The All-Stars Are Coming

To your television tonight, on Fox, at 8:50 EST.  I am obsessive about baseball, and my team the Dodgers.  There are three Dodgers in the All-Star Game tonight, Brad Penny (P), Russell Martin (C) and Takashi Saito (P), and I will be rooting for the National League to beat the American League this year.

In the Church, we are all saints per se, but to misquote Orwell ”some are more saints than others,” socially amongst Christians at least.  We all have our favorite saint.

If I had to pick an All-Star Team of saints it would appear like this:

N. T. Wright: to me, he is the one I rely on the most for guidance; he is my favorite of favorites, the type of person that no matter what he writes you feel inclined to read it.

Eugene Peterson: he is that wise old sage out in the woods that always divulges wisdom in the beauty of his words.

Karl Barth: he changed the way I read the whole Bible, especially Genesis.  And he’s Lutheran, which is a plus.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Another Lutheran!  He had more courage in his pinky finger than I’d ever imagine to have.  Watch the documentary if you haven’t yet.

Augustine: He showed me that it is cool (and ancient) to interpret the Bible in a way different than the historical-grammatical hermeneutic.

C.S. Lewis: His fiction is theology, and encourages me to be intertextual.

J. R. R. Tolkien: I have been accused of talking about Tolkien way too much.  He encouraged me to seek the goodness in Creation and become a sub-creator in the Image of God.

Pseudo-Dionysius: He reminds me in his Mystical Theology to get my head out of books and rise up in spirit and body, bringing adoration to the unknowable and mysterious God we serve.

Wendell Berry: He demands that I build Christ’s kingdom in a radical way, through local community, limited consumption, understanding the environment, and renewing the world as a part of the Body of Christ.

What would your All-Star saints team look like?