I won’t be able to be with my mom this Mother’s Day, but I will be soon after. When I see her in a few weeks, it very well might be the first time that she doesn’t recognize who I am. This might be the first time that she not only doesn’t know I’m her son, but that she doesn’t even recognize my face. Millions of people have experienced the disappearance of a loved one’s memory, their identity, their familiarity. The... Read more
This is the second post of a series I will be writing over the next few months in which I reflect on my theological journey through Evangelicalism and “out the other side.” Is the Bible completely and utterly and absolutely true? Is it completely and utterly true about everything (or even everything about which it speaks)? Can we take the Bible’s words and lay them up against what we know about history, and biology, and cosmology, and sexuality, and the size of... Read more
This post is a contribution to a Patheos Book Club discussion on Everyone Belongs to God, by the German pastor Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842-1919). The book is a new edition of a collection of letters Blumhardt wrote to his son-in-law, Richard Wilhelm, who worked as a missionary pastor in China. For this post, I interviewed my friend and former colleague Christian T. Collins Winn (PhD, Drew University), who is Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Bethel University, St. Paul, MN. Collins, among... Read more
Destin Sandlin of the SmarterEveryDay YouTube channel has a challenge for you: Try riding the “backwards bicycle,” a bike whose wheel turns opposite the handlebars (i.e. you turn to the right, the wheel goes left). It took him several months of practicing every day to learn to ride this bike–because the normal way had been so deeply engrained in his neural pathways. His young son, however, caught on in only a few weeks. I’ve been working through Robert Burton’s On Being... Read more
There’s a big fight going on tonight. Not being a fan of boxing, I haven’t ponied up the $90 for the fight–nor was I ever tempted to do so. I have other guilty pleasures (NFL football, for example). As Sarah Pulliam Bailey points out, though, there is an interesting storyline behind this one. Manny Pacquiao, professing “born-again Christian” goes up against Floyd Mayweather, who is an alleged abuser. As she puts it, The dramatic matchup is expected to draw millions of... Read more
This post is a contribution to the Patheos Book Club discussion on a new edition/collection of letters written by Christoph Blumhardt (1842-1919), a German Lutheran pastor, to his son-in-law, Richard Wilhelm, a missionary in China. The letters reveal Blumhardt’s convictions that God is on the side of everyone, and that conversion to a particular religion (i.e. Christianity) should be far from the objective of Christian missionaries. Their objective should be to share the love of God and to witness to... Read more
Last week I published an essay on The Table, the online blog of Biola’s Center for Christian Thought. The essay takes up a theme I began awhile ago on this blog: the relation between theology, death anxiety, and terror management theory. I’ve been surprised at how little TMT has been engaged for gaining understanding about the violence that swirls around us. I admit it’s a bit challenging to critique forms of religion from within the practice of religion. But it is necessary... Read more
This is the second post of a series I will be writing over the next few months in which I reflect on my theological journey through Evangelicalism and “out the other side.” When I first starting teaching theology, I discovered the significance of context. This might sound strange and indeed, it is strange that in eight or so years of theological education (seminary and doctoral studies) in Evangelical settings, context was so little discussed and so underestimated. Now, when you... Read more
Readers will be aware that I have just begun a blog series describing my theological journey through Evangelicalism into a post-Evangelical identity. So it might come as a surprise that I would alert readers to a new book called A Future for American Evangelicalism. (Subtitled “Commitment, Openness, and Conversation”). But I am aware that some of you who are interested in this ongoing dialogue remain in Evangelical contexts and are looking to connect to hopeful conversations relating to reframing, reshaping, and... Read more
This is the first post of a series I will be writing over the next few months in which I reflect on my theological journey through Evangelicalism and “out the other side. I should begin this series with a qualifier: The “Evangelicalism” I will primarily refer to throughout this series is a particular manifestation of a broader and more diverse, global “evangelicalism.” The Evangelicalism I am leaving is U.S. Evangelicalism (designated with a capital “E”), sometimes known as “neo-Evangelicalism”; a... Read more
Unsystematic Theology
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