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Miracles: God’s Presence and Power in Creation

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Luke Timothy Johnson WJK Press, 392 pages True story: A young pastor wrote an article for the church newsletter one Easter making the point that the resurrection was the keystone of the Christian gospel. Two families declared that that was too much for them to swallow, and they hit the road. Anyone who has been on a pastoral staff knows there are others with similar sympathies who keep it to themselves. Such knowledge tempts those who preach to turn the volume down when it comes to the bolder affirmations of the gospel. Embarrassed by and recoiling from aggressive fundamentalisms, mainstream Protestants risk a theological timidity meant to calm those in the pews for whom a polite skepticism seems the best way to defend their integrity. Luke Timothy Johnson is professor of New Testament emeritus at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, and decades of observation leave him dismayed that “Christians have more or less given away the game by debating things like miracles in terms … [Read more...]

Tagged With: creation stewardship

Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ

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Fleming Rutledge Eerdmans, 426 pages Fleming Rutledge has gathered from her repertoire of (mostly) unpublished materials a number of sermons and writings to help others who preach to understand and grapple with the rich themes of Advent, often passed over lightly. Rutledge is not fussing about the way Christmas seems to have seized Advent and misshapen it so that it matches the secular holiday that begins before Halloween. She is concerned that the Advent themes are too central to the gospel to be easily surrendered in an annual rising tide of sentimentalism. Mainline Protestant churches, acutely uncomfortable with the apocalyptic, have tended to avert their eyes from it, leaving it to fundamentalists, who have seemed overly fond of literal interpretations that favor themes of punishment for a huge cast of characters that probably includes us. Only recently have some mainliners begun to appreciate that God’s project is not a matter of getting to heaven one at a time, but a far … [Read more...]

Tagged With: Advent

What about the sacraments?

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Churches like our own are “challenged more strongly by the sacraments than by anything else,” according to J.J. von Allmen, a Swiss Reformed theologian. Why? One reason is that since the Reformation we have been frozen in a posture of resistance to the superstition so evident in the medieval church. That resistance pressed us to insist that true Christianity has to do with spiritual things, not idolized objects. Our Reformers fought superstition with a cascade of words: translations of the Bible, preaching, lectures, catechisms and volumes that could be mass-produced on Gutenberg’s new printing press. Words, it seems, are spiritual. Water, bread and wine not evidently so. Fast forward. We have sermons every Sunday. We celebrate sacraments now and then, or quarterly, maybe the first Sunday of the month. Ritual, involving material things, makes us nervous. Although in “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” John Calvin himself observed: “For if we were incorporeal … [God] would give … [Read more...]

Tagged With: sacraments • worship

Preacher: David H.C. Read’s Sermons at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church

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David H.C. Read (John McTavish, editor) Wipf & Stock, 272 pages Teachers of homiletics debate whether or not preaching can be taught. It is possible to teach techniques, of course: here’s how you prepare; here’s how you start and end; use your voice, your hands. What cannot be taught so easily is imagination: how to discern a relationship between an ancient text and the contemporary moment. But that can be learned, too, for those who truly want to learn it. One of the best ways is learning by example. David H.C. Read is one fine model. Born in 1910, Read grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. On a scholarship from New College, he studied theology at the three seminaries of the French Reformed Church where he was introduced to the theology of Karl Barth, a major influence. Ordained in 1936, Read became a military chaplain, eventually taken prisoner by the Germans. After the war, he served in various positions in Scotland. He became pastor of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in … [Read more...]

Paying attention to the elephant in the room: Recommitting to adult Christian formation

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My friend, a retired Lutheran pastor, confessed in a sermon that he was a believer on Sunday, but by Thursday nearly an atheist. Yes, he was overstating the case — maybe. But he was also telling it like it is. Our society, which for generations offered at least tacit support and even approval of faith — and particularly Protestant Christian faith — has now withdrawn it. No, we are not being persecuted. There is no “war on Christmas.” Nevertheless, the general public finds itself somewhere between indifference and suspicion when it comes to faith of any kind, including Christianity. Members of churches are not exempt, either. Reasons for this are many, including recoiling from aggressive and triumphalist forms of fundamentalism (Christian and otherwise); headline stories about clergy sexual abuse; distrust of institutions; and widespread misconceptions of who we are and what we are about. The elephant in the room is this: Our culture challenges faith every day, sometimes directly, … [Read more...]

Tagged With: Christian Ed

Money and Possessions (Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church) 

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Walter Brueggemann Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Ky. 384 pages This book is not a biblical manual on how to get rich. Nor is it a moralistic scolding, chiding the reader not to be so materialistic. The title does not sizzle, but the book does. It is not that the texts cited by the author are likely to be new to us, but that it is so very easy to encounter them without fully appreciating their essential gravity. The author examines them with attentive eyes, and testifies that both testaments understand economic neighborliness to be central to the common good. Brueggemann argues, “The Bible is relentlessly material in its focus and concern. … Everywhere the Bible is preoccupied with bodily existence.” It takes seriously the destructive power of hopeless indebtedness, of interest rates that rise exponentially, of the helplessness of those who have nothing and depend on the mercy of those who have a lot. And so, it is not surprising that the Torah lays down the law, … [Read more...]

Tagged With: God's economy • stewardship

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