Resident Theologian
About the Blog
My latest: why baptism isn’t optional, in CT
A link to my latest CT column on the sacrament of baptism.
Carr, Sacasas, and eloquent reality
A long reflection on an essay by Nicholas Carr engaging L. M. Sacasas about enchantment, reality, and contemplation.
My latest: on Houellebecq (in Mere O) and Forgiveness (in Comment)
Links to two new essays just published online.
The Eucharist: ceremony, doctrine, and the real presence
Further reflections on the Eucharist and its celebration across different Christian traditions.
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.
My latest: on lights and liturgy, in CT
A link to my latest article for Christianity Today, on lights, liturgy, and American practices of worship in contemporary evangelicalism.
Coda: what is a CoC?
Further reflections on “family marks” that once distinguished Churches of Christ from American evangelicalism, but no longer do so.
A loosening
Reflections on trends in low-church Protestant settings regarding such things as tattoos, alcohol, charismatic gifts, feast days, and more.
My latest: on holy orders
A link to and brief description of my latest publication, an article on the sacrament of holy orders.
I’m in Mere O on streaming worship
Should churches continue live-streaming worship? In a new essay for Mere Orthodoxy, I make the case that the answer is no.
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.”
Sermon length
A friend mentioned that there was recently (is currently?) a vigorous conversation on Twitter about the ideal, or proper, or fitting, sermon length. Since I’m off Twitter I barely have access to people’s most recent two or three tweets; I definitely can’t go perusing anyone’s account for extended back-and-forth replies and RTs. But the mention piqued my interest.
Church for normies
In his book Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction, Nicholas Healy raises an objection with Hauerwas’s ecclesiology. He argues that Hauerwas’s rhetoric and sometimes his arguments present the reader with a church fit only for faithful Christians—that is, for heroes and saints, for super-disciples, for the extraordinarily obedient, the successful, the satisfactory. By contrast, Healy argues that the church ought to be a home and a haven for “unsatisfactory Christians,” and that our doctrine of the church ought to reflect that.
CCM
My friend and colleague Richard Beck, author of the best theology blog around, has been on fire lately with some stimulating reflections on church, ministry, preaching, and what it means to be faithful in the contemporary American context. If you’re not reading his Friday series on Jordan Peterson, get on it forthwith. His post this past Monday was a sort of follow-up to his latest Friday piece on Peterson. Both posts, along with many preceding ones, are about interpreting the state of the culture and what that interpretation tells us about how to respond with the gospel—not in 1950, not on an exotic mission field, but here, now, today, in the United States in 2022.
Needing Jesus
Start with a man. A young man, to be more specific. He lives in a small but well-furnished apartment in a gentrified neighborhood of Austin (or Chicago, or Brooklyn, or Portland). He’s 26. He’s single, he’s got friends, and he works a reasonably well-paying job with a tech start-up, a consulting firm, or perhaps a non-profit. He eats good food, reads good books, listens to good music. In general he’s a nice guy. He’s not a jerk. He recycles. He has reliably soft-progressive opinions. He voted for Bernie then for Biden. You’d enjoy his presence if you spent an evening with him.
Anti-sacramentalism
[W]hile sacraments have precarious or penultimate status in religion by and large, it is a distinguishing mark of Christianity that it is decidedly and finally sacramental. If God is one thing humans have to communicate with one another, to the saying of which the word’s embodiment is essential, God is the one thing Christians cannot cease to communicate.
How the Eucharist effects salvation
Since [the Eucharist] is the sacrament of the Lord’s passion, it contains in itself the Christ who suffered. Thus whatever is an effect of our Lord’s passion is an effect of this sacrament. For this sacrament is nothing other than the application of our Lord’s passion to us. . . . Hence it is clear that the destruction of death, which Christ accomplished by his death, and the restoration of life, which he effected by his resurrection, are effects of this sacrament.
Digital ash
I'm on the record regarding "streaming" the sacraments, or otherwise digitally mediating the celebration of the Eucharist. With Lent approaching, the question occurred to me: Might churches "stream" Ash Wednesday? That is to say, would they endorse or facilitate the self-imposition of ashes?