Bruce McCormack on Christology and the Peter Enns/Westminster Theological Seminary Controversy

This is Bruce McCormack's first blog post that I'm aware of, and it's a doozie! He typically frames contemporary problems in a theologically historical context, which I always find helpful.

Envision '08 Conference June 8-10

I plan on being at the Envision '08 Conference,since it's happening in my own backyard here in Princeton.  There are some pretty awesome speakers: Shane Claiborne, Brian McLaren, Kay Warren, Miroslav Volf, Jay Bakker, Bart Campolo, Rich Cizik, John Perkins, and Jim Wallis.  

Second Helvetic Geography

Check this out from the Second Helvetic Confession (1566):

"We, therefore call this Church catholic because it is universal, scattered through all parts of the world, and extended unto all times, and is not limited to any times or places.  Therefore we condemn the Donatists who confined the Church to I know not what corners of Africa."

You know they spent hours debating where it was, and finally threw in the towel.

Benjamin Milner on Calvin's Doctrine of the Church

I just came across an incredible book by Benjamin Milner on Calvin's Doctrine of the Church (Leiden: Brill, 1970), which is the most thorough systematic treatment out on the topic.  Here's a great quote:

The creation of the church, also a creatio ex nihilo, is represented by Calvin as recurring resurrections from death.  When he describes the “restoration” as “perpetual,” then, he points not so much to eternity as he does to the perpetual need of a disordered and confused world for “God’s gathering together of his Church.”  The church is not so much an institution in history in which the restoration of order has been accomplished, as it is itself the history of that restoration.[1]

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[1] Benjamin Milner, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Church (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 47.

Online Debate Between N.T. Wright and Bart Ehrman on the Problem of Pain

You can check it out here.

Here's an excerpt from Bart Ehrman on How the Problem of Suffering Ruined His Faith:

Eventually, while still a Christian thinker, I came to believe that God himself is deeply concerned with suffering and intimately involved with it. The Christian message, for me, at the time, was that Jesus Christ is the revelation of God to us humans, and that in Jesus we can see how God deals with the world and relates to it. He relates to it, I thought, not by conquering it but by suffering for it. Jesus was not set on a throne in Jerusalem to rule over the Kingdom of God. He was crucified by the Romans, suffering a painful, excruciating, and humiliating death for us. What is God like? He is a God who suffers. The way he deals with suffering is by suffering both for us and alongside us.

This was my view for many years, and I still consider it a powerful theological view. It would be a view that I would still hold on to, if I were still a Christian. But I'm not.

About nine or ten years ago I came to realize that I simply no longer believed the Christian message. A large part of my movement away from the faith was driven by my concern for suffering. I simply no longer could hold to the view—which I took to be essential to Christian faith—that God was active in the world, that he answered prayer, that he intervened on behalf of his faithful, that he brought salvation in the past and that in the future, eventually in the coming eschaton, he would set to rights all that was wrong, that he would vindicate his name and his people and bring in a good kingdom (either at our deaths or here on earth in a future utopian existence).

We live in a world in which a child dies every five seconds of starvation. Every five seconds. Every minute there are twenty-five people who die because they do not have clean water to drink. Every hour 700 people die of malaria. Where is God in all this? We live in a world in which earthquakes in the Himalayas kill 50,000 people and leave 3 million without shelter in the face of oncoming winter. We live in a world where a hurricane destroys New Orleans. Where a tsunami kills 300,000 people in one fell swoop. Where millions of children are born with horrible birth defects. And where is God? To say that he eventually will make right all that is wrong seems to me, now, to be pure wishful thinking.

Colbert and Sharia Law

Colbert and Anne Lamott

Sermon on the Good Samaritan and the Homosexual

If you go here, and click play on the sermon entitled UNCHRISTIAN V: Anti-Homosexual // Tony Sundermeier, you'll hear a prophetic sermon that addresses the common assumption by the public that Christians are Anti-Homosexual.  

I worked with Tony during this last academic year for my internship at Dilworthtown Community Church, and learned a lot from him.  

There WIll Be Blood (of Christ)

This is an excellent parody of the film, There Will be Blood. It was shown at Theologiggle, the seminary's annual laugh-fest. I think you'll appreciate it.

Yo Yo Whattup?!

Some videos are too awesome not to post on your own blog. Thanks to Aric Clark over at Mined Splatterings.

Being Taken Outside Ourselves

Calvin spoke of God condescending to our weakness by instituting the Lord's Supper, which exists for the sake of sealing and confirming the preached Word for the believer.  However, condescension is not the way Calvin describes eucharistic presence.  The body and blood of Christ do not condescend to us by becoming substantially united to the bread and wine.  Instead, we as the communicants are spiritually lifted up to Jesus Christ who has ascended to the right hand of the Father.

However, the early church did not think of heaven as being "up there."  The Kingdom of God is breaking in from the outside.  Heaven is "out there."  As I thought about this, it connects well with Luther's notion of Christ calling us outside of ourselves, outside of our self-justification, beyond our being as incurvatus in se (being curved in upon ourselves).