Some ink (some virtual) has been spilled on novelist Ms Rice announcing that she has “left the Church” but not left Christ. Recently I have been reading and studying the five theological orations by St. Gregory the Theologian (also known as St. Gregory of Nazianzus where he was Bishop . . . . Continue Reading »
You know: the subject of God’s love is not an either/or question in the face of orthodoxy. It’s not either you think God loves men or you have the right theology. In fact, I would say that the manner by which you can affirm that God loves men determines whether or not you have the right . . . . Continue Reading »
Throughout Church history, theological controversy has been one of the enduring features. Name any communion or denomination and you will find one which has struggled with this matter. St. Maximus the Confessor was imprisoned, exiled, and lost his tongue and compared to many he got off easy. For . . . . Continue Reading »
There have been many write ups on the so-called “New Calvinism” sweeping through the evangelical landscape, and much attention has been paid to highly organized leadership behind it. It seems that what Emergent Village was trying to accomplish through networking and organizing with other . . . . Continue Reading »
We love our stuff, and that makes God less-real to us. We want our relationship with God to be completely under our control the way all our stuff — everything from cars to boxes of paper — is under our control. And because Jesus is not in your face the way this blog is in your face, . . . . Continue Reading »
That’s not the end of what Peter said that day, and we’ll get back to that in a minute. But I think that we have to admit something to ourselves since we know we are like Oprah Winfrey. We have to admit that often, we don’t care about what God wants.
It’s obvious, I hope, that I’m writing here for people who say to themselves, “There is something irresistible about Jesus.” For some of you, that’s a point which you make into an ideological cathedral — a point of doctrine which lines up in an acronym that summarizes the faith, your faith. For others, it’s a nagging thought — as you work out your faith on your own, you keep coming back to this Jesus, and you can’t make sense of him all the way, but you also can’t accept everything he says because it seems somehow too hard to live that way, or too complex, or too simple, or merely out of your grid of experience. Continue Reading »
Some people have been hurt in the local church. For some people it’s just a rote activity, as Oprah admits, which she learned as a child. Some of us are much smarter than our local church can bear, and some cannot stand how smart the church thinks it is. Worse still for others: it will simply be completely useless. Continue Reading »