The Politics of Jesus remains a landmark book that has inspired much of neo-Anabaptist thought. I read it for the first time in seminary alongside several other seminal works by Gustavo Gutierrez, James Cone, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Reinhold Neibuhr and others. It’s represents a movement that I’ve been impressed by in recent years, particularly with its critique of how power often gets used in our culture and in the church to reinforce hierarchies and antagonisms, rather than to advance God’s kingdom.
Author: Bill Walker (Page 4 of 24)
[The audio for this sermon can be found here.]
Well if you’ve been around all in 2017, you know that we’ve been in a series on Sunday mornings on discipleship: how to be with Jesus, do what he did, and become like him — and in the last couple of weeks, we focused on two key essential ingredients for doing exactly: what does it take to become like Jesus? First of all, we have to know his message and his teachings, and then we have put that message and teaching into practice — because what we do with our lives, and the habits we form and practice determine where we end up and who we become.
What we do and the habits we form literally, actually changes our desires themselves, from what they naturally are, which is very self-serving, to what they could be, in the service of God and others.
And you can be sure that, if you go on this journey of doing the things the Jesus did, your life is going to look different from the rest of people’s lives in the society and culture us. It’s safe to say that we will actually be living a counter-cultural lifestyle if we’re imitating Jesus, and he has authority over what we do.
But there’s one aspect to this counter-cultural life that may actually be the most unnatural and counter-cultural of all in our present age. And it’s this: community.
[This post originally appeared on the Mockingbird blog.]
The kind of religion many people in America grew up with went something like this: do or believe these things in order to be “right with God.” But as experience will show, following either of these directives tends to lead to greater frustration, disillusionment and anxiety. “Am I really good enough?” “Am I really saved?” This encounter with church or Christianity for many did not enable a more joyful, tranquil and abundant life. It did the opposite. Sometimes it told folks they had to vote Republican. In other instances, it made them feel like they couldn’t trust science or enjoy the arts.
This is not to say there aren’t more thoughtful and grace-centered versions of Christianity out there. There are. But examples of bad faith still abound, and these lead many people to doubt, despair, or simply accept that they’re just not very “religious.”
The self-help industry, popular psychology and new age spirituality all have something of a stigma in most Christian circles, and for some good reasons. I too have tended to be a skeptic, but I’ve also been fairly ignorant about these movements. And in light of the sort of religion I’ve just described, is it really any wonder that we’ve seen the growth of such “unorthodox” spiritual schools of thought in recent decades?
On the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, there is quite a convergence right now with this past Saturday’s Women’s March, Trump’s Inauguration the day before, and the March for Life this coming Friday. I don’t think I’ve ever written about abortion, mainly because it’s a conversation I’d rather have in person, and I’m certainly not an expert. Not to mention, it tends to get people up in arms, and often for good reason. But today I felt compelled to say something.
Though my theological orientation has tended to be broadly evangelical, I hold fairly “progressive” views on many social issues. But not when it comes to abortion. I have a son now, and there’s no question in my mind about the sanctity of his life in the womb. I can only speak as a man, which is insufficient (my wife Whitney speaks for herself below), but even in the exceptional cases that make abortion necessary or justified (rape, incest, risk to maternal life, etc.), I believe it remains tragic. And the reality is that the majority of abortions do not occur as a result of these terrible circumstances.
[This post originally appeared on the Missio Alliance blog.]
In his work, Varieties of Religious Experience, William James makes a distinction between the spiritual posture of what he calls the “sick soul,” on the one hand, and “healthy-mindedness,” on the other. Neither label is necessarily positive or negative.
By “sick soul,” James means someone for whom human suffering and injustice tend to be an inescapable and overwhelming problem. There are no answers for it, and finding a state of “rest in God” can be very difficult for those with this disposition. By contrast, the “healthy-minded” person of faith is able to cultivate a deep sense of peace and trust that God is good, and all manner of things will be well. Evil for the healthy-minded is like a lie that poses no serious threat.
Of course, many of us probably oscillate between these two places from time to time, and certainly the latter is ultimately more desirable from a Christian point of view. But rush too quickly to healthy-minded religion, and we are sure to lose the prophetic heart of the biblical narrative. We see examples of both throughout Scripture, each one given legitimacy as a earnest stance before God — e.g., “How long Oh Lord?” (Psalm 13) vs. “I have stilled and quieted my soul” (Psalm 131). But the movie Silence, much like the book, does not make the still and quiet of healthy-mindedness very easy to come by.
[This is a re-post from Missio Alliance.]
Recently I noticed a little twitter interaction between Tim Keller and Rachel Held Evans. Keller tweeted the following:
People think a Christian is one who follows Christ's teaching and example, but Jesus is not primarily a teacher. He's a rescuer.
— Timothy Keller (@timkellernyc) December 12, 2016
To which Evans replied:
I'm one of those crazy people who thinks a Christian is someone who follows Jesus. https://t.co/r3KaE75WkS
— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) December 14, 2016
Keller replied back:
@rachelheldevans Key phrase in that tweet is "not primarily a teacher." Hope that helps.
— Timothy Keller (@timkellernyc) December 14, 2016
Evans went on to make a number of other responses, when others chimed in, like:
.@timricchuiti @jdallen_pax Nowhere did I say Jesus was *just* a moral teacher. I'm challenging TK's dichotomy between teacher & savior.
— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) December 14, 2016
Fully recognizing, of course, that banter on twitter hardly counts as real dialogue or theological discussion, this exchange is nonetheless revealing. Now, it could be dismissed as just a typical debate between two different streams of Christian thought, one evangelical and the other mainline Protestant. And some might want to criticize the way Evans responded to Keller’s tweet, like she was picking a fight (the snarkiness of “I’m one of those crazy people…”).
Still, I think her last tweet above actually gets at something very important. Evans’ point is not a liberal one. Nor is their disagreement necessarily about atonement theory—say, between penal substitution and moral influence. And I do not think Keller and others like him are dismissing Jesus’s teachings or the significance of following him, either.
[This sermon is based on Luke 10:1-11. The audio can be found here.]
Well we are in Week 3 this morning of our Advent series in which we are asking the question, “what gift can you bring?” We’ve talked about how we bring our whole selves before God, and how we bring our sacrifice of worship. And today we’re going to talking about offering the gift of passion for God’s mission and participation in that mission.
And when we think of the word “mission,” it’s one of those words that can mean many things to many different people, both good and bad. Companies have missions, the military has a mission, non-profits have a mission, churches have missions, and you may have even at one time or another crafted your own life-mission, which may be a good idea! Whitney and I have asked before, what is our family mission?
[This sermon is based on the the parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke 15:11-32. The audio can be found here.]
For Advent this year, as you’ve been hearing, our theme is to ask, “What gift can you bring?” We all have many gifts and blessings that God has given us, that can be used and offered back to God and to the world in an act of gratitude for what we’ve been given.
And so part of what this theme and question should provoke is a kind of self-reflection and inventory where we look at our lives and ask: what do I have, what am I holding on to, that God may be asking me to hand over or to submit, to surrender for his purposes.
But the other thing that can happen when we ask the question, “What can I bring?” is that we get a little bit anxious or insecure. We might take the question the wrong way, maybe by excessively judging and doubting ourselves — or just comparing and competing with others based on what they have, and what they can bring that we can’t.
[This post originally appeared on the Missio Alliance blog]
A week later, what has transpired with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States is still stunning. It’s hard to imagine that the country could be more divided than it is right now. The division runs deep, and it is not just political. It is also spiritual.
The following is a working draft of the presentation I will be making at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in the Open and Relational Theologies session on the topic, “A Wider View of Theodicy: The Place of Sufferers, Mourning, Love, and Lament in Theological and Philosophical Reasoning”:
“The Hegelian babble about the real being the true is therefore the same kind of confusion as when people assume that the words and actions of a poet’s dramatic characters are the poet’s own. We must, however, hold fast to the belief that when God—so to speak—decides to write a play, he does not do it simply in order to pass the time, as the pagans thought. No, no: indeed, the utterly serious point here is that loving and being loved is God’s passion. It is almost—infinite love!—as if he is bound to this passion, almost as if it were a weakness on his part; whereas in fact it is his strength, his almighty love: and in that respect his love is subject to no alteration of any kind. There is a staggering perversity in all the human categories that are applied to the God-man; for if we could speak in a completely human way about Christ we would have to say that the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” show a want of patience and a want of truth. Only if God says it, can it be true, i.e., even if the God-man says it. And since it is true, it is also truly the climax of pain. The relationship to God is evidently such a tremendous weight of blessedness that, once I have laid hold of it, it is absolute in the most absolute sense; by contrast, the worldly notion that my enemies are to be excluded from it would actually diminish this blessedness.”
The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, quoted in the preface of Theo-Drama Vol. 5: The Last Act, Hans Urs von Balthasar
“If God’s nature, theologically speaking, shows itself to be absolute love by giving itself away and allowing others to be, for no other reason than that this (motiveless) giving is good and full of meaning — and hence is, quite simply, beautiful and glorious — the same must apply to [God’s] “making room” for [God’s] free creatures.” – Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Vol. II, 273
In this paper I’d like to propose that Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “theo-dramatic” account of divine and human freedom, on the one hand, and divine experience in humanity’s suffering, on the other hand, can shed light on God’s love for an open and relational understanding of the doctrine of God. For Christian love — both of God and of neighbor — has not only an open and relational quality, but it is also dramatic in that it is embedded in a history the oscillates between freedom and contingency.
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