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Posts from the ‘Theology’ Category

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

Oct 30

8 Comments

U-Turn

I got a traffic ticket on Sunday.

It was an ugly exclamation point at the end of an exhausting weekend. My wife had been in Calgary for a seminar and I had been going nonstop from about Friday noon until Sunday evening. Volleyball tournaments, swim meets, soccer games, piano recitals, a communion service, church meetings, kids’ social gatherings… It just seemed to go on and on. There was just one thing left to do on a late Sunday afternoon before an enjoyable evening with friends beckoned, and that was to drop my son off so that he could get a ride to soccer practice. We stopped at the place where he was to be picked up.  I then proceeded to make a U-turn to head off for supper. And then, the ominous red and blue lights in my mirror.  Read more

Oct 25

30 Comments

What Kind of God is This?!

Those who know me well will attest to the fact that the question of how we think about the nature of God is important to me. Like, really important. Like, it’s the fundamental reality behind almost every significant theological, anthropological, exegetical, hermeneutical issue we get excited about. Like, it’s implicitly or explicitly operative behind nearly every pressing existential question we spend time agonizing over. Like, it affects how we relate to and understand others (especially those who are different from us!), how we understand and exercise power, how we parent, worship, pray… How we think about who God is, what God is like, and how God relates to human beings matters. A lot.  Read more

Oct 20

10 Comments

Hellbound?

Does hell exist? Who goes there? Is it a literal “lake of fire?” How does what we believe about hell relate to our views about violence? About the nature and interpretation of Scripture? About people of other faiths? What does our view of hell say about our view of God? These are among the questions addressed in Hellbound?, an intriguing and, for some, controversial film that has been making its way around North America this fall. Read more

Oct 11

“God Has Bound Himself To Us”

One of the interesting things about participation in the wild world of social media and online interaction is the many and varied mediums through which feedback and conversation can take place. Blogs are synced with Facebook and Twitter and who knows what else, and feedback can (and does) arrive from any number of sources.

I believe the correct term  for this—the usage of which would undoubtedly make me sound far smarter and more technologically savvy than I really am—is “multi-platform engagement.” I am only scratching the surface on these matters, having recently linked my blog to Facebook (and having thus far resisted the madness of Twitter), but it’s been very interesting to interact with the same content in multiple contexts. “Likes” and comments and “re-posts” and “pins” and “tweets” and “re-tweets” “+1’s” and before you know it my head is spinning. I remember the good old days back in 2007 when all I had to remember to check was if there were any comments on my blog. Read more

Oct 10

1 Comment

Why (Not) Me?

As I mentioned in the previous post, our church is spending the month of October in the book of Job, looking at themes of suffering, lament, protest, repentance, and the motivations for faith. As it happens, Job was the subject of conversation on the most recent edition of “Tapestry,” the weekly spirituality program on CBC Radio. More particularly, the theme of the program was “coping” and explored the question: “How do we cope with the suffering that inevitably comes our way?” A number of appropriately diverse perspectives were explored (this is Canada, after all!), each of which contributed to what was a fascinating program. Read more

Oct 4

8 Comments

The Formula of Faith

I’ve been thinking a lot about carrots, sticks, and formulaic faith over the last little while. I spent a good chunk of last week wrestling with the well-known (and often abused) “pray and you will be healed” passage from James. Among the questions I explored were, Is there a one to one correspondence between (the correct kind of) prayer and the experience of healing/blessing? Is faith a kind of formula where the input of x leads to the output of y? And, of course, lurking behind these questions are even bigger ones: What is the motivation for our faith? Do we follow Jesus because of what we can get out of the deal? Is our faith contingent upon the experience of blessing/goodness? Read more

Sep 26

15 Comments

Indicting the Cross

Last night was spent at a local theology reading group hosted by a philosophy professor from the university in town. It’s an eclectic mix—a few professors, a chaplain (who was gracious enough to invite me!), history and philosophy students, Mormons, atheists, agnostics, and a handful of other positions on the way to or from faith, no doubt. The discussion was freewheeling, lively, and very stimulating. I spend a lot of time in “churchy” circles where I am supposed to be some kind of “authority” or, ahem, “expert.” It was nice to take that hat off for an evening and just explore some interesting questions with others. Read more

Sep 12

19 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany: The Freedom, Scope, and Abuses of Religion

A bit of a mixed bag this morning, but here are a few things that have caught my eye over the last few days and have me thinking (and avoiding sermon-writing!) on this crisp September morning. These are mostly unrelated themes, but if pressed for a connection, I suppose I would say that they deal in turn with the nature of religion, the purpose of religion, and the practice of religion. Read more

Jul 11

3 Comments

On Denominations and Open Doors

One of the highlights of our last week and a half or so in Greater Vancouver and Vancouver Island has been the opportunity to reconnect with some of the many good friends we made during our six years out here. Aside from the irritation of fighting a cold almost from the moment our holiday started, it has been a great time filled with great conversations and great people. Read more

Jun 27

14 Comments

The Anabaptist Vision—Synchro Blog

A few weeks ago, someone who has been worshiping at a Mennonite church for nearly a year, and who had no prior exposure to or experience with Mennonites, remarked to me that, while they had deeply appreciated their time with the community, it seemed to them that Mennonites were basically people who did lots of good stuff and liked to do things together.  It is a common enough sentiment.  Many expressions of Anabaptist faith can come to seem like little more than an ethical system designed to produce Christ-like behaviour and character with little, if any attention, paid to the indwelling presence of Christ and the ongoing power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. Read more

May 11

23 Comments

Vengeance is (Not) Mine

We have a tendency to want to create a God in our own image who we can then emulate.

These were the words of Perry Yoder, professor emeritus of the newly renamed Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, at a theological studies conference put on by Mennonite Church Alberta that I have been attending in Calgary over the past few days. We have been talking a lot about how we read the Bible—about the presuppositions that inform our interpretations, about how our various traditions dispose us toward certain possibilities, about what to do about seemingly irreconcilable texts, and myriad other issues around reading and understanding Scripture. Including, as the quote alludes to, the constant temptation to read Scripture with an eye toward the God we expect (or would prefer) to find.  Read more

May 1

5 Comments

Faith Does Not Wait

I haven’t been writing much over the past week or so due mainly to the demands of settling back into “real” life after my trip to Colombia, as well as dealing with a persistent bug that seems to have followed me home from South America.  Even though being sick is no fun, there are blessings here too, for I have had found myself with much more time for reading than normal!  One of the books that I have been reading over the past week or so, as I continue to reflect upon and process what I saw and learned in Colombia, is Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination.  Here’s a quote I am mulling over today as I think about the reality of five million internally displaced people in Colombia: Read more

Apr 8

The New Beginning Has Already Been Made

The resurrection message burst through the frontiers and was universal: Christ has been raised not as an individual but as Israel’s messiah, as the Son of man of the nations, as humanity’s ‘new Adam’, and as “the first-born of all creation”…. The risen Christ pulls Adam with his right hand and Eve with his left, and with them draws the whole of humanity out of he world of death into the transfigured world of eternal life. His new beginning in his end is the beginning of God’s new world in the passing away of this one. Whether this world will come to an end, and whatever that end may be, the Christian hope says: God’s future has already begun. With Christ’s resurrection from the catastrophe of Golgotha the new beginning has already been made, a beginning which will never again pass away.

— Jürgen Moltmann, In the End—the Beginning

Feb 21

4 Comments

The Life and the Light

Two services in the next six days, combined with a quick jaunt to Saskatchewan to see family in between will likely mean a rather light week on this blog. I did, however, want to throw up a quote that I came across a while back that I’ve been thinking about as we head into the season of Lent.

This past Sunday was Transfiguration Sunday where the divinity of Jesus is revealed to a handful of frightened and bewildered disciples on the top of a mountain. During Lent and Holy Week we reflect upon the simultaneously horrific, beautiful, and unexpected manner in which this divinity is expressed. Read more

Feb 15

3 Comments

The Crucial Question

Over at the Mennonite Weekly Review’s “The World Together” blog, writer and activist Bert Newton has written a really thought-provoking piece on “the crucial question” when it comes to religion. So many debates and conversations on the nature of religion and irreligion focus on “belief in God” or its absence. Newton helpfully probes the common assumption that this is the central question, and asks us to ask harder and more honest questions about how and why we invest in the formation and maintenance of the views we hold about the world.

Read more

Jan 27

3 Comments

Doodles

I always enjoy Kim Fabricius’s theological “doodlings” over at Faith and Theology. He’s got a real talent for coming up with short, punchy, provocative statements that are invariably theologically insightful and interesting, and amusing to boot!

Today’s post is well worth a quick visit.  Here are a few of my favourites: Read more

Jan 24

11 Comments

Why Can’t I Find You?

Where are you Jesus?
Why can’t I find you?
have you disapeard?
have you left me hear alone?
 
God wear you?
I cannot see you
are you gone forever?
Why can’t I see you?
Are you still listening to me?

——

The preceding found its way to my inbox courtesy of a young child this week.   Read more

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