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Up one levelThe Argument from Antiquity
Every so often you hear in the church the argument: “We’ve never done that before, so we’re not going to start now.” Nowadays this argument is generally invoked against things like the ordination of women or of homosexuals. It has a converse expression, too: “We’ve always done it this way,” and therefore to do otherwise is wrong. This I will term the “argument from antiquity” and honestly I find it quite baffling that pastors (or any other Christians, for that matter) ever use it...
Mark’s Indirect Christology
My brother Will once had the misfortune of taking a New Testament class with one of those professors whose chief joy seems to be the destruction of youthful faith for reasons that are more psychological than intellectual. Among other things this professor claimed that “Mark did not believe Jesus was divine in the ontological sense.” Quite apart from the obvious and gleeful departure from Christian dogmatics in a statement like this, the professor was just being an idiot. If you are looking for a full-blown Platonic or other such theory of divinity developed by Mark in which Jesus is subsequently forced to fit, then you will certainly be disappointed. But that says far more about your own preconceptions of divinity than anything else. And if there is one thing all the gospels are determined to do, it is to demonstrate the falsity of your preconceptions of divinity...
Doing Something Practical - Mass
Though mildly irreverent in its portrayal of Roman Catholicism and Christianity in general, I have found the now decade-old British television program Father Ted to be an insightful critique both of Christianity and of human nature in general...
A Sort-Of Kind-Of Cosmological Variant of the Ontological Argument
Hear me now: I am no fan of natural theology. Nein! God considered as a proposition strikes me as laughably implausible. I believe in God because I believe in the incarnate Son, not the other way around. But then, since the Son implies God in the more familiar divine-attribute guise, I do occasionally have to consider God in this form. I’m OK with all the usuals. Immortal, invisible, God only wise, omniscient, omnipotent. I recently discovered, however, a divine attribute that I could not wrap my mind around. This one: God is big.
Summer Reading
With the arrival of summer hopefully your schedule allows you a little more free time for the simple joy of reading. The challenge of course is that it is summer and your brain doesn’t want to be bogged down by heavy theological discourse, it wants to be entertained. Yet at the same time you are aware of your God-given responsibility for life-long learning. The solution, two books which provide the best of both worlds, in depth education coupled with lively and entertaining writing styles...
Ecclesiastical Eavesdropping
Recently I had reason to attend a nondenominational Reformed evangelical church on a Sunday morning. In a previously held theological attitude, I would have spent the time tallying all the ways it did things wrong—in other words, all the ways it didn’t do things like an LBW-toting Lutheran church would have. Nowadays I find myself more in a place I have come to call “post-tribal Lutheranism,” wherein my passion for Lutheran theology has turned from judgment to generosity. I am more glad to find the gospel preached in word and sacrament, wherever I may find it, than I am to see institutional success for my tribe...
Clash of Cultures
The release of Prince Caspian in theaters, as with The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe before it, has once again presented the opportunity of using modern film to teach elements of the Christian faith. It is a tactic that seems to have value within the entertainment driven cultural context in which churches minister today. Oddly, one of the best films that I have seen in recent years, a film which really gets at the heart of the challenge facing contemporary Christianity, is not a “Christian film” at all...
Clergy Shirts and Misinterpreted Symbols
Symbols are a very big thing to people on opposite ends of the theological spectrum. To one end they are sort of like anchors to truth and orthodoxy. As long as you keep proffering the symbol in a theologically well-thought-out way, all will be well, and no amount of contemporary futzing around will undercut its crystal clarity. At the other end the symbol is a lovely replacement for the irritating hard edge of doctrine, allowing lots of bitterly disagreeing people to pretend that they actually are united on something, and suggesting that because truth is bigger than us we don’t have to be accountable...
Sleepless Nights
There are few things more ominous for a pastor than being awoken after midnight to the sound of the phone ringing. Invariably it is bound to lead to a sleepless night. It was no different last night when the phone rang, and yet this time everything was different. For the phone call was not from a hospital or a grieving loved one, it was from someone who was dealing with the demonic...
Correcting the Creed
Some of my fellow ELCA pastors do not react to the new and improved Apostles' Creed in ELW with horror and dismay. Largely it is because they were not expecting to be horrified and dismayed. I admire this; it must be nice not to approach the church with suspicion at all times. I do not have the charism of ecclesiastical trust, so I am left to deal with my horror and dismay...
Leaving Wittenberg: Rome or Constantinople?
It seems an almost yearly occurrence that one reads about a Lutheran pastor who leaves the ecclesial confines of Wittenberg for either Rome or Constantinople. While much ink gets spilled about why they have left and what their leaving says about the current state of Lutheranism, one interesting detail seems to have gone unnoticed. Why is it that those who come out of the ELCA (most notably Leonard Klein, Philip Max Johnson) have tended to gravitate toward Rome, while those who have left the LCMS in recent years (most notably John Fenton) have made their way to Constantinople?...
The Problem is Not Self-Care
Nowadays it seems the single most important thing you hear in seminary, candidacy retreats, first call education and so forth is not “proclaim repentance of sins for the kingdom of God is at hand” but “please take care of yourself so you don’t burn out, leave the ministry, and worsen the clergy shortage problem...”
Praying With the Pope
Rock Star. Even those words, and the image of the Beatles that they conjure up, do not due justice to the excitement that existed at St. Joseph’s Parish on the Upper East side as we waited for the arrival of Pope Benedict. From inside the church you couldn’t see anything, but there was no mistaking when he arrived – the roar of the motorcade followed by the roar of the crowd, many who had begun lining up earlier in the morning amidst extremely tight security just on the hope of being able to catch a glimpse of the Pope...
Proclamation is Trinitarian
The Litany is my favorite of prayers. The chant and its transition halfway through are penitent but not despairing, humble but confident. It is bracketed on either end with threefold pleas for mercy, and the petitions in between are as comprehensive as one could want. When I was praying it recently I was startled by one line in particular—a familiar experience for those who are used to praying the same old words over and over that are usually dulled by their frequency. In one petition we implore the good Lord to “accompany your Word with your Spirit and power”...
Eating at the Theological Table
For one of my classes at the seminary, we were required to read 1000 pages of Luther. It could come from any of his writings, with one exception – no more than 250 pages out of his Table Talk. The exception of course piqued the interest of those who had never discovered the crass, boorish, joviality that is Luther in his Table Talk. But it was there for a reason – seminary students when left to their own devices apparently gravitated toward Luther in his baseness more than they gravitated toward Luther in his brilliance...
Preaching on Easter
Preaching on Easter is not like preaching on Christmas, although the two days are paired together for their mutual fame and likelihood of drawing in strangers, marginal members, and victims of filial piety. Christmas finds everyone in a state of spiritual drunkenness: either so happy with children and presents and cookies and sentiment that the little baby in the manger is yet one more part of the larger parcel of charm, or so miserable with family tension or loneliness or disappointed expectations that the little baby in the manger is yet one more part of the larger parcel of oppression...
So Many Words
For Lent this year, I decided to give up clutter. Central to the clutter was a number of boxes of books that I had accumulated from years of impulse purchases and the libraries of retired pastors. Each one got evaluated on the basis of this question– “Am I likely to read this again?” And so each book was distributed with limited exceptions for “sentimental value” into either a pile destined for the office bookshelf, or a pile where the books would be sold to raise money for the parish school. It was a painful, almost purgatorial, experience for a historian pack-rat like myself...
Dissing the Stranger
A couple of months ago I was at a Lutheran seminary—I won’t say which one—for a day-long session with a bunch of other pastors. Thinking it might be interesting to keep other company during lunch in the seminary’s cafeteria, I flagged down a student and asked if I could sit with her. She gladly agreed and we had a nice conversation. But as the table filled in with more students—of many races and both genders—I found myself utterly ignored by the newcomers...
A LCMS Case for Social Justice
Yesterday, in conjunction with Lutheran Social Services of Metropolitan New York, LCMS President Gerald Kieshnick held a round-table forum to discuss issues of church related social service and social justice. Conventional wisdom has long observed that with few notable exceptions (abortion, homosexuality, embryonic stem cell research) the LCMS has shied away from issuing political-ethical missives. In contrast the ELCA seems to produce statements on just about everything, or so the caricatures go...
A humble hurrah for fasting
I have never been much one to appreciate ascetical self-discipline that has no purpose beyond itself. It always reminds me of a story I once heard about an earnest young collegian who put a sharp pebble in his shoe to call to mind the sufferings of Christ; one of his buddies was heard to remark, “If he really wanted to suffer, he could try shoveling the walk...”