I got appointed to sit with some muckey-mucks at a luncheon tomorrow with Brian McLaren. My first question will be an easy one: “So, Brian, who got the better end of the trade of Sammy Sosa to the Orioles?” That’ll test his generosity but not his orthodoxy! Read more
I got appointed to sit with some muckey-mucks at a luncheon tomorrow with Brian McLaren. My first question will be an easy one: “So, Brian, who got the better end of the trade of Sammy Sosa to the Orioles?” That’ll test his generosity but not his orthodoxy! Read more
Franke’s Character of Theology, which I began here, turns in the second chapter to the Subject of Theology. The book is written for seminary students and academics. A Brief of the second chapter In essence (no pun here), the Subject of theology is the Trinitarian God who is Truth and who makes himself known truly in Christ and Spirit.(Incidentally, some in the emerging movement are “playing” with the doctrine of the Trinity, and this would be a good chapter for... Read more
When I was in seminary, two other seminary classmates (Jim Davis, Steve Beck) and I began to play a game with one another. Here was our game: “Do you know what the initials in a NT scholar’s name stand for?” So, we would come to class with a new set of initials every day. It was a fun game until one of us (I’ll not give names) found about five initials for Edward Schillebeeckx and ruined the fun of finding... Read more
John Franke’s new book, The Character of Theology: An Introduction to Its Nature, Task, and Purpose, promises to be a study of theology that will enable (what I have elsewhere called) a purple theology. In other words, it is postconservative and postliberal. In this post I will look briefly at the first chapter, “Doing Theology Today.” This chapter is an exceptionally lucid place to begin for a theological student or a philosophical student. It surveys “where we are” and, in... Read more
The term “theology,” or even worse “systematic theology,” have bad names among Old and New Testament specialists. The primary reason for this is bad manners: these sorts of scholars intend to be specialists in history and exegesis and don’t want theological questions cluttering up their quest for what the text really says. In other words, and I confess to having participated in these bad manners myself on many occasions, the order is first Bible and only then (if ever) theology... Read more
A recent meandering through the new biographies at Barnes & Noble confronted me one more time with a bald fact of our time: people want to read biographies with salacious details or biographies of celebrities who have achieved — well, what do celebrities achieve? — or biographies of famous figures. I passed over Brooke Shields new book about how she struggled with post-partum depression, and I don’t want to minimize her pain but don’t we have some very fine books... Read more
In this final post on how Paul understands the ministry of the gospel in Colossians 1:24-29, we want to look at the goal and source of this ministry. Again, this is not about what pastors do or professional evangelists, but indirectly what each person is summoned to be and do — anyone, in other words, who is working with another. |inline Read more
I’m trying to get through my entire blogroll each week, but the book on prayer has kept me so busy I’ve not visited them all. Kris reads perhaps even more than I do, but I’ve found the following blogs this week to be especially interesting or provocative or courageous. |inline Read more
Lots of folks claim to be Cubs fans, but some of them are Parousiacs — that is, fans who hang on so they can participate in the final coming of ultimate victory when the Cubs win the World Series. Other fans are genuine. This morning, when Kris and I were walking around the lake at Independence Grove, I saw a man with a Cardinals shirt, and I said, “Go Cubs!” |inline Read more
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