Resident Theologian
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Lecture recording: “The Word of the Lord”
A few weeks back I delivered a lecture here in Abilene for the Center for the Study of Ancient Religious Texts, at the cordial invitation of my colleague Jeff Childers, who is a world-class scholar of ancient and Syriac Christianity in the Graduate School of Theology. The lecture is an amalgamation of a few different sections of my book The Doctrine of Scripture, but it is also followed by 20-30 minutes of Q&A.
Double literacy loss, 2
A few more reflections following my previous post on the double loss of literacy in young people today: that is, the loss of ambient or default biblical literacy together with the loss of literal literacy, by which I mean the well-developed habits, eager interest, and requisite attention for sustained personal reading—of anything at all.
Lent: no Twitter + new piece in FT
As promised a few weeks back, I deactivated my Twitter profile this morning. (I thought to link to it and then realized … there’s nothing to link to!) It’s the first time I’ve done so since creating an account nine years ago. It was reading Thomas à Kempis that spurred me seriously to contemplate it; then it was reading Bonhoeffer for class this morning that prompted me just to get it over with already. Mortify the flesh, doubly so when that mortification is digital.
Double literacy loss
Last week I was asked by a graduate student the following question: In today’s culture, what is the biggest challenge for Christians in attempting to steward and share the scriptures with the next generation—whether within the church or without?
Burkeman’s atelic self-help
Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, is well worth your time. It is a splendid meditation on what it means to be a finite creature and what follows for making decisions, down to the most mundane, about how to spend one’s vanishingly small allotment of hours in this, our only world, with this, our only life.
More on post-biblicism biblicism
A few more points in addition to yesterday’s reflection on the odd phenomenon I’m calling “post-biblicism biblicism,” or PBB for short.
Biblicism beyond biblicism
There is a strange phenomenon in graduate theological education that I’ve never quite been able to understand. Here’s my best attempt at describing it.
God’s love for Israel for its own sake
Any theological account of God’s relationship with Israel will have to approach it as a relationship that exists for its own sake. God loves Israel like a parent loves a child or like a husband loves a wife. Israel is not a means to a larger end but a love with its own intrinsic end. This is the way the Biblical narrative characterizes the relationship between God and Israel—in the Torah, in the prophets, and in Paul.
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.
Church people
What does the phrase above mean to you? I can imagine many answers, but here’s a stab at a common enough picture that comes to mind when the phrase is used.
Touchy self-regard
There are many scholarly vices, but the two that stand out most prominently to me are defensiveness and self-pity. We all know academics who fall prey to these. What’s unfortunate is that, far too often, they seem to be positively rather than inversely correlated to one’s status, fame, renown, and success. Attend a conference, observe a well-known master of a sub-guild on a panel, and you’ll be shocked (or not) by his sheer touchiness. The mere mention of a minor dissent from one of his many ideas will call forth a thunderstorm of wrath and emotion worthy of a toddler tantrum.
Misdiagnosis
A running theme has emerged on this blog over the last few years, but especially the last 18 months or so. That theme is the sorry state of the church in the U.S., in particular “low church” traditions: non-denominational, baptist, evangelical, and other similar communions (like my own, churches of Christ). The focus is on those traditions because those are the ones that compose my world: the Christians I know, the neighbors I live among, the students I teach.
What do I want for my students?
I teach theology to undergraduates. That means, on one hand, that I’m not teaching them a skill. Many professors pass on a set of concrete skills meant for a job or some other professional activity: how to interview a client; how to detect a speech impediment; how to parse a verb; how to mix solutions. Not me. That’s not what theology is about.
Christian ethics
This spring semester I’m piloting a course in theological ethics for upper-level students at ACU. Wednesday this week wrapped up our fourth week as well as part 1 of the course. To begin the work of synthesis I wrote up a series of ten theses on Christian ethics and distributed copies to the class. Here’s what I wrote.
Turning back the clock
In the last six weeks I’ve read three different books that all makes disparaging reference to “turning back the clock.” By disparaging I mean that they repudiate the usual use to which the cliché is put. Noticing the shared rhetorical move between these works, spread across about four decades in the first half of the twentieth century, made me wonder how common a trope this is for Christian and especially conservative writers in the last hundred or so years. Do share if you know some other ones.
Perennial epigraph
Plaster this as the epigraph or foreword to every work of theology, every essay, every review, every lecture, every class, every tract, every sermon, every degree in doctrine or ministry or biblical studies.
Twitter and Thomas à Kempis
I’ve been on Twitter for nearly nine years. For the last three of those years I’ve wondered whether I should stay on, and I’ve gone back and forth. I quit for a few months while keeping my account active before returning in the spring of 2020, then took another big break that summer. Since fall 2020 I’ve stayed more or less consistent with a few self-defined rules for my Twitter usage.
New essay published in The Christian Century
An essay of mine is the cover story in the newest issue of The Christian Century; it’s titled “Jewish Jesus, Black Christ.” I first wrote it in late August 2020, about 18 months ago, and it’s finally here, in the world. Thanks to the editors at CC for their comments and for accepting it.
Perennial Lewis
As I’ve written about previously, I’ve spent the last 10-12 months rereading the major works of C. S. Lewis by listening to them on audio. That has meant nearly 20 books, split evenly between fiction and nonfiction. I’m on my last one now (I finished my romp through Chesterton earlier this month), which means 2022 will be wide open for my post-podcast listening habits.
Evangelical addenda
As soon as I hit “Publish” on the last post, I felt some unease about how it might come across. I re-read it, and let me offer a few further comments, especially before I go read what anybody else makes of it.