout the Old and Testaments.  We see it in the Old Testament in God's unwillingness to give a king to Israel.  When God finally relents God takes this as an explicit rejection and predicts things aren't going to go well for Israel: But when they said, "Give us a king to lead us",  this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the LORD.  And the LORD told him:  "Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.  As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, fo...

I'd written earlier as part of a post:  "So it doesn't take a genius to see that God doesn't like empires".  Enshrined quite early in the biblical narrative, we read this (Genesis 1.26-27): Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. There's been a great deal of ink spilt in theological literature over what this "image of God" might be.  I want to offer a political theological reading. Also enshrined within the biblical narrative is a Christological definition of "the image of God".  The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For in him all things were created:  things in heav...

I've written previously here about a couple of those books by William Stringfellow that have had an impact on my thinking.  I want to continue with that series by focusing today on his Dissenter in a Great Society:  A Christian View of the American Crisis , from 1966. In the Forward, Stringfellow sets out the goal of the book: This book has no other ambition than to be a chronicle of criticism, complaint, and dissent, informed, I trust, by the faith and ministry exemplified in Christ, in which all things whatsoever are brought into question in this life. This "chronicle of criticism, complaint, and dissent" has four chapters.  Chapter 1 deals with poverty.  Chapter 2 deals with the American political crisis characterized by a "breakdown in rational public dialogue" between the political ideologies captured, as they are, by the Republican and Democratic parties.  Chapter 3 deals with race relations.   The final chapter is meant to articulate a...