Skip to content

Archive for

Nov 29

2 Comments

The Choice is Ours

One commonly hears some version or other of the refrain that faith is difficult here in the twilight of modernity. How can we possibly believe in the God of Christianity in light of modern science? Or in light of an understanding of the history and composition of Scripture? Or in the context of such astonishing religious diversity and all of mutually exclusive truth claims therein? Or given the amount and variety of suffering in our world? Or given how much we know about the sociobiological basis of all of our thinking and believing as human beings? Or _____?

The impression often given is that faith is uniquely improbable or challenging or implausible here in our current cultural moment. All we are left with, it seems, is some vestige of faith as an individually chosen, privately held, subjective  collection of beliefs which may provide psychological comfort or a kind of illusory meaning for our lives, but has little bearing on the real world. Read more

Nov 26

2 Comments

Far From God

Last night as bedtime approached, my daughter was sitting at the kitchen counter casually thumbing through one of those Bibles that has a “Where to Find Help When…” indexes in the front. It’s quite a resource. Whatever your problem—“Sleeplessness” or “Difficulty in Witnessing,” “Tempted to Envy” or “Choosing a Career”—there are 3-5 verses conveniently listed to address it. The Bible as self-help manual, apparently. Or something like that. It’s an approach to Scripture that irritates me, in many ways, and breaks any number of exegetical/hermeneutical principles along the way, but I suppose these things must occasionally do some good. I guess. Read more

Nov 23

14 Comments

Leap

In response to the previous post, Tyler asks a question about why my writing here has shifted away from more philosophical interests and toward more of an emphasis on faith.  I actually haven’t noticed a pronounced shift in my writing, to be honest, but I am not always the most reliable or accurate assessor of myself, so I will happily leave such questions to others.  I provided a long-ish answer to Tyler’s question in the comment thread of the previous post, but I think the shorter answer just walked out of my office door. Read more

Nov 21

38 Comments

Jesus is Weird

Have you ever thought about how utterly weird the Christian message about Jesus is?

The hope of the world, Christians claim, is a crucified Jew who was born of a virgin over two thousand years ago, lived a very peculiar and provocative life, taught and modeled a bizarre mixture of love, compassion, and peace alongside jarring and bewildering words of judgment and warning, was executed by a predictable combination of religious and imperial power while simultaneously paying the price for human sin and absorbing the evil of the whole world, cheated death (so his followers say) by rising from the dead, and claimed, in this whole package, to be the fulfillment of the very old, strange story about a very strange group of people whose mode of relating to God scarcely resembles anything we would recognize or welcome today.

On top of all this, his rag-tag band of followers subsequently tramped all over the known world proclaiming that this Jesus was (presently) alive and well, thank you very much, that his kingdom was at hand, that his church was called to invite all people to follow him, and that he would one day return to as the judge and Lord of history with the keys to eternal life.

Um. Ok. Read more

Nov 19

8 Comments

Trending

It’s been the usual quiet Monday morning routine of easing into a day off with a pot of coffee and a tour through a handful of blogs and news sites. But for whatever reason, today is a day when I have been struck by the uncomfortable absurdity of life in the digital age. Across the top of one major newspaper’s site is a large red arrow with an ever-rotating banner that informs me of what is “Trending” today. Conveniently arrayed for me are the stories and photo galleries and surveys and videos and articles that are being the most greedily devoured by the denizens of the twenty-first century with our insatiable appetites, always in search of the next interesting cyber-morsel to pin or share or tweet. This is what the cool kids are looking at today and, presumably, this is what I should be interested in and clicking on as well. Read more

Nov 15

9 Comments

How Dare You Speak of Grace?

I spent a good chunk of this week at a denominational pastors retreat in the Alberta foothills just north of Calgary. One of the things we did during our worship times each day was spend some time “dwelling in the Word.” The specific text we focused on each session was Luke 7:36-50, the story where Jesus is anointed by a “sinful woman” at the home of Simon the Pharisee. It’s a scandalous story—a woman of ill repute showing up a bunch of religious elites, crashing their party with her sensuous, inappropriate display of penitence, love, and devotion. Even more scandalously, Jesus praises her as an example to emulate, claims to forgive her sin, and sends her away in peace. One can only imagine what must have been going on in the minds of the esteemed, religious host and his respectable dinner guests! Read more

Nov 10

6 Comments

Hope for a World of Lost Horizons

Nearly every Saturday afternoon/evening finds me furiously editing, rewriting, rearranging, hating and hacking out parts of a sermon manuscript that has inevitably grown rather bloated over the course of the week. The longer I do this preaching thing, the more I am convinced that short sermons are far more difficult to write than long ones! It’s relatively easy for me to ramble on (as readers of this blog are no doubt aware!); it’s much harder to keep things concise and, if necessary, to get rid of stuff that I am quite (humbly) convinced is rather eloquent,  insightful, and necessary. Such is the cross I bear. Read more

Nov 6

31 Comments

Placebos, Politics, and Prayer

Today is election day south of the border. I have been trying—mostly unsuccessfully—to follow this over the last few months and am glad that after tonight I will be relieved of this (imagined) burden. I confess that I find the whole business so spectacularly boring and predictable. Two rich men squabbling over power, spending obscene amounts of other people’s money to sell themselves back to these same people. It’s the same story every four years or so: we have laughably impossible rhetoric about “hope” and “change” and “rebuilding America” combined with the inevitable sloganeering and nasty attacks on the other guy’s character and intentions…. Yawn. Wake me up when it’s over. Read more

Nov 1

22 Comments

Secularly Spiritual? Spiritually Secular? (Gil Dueck)

Over the last few days, my commutes have been spent listening to the 7 part CBC Ideas series called “The Myth of the Secular.” I’m not finished the series yet, but it’s been very interesting thus far. Is “the secular” simply the absence of religion? Or does it require religion and lean heavily on versions of religious eschatology in its vision of the future? Is religion a private exercise in a kind of generic, value-free public square or is it public truth with private implications? Basically, what I’ve picked up from the series thus far as that “the secular” owes considerably more to religion than it often cares to acknowledge and religion is often fundamentally secular in its presuppositions and expectations. The lines are often very blurry indeed. Read more