The Word of God always precedes and forms the People of God. This is an engagement (not a sweeping denial) of the claim that the Church came before the Scriptures and produced the Scriptures. That's a claim that can be affirmed but within a well understood framework of meaning. One framework that makes Scripture as … Continue reading The Word Comes First

It was a dark and stormy night. Seriously. A thunderstorm was raging that fateful evening in mid-June 1998. I'd just gotten off the telephone with my best friend, and my eyes were drenching my pillow almost as aggressively as the storm was splattering on my bedroom window. My best friend had just finished telling me … Continue reading My Ordained Obsession

I'm the purified and/or putrefied product of a Protestant potpourri. From the mainline to the sideline to the outsiders trying to break from tradition and back again, I'm originally a Protestant by providential circumstance, and I've grown to be a Protestant by professed conviction. And the confessional contours of my present Protestantism are more akin … Continue reading My Ecclesiastical History

Below is an email conversation between a friend and me discussion Ascending Love and Descending Love from an article by Peter Leithart linked in my first email. This came up in the context of the two of us reading through Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. FROM ME: I think I need to make an effort to rein in a mental … Continue reading Conversation about Eros

The notion of sexually-decoupled or disentangled eros is something I've discussed with friends over the years. This often comes up when I make the distinction between erotic desire and venereal desire. Our hypersexualized culture today generally misnames and conflates these two things. Eros by Orestes-Sobek on Deviant Art Let’s allow the classic mythological imagery to … Continue reading Disentangled Eros

I’ve had conflicted thoughts about Lenten practices and other aspects of the medieval liturgical calendar for years. But I’m pretty sure my reasons are significantly different from those of contemporary evangelicals. My concern is a matter of the effectiveness (or counter-productivity) of communal formative habits and modest implementation of a regulative principle of worship in … Continue reading Lenten Thrift Shop

This is a summary of my interpretation (or adaptation?) of the ritualistic framework for soteriology that I've learned from reading Peter Leithart's materials. I favor it, because I think it does a good job modeling ordinary human social and developmental reality and the perspective from which the biblical authors were writing. This soteriological framework is … Continue reading My Leithartian Framework

Reading the Gospels as one gigantic political tragicomedy (since it is one) … The story opens with a nation having a history of slavery and exile as an occupied land looking for deliverance. An imperial census causes mass displacement. A baby is born to a royal lineage and proclaimed to be king by an entire … Continue reading The Gospels as Political Theater

This is an updated version of a prior post that's been revised to reflect some ideas that came to my attention since the original post and to use the much better title that came to mind after the fact. It's a common pop Evangelical interpretative move to handle the story of Noah and Ham in … Continue reading Saintly Noah vs Deviled Ham

It's a common pop Evangelical interpretative move to handle the story of Noah and Ham in Genesis 9:20-27 as if it's a sobering morality tale about the dangers of alcohol and an illustration of the imperfect characters of even the godly saints in Scripture. But I regard that as a poor and unwarranted reading of … Continue reading Righteous Noah vs Wicked Ham