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Reflecting on the Bad Guys in Lent: Judas
There’s actually quite a number of Judases in the New Testament: Judas the brother of Jesus (Matthew 13:55), Judas the son of James (Luke 6:16, Acts 1:13), Judas not Iscariot (John 14:22), Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37), the Judas who sheltered Paul (Acts 9:11), Judas called Barsabbas (mentioned three times in Acts 15), and the epistle-writer Judas whom we in English prefer to call Jude, most of whom are basically good guys, but you won’t find Christians naming their sons after any of them. When we say Judas we mean Judas Iscariot, the sneaky low-down traitor, so oily that he betrays the Son of Man with a kiss, so cheap that it’s Mary of Bethany’s extravagant anointing of Jesus with nard that drives him as thief and keeper of the moneybag to bargain with the chief priests for thirty pieces of silver in exchange for his teacher...
Reflecting on the Bad Guys in Lent: Peter
Peter is the icon of the sinner-saint. We always find ourselves in his shoes. He’s the one who leaps out onto the water because of his great faith in Christ, and then halfway there—when the miracle is evidently working just fine—that’s when he panics and starts to sink. He’s the one who confesses first that Jesus is the Messiah, not a prophet or Elijah or John the Baptist, for which the Lord praises him and the blessing of divine revelation that granted Peter this insight; yet within three verses Peter’s telling the Messiah that he’s not allowed to go to the cross, which is Satan speaking from within him...
Reflecting on the Bad Guys in Lent
When I was little, I took comfort in an early theological certainty: that Judas, Pontius Pilate, and Hitler were all in hell. I think this must have been, among other things, assurance in an unpredictable and uncontrollable world that righteousness and order would reign in the end. Now I am older and, as often happens, past assurances have ceased to be comforting...
Occult America
Three is a tendency for individuals to assume that the days in which they are living are the apex of spiritual decline. That with the preponderance of new religions and religious philosophies and the decline of the old mainline Christian faiths, a new religious order will be established and Christians will be pre-Constantinian outcasts once more. History tends to generalize and sanitize and as a result the past often becomes homogeneous and the glory days become perhaps a little more glorious than they may have in actual fact been... Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation provides a helpful corrective to the view that America was once a unified Christian (at least in the traditional creedal sense of the word) nation.
Bible Studies for Lent
One of the earliest decisions that the church made, as a whole, was that there would be four gospels telling the One Gospel. The four would not be smoothed out into one streamlined account; each would be allowed its own voice, its own emphases and peculiarities. Almost as early, systematically-minded and earnest theologians tried to iron out the wrinkles and force the four into one. Tatian in the second century tried to do just this with his Diatesseron. The church didn’t think much of it and stuck with the four...