Ezra 9:1
The idea of divine election, while central to the biblical witness, can be dangerous if misunderstood. Political rhetoric this election cycle has called attention to the undercurrent of exclusionary sentiment flowing throughout the U.S. population. Events abroad surrounding the Syrian refugee crisis attest to the universal character of this sentiment. Everyone, even believers, it seems, wants to exclude someone from access to something and somewhere.
Evidence suggests that two impulses deeply rooted in my religious tradition have recently resurfaced in not-so-subtle disguises to the potential detriment of the church: ministerial servitude and anti-intellectualism. By the former, I mean the constellation of behaviors that churches manifest toward their ministers and that reveal an underlying confusion
Continue reading “Study to show yourself approved unto God…” (2 Tim 2:15)
Keeping Kosher from a Contemporary Perspective
For a period when he was small, one of my children would regularly ask at mealtime, “What was this when it was alive?” His question expressed an attitude remarkably near that of ancient Israel’s priests about food that must be addressed in a life of faith.
Genesis 14:19-22 and Acts 17:23-24
Wishing to express solidarity with American Muslims who face growing hostility, Larycia Hawkins, a tenured professor on the faculty of Wheaton College (IL), posted a comment on her FaceBook® page on December 10, 2015. “…as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” Saturday February 6, 2016, Hawkins and Wheaton’s academic
Isaiah 6 and Worship
Poor Isaiah. He experienced what we all say that we want to experience in church on Sunday morning: the undeniable presence of God. It was not entirely pleasant. Immediately, the prophet became aware of his unclean lips. Perhaps, seeing God “high and lofty” (Isa 6:1, NRSV) called attention to the inadequacy of the things he had been
On Genesis 17
Some years ago, Dennis came to my office to talk about how his study of the Bible had reshaped his understanding of God. He related an episode in his life just a few years earlier involving the purchase of a swing set for his young daughter. His church background had emphasized the sovereignty of God, including the notion that God’s
Continue reading The Sovereignty of God and the Sears Catalog
In the previous entry in this blog, I argued that the most profitable approach to reading prophetic literature involves a variety of “pattern recognition.” Yesterday, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, I took the opportunity to re-read Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” his famed “I Have a Dream” speech, and the concluding chapter of his
The Danger of Genre Confusion
During the initial days of the First Gulf War, several local news outlets contacted me wanting to know whether events in the Persian Gulf were fulfilling biblical prophecies against Babylon. I am sure that they expected the Baptist Old Testament professor at the local college to detail an apocalyptic panorama for them. Instead, I told them, simply,
The early church affirmed the canonical authority of the Old Testament over the objections raised by some (Marcion, for example) that its focus on covenant-keeping (works legalism) and its portrayal of an “angry,” “violent” God do not comport with the Gospel’s message of grace and love. Nonetheless, the history of the church’s relationship
“The chief end of [humankind] is to glorify God.”
The Westminster Shorter Catechism
Readers of the Bible will recognize the title of this entry as a paraphrase of Genesis 1:26, the statement of God’s intention to create humankind. The paraphrase echoes a position often taken by critics of religion (Sigmund Freud, and more recently Christopher Kitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others), namely, that human beings simply project a super-human
Continue reading Let us make God in our image and according to our likeness