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Prayer for the Celebrity's Purgatory
Friend and colleague Maurice Frontz composed a poem this week as a response to the news of the death of Michael Jackson. He has given permission for me to submit it as a guest column in this space...
Critique of the New LSTC Faculty Statement, Part Three
The errors in historical and theological judgment committed in the LSTC Faculty Statement's brief account of history could take an entire book to refute. As a fellow scholar, I can only offer here brief refutations of an all too convenient account of the facts rendered by this simplistic progressivist narrative sufficient to show how insubstantial it really is. The deeper problem, however, is that the LSTC statement regards overcoming certain ideological abuses of Scripture as the fundamental theological task, when it never tells us why and on what grounds the gospel traduces itself first and foremost as canonical Scripture. How can anyone discern abuse apart from a prior account of right use? The result of this superficial procedure is that abstract ideas like grace or liberation functionally replace authoritative texts as the material of theology; pre-eminently, the notion of grace as sheer acceptance or radical welcome replaces the historical, biblical Christ whom we meet in the Bible...
Critique of the New LSTC Faculty Statement, Part Two
What is the gospel and what does it means for us, according to the LSTC Faculty statement? We learn in this concise formulation from the beginning of their statement that the redemptive act that constitutes the good news is that Christ crossed religious and societal boundaries, including the excluded. In this Christ is said to have modeled radical love, providing an example of grace which frees God’s people in turn to do likewise...
Critique of the New LSTC Faculty Statement, Part One
As I mentioned in my previous blog post on the two contending teachings about reconciliation vying for the heart and mind of Christians in the ELCA, some faculty at the Lutheran School of Theology have responded to criticisms of the Task Force draft Social Statement and Recommendations with a new statement. I asserted that this is a truly sad attempt at alleging fidelity to the Scriptures as understood in the Lutheran Confessions. Sad, because if what they write is sincere, these teachers need a crash course in Remedial Lutheran Theology...
Take the Test: A Sermon on Genesis 22:16
Today we’re radicals because we’ve read Genesis 22 out loud in church on the near sacrifice of Isaac. Many Christians today are saying that these Bible verses shouldn’t be read in church because they scare children–traumatizing them with the thought that God might also ask their parents to kill them. So why have we today, blithely and a bit recklessly, waded into these deep and dangerous waters?...