The Little Friar

Why do so many folks stay away from Sunday morning worship and churches are trying to draw them in? We've forgotten that each Sunday is a proclamation and reenactment and participation in the Christ- drama .  Little  of that drama takes place, and has been instead substituted with pop-psychology's "meeting our felt needs" and "relevant" preaching.  If worship is about us -- if we are the liturgy's object -- then such worship is misunderstood at least, and idolatrous at most.  Why do so many congregations seem infantile and childish in their repetitions on Sunday? If our liturgical repertoire includes only songs of praise, it's the spiritual equvalence of emotional infancy.  Churches whose only words amount to " God-you-make-me-happy" and "God-I'm-infatuated-with-you", are those churches who have yet to enter the depths of the biblical witness in Psalms or the Prophets or Jesus.  It's  why entire congregations sometimes see...

"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.

Stanley Hauerwas was my thesis adviser at Duke.  He was and is a thoroughly unpleasant man in the social sense.  I've heard him dismiss Jurgen Moltmann as "full of shit".  Stan the Man -- as some of us lovingly call him -- is a self-admitted violent man.  Not exactly what you'd expect from a Christian theologian who engages in ethical reflection.  I'm always inclined to respond to those who attack Stan in the same way he  responds:  "What else do you expect from a Texan?"   But then Hauerwas also happens to be an Episcopalian layman and one of the church's most outspoken apostles of non-violence.  Gandhi wouldn't be surprised:  The violent, he said, often make the best pacifists. I love Rowan Williams because he's so irenic and humble.   Stan Hauerwas I love because he’s such a rootin' tootin' gunslinger.  He stands in the venerable tradition of the  rabies theologorum  that can be traced back to the vitriolic Paul, v...

1.   Two's company; three's a crowd . Teaching intro to theology or graduate seminars on the Holy Spirit, I've noticed first-hand how the Holy Spirit is nearly a theological footnote.  The third article of the Nicene Creed of 325 is minimalist.  Only after St Basil's On the Holy Spirit , and his battle with the pneumatamachi, do we find the 381 revisions dealing more concretely with the Holy Spirit.   Then there was the domestic bust-up between East and West over the  filioque  clause from the 9th century, leading to the messy divorce of 1054.  In the 20th century the Pentecostal and charismatic movements foregrounded the Spirit in the Western church, but, again, not without controversy.  No doubt about it:  While often rather anonymous, the Spirit is a holy troublemaker. 2.   The Holy Spirit is God.  By "appropriation", after a nod to creation, we tend to associate the Spirit with ecclesiology, and also with anthropology -- the Spi...

Perhaps one of the least appreciated spiritual texts, Simone Weil's Waiting for God  is extraordinary.  I read it in seminary as part of a project for the theology of suffering.  Here's an amazing quote over which I'm ruminating lately: " God created through love and for love.  ...  He created love in all its forms.  He created beings capable of loving from all possible distances.  Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance.  This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion.  Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed.  "This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony.  This is...

I've had more than my fair share of doctors lately.  Waiting is a difficult thing for me to do.   In his ethical section of "Freedom for Life" ( Church Dogmatics , III/4, sect. 55), Karl Barth wrote: " Sickness, like death itself, is unnatural and disorderly.  It is an element in the rebellion of chaos against God's creation.  It is an act and declaration of the devil and demons.  To be sure, it is no less bound to God and dependent on Him than the creature which He created.  Indeed, it is impotent in a double way.  For like sin and death, it is neither good nor is it willed and created by God at all, but is real, effective, powerful and menacing only in its nullity, as part of that which God has negated, as part of His kingdom on the left hand.... "The realm of death which afflicts man in the form of sickness ... is opposed to His good will as Creator and has existence and power only under His mighty No.  To capitulate before it, to allow it to t...

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...

I typically eschew twitter debates.  How can one make the necessary moves in argument with a constraint like 140 characters?  How do you develop an account of subtle differend  (to use Lyotard's word) that is at once open and  committed? Today, though, I was inadvertently drug into one, which I promptly exited, over the contrasts between capitalism, socialism and distributism.  This guy wanted to tell me Jesus was a socialist.  I disagreed.  But I couldn't develop my argument fast enough with just 140 characters.  Jesus does have a "preferential option for the poor".  He speaks quite a bit about the kindness of the Gospel toward the disenfranchised.  He condemns personal greed.  But it's quite a jump from there to say he was a socialist.  (Pro proto-socialist, at best.  But even then I'm not sure.) If Acts is any indication, the Church took such Kingdom economics seriously.  Acts 5 comes immediately to mind.  So ...

Preaching is a task given to the Church.  It is the presence of Jesus in Scripture and its proclamation.  Preaching is, therefore, one of the two principal services of the Church at worship.  Alongside the "Service of the Table", the "Service of the Word" is the Church's ministry of reconciliation lived out in words and actions.  It is the sharing of Jesus himself -- first through the words of Scripture read, and then through the verbal acts of the people gathered (hymns, proclamation, and its various responses in prayer and creed and deed) -- that demonstrate Jesus as the Center, the very glue that holds the cosmos together (Colossians 1.15-18).   So whenever there's a service of the Church's worship that doesn't have at least one (though ideally it should always have both !), the Church loses its very mission.  It collapses its identity into something else (social club or, even worse, a building).  To lose the opportunity to proclaim Jesus is to fo...

Great theologians are like icons rather than religious paintings:  You not only look at God, God looks at you.  The theology of  Rowan Williams  is iconography. In it we meet the gaze of God.  It's the look of agape .  Not since Bonhoeffer -- an immense influence, obviously, to all my regular readers -- have I felt so love-touched by a theologian.  But the divine gaze is an x-ray of penetration, revealing the  cor inquietum  (Augustine is probably Rowan's most significant theological other), exposing the self-love and self-hatred that infect the human project, and the self-deceit that blinds us to both.  Rowan is completely conversant with postmodernism, but he doesn't need Derrida to resource his own hermeneutic of self-deconstruction and social suspicion.  Iconoclastic as well as iconographic is Rowan's theology. In fact, there is hardly a language-game Rowan cannot play (Wittgenstein is another mentor).  He quite promiscuous...

I've been thinking for some time about a new series on those theologians I love.  I'm not so much interested in a roll call of "great" theologians (as fun as that might be) nor do I care to come up with a list of influential thinkers.  Instead, I'm going to write on why I love  particular theologians.  So it's meant to be personal and subjective.  Doubtless other lists would contain other folks.   In other words, the series is as much about love as it is about theologians .  Why is it that the experience of love is so closely tied to theological study?  Why is it that we are really deeply influenced only by those thinkers to whom we open ourselves in love?  Why is it that the absence of love so often constitutes an obstacle to genuine understanding -- so that the thinker whom we have not yet learned to love seems remote and unintelligible? Those are questions I want to address, however indirectly, in this series.   This may seem a stran...

I've been attempting to set out a positive way forward, through the impasse created, in how the church thinks about homosexuality.  This is, of course, all one piece of a larger theology of sex, relationships, and marriage, that's grounded not in "natural law" or Genesis, but in Jesus.  I want ultimately to articulate a theology that finds its beginning in baptism, not gender (and certainly not genitalia). Specifically when it comes to homosexuality, though, this impasse is created in a problem of language.  More specifically:  The  discussion of homosexuality when the label sin  is used to portray same-sex cohabitation as unacceptable to many in the Christian community.  It's not that homosexual persons are not sinners.  We all are.  "No one is righteous, not even one” (Rom 3.9).  The issue is more complex than that.  Is there an alternative? I think there is.  All human life is tragic.  Some years ago I was pastor o...

Bonhoeffer treasured Cervantes'  Don Quixote .  He believed the beleaguered idealist was an apt metaphor for the Confessing Church.  He reasoned that the church needed "new" weapons, a "new" theology, "new" strategies to confront the rise of National Socialism.  The established state church reflected an old falsehood, a church which had burned its witness at the stake as the Nazis had burned books in the Bebel  Platz in Berlin.  Now, new "weapons of the Spirit" were necessary. Bonhoeffer found all that newness with Christ the Center , focused in Discipleship , expressed in Ethics  and attentive particularly in Spiritual Care  through Life Together .  He was, in a very new way, the Confessing Church's "renaissance man".  To quote Bonhoeffer:  "Here is the immortal figure of Don Quixote ... who takes a barber's dish for a helmet and a miserable hack for a charger"; [in Germany we have] "an old world venturing to...

I'm fleshing out -- over the past few days -- my theology of homosexuality.   Now, granted, if I want to avoid problems, I probably should simply shut up.  But, as I see it, this is a question of truth before it's a question of ethics.  So, here goes: 1.   Let it be said at once that the question of same-sex relationships and the church is a question of truth before it is a question of morality or discipline.  Is the church's interpretation of scripture true?  Is the church's traditional teaching true?  If they are not, then they have to go, otherwise the faith of the church becomes bad faith (Tillich).  As Milton said, "Custom without truth is but agedness of error".  One other thing in anticipation:  Jesus said that the truth will make us free (John 8.32); Flannery O’Connor added that "the truth will make you odd".  But before we say anything more, we must know what we are saying it about.  In most discussions on the i...