It just registered with me that the shirt I just bought left off the God part. I confess I feel a little disappointed about that.
friend:
I did notice that. And then I noticed that I actually like that. And then I spent some time pondering—feeling some shame for being negatively associated with bad theology/“Christians" and if it was more accessible to people reading it that might discount the text if they knew it was a Bible verse, but might open the door for conversation if they compliment the shirt, and if that was just my excuse/out for being hesitant to wear a “God” shirt these days.
me:
Good thoughts. The Micah 6:8 commands are intrinsically good with or without direct reference to God, so in that sense, it’s still a great shirt. Yet it does seem unnecessarily diffident. I think I’ve noticed a tendency in progressive Christian circles to leave overt God talk to the conservatives. And I think this is counterproductive. It creates a unwanted positive feedback loop: If the only Christians talking openly about Christ, the Bible, and God are racist homophobes and jingoistic conservatives, then the world won’t be able to help but reach the conclusion that Christians are racist homophobes and jingoistic conservatives. And the more the world thinks that, the more progressives will feel embarrassed to talk openly about Christ, the Bible, and God.
It is precisely a re-coupling of God language with virtue and justice language that we ought to be bringing.
friend
So true. And exactly my little introspective mind circular thought process.
Some Christians who take a traditionalist line about same-sex erotic behavior are quick to supply extrabiblical context to their exegesis on other matters in the name of preserving biblical inerrancy (e.g., GotQuestions on the question of eating meat sacrificed to idols) or defending current practices that are prima facie at odds with biblical injunctions (e.g., Ben Witherington on women teaching men). Yet they demur about doing so in the name of extending the right hand of fellowship to actively bisexual, lesbian, and gay Christians, despite a ready supply of much less speculative (albeit not uncontested; see Gagnon, Wright, and Loader) extrabiblical context that may similarly qualify the New Testament clobber texts on the subject.
It never occurred to me how head-turningly paradoxical this command from Galatians is: “Become slaves to one another” (5:13). The very nature of a slave relationship is that the power is unipolar. How can slavery be mutual? (There’s certainly an antisocial, obsessional, probably erotic way of interpreting this that describes a possible meaning, but—hopefully obviously—neither desirably nor plausibly.) Paul here pushes semantic boundaries to rhetorically amplify Great Commandment no. 2. It’s a dangerous amplification: If only some people in a group heed it, then you’ve got a cult. But man, if everybody has bought in and there’s that kind of earned trust in a group, what a great way of thinking about it.
And talk about destabilizing institutional slavery! Masters commanded to be slaves of their slaves! Mm mmm. You probably didn’t hear too many American slaveholders quoting that translation of Galatians. Most translations soften things by saying “serve one another,” which I suppose a slaveholder could say he was doing by providing, say, shelter and food for his slaves. But they probably didn’t quote any translation of Ephesians 5:21 (“Subject yourselves to one another in the fear of Christ”). No idea how they would’ve gotten out of that one. Yes, the next chapter of Ephesians does have instructions for slaves to be obedient to their masters—but then it says, “Masters, do the same things to them” (emphasis mine)!
Just finished reading (in one sitting): Miracles & Marvels: A Life-Long Love Affair with God (2024) by my neighbor Marie Hamilton. A brief, guileless, autobiographical and episodic account of thirty healings, improbable moments, timely pairings of prayer-and-answer, divine taps on the shoulder, audible voices, and assorted other remarkable happenings that have accompanied this creative, compassionate, award-winning salt of the earth do-gooder throughout her life. She and I have never met, but I think I’d like to go walk the quarter-mile over to her house, knock on her door, and tell her thanks.
Charlie, Carla, and I bumped into the sons of Bryant & Lynelle Martin and Hector & Lois Troyer at the sheep farm swimming hole this evening. They were enjoying the diving board they had tapconned into the concrete pylon on the east bank probably sometime in the spring. Charming, conversationally able boys, all seven or so of them.
Charlie and I agreed on our amble down the sheep driveway home that there’s something about their old-fashioned Anabaptist culture that we find appealing. I’d even call it alluring. Alluring in the way I’ve always imagined a fully Christian culture would be: creative, down-to-earth, obviously committed to one another yet very openhearted to outsiders, playful, and dedicated to the common good and to the will of Jesus as if the two are nearly coterminous. I suppose I could write that last part about many Christian groups. But these folks appear to do it with such abundant industry and sense of play that it elicits in me something close to envy.
Just finished reading: Paul and the Power of Grace (2020) by John M. G. Barclay. A 70% reduction for laymen of Barclay’s well-received, paradigm-establishing academic doorstop Paul and the Gift (2015), which through a brief survey of the anthropology of gifts followed by close examinations of Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Romans establishes “grace” (charis) as the linchpin of Paul’s entire theological and ethical program and demarcates what is so amazing about it from what is not, thereby providing important correctives to Wright’s rendition of the New Perspective on Paul and to Paul Within Judaism, establishing a firm theological foundation for building churches/societies on mutuality and without regard to preexisting markers of social capital, and, most excitingly to me, resolving centuries-old Protestant soteriological conundrums.
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” I’ve always taken this to mean something like “regard and act toward those around you as if they and their good are as important to you as you and your good.” We can call that an equivalential reading. It’s probably a valid way to take it. But a passing remark in John Barclay’s Paul and the Power of Grace (that I’m having some difficulty re-finding so as to quote) has me thinking of another subtly but importantly different way of parsing it: “Regard and act toward those around you as if they and their good are you and your good.” We can call this a constitutive or even identificatory reading. I like it.
[edit, 7/8/26] Here’s the Barclay quote:
Love, then, does not mean self-sacrifice in the sense of negating oneself for the sake of others and expecting nothing back. The scriptural citation—“You should love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, cited in Galatians 5:14)—could be understood in a number of ways, but it seems to include, not exclude, the self in the good that one shares with another in love (perhaps: “You should love your neighbor as if he/she were integral to yourself”). In other words, the self is not given away in love, but given into a relationship with others, a relationship in which all parties flourish“.
“Justice is patriotic,” intoned Bonnie Kline Smeltzer from the pulpit at University Baptist and Brethren Church today. I was this close to shouting “Amen!” I totally shoulda.
(It helped that she was wearing a one-of-a-kind, red-white-and-blue Free Subu button she had handmade last week. Appropriation of Old Glory for the sake of something good and having nothing to do with government authority or selling something is something I go in for.)
My basic problem with spontaneity—generating my own and fielding that of others—is one of greed: I learned early on that the only way to get done all the things one wants to get done is to fully regiment one’s time. I got no time for whim!
But I say to myself (as I’ve said before): I need to let go. It’s “do everything in love,” not “do everything you want or feel obligated to do.” The latter is impossible anyway.
May the scales of how I spend the leisure that’ll temporarily open up during Éa’s upcoming absence and then permanently open up in 2028 tip heavily toward doing good over enjoying good—and in forms that are highly altruistic, that make sense only in light of discipleship to Jesus and hope for resurrection, thus putting flesh on those propositions I call Christianity.
Theoretically, it’s not only possible to hold orthodox (or, if you prefer, traditional) theological views in one hand and progressive social and political views (to a point) in the other, but also, in an abstract, platonic, logical sense, more probable than not, all else being equal. That the combination appears rare in my experience of American reality must be the result of something external to The Book: Perhaps my limited vantage. Perhaps alogical sociohistorical pressures.
If the latter, I plead with faithmates: Break free. Think.
Good enough is good enough, I thought to myself about my own understanding of the purposes and mechanisms of the Cross of Christ as I leafed through a copy of Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement and came face to face with the fact that I’ve probably read well under 1% of what thoughtful people have written on the subject. The fact is, I have a working account, and “of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12).
Descriptive doxastic pluralism is enough to get this doxastic monist down. Still, I grant its inevitability and can get by. But normative doxastic pluralism beggars belief and grieves me deeply. It is a capitulation to individualism and an erasure of accountability. There is a Truth. I could be wrong about it, and so could you. But that doesn’t mean It doesn’t exist.
“Simply put, we long for Judgment Day because Judgment Day is good news.”
— Richard Beck, in harmony with the second half of my “I look forward to seeing You” sermon, which is itself a knowing echo of the third chapter of Dale Allison’s winsome, thoughtful Night Comes, entitled “Judgment and Partiality,” where he writes, “We’re not coherent when we applaud justice and jeer judgment.”
Just finished reading: The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011) by James H. Cone.
Dr. Cone makes it hard to deny that (1) many 19th- and 20th-century African-American Christians saw—nay, experienced and made pastoral use of—the remarkable congruencies between the cross of Christ and the lynching tree, and that (2) most white Christians, including our best theologians, were and still are blind to the same.
Until I read this book, I myself was one such white Christian. And upon my being enlightened by Cone’s strong voice and ample evidence, those congruencies tempted me to say that my entire thoughtcastle on the Cross is an abstract sham.
And that makes a world of difference. If you think Jesus was crucified against His will, then the best thing you can say about His crucifixion is that died a martyr for the justice of His own teachings and popularity—which is precisely all that Cone, not to mention most theologically liberal Christians I’ve met, seem to be saying about the Cross per se. In doing so, you brush aside a mountain of scriptural claim that there’s more to it than that and thus evacuate the Cross of much of its salvific power. Evacuate it or perhaps, as Cone hand-wavingly and unhelpfully does, render it “a mystery.” If I have one theological pet peeve, it’s calling answers to theological questions “mysteries” without even trying to see if there’s anything more to be said. (Okay, that’s just one of of my…many theological pet peeves.)
Hence, despite this book’s first-place win in the Catholic Press Association’s Theology category, there’s barely any theology in it. It’s a Religious Studies book rather than a Theology book. And what theology there is in it is no theology of the Cross; instead, it’s a theology 101 of the Resurrection: Since God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead, then God will raise us from the dead, and hence our suffering becomes sufferable.
A sound, welcome, life-changing theological conclusion, to be sure. And as a Religious Studies book, this book was worthwhile: Reading the Jesus- and lynching-related quotations from Hughes, King, Wright, Du Bois, Ellison, Wells, Hamer, and several bluesmen was truly enlightening, and I’m grateful for it.
In progressive and evangelical circles alike, I hear so much emphasis on the disillusionment of the Crucifixion and the joyous surprise of the Resurrection that it’s easy to forget that crucifixion and resurrection were both part of The Plan. Jesus purposely reentered Jerusalem and provoked the authorities knowing it would lead to His trial and execution. He withheld any exercise of power to liberate Himself from that excruciation. And He did this having said repeatedly that He’d come out alive a few days later. We miss some good theology and soteriology if we miss this. Let’s not be like the disciples.
For me, there’s a problem with calling God our “Parent” instead of our “Father.” Besides being distracting, it breaks down the felt relationality of the analogy: No one I know calls either of their parents individually their “parent.” Calling God “Parent” makes Him alien.
You might say that God is alien, and that calling things as they are is good. I grant the point. Yet I say that more than that, calling God “Parent,” before foregrounding any actual theological point, foregrounds the supposed sensitivity of the speaker to other people’s theological hang-ups. That’s its purpose.
And even though it does highlight the theological fact of God’s non-sexed alienness and thus can be said to offer a true good, it does so at the cost of losing the greater good: In so-called progressive churches, it’s more important that we linguistically fortify our relationship with God than that we fortify our understanding of His alienness. I’d rather (and occasionally do) call God “Mother” than “Parent.”
If I am to “follow the impulses of [my] heart and the desires of [my] eyes, yet know that God will bring [me] to judgment for all these things” (Ecclesiastes 11:9), how am I to distinguish the impulses and desires that God will judge favorably from those that He will frown upon? If a way already “seems right to [me]” (Proverbs 14:12/16:25), how am I to determine whether it’s the kind whose “end” is “death”? How am I supposed to tell a righteous “desire of my heart” from an unrighteous “desire of the flesh” or “desire of the eyes”?
One rule of thumb is to ask myself, in keeping with my working definition of love, the following question: “To whose importance am I responding?” If the honest answer is “my own,” then I am loving myself, and unless I am a doormat in need of some assertiveness training (which I myself am most verily not), then there’s my clear signpost: WAY OF DEATH.
Genesis is full of weird relational episodes with sometimes inscrutable morality. But the lesson of Genesis 20, one of several stories in which, as Marilynne Robinson puts it, “the patriarchs act badly and the pagans act well,” is clear: Do not presume the moral fiber of people whose ethnicity—or, more pointedly, whose metaphysics—are different from yours. I feel disappointed to be feeling the need to say this.
Given that “if we ask for anything in agreement with [God’s] will, He listens to us,” and that “if He listens to what we ask, we know that we have received what we asked from him” (1 John 5:14-15), then—from a place of excitement—I’m going to stick to asking Him for what I know is His will and not sweat the rest. Actually, it’s more like going to have a field day asking Him for what I know is His will.
NB: There’s very little that I know to be His will: the growth of the knowledge of Him and the flowering of undisputed goods and virtues, such as wisdom, generosity, and the fruit of the Spirit, are pretty much it. The rest, I might talk with Him about and occasionally make requests about, but I won’t come with an expectation of getting what I want.
A friend of mine at UBBC remarked last Sunday that to figure out Paul’s letter to the Romans, you have to “wade through so much Lutheran bullshit.”
I love that phrase, with all apologies to actual Lutherans, who may or may not hold to the biblical interpretation it denotes. The “bullshit” my friend has in view is the idea that somehow, contra James, faith in God without works is alive or is worth something. This friend tends not to like Paul and sees Romans as Paul thinking out loud and thus confusing things. (My friend is not alone in making a remark along those lines.)
In a bid to both correct my friend and the Lutherans he imagines, allow me to say that Paul is plenty clear about this matter and is never, ever saying that faith without works is alive. On the contrary, behold the reasons he puts forward just in Romans alone that God gives us His grace in the Messiah Jesus:
“…through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles in behalf of His name” (Romans 1:5).
“[G]race abounded all the more, so that…grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (5:20-21).
“We have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).
“We know that our old self was crucified with him, so that the body of sin would be rendered powerless, so that we would no longer be enslaved by sin” (6:6).
“But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life” (Romans 6:22).
“My brothers and sisters, you also were put to death in regard to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God" (Romans 7:4).
“You…have been shown mercy…oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!…therefore…present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God” (Romans 11:30,33; 12:1).
“[N]ot one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living" (14:7-9).
“…according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now has been disclosed, and through the Scriptures of the prophets, in accordance with the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith” (Romans 16:25-26).
And in Paul’s other correspondence:
“For you have been bought for a price: therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:20).
“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin in our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
“[T]he love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that those who live would no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose on their behalf” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).
“…who gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue us from this present evil age” (Galatians 1:4).
“[What] counts [is] faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6).
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8-10).
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and in a godly manner in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, eager for good deeds” (Titus 2:11-14).
What is the relationship that Paul wants us to understand between grace, faith, and good works? The words I bolded above telegraph the answer: We are saved by God’s grace (i.e., gift) through our faith (i.e., through believing Him about His gift or through Jesus’ faithfulness—or both) so that we do good works.
(See also the Paul-adjacent Hebrews 9:14 and 1 Peter 2:21-25, not to mention the liters of ink Paul spills simply telling Jesus-followers how to act and what to do.)
James may have be arguing with Paul’s hearers, including many Lutherans, Calvinists and evangelicals among us today, but he is not arguing with Paul himself. According to Paul, we can be—no, ought to be—both amazed at God’s grace andtherefore diligent to pay God back. God’s grace is freely, undeservedly, surprisingly, extravagantly, and purely benevolently given and it obligates us to grateful good works in response.
In the above, I’m just repeating an important takeaway from John M. G. Barclay’s Paul and the Gift or its lay reduction Paul and the Power of Grace, whose thesis I had Gemini reduce and polemicize as follows:
“Modern Christianity has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of ‘grace’ by projecting a modern, Western, ‘no-strings-attached’ fantasy onto the ancient world. Furthermore, modern scholars have flattened the explosive nature of Paul’s theology. God’s grace is undeniably free, but it is entirely obligatory; it requires a radical return, and its distribution shattered every existing Jewish and Roman system of social worth.”
