Hearers and Doers of the Word

We have had a variety of experiences in relationship to the Bible that colour how we have come to approach it. Some recall positive experiences of hearing a grace-filled word, others recall negative experiences of being held to account by its . Whatever our past experiences, many of us have been surprised to discover, through various authors or our own reading, that the Bible contains a depth of meaning beyond what we expected. The Word was introduced as an 'incarnate and living word', 'like Christ' in that it actually exists yet points to something transcendent. It is meant to be

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An Unmerited Unity

I began my current exploration of the life and theology of Martin Luther by reading Richard Marius' Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death. I am glad I did. Marius doesn't idealize Luther in the least. His meticulously reed biography raises a raft of doubts about Luther's place in history. Marius interprets Luther more as a schismatic than a reformer. Luther comes off as a character-disordered individual. While creative, brilliant and earnest, Luther nonetheless displayed a boorish and pugnacious attitude toward all who disagreed with him, a fawning dependency on political 'father-substitutes', and a life-long morbid fear of death

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Beloved Community

Tonight we're going to talk about the beloved community and the repeated command that they get to love one another, and how for some reason that gets misunderstood and misinterpreted. He is stressing this one command and in the Brown Retreat (A Retreat with John the Evangelist by Raymond Brown) he says that is the commandment that John stresses. He presupposes that people will have known the sermon of the mount, those biblical and ethical injunctions. But the thing he stresses because they're getting kicked out of the synagogue so they need to have a different sense of kinship, a

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Christianity and Culture

We've been looking at how Christianity is interpreted differently by different groups of people. I find this fascinating because it always seems easy to think that how I define Christianity is simply THE definition that's out there. But there are so many ways. Richard Niebuhr identifies fives ways that Christianity gets expressed in the world: 1) Christ Against Culture - The easiest way to describe this definition is that it's the one that we grew up in. It's the way of the Anabaptists who chose to reject the close relationship that Luther supported between the church and state, and struck

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Defining Christian Spirituality

We're basing our studies on the book Christian Spirituality by Lawrence Cunningham. Our focus is trying to figure out what Christian spirituality means. Spirituality is a phrase that's pretty common these days, as people like to use it instead of religion. Religion feels boxed in or institutional whereas spirituality feels more open and interpretive. But Paul talked about how the way that we enter spirituality needs to engage the tradition that we're part of. Having a general definition of spirituality (such as having a sense of a higher benevolent power) is good in that it allows connection to people of

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Ethics: Duty or Relationships?

Duty has that feel of doing more in terms of law, to perform more and more actions. Those actions seem to be based, if we don't watch it, those actions can be based on rules. You don't not have fornication because you have to obey the rule. You don't do anything because the rule's there. The rule is there because of the love. Not that you have the rule first and then comes the love. I think what is going on is there is a transformation of the human personality that takes place as a result of coming into contact

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Honouring What Once Was

This morning I began reading Berhard Lohse's Martin Luther's Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development. Lohse introduced me to an early version of Luther as a theology student studying a standard medieval curriculum. Peter Lombard's Sentences emphasized Augustine, whom Luther regarded highly, but did so in a very scholastic philosophical manner, with which Luther felt at odds. Luther's assignment as a young student was to write marginal notes on this benchmark text. On the margins of Lombard's book Luther railed against scholasticism, especially that which was influenced by Aristotle. He complained that philosophic theology was not true theology but mere

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Introduction to Origen

Last class we studied Origen, a guy who was dedicated to understanding the Christian message at its depths and contributed the first systemic theology of Christian thought. Origen lived from 185-251 in Alexandria, a city rich in learning. The wealth of his family allowed him to study, and the martyrdom of his father for his Christian faith must have encouraged his own devotion to the message. Up until this time no one had really sat down and made sense of Christian thought so one of the responses to Christianity was a mocking disdain of it as a folk religion. Origen's

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Is Jesus The One?

We began the evening by listening to Luke 3:21 - 4:13, hearing of Jesus' baptism, the temptations and his genealogy. According to Boch, this "… entire unit demonstrates one thing: Jesus is qualified to represent both humanity and the nation of Israel as her Messiah." Eldon led us in a discussion on these sections and also introduced us to some of Luke's methods in crafting the story. John the Baptist prepared the way by saying that only those with a repentant heart were able to receive the message. It wasn't merely for the religious/Pharisees or even just the Israelites: "God

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Jesus' Authority in Luke

Luke 5 begins at the Lake of Gennesaret where Jesus enters a fishing boat from which to better speak to the crowds and a miracle follows. We began our Wednesday night considering the symbolic nature of the lake — an uncontrollable space where in this story human endeavor is tested to reveal that God is in control. We were reminded that still waters run deep, but equally likely is that beneath a calm surface an expansive unknown may be roiling. Simon's boat was on the water, much like we create constructs to keep the depths at bay. But our constructions

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