A huge congratulations this morning to our niece, Katie Norman, and Keegan Johnson, who will marry today! One of my favorite Northern students, Phil Jackson: When God gives us a vision for the future, He rarely gives us a play by play rule book with specific details concerning how we should get there. In fact, He usually just gives us a “word,” or a “knowing” in our soul about the direction He wants our lives to go in. For Phil... Read more
By Mike Glenn Like most well meaning parents, I was determined my family would have a family devotional. In my mind, I had pictured a Norman Rockwell painting of a nice Christian family with me as the loving father seated at the head of the table with my Bible open in front of me. My adoring wife would be seated at my side and our scrubbed clean, well-dressed boys would be dutifully and obediently seated in their places with their... Read more
Most readers of this blog live in societies that try (not always successfully) to foster freedom of religion. The governments don’t require any specific set of religious beliefs or practices. All are acceptable in society, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Native American, atheist. As a corollary, we also permit freedom of conversion. But is it right (morally and ethically) to persuade others to change their beliefs? Most Christians will have no qualms answering yes (nor will Muslims). Persuasion, but not... Read more
Our MANT program tries to make writing a feature of education because, let’s face it, writing is a desire for many who want to work for the church and, at times, it can be more assumed than focused. Several of our students have published during their time at Northern, and I want to highlight one here who took my books and turned them into a curriculum — but there’s lots and lots of Becky in this book. A friend of... Read more
What depresses me about Bible translation debates today is tribalism. Some have raised the bar of this conversation to such heights that variation is tantamount to heresy. But let’s have a little fun with the tribalism that does exist, that seems almost inevitable, that does sometimes lead to uncharitable divisiveness, but that can lead us to see ourselves in humorous tones at times. No one person, and not even a committee, can translate and not have some bias. There is then... Read more
What comes first, the church or the bible? In many respects this is a chicken or egg question. It isn’t really possible to separate the two. We have the bible through the church and we privilege the bible because of Christian community. Walter Moberly in Chapter 3 of The Bible in a Disenchanted Age: The Enduring Possibility of Christian Faith looks at plausibility structures for Scripture. The bottom line, he suggests, is that we can’t separate our confidence in the... Read more
Last week I (re)posted on the art of conversation in preparation for this week’s post on C. Christopher Smith’s wonderful new book, How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church. The evangelical church’s conversational style can be simplified to the term didactic while the mainline’s approach is dialogical, and Smith and his church are seeking to embody the recovery of conversation as how the church can better be a body. Let me ask you to think about doing... Read more
Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun, in For the Life of the World, contend for the following major ideas when it comes to what theology is or what it ought to be doing today: The heart of our proposal concerns the purpose of theology. It is to discern, articulate, and commend visions of and paths to flourishing life in light of the self-revelation of God in the life, death, resurrection, exaltation, and coming in glory of Jesus Christ, with this entire story,... Read more
Long ago I read a portion from a well-known theological textbook to a classical theologian who knows the Creedal tradition with expertise, and his response was “That sounds Arian, or at least very close to Arian.” Michael Bird and Scott Harrower, in their new book Trinity without Hierarchy: Reclaiming Nicene Orthodoxy in Evangelical Theology, now have provided a collection of essays that both criticize what must be called a Complementarian sub-Trinitarianism (Bird picks a fight by calling them “theologians of a... Read more
O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. BCP Read more
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