COVENANTS: Relationships that lead to Thriving

This is a sample chapter from my Systematic Theology project "Theology for Thriving". 📎MORE TO THE STORY notes are not part of the main text of the book, but additional resources, charts, or other materials from Biblical Theology class resources.

Genesis 17.1-7, 17-20 [1] When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. [2] And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” [3] Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, [4] “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. [5] No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. [6] I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. [7] I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you... [17] Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” [18] And Abraham said to God, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!” [19] God said, “No, but your wife Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. [20] As for Ishmael, I have heard you; I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation.

EKKLESIA: The Community that helps us thrive

This is a sample chapter from my Systematic Theology project "Theology for Thriving". 📎MORE TO THE STORY notes are not part of the main text of the book, but additional resources, charts, or other materials from Biblical Theology class resources.

1 Corinthians 12.12-14, 20-27 [12] For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. [13] For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. [14] Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many... [20] As it is, there are many members, yet one body. [21] The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” [22] On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, [23] and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; [24] whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, [25] that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. [26] If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. [27] Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

RELIGIONS: Relating to those in different Stories with God

This is a sample chapter from my Systematic Theology project "Theology for Thriving". 📎MORE TO THE STORY notes are not part of the main text of the book, but additional resources, charts, or other materials from Biblical Theology class resources.

Acts 17.22-28 [22] “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. [23] For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. [24] The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, [25] nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. [26] From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, [27] so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him— though indeed he is not far from each one of us. [28] For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

TIKKUN OLAM: Sharing in God's Mission to Heal the World

This is a sample chapter from my Systematic Theology project "Theology for Thriving". 📎MORE TO THE STORY notes are not part of the main text of the book, but additional resources, charts, or other materials from Biblical Theology class resources.

Isaiah 11.1-9 [1] A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. [2] The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. [3] His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.  He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; [4] but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. [5] Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. [6] The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. [7] The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. [8] The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. [9] They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

The Inclusive Gospel of School Chaplaincy

Especially on Christian High Holy Days like Ash Wednesday, I am asked how School Chaplains proclaim the Good News of Jesus in the midst of a diverse school environment, with students and staff of all faiths and no faith at all. Unlike local Episcopal parishes, in our pews we have Christians and Muslims, Jews and Gentiles, Hindus and Buddhists, Sikh and Secular, and everyone in between and beyond. I could use fancy language and talk about how chaplains navigate the particularity of Christ's Incarnation and the universality of God's Love, or about how we discern between models of Theological exclusivism and pluralism and inclusivism. But let me see if I can do it in a few paragraphs without specialized language:

Three Strands of Classical Liberalism

Recently, I have been part of a book study of Patrick J. Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed”. Three conversations into Deneen and I find myself continually frustrated by his loose use of the word Liberalism to mean anything and everything corrosive in contemporary culture, ranging from radical libertarianism to deconstructive relativism to unrestrained consumer capitalism. I also find he is quick to demonize liberalism– or rather his version of “liberalism”-- while very reticent to acknowledge the good liberalism has brought, which has never appeared en masse in any large society on earth. Goods such as universal suffrage, modern science, sustained engagement across radically different cultures, and civil rights for all kinds of people historically excluded or diminished across cultures (women, POC, LGBTQ, disabled, etc.). When I decide where to eat at night, or where to work on the weekday, or where to worship on the weekend, I have the choice between dozens of cultures and thousands of different opportunities, all within 15 minutes of my house. And that doesn’t happen without Liberalism. So, in order to balance the ledger, I would like to present my corrective to Deneen, in what I am calling the three strands of Classical Liberalism.

Provocation on Revisionists, Traditionalists, and Jesus

Revisionists often proclaim Jesus as a radical prophet of the justice of God who overturns Empire, while denying or ignoring Jesus as the Incarnation of God in solidarity with humanity. 

Traditionalists often proclaim Jesus as the Incarnation of God in solidarity with humanity, while denying or ignoring Jesus as a radical prophet of the justice of God who overturns Empire. 

I think the outline of a solution is obvious: Both general trajectories are right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny. 

Jesus is a radical prophet of the justice of God who overturns Empire BECAUSE Jesus is the Incarnation of God in solidarity with humanity.

Rejecting the Reconquista for Christ's Mission of Inclusion

Earlier this week I found the Reconquista movement, with its Episcopal version, which details a plan to "re-conquer" historic denominations and take over their property, resources, and reputation with a form of exclusionary Christian faith. In these pages, we find "95 Theses" which are a syncretistic mixture of three strands of incompatible ideas: 

First, there are ancient Creedal beliefs about the Triune God, incarnate in the Lord Jesus Christ, who works through the Holy Spirit to extend the mission and incarnation of Christ through the sacramental community of the Church. 

Second, there are explicitly Reformed or Calvinist or "Evangelical" framings of the Nature of God and of salvation which are historically rejected by most non-Reformed Christians (such as Catholics, Orthodox, and non-Reformed Protestants). 

Third, there are modernist exclusionary stances to reject certain social/racial critiques, political-economic ideas, and gender/sexual identities, while at the same time implicitly or explicitly affirming other modern categories of race, social structure, politics, economics, gender, and sexuality. 

This is to say they do precisely what they accuse others of doing: They use reformed and modern categories to view and mold the Ancient Creedal Faith, rather than interpreting theology and culture through the lens of the Ancient Creeds. 

God's relationship with the world and culture

This is intended to help us understand how "Scripture speaks" on various topics. I have taken topical outlines I created for preaching and teaching, and reformatted them as articles to provide minimal framing and commentary, so that Scripture passages on certain topics may be collected, read, and meditated on. This is not an exhaustive commentary on Scripture, but rather an opportunity to collect thematic Scriptures together to see the trajectory that Hebrew and Christian Scriptures take, and how they converge and diverge on various topics. This is drawn from my own eclectic reading in Biblical and Systematic Theology, as well as topical resources such as Alister McGrath’s Thematic Reference Bible, Walter Elwell’s Topical Analysis of the Bible, Nave’s Topical Bible, Bible Gateway online, and the Open Bible online. 

In order to understand how to navigate our relationship with the world we live in, and the cultures we are immersed in, we need to understand the relationship of God to our world and the cultures in it. This can be difficult, because at different times in Scripture, there are different relationships between God's people and the world they inhabit, and the cultures that surround them. Sometimes, such as during the Davidic Kings of Judah, God's people were in charge of their culture and were directed to use that culture for the full flourishing of the people in it. Other times, such as during the Babylonian Exile or the period of Roman domination, God's people were called to create their own culture in the midst of cultures that ranged from being apathetic toward God's people, to being actively hostile to them. Despite this diversity of cultural context, there are some common Biblical themes that emerge:

The Politics of God’s Kingdom

For a long time I have said: Wherever there are people, there are politics. Politics are the distinctive ways of organizing a community, ensuring justice and fair treatment for all members, and creating social structures to make it possible to live into those supreme values which the community serves. And make no mistake: Every community has its supreme values, its gods and masters, which it sacrifices for and serves. It may be power or profit or praise or pride or possessions or position. It may be God or gods or kings or supreme rulers or parties or free markets or liberty or control or ideology. But every community serves some set of supreme values. And every community creates structures and strictures and sanctions and stimulus packages to enact those values. 

So, unless we are going to live alone on a desert island, we will have politics because we will live with people. We were made for community. So it isn’t a question of IF we will be political, but HOW we will be political. And this is where I think the Way of Jesus offers a different kind of politics: A Way of Love. Not a way of imposing politics on others by force, but a way of inviting people into a politics of full human flourishing. Not a way of violence and exclusion and coercion. But a Way of healing and inclusion and persuasion. Not join us “or else death!” but join us “because of life!”

The Politics of the Kingdom of God is wholly different from the politics of the world and its crumbling fiefdoms. It calls God’s people out of partisan politics and into a deeper walk with Jesus; Out of step with the world and into step with Christ’s Spirit; Out of faith in parties and politicians and into faithfulness to the Father. Where each decision is not made to advance an ideological platform, but to love our neighbor in concrete ways; To judge situation by situation, and person by person, so we choose the most good and the least evil; The most life and the least death; The most love and the least hate; The most compassion and the least apathy. Because, as Saint Irenaeus reminds us, “the  glory of God is humanity fully alive”, but the death and destruction and degradation of any of God’s children dishonors the One who made them. So vote with ballots as a necessary evil when you must. But vote with Christlike words and deeds every day in every situation with every person God brings into your life. 

Beware of Prophets for Profits

“Think again Sunshine!” Pop-intellectual Jordan Peterson has released a video in which he takes the role of a prophet and tells all Christian churches— Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox— how to do outreach and what our message should be. It is a video in which an exemplar of unhealthy right wing “good think” lobs rhetorical grenades at unhealthy left wing “political correctness” in the name of a religion and a God he himself does not embrace. His central thesis is that young men are burdened with a version of “original sin” experienced as guilt and shame for three overstated reasons, promoted by his enemies such as Derrida and Marx, deconstructionists and cultural Marxists. 

The strangest thing about Stranger Things

We did a marathon of the newest half season of Stranger Things over the last couple of nights. As a spiritual guide, I think the strangest thing about Stranger Things is their ability to reimagine evil as demonic, predatory, grotesque, and cruel, while taking into account our newest understandings of trauma, in a way that is robustly super-natural as well as meta-scientific.  We have allowed people to reimagine wicked demons and evil spirits for an age of quantum physics. 

However, this is not the truly strange part. 

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Scripture

At the school I serve as chaplain, I was recently asked to provide some Scriptural reflections on our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Earlier, I did an essay for my previous school on how these values are rooted in Episcopal Identity and the foundational beliefs and prayers of the Episcopal Church. Not only that, but the Christian vision of God leads us to these values, because the very idea of God as the Trinity leads us to embrace diversity, and the Incarnation of God in Christ leads us to embrace inclusion. These ideas of God are, in turn, rooted in the self-revelation of God which is recorded in Scripture. So now it is time to dig into the foundational texts of the whole Christian Faith, and the founding stories of Jesus and his Apostles, to understand how they inspire us to create communities of diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice. 

Resurrecting the Matrix: An Ideological Review

I just saw Matrix Resurrections. Here are my responses in no particular order:

Stupidity as a gateway to Fascism

These excerpts on stupidity as a gateway to fascism are taken from a circular letter, addressing many topics, which was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to three friends and co-workers in the conspiracy against Hitler, on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship of Germany:

Religious Fascination

I am fascinated by religion, and the process by which humans have created structures and norms and beliefs and practices which allow us to connect with the deepest aspects of who we are, the Source we come from, and the Destiny we are headed toward. I am fascinated by the sheer variety of rituals and art and foods and clothing through which people get glimpses of the Divine. I am fascinated by the constellations of overlapping and diverging beliefs about God and creation and humanity and final destiny. I am fascinated by the process of moral reasoning, through which ancient texts collide with contemporary experience to forge new paths into a (hopefully) better future. I am fascinated by how all of this intersects with our particular place in space and time, in the unfolding of history and culture, to form our sense of personal identity and collective destiny. But to truly study and embrace religion, we also have to embrace something like this insight from Acts:

A Post Pentecost Poem

We Christians love to affirm:

.

Semper Reformanda!

Always reformed

Always reforming!

Until that reformation

Reforms the way we read the Bible

Reforms the kinds of families we approve

Reforms our understanding of how God made us

Through the unfolding dance of evolution

Reforms the ways patriarchy and hierarchy 

Have silenced and sidelined

Women and Queers and Outsiders

So we can at last hear Christ

Speak through them!

.

When Reformation reforms too much

We cling to Tradition

To keep the boundary stones

Firmly in place

Predictably

Immovably

Inertly

In place...

The Great Weariness of “If Only...”

What would you do if only you had the power and knowledge of a god?

Living Vine, Dead Trellis

A poetic reflection on John 15.5 and institutional religion.

Speed Wobble

You know that feeling

When you are cruising down a hill

On a skateboard

Or maybe a scooter or bike

And you get going

Faster

And faster

And faster

Until you are far beyond

Your ability to steer?