The Little Friar

Not long after I started seminary, I read a collection of Karl Barth's sermons ( Deliverance to the Captives ) that we're preached toward the end of his life in Basel.  One of them so shocked and overwhelmed me that I still vividly remember my response to it.   It was entitled "The Criminals with Him", and took as its text a verse from Luke's passion narrative:  "They crucified him with the criminals, one on either side of him" (Luke 23.33).  "Do you know what this implies?" asked Barth.  "Don't be too surprised if I tell you that this was the first Christian fellowship."  And Barth went on to conclude:  "In reality we all are these crucified criminals.  And only one thing matters now.  Are we ready to be told what we are?  Are we ready to hear the promise given to the condemned, [and] to 'get in line behind' [them]?" Get in line behind them?  I thought.  Hang on a minute, Karl!  I know you're big on grace, ...

At school, one of the most formative books on shaping my pastoral identity and practice was St Gregory's Pastoral Rule .  In it, he highlights the importance of pastoral distinctions -- ministering to folks who are different from one another and being intentional about those differences.  It's been so formative a book, in fact, that I come back to it year after year.  That kind of training in making pastoral difference that makes a real difference in a world that tries to flatten distinctions has taught me to think about people.   And in the Church, I think we're missing an important distinction these days.  It's the difference between what I call Summer Christians and Winter Christians .  It goes like this.  Summer Christians believe -- know! -- that God is still doing great things.  They have regular reports of what God is doing, what God has taught them, what God has "put on my heart".  They worry about the deistic tendencies they see of ...

In his Letters and Papers from Prison , Bonhoeffer outlined a book he wanted to write.  Of course, that book never materialized, but there are tantalizing clues about what he was thinking.  In  his notes for what would have been Chapter Two, Bonhoeffer sketched out some thoughts about the nature of "authentic transcendence": Our relation to God is not a "religious" relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable -- that is not authentic transcendence -- but our relation to God is a new life in "existence for others," through participation in the being of Jesus.  The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbor who is within reach in any given situation ... Authentic transcendence is existence for others. Authentic transcendence is the neighbor who is within reach in any given situation. That's a radical redefinition of transcendence , but I think he's absolutely correct. 

As a pastor and spiritual director, I spend a great deal of my time praying.  I pray, and I help others in Christian friendship to pray, to learn to pray, to learn to listen to God in prayer.  There's no doubt that prayer is important.  But I also spend time with folks who focus so exclusively on praying that they forget Christians also live .   That's Greg Darley's concern in Wasted Prayer:  Know When God Wants You to Stop Praying and Start Doing .  This book is pastoral advice for every Christian who prays:  Start doing what God has called you to do.  So many of us treat God's will said it were a mystery to be solved, and prayer -- so many of us think -- is the key to that mystery.  Darley rightly contrasts this "Religious Cycle" with the "Discipleship Cycle" (pp. 29-30).  So many Christians treat our prayers as reactionary monologues to God:  Something happens and we need God to act.  But Darley points out that so many of th...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer:  Pastor, theologian, friend, son and brother, student.  That's the Bonhoeffer of Charles Marsh's new biography, Strange Glory:  A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer . As someone who has spent nearly two decades of his academic life reading and learning from Bonhoeffer, I was excited to read Marsh's biography.  Marsh's previous book on Bonhoeffer -- Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer  (Oxford, 1994) -- had been such an earthquake in Bonhoeffer studies, that a biography by Marsh had such high hopes to fulfill.  And Marsh doesn't disappoint.  His biography of Bonhoeffer avoids so many of the pitfalls of recent Bonhoeffer biographies.  There's no agenda (like in Metaxas' Bonhoeffer ).  And while Marsh's biography will never replace Bethge's monumental works, Charles Marsh has written an accessible work that presents the real Bonhoeffer --  a real person with real faults as well as real gifts.  Bonhoeffer, the pacifist, may ha...

Any illusion that America is a Christian nation should have been dispelled by now.  But some illusions are psychotic -- they hang on well past any evidence to the contrary.  This illusion is one of those.  Nowadays, our culture rarely takes notice of anything Christian , unless it's in  the context of controversy.   As Christians in the US,  we are increasingly back where our forebears have been in many different contexts -- from slavery in Egypt, to exile in Babylon -- that latter word even becoming a shorthand way of describing a worldview antithetical to Christ.  Think 2 Peter or Revelation.  That's why, for some time, I've insisted that America isn't Christian.  It's Babylonian.  It's Roman.  It's pluralistic, multicultural, urban, profane, political, and immoral.   So how, then, should we Christians handle our situation? The New Testament has lots of hints.  And none of them find us wrapping the Bible in the flag...

"As a way to challenge such a [liberal] view of freedom, I start my classes by telling my students that I do not teach in a manner that is meant to help them make up their own minds.   Instead, I tell them that I do not believe they have minds worth making up until they have been trained by me .  I realize such a statement is deeply offensive to students since it exhibits a complete lack of pedagogic sensitivities.  Yet I cannot imagine any teacher who is serious who would allow students to make up their own minds." -- Stanley Hauerwas, "Christian Schooling  or  Making  Students Dysfunctional", in  Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified   ( Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), p. 220, emphasis added. 

Contrary to popular thinking, I struggle to be patient.   Being graceful  doesn't come easy for me.  Those are practices of the Christian virtues that have taken time -- a long time -- to be practices in my life.  I try, but I fail as often as I succeed.  That's because, as virtues, being patient and graceful take time .  And they take work .  The virtuous life, as Aristotle and Aquinas knew, isn't for men (or women) who don't have courage -- the determination to keep at it, despite the bumps in the road.  I'm thinking about patience today, because I've been sick for over a week.  Kendra and I have also been between that proverbial economic "rock and a hard place".  Those things take patience. Everyday life takes patience.  But most importantly being Christian takes patience.    Then I begin thinking of the parable Jesus tells in Matthew 13.24-30.  It's called the "Parable of the Wheat and Weeds".  I call it the ...

I grow tired of the "debates" between creationists and evolutionists.  Neither, I discover more often than not, have taken the time to read  Charles Darwin's Origin of Species .  It's just easier to demonize the man as an "atheist" and thereby dismiss his life and work.  What I want to tell today is a story.  A narrative that I wish more Christians knew.  Because it should reframe how we think of Darwin and his revolutionary idea.  Darwin, when you look at pictures and at biographical accounts, was a quiet man. His unassuming ways seem far removed from a guy responsible for a seismic shift in the way we think of The Origin of Species .  Where did his ideas come from?  What drove Darwin? We know  Darwin inherited a fierce anti-slavery abolitionism from his family, on both his side and his wife's.  Both the Darwin and the Wedgwood families (Emma Wedgwood was Darwin's wife and the  Darwins and Wedgwood frequently intermarried ) we...

When Todd and Erin Stevens' How to Pick Up a Stripper and Other Acts of Kindness:  Serving People Just as They Are  arrived, I opened the box and left the book on the counter.  My wife happened passed it, took one look at the book, then at me, and asked for an explanation.  This is my explanation.  How to Pick Up a Stripper  is about the Church's identity and mission -- who and why we are.  Both are embodied in the phrase "servant evangelism".  "Servant evangelism is an approach to outreach that isn't just about telling people the gospel: it is about showing them too" (p. 5). Todd and Erin spend the rest of the book exploring what that servant evangelism has meant for Todd's pastoring at Friendship Community Church, and his wife's ministry with Nashville Strip Church.  For them, the heart of the gospel is God's love for us, right where we are, in the midst of all life's messiness.  And, what's more, God's love is made real in our ...

It's no secret to readers here that I have a hard time being patriotic  in the ways patriotism is practiced in modern America.  I haven't said the Pledge of Allegiance is decades.  I stand out of respect, but in honest protest, I stay silent.  July 4th, and all its related celebrations, are particularly rough.  The social pressure to confirm is nearly too much.  Nearly.  And every year, I end up having to explain why, yet again, there's a wide gulf of difference between being Christian and being American.  In so many ways, those are mutually exclusive.  The problem started for me back in 1994.  There comes a time in every Bible reader's life when the queasy-making parts of the Bible just can't be ignored.  When it's time to admit that following Jesus, confessing him as Lord and God, means you recognize the Bible won't fit into modern categories.  It's almost like instead of reading the Bible, the Bible is reading us.  Narr...