Too often the debate over same-sex marriage is reduced to trying to sidestep a few tangential passages or throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. Instead, we need a comprehensive Reformed theology of marriage that honors the full arc of Scripture from creation to eschaton.
Lent and Easter remind me to have hope. Though the Crusades did horrible damage to people and to the name of Christ, they came to an end. Likewise, this present madness embarked on by culture warriors in America will end too. Just as God reminded Elijah that not all Israel bowed its knee to Baal, so also not all Christians in America embrace destructive, vigilante power. Some deny themselves, take up their crosses daily, follow Christ, and lay down their lives for others.
Despite some qualms about theological language and recognizing that this is not a Pew Research or Gallup study with in-depth explanations of social causality, I came away from reading this book with a better understanding of what has happened in the past twenty-five years, and with hope for the future because God is presently at work, even amid the Great Dechurching.
Recently I participated in a theological conference at Brigham Young University. It was called, “Salvation in Christ: Christian Perspectives.” Six Latter Day Saints (LDS) scholars participated as speakers, all of them impressive and serious faculty members in the Religious Studies department at Brigham Young University (BYU), and nine representatives from what I will call historic or mainstream Christianity. They included six Protestants, two Catholics, and one Greek Orthodox pastor. Evangelicalism was well represented.1 Although this was my second visit to…
Roger starts every scripture reading with, “Listen, then, for the voice of God,” and in summation of his twenty years of preaching, that is both what he has been doing and what he invites us to do.
Of the making of books (and films and recordings) by and about Dietrich Bonhoeffer there is no end, apparently. The Lutheran pastor, theologian and political resister who died at the hands of the Nazis in the closing weeks of the Second World War has seldom been out of the theological limelight since the posthumous publication of his Letters and Papers from Prison in the early 1950’s. His close friend, biographer and literary executor, Eberhard Bethge, is now deceased, but a…
Recognizing this tendency to limit myself, I prayed, asking God to show me places I’d been holding back. I prayed for the courage I knew I’d need to respond in faith. Teresa says, “Fear distorts knowledge of self…And so I say, my friends, let us set our eyes on Christ…then self-knowledge will not make us timid or cowardly.”
The Bible is a historical book, thus requiring historical tools of analysis, the most basic of which is establishing the context for what is going on in the text. The Bible is also a literary book, thus requiring literary tools of analysis, like asking the genre of a text: a chronicle is not a poem, nor a first-person account, nor a letter of a specific church, nor an apocalypse. There is, in fact, no such thing as “quoting Scripture” with integrity without an awareness of context and genre. The whole discussion stops when someone confronts me with “What do you with the verse that says?” Every time I am presented with that question, my answer begins, “Sure, I believe the Bible is our guide for faithful living, but what kind of book is the Bible?”.
Sun House reads like Duncan’s other novels: sprawling, ambitious, imperfect, bursting with humor and sex and spiritual longing, drawing on ancient wisdom traditions of every kind and synthesizing them into nothing less audacious than a new nonreligion, which he calls Dumpster Catholicism.
