Jesus Creed
“We three kings of orient are” is another Christmas song that combines a rich legend (like names: Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar) about the magi and some nice theology. Here it is. Go ahead, Steph, tell us something about it… |inline Read more
“We three kings of orient are” is another Christmas song that combines a rich legend (like names: Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar) about the magi and some nice theology. Here it is. Go ahead, Steph, tell us something about it… |inline Read more
“Now let us examine,” John Calvin says with a scorching pen, “the arguments by which certain mad beasts ceaselessly assail this holy institution” [infant baptism]. This is found in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.16.10. So, we enter today into a debate Calvin had with the Anabaptists who argued that baptism was not to be associated with circumcision. |inline Read more
You can’t have a good story with a protagonist as highly exalted as Jesus, not the least in his birth story, without having a solid antagonist — and we’ve got one: Herod the Great who populates Matthew’s second chapter like a crazed power-hungry despot. Which he was in fact. |inline Read more
In chp 7 of The Divine Embrace Robert Webber tells “My Story” of God’s embrace. This is not what you think it might be, and for me it reveals the genius of the Ancient Future approach of Webber. “My story” somehow avoids the rampant individualism so that “my story” becomes “God’s story.” The capacity to tell my story as God’s story is what Webber offered to his students for years, and I’d love to hear some of his students speak... Read more
It is customary for many today — and I’m a big fan of this — to speak of the Bible as Story. There is another story we need to know, and it is the story of the Church. Why? I can think of several good reasons, not the least of which is that we owe to our forbears to know where we have come from. It embarrasses me not a little when normal Christians don’t know about Ignatius and Irenaeus,... Read more
My penitence for the Bears losing to the Vikings is to read John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, chp 16, on infant baptism. Calvin doesn’t begin on a good note for me when he refers to Anabaptists, which I am, as “frantic spirits” who have “grievously disturbed the church” and “do not cease their agitation.” Calvin writes to “restrain their mad ravings.” Mad, I’m not. Disturbed by this Swiss theologian’s words and vituperative rhetoric, I am. |inline Read more
Nearly every piece of Christmas art work I have scence has a bright, shiny star, the Star of Bethlehem, the star that guided the Magi from the East to Jesus, he was born to be King of the Jews. What do we learn from the star for Advent? |inline Read more
I tire, as many of you no doubt do too, of the word Episcopalian meaning “debate about gays and lesbians.” There is much more to the Episcopal church and the Anglican Communion worldwide than this debate, but it has garnered all the media’s attention. Here’s my question for the day: |inline Read more
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