I was heartened to day to read the Church of the Nazarene’s statement on Emerging/Emergent churches. This is one of the most balanced responses I have seen, and coming from a somewhat conservative ecclesiastical body I am even more impressed with its balance and winsomeness. The statement acknowledges those among the church’s number who are [...]
This weekend our church was looking at Mark 7. This is a challenging chapter on numerous fronts. It shows Jesus in a controversy over purity rituals in which he argues for upholding God’s law rather than setting it aside in favor of human tradition. And then, in the explanation of purity issues to the crowds [...]
Continuing our review of C. Kavin Rowe’s World Upside Down, we come to the synthetic chapter (chapter 4, where he works through a narrative in tension between the church being a catalyst for instability and its innocence in Roman court) followed by a final chapter that works out the theological implications of the study. Chapter [...]
Last week I read C. Kavin Rowe’s World Upside Down and wanted to say a few things about it here. As I indicated in my brief mention of the book last week, the book is a great “fit” for the Storied Theology theme that I hope somehow will (loosely) hold my blog together. Rowe declares [...]
What does narrative theology look like? What might it look like to take rigorous historical critical scholarship (or believing criticism) and not stop with exegetical details but move into rich theological exposition? It looks like this: I just finished this book a few minutes ago, and the culminating chapter, with its theological reflections, is strewn [...]
Otherness. Distance. Unbridgeable gap. Creator. Humans. Proximity. Creatures. In the world structured by the transhistorical law of the King Who Is Other, we start off in quite a hole with respect to God: all is duty and obligation by the order of creation, and a special act, an added gift is required, if God is [...]
(The following is an encore presentation of a post from the dearly departed Sibboleth blog. The series, posted here this week, will serve as an introduction to the project of this particular blog: what it’s called “Storied Theology” and what it means to speak of a “story-bound God”.) When our idea of the fundamental fabric [...]
