Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko, Dean Emeritus of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and who currently serves as priest to the nuns at the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, PA, gave a talk for the Orthodox Christian Fellowship at the University at Buffalo at the beginning of this past Lent discussing how we can come to know God. In it, Fr Hopko highlights a few prominent points in the Eastern Christian ascetic practice and theological method. In the West, especially with the rise of Scholasticism, theological method and prolegomena became bogged down in the study of philosophy, history, languages, etc, so that one could either produce logically deduced statements about God or exegete, by means of various historical-grammatical methods, the Holy Scriptures. ... more

Is it really worth it? I have been asking this question for a while now, mostly subconsciosly until the past few days.. I cannot really ask it for my own sake, because I have had a pretty easy life thus far - I have not sacrificed too much. But I have seen others suffer...and I'm not sure I can tell them "It is worth it."

I do not have an answer for the above question, but yesterday it was pointed out to me that I am asking the wrong question anyway. Here is the right question: Is He worthy?

This is the first post in the “Text(s) of Scripture” series in conjunction with Dave at Through A Glass Darkly.

Our first text is Hebrews 4:12:  “For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

Reflections

Dave: What does it mean for a text to be “living and active?” I’m reminded of current debates in the United States about whether our Constitution is a “living” document. There is lots of unfortunate political baggage around this concept, but it seems obvious to me that the Constitution is a living document, whatever approach one takes to its interpretation. The Constitution must continually be applied to circumstances the framers never could have anticipated, such as the scope of free speech rights on the Internet. And the Constitution continually judges our polity and praxis, forcing us to consider again and again whether “we the people” are living up to our formative ideals. There is a hermeneutical spiral in the interpretation and application of the Constitution, as we move from the original context to the contemporary challenges and back again.

The Bible is a sort of constitution for the Church, and it is “living and active” in a manner similar to the U.S. Constitution. The community governed by the Biblical constitution – the Church – must continually apply the principles reflected in the text to new circumstances the human writers could never have imagined. How do we respond to ethical challenges posed by new technologies, such as in vitro fertilization? What kind of community should we become in a global village networked on a scale inconceivable in the first century? And the Biblical constitution continually judges the polity and praxis of the Church, cutting through our cultural baggage and hypocrisy and asking whether we truly are loving God and neighbor fully.

Yet the Bible is “living and active” in ways that cannot be claimed for a legal text like the Constitution because this “word” is uniquely “of God.” The God who speaks this “word” is the triune God, who became incarnate in the Son and who speaks in and to the Church in the Spirit. The “text” of the “logos ton Theou” is not merely a set of signs that signify discrete legal-regulative principles in the manner of a Constitution. It is rather the signification of the presence of the triune God who continually transforms the community of faith.

... more

David Opderbeck of Through A Glass Darkly and I have run out of steam on the “postmodern apologetics” series, so we’re starting a new one on “Reading the Text(s) of Scripture.” David and I both were educated in (me: Philadelphia Biblical University; he: Gordon College), and worship and fellowship in, the evangelical world, so we’re both aware of the hornet’s nest any discussion of the doctrine of scripture can stir up. We’re hoping, though, that this will not be taken as another set of broadsides in the “battle for the Bible,” or as picking fights, but rather that it will represent the reflections of two textual scholars from outside the theological guild (he: literature and literary theory; me: case law, statutes and constitutions), with a missional sensibility, on the nature of the Biblical texts.

We’ll approach this as follows: we’ll first offer a quote from a systematic theology text / book / article on the doctrine of scripture and/or Biblical hermeneutics, or a passage directly from scripture about scripture, and then we’ll offer our personal reflections on the quote.

David has come up with a mediating tone for our series: we are both very imperfect, but serious, Christians, and so we both take the Bible to be “scripture.” Whatever precise statements, definitions, qualifications, and such we each might feel comfortable with concerning the doctrine of scripture and hermeneutics, at the end of the day we both seek to submit to and be transformed by God as He speaks through scripture. If there are any elements of “deconstruction” of any of the definitions we discuss — and we're not prejudging that there necessarily will be — that is only for the purpose, we hope, of understanding more fully, expressing more articulately, and representing more faithfully and truthfully the power and majesty of the scriptures. ... more

You voice the world into being,
You voice the church into obedience,
You voice us now, and then into newness,
You speak and call into existence that which does not exist.
- Walter Bruggemann, from "Reading Psalm 1"

Sufjan Stevens wrote this great song called "All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!", and I think the title applies to how people need to begin to view Brian McLaren.  They have spoken up, raised objections, and unfortunately spread gossip, lies, and exaggerations as well. 

Realizing this (perhaps a bit too late, perhaps just in time), Mr. McLaren has served up a whole bunch of answers to FAQs (part 1 and part 2) he gets, most of which deal with aspects of his thinking that are often deemed heretical.

Now is your time, good naysayers, to speak up, read the answers, and, hopefully, forever hold your peace, content that McLaren is not leading the next generation of Evangelical Christians straight to hell (but I thought McLaren didn't believe in hell...) ... more

Christianity Today published short essays by two moderate voices in the Complementarian vs. Egalitarian debate called Wounds of a Friend: Complementarian and Wounds of a Friend: Egalitarian respectively.

John Koessler and Sarah Sumner do a good job of each pointing out the pitfalls of each view and how some problems can be remedied.

If someone forced me to be pick a side I would choose Egalitarian, but for the life of me I have been seeking a third way out of this mess.  I think the problem lays not in Male/Female but in the immense discrepancies between titled roles within the early church and what they are called today.  Bishop, Deacon, Elder, and Pastor are all viewed differently by different denominations and mean different things than they did two thousand years ago.  This makes the problem very complex. ... more

I thought this was some kind of joke to sucker all the gullible N.T. Wright devotees into a sugar rush of enthusiasm, but indeed, it is true!  Lord Have Mercy on us all!!!

It is confirmed via Mike Morrell and the Emergent Village website that N.T. Wright will be on The Colbert Report today
Thursday 6/19, at 11:30 p.m. EST / 10:30 p.m. CST. ... more

Christianity Today has a short Q&A with Frank Wolf, who recently helped to form the House of Representatives' Caucus on Religious Minorities in the Middle East.  Christianity is a minority in the Middle East, but that does not mean it is not well represented in the region, especially in major areas of conflict like Iraq and Lebanon.

As Christians, we need to be first concerned about our kingdom, the children of God who form the nation without borders: the kingdom of God.  When people like Wolf voice that there are "currently an estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria and another 600,000 in Jordan, a significant number of whom are Christians—and these figures are probably growing," it makes me wonder why so many Christians don't put the survival of the kingdom first.  As Wolf elaborates, "these refugees don't have food, housing, or health care. They can't work or get an education for their children," which means that the minority of a foothold the kingdom had in the Middle East has been ripped apart socially, educationally, religiously, and demographically by the war in Iraq.  And what's more, this does not include the devastation caused to the Marionite Christian population of Lebanon that is around 30% of the Lebanese citizenry.

Many Christian proponents for the wars in Iraq and Lebanon have been adamant that freedom and democracy are better for the church than persecution.  A case needs to be made that war is far worse for the communities of the Kingdom than persecution is.  One of the oldest sources of edification in the Church is the martyr's tale.  The Church grows by the blood of the martyrs.  When we are persecuted in the darkest of times the kingdom of God shines brighter.  War, on the other hand, is an arbiter of misplacement, pain, and fear.  It is far scarier than persecution, which is specifically directed at a religion, but instead is a persecution of our very humanity itself.  It is a consuming fire that destroys not just culture but the very ground beneath our feet.

We cannot continue to see how the kingdom of God is effected by the atrocities of war and continue to accept it as a trade-off for freedom and democracy.  Freedom only comes from God, and he has seen fit that in the last days freedom be not by democracy but by a King reigning over his kingdom.

May it be so. ... more