The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatient violence by cross and resurrection.
I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.
I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth.
In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.
Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the meekness of a cross.
Civil religion is the attempt to empower religion, not for the good of religion, but for the creation of the citizen.
From the perspective of the one committing suicide, his or her act can be one of the most perverse forms of moral manipulation, as it abandons those left behind to their shame, guilt, and grief. Suicide is something like a metaphysical “I gotcha!” It is often an attempt to kill or wound others.
From my perspective, ‘postmodernism’ merely names an interesting set of developments in the social order that is based on the presumption that God does not matter.
We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.
My father was a better bricklayer than I am a theologian. I am still in too much of a hurry. But if the work I have done in theology is of any use, it is because of what I learned on the job, that is, you can lay only one brick at a time.
I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.
Consider the problem of taking showers with Christians. They are, after all, constantly going on about the business of witnessing in the hopes of making converts to their God and church. Would you want to shower with such people? You never know when they might try to baptize you.
To come to terms with our beginning requires a truthful story to acquire the skills to live in gratitude rather than resentment for the gift of life.
A social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid the creation of a people whose souls are superficial and whose daily life is captured by sentimentalities. They will ask questions like “why does a good God let bad things happen to good people ” such people cannot imagine that a people once existed who produced and sang the psalms. If we learn to say “God ” we will do so with the prayer “My God my God why have you forsaken me?
We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.
As long as it is assumed that war is always an available option, we will not be forced to imagine any alternative to war.
As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and and self-expression.
Whatever it means to be a Christian, it at least involves the discovery of friends you did not know you had.
The church does not exist to provide an ethos for democracy or any other form of social organization, but stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.
I do not put much stock in “believing in God.” The grammar of “belief” invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. “Belief” implies propositions about which you get to make up your mind before you know the work they are meant to do.