Does priesthood derive from the New Testament?

I have a friend who objects to the idea of Christian priesthood because he believes it diminishes and even denigrates other members of the Body of Christ who are not priests or bishops. His objection is to a distinctly “sacerdotal” image of the priesthood, in which only the priests or bishops can perform sacraments and teach in the Church, while all other members are more or less passive. To put it in a simplistic and crass way: Priests and bishops are seen to have “magic hands” which can consecrate sacraments, while everyone else is “non-magical”. To be fair, this view of the priesthood is a caricature, and very few people would insist that all ministry must be done by ordained clergy, while everyone else must be passive and receptive. However, this CAN be an implication of some early modern conceptions of the “sacerdotal” priesthood.

Seven Tips on Leading Camp Songs in School Chapel

So, you have gone on retreat, or to camp, and you have had an amazing experience of God, and now you want to share that with your local congregation! Awesome! That is exactly what God wants us to do with our passion and our gifts: Share them with others. However, sharing the gift of music is not as easy as it seems, and is not always received the way you intend it. To help avoid some of the pitfalls of sharing your music in Church, here are seven helpful hints by someone who is not musically trained, but has been a camp counselor, youth minister, priest in the Church, and school chaplain. I have seen this done well, and done not-so-well.

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. 

The Metaphysics of Materialism

Materialist determinism is a perpetually popular view in the modern world. It is the metaphysical viewpoint which denies metaphysics by positing that: 1. Reality is made of matter and only matter. The only reality is matter and the physical forces which operate within material interaction. This raises the thorny question of what exactly matter is. But let’s bracket this and assume there is something called “matter”, and it is the only constituent of reality (as opposed to “spirit” or “mind” or “consciousness”). 2. The events in reality are causally determined by material laws and forces, such that even the workings of mind and consciousness are determined by the physical states which preceded them. There is no free will or choice. All are illusory experiences formed in brains after events have happened. All phenomena can be fully explained in a mechanistic way through the matter and forces at work in an event, without any reference to choices or intentions or motives or thoughts.

However, as elegant as materialist determinism seems to be, it has some rather impractical and non-elegant implications. 

Should we rethink the dates of the New Testament?

Recently, New Testament scholar Jonathan Bernier has put forth a powerful proposal about  "Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament". He shows that in the era of modern Biblical scholarship, there have been three basic kinds of dates proposed for the writing of the New Testament:

Why God cannot be evil

Recently I was in a discussion in which someone asked whether God could be evil. Is it possible that the Ultimate Reality that is the source of all other realities is actually malevolent? Fortunately, it is both an evidential and a logical impossibility for God to be evil. God cannot be evil due to both an a priori reason (a reason which comes prior to experience in the world) and an a posteriori reason (a reason which comes from reflection on experience in the world). 

Twitter Gospel

A friend talked about summarizing the Gospel in 280 characters for Twitter. So here’s my Twitter Gospel. What is yours?

The Good News is that the LORD of Love is drawing us ALL into God’s embrace through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, as God journeys with us through our hells &  heavens, and guides us in our trials & triumphs, so we may share fully in God’s Life and Love and Light.

I even have a 9 word version:

Christ shows God. 

God is Love. 

Love heals all. 

Amen.

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 Spirituality of Physical Training

Lord of Life strengthen us in Spirit, body, and soul: With our mind, heart, and will in your loving control; So we can heal our world, and make your children whole.

One of the driving concerns behind my entire life project is integral holism: To help us become healthy and whole in body, spirit, and soul. I believe the integration of bodily health and activity is foundational for our spiritual vitality and psychological wholeness. As a Christian pastor, my primary means of accessing wholeness and purpose and integration in life is through the God of Love revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. Followers of Jesus are not usually known for their dedication to physical training and integration. But I think this is a mistake. After all, Jesus usually met people's bodily needs by feeding and healing them, before he taught them spiritual and ethical truths. And the "abundant life" promised by Jesus has physical as well as spiritual dimensions, such as making "our daily bread" a central concern in Jesus' model prayer.

Just as Jesus combined both physical and spiritual dimensions in his ministry, I usually combine my spiritual training with physical training, staying mindful of my diet and rest, exercise and mobility. This practice uses many of the spiritual-physical insights we find in Christian asceticism, as well as Hatha Yoga, and modern ideas of physical mobility, to create a method of living which not only connects us with Christ, but also makes us the strongest version of ourselves, which is holistically holy and wholly whole.