David Bartlett (foreword by Leonora Tubbs Tisdale) Westminster John Knox, 256 pages At a commencement ceremony in Richmond, Virginia, I introduced myself to Jonah, David Bartlett’s son, adding, “I’ll bet I’m the only one here who heard your grandfather [Gene Bartlett] give the Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School.” Of course, David Bartlett also delivered the Beecher Lectures some four decades after his father, but he and I never met. However, I had used some of his writing in my own teaching, and knew that his voice was one to be trusted. The most recent of these published sermons were preached either at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, where David served as theologian in residence for several years while teaching at Columbia Seminary, or at The Congregational Church of New Canaan, Connecticut. Together these account for more than half of the 52 sermons. The last is one he preached at Yale Divinity School a few months before his death in 2017. Since Bartlett’s … [Read more...]
Won’t Jesus miss us?
While I was leading a church-sponsored trip, the father of a parishioner told me a family story. His two daughters had left the nest. His adult son, who was intellectually challenged, remained at home. Every Sunday, he, his wife and their son worshipped in their Lutheran congregation. One week, for some reason, it seemed prudent to stay home, and the father told his son that they would not be going to church that day. The young man was silent for a time, and then asked, “Won’t Jesus miss us?” It was a touching question, one that highlighted the simplicity of the young man and the charm of what seemed to be his naiveté. Although I have described this scene in print more than once, the passing of time has led me to revisit it with an ever-increasing sense that it reveals something profoundly important. His unguarded description of how he experienced the church at worship is a reminder of what has dimmed for many of us in a secular age, or even been lost. The whole of Western … [Read more...]
Miracles: God’s Presence and Power in Creation
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...]
Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ
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...]
What about the sacraments?
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...]
Preacher: David H.C. Read’s Sermons at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church
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...]
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