Resurrection: Beyond Ghosts and Ghouls

MORE THAN A fact or doctrine, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth embodies personal and historical hope. While reading a variety of viewpoints on the resurrection, I have been alternatively confused, comforted, restored and unexpectedly devastated by this theme. Internally and subjectively the resurrection is an encounter with the epicenter of meaning and significance. Without a living encounter and reliance on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, spirituality amounts to little more than armchair speculation. This strikes at the root of my fears because my intellect hesitates to believe that a person whose bodily functions had ceased, whose tether to

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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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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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Journey into Modern Culture: The Spiritual Theology of Richard Niebuhr

I selected Richard Niebuhr as an exemplar and trailblazer into modern culture because he combined the cataphatic (with image) and apophatic (without image) modes of spiritual life and thought. These technical terms from spiritual theology were not used by Niebuhr nor are they normally used by moral theologians, especially those practicing fifty years ago. Nonetheless, applying these terms from spiritual theology may revitalize Niebuhr's thought and position it in the context of spiritual theology.

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Luke and the Plan of God

Luke is a Gospel of Reassurance. It describesthe suffering of discipleship, that Christ is forming us, that we are called to be witnesses of redemption and forgiveness to the world and that we are called to participate, through listening to the Spirit, in the creation of the Kingdom. On Wednesday we began our look at the book of Luke, our focus for 2007. Luke is the best book for learning about discipleship and learning how to live in community. There are a number of different sources that will inform our study including commentaries from Darrell L. Bock (The NIV Application

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