There’s a song stuck in my head from our mission trip: “Is what I’m doing or thinking or saying building trust or undermining trust?” I learned it from a woman named Katie who has one of the most gentle, Christ-like spirits of anyone I’ve met in a long time. I think if God wanted to teach the world something, he would get the best results using someone like Katie whose demeanor builds trust. Being an impulsive, opinionated firebrand, I am... Read more
The other night, I had a conversation with a fellow member of our church’s Dominican Republic mission team who was troubled by the way that we are leaving behind people we just barely got to know. It’s the toughest part of every mission trip: saying hasta pronto when you know very well it’s going to be hasta never. I told my teammate what I’ve come to believe: that somehow I’m getting to know God better even through people I barely... Read more
Today I preached at the iglesia evangélica dominicana de Sosua here in the Dominican Republic on one of my favorite texts in the Bible: Isaiah 6. I’ve always seen the story of Isaiah’s call as a model for how God calls each of us. It also illuminates the importance of the fear of God and its relationship to holiness. Before Isaiah can come to the place where he says, “Here am I; send me,” he has to go through the... Read more
I’ve been reading through Stanley Hauerwas’ Working with Words. I just read an essay in which he gives a great summary of the problem with moralistic therapeutic deism: “God becomes that great OK who tells us we are OK and… we should tell others they are OK.” In other words, God’s “I love you” is twisted into “I approve of everything you do.” Having argued for a more therapeutic understanding of holiness ( that God is more interested in healing... Read more
One of my favorite things about Stanley Hauerwas is the way he says outlandish, exaggerated things to get a rise out of people. For example, in a recent lecture to the Duke Youth Academy, he shared that he wished the phrase “under God” could be taken out of the pledge of allegiance, because it promotes a generic concept of God that isn’t necessarily Trinitarian. I often try clumsily to emulate Hauerwas by saying things in a more provocative way than... Read more
When Christian Smith and Melinda Denton coined the phrase “moralistic therapeutic deism” in 2005, it described the way that many Christian teenagers have grown up with fuzzy theology in which God is basically nice and he just wants people to be nice and happy. Since that time, MTD has become a catch-all slur to use against any theology which doesn’t make God sufficiently strange or mean. The way to prove that you haven’t succumbed to MTD is to interpret the... Read more
There is probably not a more awkward passage for Biblical literalists than the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11. How exactly do you build a tower to heaven in the real world where physics and atmospheric pressure exist? And what kind of sovereign God would squash this project out of fear that “nothing they propose to do will be impossible for them” (v. 6)? The text gives no moral reason why building the tower was wrong so... Read more
In the information age, people define themselves primarily by their opinions rather than their actual behavior. This is not only the case for hard-core partisan ideologues, but also moderates who define themselves as more “reasonable” by balancing “conservative” opinions with “liberal” ones. While it used to be said that treating others with respect and integrity was the measure of one’s character, many today evaluate their moral courage according to how willing they are to stand up for their opinions (ESPECIALLY... Read more
As I was standing in the checkout line at the grocery store this week, I saw a news story about a five year old transgender child. It elicited a mixture of reactions inside of me. I get angry at the way that our scientistic world so ruthlessly diagnoses and categorizes everything. How many 13 year old kids today do not have some variation of attention deficit disorder? How many young children today are not in some form of occupational therapy... Read more
The 23rd chapter of Matthew is probably the harshest speech that Jesus ever gave. We don’t hear many sermons about it because Jesus was skewering the celebrity pastors of his day. Verse 15 is particularly poignant and troubling: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You travel over sea and land to make a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice the son of hell that you are.” Son of hell. I thought of this verse... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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