Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist?
A reflection in response to Jeff Reimer's essay on wayfaring through the ecclesial wilderness in search of the one true church.
You can’t die for a question
A follow-up reflection on biblicism, catholicity, martyrdom, and perspicuity.
The great Christian divide
Hashing out the differences between a biblicist and a catholic approach to Scripture, tradition, and the Christian faith.
CoC: past, present, future
My two posts on churches of Christ—the first on CoC-past as not-evangelical-but-catholic, the second on CoC-future as no-longer-catholic-but-evangelical—were intended to be merely descriptive, but I think their overall effect was something of a downer. This third and final post is meant to clarify what I’ve written and reflect constructively on the future.
CoC: evangelical, not catholic
I’ve had a number of readers reach out to me about my reflection on the churches of Christ as catholic rather than evangelical. I’m gratified to learn that what I was trying to put my finger on is something others resonate with. Some wrote as still-CoCers to say that it helped them articulate “the difference” they had always felt but had never been able to name; others wrote to say that, yes, indeed, they were raised CoC but were now a part of one of the three great episcopal branches of catholic tradition: Anglican, Eastern, or Roman.
CoC: catholic, not evangelical
For the whole of my academic career, it has been difficult to explain to friends and colleagues who have no prior knowledge of the Stone-Campbell Movement why churches of Christ are not best understood as “evangelical,” that is to say, as part of that rambunctious and dysfunctional family called “American evangelicalism.”
“The slow death of the Protestant churches”
Fifteen years ago, in a journal article on Karl Barth’s christology and Chalcedonian doctrine (among other things), Bruce McCormack concluded his article with the following paragraph (my emphasis): It remains only to say a word about the situation—and the motives which have led me to elaborate precisely this form of Christology in the present moment. The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.