May 19
Before Rob Bell went and wrote a book about heaven and hell, thereby ensuring his status as “lightning rod for criticism and heresy charges for the foreseeable future,” Brian McLaren was often the most frequent target of abuse for angry Christians. Ever since A New Kind of Christian was published in 2001, McLaren has been a polarizing figure in parts of the Christian world. Read more
Each year, one of the most significant parts of the Regent Pastors Conference for me is when we take the Lord’s Supper together as our last act before going our separate ways. Given some of the themes that I reflected upon in my previous post, this year was no exception. Read more
May 2
The conversation taking place on my previous post—specifically the comment referring to open theism—has got me thinking about some of my writing and reflection I did on the topic during my university days. I spent an entire undergraduate thesis under the supervision of a self-described “atheistic Jew who is angry with God” advocating open theism as a response to the problem of evil. Read more
Last night, we had a drama group performing at our church (unenviably, on the same night as game seven of the Canucks/Blackhawks series!). Through a series of sketches, the group skillfully and humorously walked us through the basic contours of the biblical narrative—creation, fall, redemption—climaxing, of course, with the resurrection and the hope of new creation. One of the ideas that stood out to me during the dialogue in an early scene which depicted God deliberating with one of his angels about what and how to create, was that in creating human beings, God took a risk. Read more
Apr 22
An interesting quote for Good Friday, from William Willimon’s Why Jesus?:
[T]he cross is not what God demands of Jesus for our sin but rather what Jesus got for bringing the love of God so close to sinners like us. This is all validated by God raising this crucified victim from the dead, not by dramatically rescuing Jesus’ failed messianic project, nor certifying that Jesus had, at last, paid the divine price for our sin. Rather, it showed the world who God really is and how God gets what God wants.
Apr 19
This morning I came across an interesting lecture over at TED Talks by journalist, author, and “wrongologist” (apparently there is such a thing!) Kathryn Schulz called “On Being Wrong.” If you’ve got 18 minutes to spare, it’s well worth checking out. Read more
One of the benefits of having a blog is that, aside from feeding your ego through the ordinary rhythm of writing about whatever you want whenever you want and plastering it all over the internet, you can use it to draw attention to yourself at any and every other convenient opportunity as well :). Like, say, when an article of yours is published. Read more
Every Wednesday in my neck of the woods, a handful of guys get together to talk and pray about God, life, work, marriage, and whatever else happens to come up before breakfast. One member of our group is a lawyer, and today we got on to the topic of justice and the irregular and inconsistent nature of its application in the Canadian system. To cite just one example (among a handful we talked about), there were back to back court cases where hunting an animal out of season resulted in a (much) more severe punishment than a clear cut case of spousal abuse. Amazing. Read more
I couldn’t help but grimace as I read the headline from Douglas Todd’s recent article in the Vancouver Sun (“Evangelicals Mostly Alone in Believing God Punishes with Earthquakes“). It highlighted, once again, the lengths we will go to to find (or manufacture) moral meaning in times of chaos and suffering. Combined with news of some painful things happening in the lives of various people in the various domains of my life and work, I have been thinking a lot about the silence of God these days, and how we are to live and think and speak about God as people of faith in a broken world. Read more
Mar 16
In light of what’s going on in Japan, the theological controversies dominating the headlines these days can seem fairly trivial (to put it mildly), but I did want to post an intriguing quote from William Willimon’s Why Jesus? I’m not terribly interested in the question of whether or not Rob Bell believes in a hot (or long) enough hell to satisfy the demands of this or that understanding of orthodoxy, but I am, and have always been, very interested in (and dependent upon) the “relentless divine reach” of Jesus: Read more
Mar 13
Each week at our Sunday services, before the children are dismissed, we take time to recite the Lord’s Prayer together. As with anything that is done repeatedly over long periods of time, if we are inattentive it can come to seem mechanical and tedious. Rather than being a vehicle for shaping and inspring us as Christ’s followers, it can come to seem like little more than part of the furniture. Frederick Buechner reminds us why we ought not to allow this to happen: Read more
Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent, the day when ashes are placed on foreheads, and the words “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” are proclaimed. For whatever reason, throughout my life, I have rarely needed this reminder. Read more
Mar 5
Around here, the first Sunday of each month is when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. As is always the case, tomorrow’s service will take place in the context of real lives affected by loss, uncertainty, pain, and misfortune. But we will be reminded again tomorrow that the brokenness of our lives and our world is never the whole story. In my preparatory reading this week, I came across this passage from Gordon Smith’s A Holy Meal that reminds us that in the midst, the Eucharist establishes us as people of joy: Read more
Today was an odd day in the blogosphere. It seemed like every third post that came through the reader had something to say, or linked to someone else who had something to say, about Rob Bell’s forthcoming book Love Wins, and whether or not Bell has placed himself beyond the pale by declaring himself to be a universalist (you can start here, if you like, and follow the link trails). Like nearly everyone else offering commentary on this book, I have not read it. The main reason for this is because the book hasn’t been released yet, which makes the hysteria around what it might say even more grimly amusing. It’s interesting to observe how threatening some people find even the possibility that Bell might not believe in a very specific conception of hell. Read more
Feb 25
Two of my projects this week have been working on an article on suffering and the sovereignty of God, and preparing a class for this Sunday on the varieties of approaches to the problem of evil. Consequently, I’ve been raiding the bookshelf over the last few weeks in order to reacquaint myself with some of the authors and ideas that I leaned on more heavily during my university and grad school days. Read more
Four years ago, as I was nearing the completion of my coursework at Regent College, I somewhat naively signed up for a seminar on the life and thought of German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. My only exposure to him to that point had been his famous book The Cost of Discipleship (a book whose title in German, I would soon discover was simply Nachfolge, or Discipleship. The change has been made in Augsburg Fortress’s republishing of the definitive collection of Bonhoeffer’s works). I had read this book in my early twenties, but my recollection of its themes was unimpressive, to put it mildly. Read more
Jan 23
Our text for the sermon in church this morning was Luke 12:13-21 (“The Parable of the Rich Fool”). One of the verses in this passage has me thinking this evening. In verse 21, after condemning as folly a life of hoarding possessions, Jesus offers a typically elusive phrase: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” So what does it mean to be “rich toward God?” Read more
Jan 18
I am in the midst of a fairly busy stretch of sermon preparation, worship scheduling, article writing, class planning, etc, etc, not to mention the ordinary demands of life with a young family, so apologies for the lack of substantive and/or original posting around here over the last little while. I hope to rectify this deficiency shortly, but in the meantime, here’s another arresting quote from William Willimon’s Why Jesus?: Read more
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