A month or so ago, in the comments to a post, I stated that, in my opinion, adherence to the Sermon on the Mount was critical to salvation. This belief of mine smacked so much of "works-based" righteousness that a reader, prayerfully, decided that he would no longer read this blog.

I've been thinking about that exchange ever since. I haven't changed my mind. Far from it. But I've been thinking about how my feelings about the Sermon on the Mount relate to a theology of "justification by faith."

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I re-post this every Advent because it's the best sermon (three points and all!) I ever preached.

Many years ago I was asked to preach on Christmas. The sermon I gave (and captured in these posts) was entitled Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from Watching TV. In the sermon (and the posts) I move through three classic Christmas specials: How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, and A Charlie Brown Christmas. In the sermon I used the TV shows to raise theological questions about the meaning of Christmas. The sermon concludes with the most overt gospel proclamation in prime time TV history when Linus steps out under the spotlight in A Charlie Brown Christmas. This special first aired on December 9, 1965 at 7:30 p.m.. David Michaelis writes about that premiere in his biography of Charles Schulz:

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I hope you are having a restful Thanksgiving weekend.

During this holiday it's hard not to reflect on what you are thankful for. And it puts me in mind about that bit of wisdom I heard when I was a child, to take the time to "count your blessings." In my church growing up we even sang a song about this:

When upon life's billows you are tempest tossed,
When you are discouraged thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.

Count your blessings name them one by one.
Count your blessings see what God hath done.
Count your blessings name them one by one.
Count your many blessings see what God hath done.

This admonition can seem trite and simplistic. Life's pretty hard. Do we really think counting our blessings is going to help?

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I have an article coming out this winter in the Journal of Psychology and Christianity. The paper is entitled Death, Art and the Fall: A Terror Management View of Christian Aesthetic Judgments. My co-authors were Dan McGregor, Brooke Woodrow, Andrea Haugen and Kyna Killion. Dan and I are colleagues at ACU, he in Art and I in Psychology. Brooke, Andrea and Kyna were my Graduate Assistants while we were working on this project. What follows is a bit of that paper edited for this blog:

Visual art has a long and rich tradition within the Christian faith. From the first Christian art in the Roman catacombs to DaVinci’s The Last Supper to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes to the work of contemporary practicing Christian artists, art has profoundly affected Christian worship, personal devotion and the larger Christian culture. And yet, with the rise of Christian retail, many Christian artists are lamenting the quality of the “Christian art” bought and sold in Christian bookstores and retail outlets, artwork that is often used for devotional purposes or to adorn worship spaces. Specifically, many Christian artists see a general decline in Christian aesthetic judgments, as poor or superficial artwork appears to be dominating the Christian visual culture. Take, as an example, the assessment of the poet Steve Turner in his book Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts:

[Aspiring Christian artists] are usually frustrated that there is so little distinctive Christian content in the contemporary arts, but on the other hand, they are embarrassed at the low standards of much of what is promoted as “Christian art.”

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As I find it, religion in America is characteristically atheistic or agnostic. Religion has virtually nothing to do with God and has little to do with the practical lives of men in society. Religion seems, mainly, to have to do with religion. The churches--particularly of Protestantism--in the United States are, to a great extent, preoccupied with religion rather than with the Gospel.

--William Stringfellow, A Private and Public Faith

A few week ago I read Phyllis Trible's book Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. In Texts of Terror Trible reads through four stories of Old Testament women. But rather than picking your classic Sunday School "heroines" of the faith, Trible reads the stories of women who were subject to neglect, abuse, and violence. More, from a literary perspective these women are, as marginal characters, also tossed aside by the Biblical story. So in reading their stories Trible attempts to give these women a voice. The four women are:

Hagar, the concubine of Abraham who, due to Sarah's jealousy, was sent into the desert with her child to die

Tamar, the daughter of David who was raped by her brother

The daughter of Jephthah, who was sacrificed because of an oath made by her father

And an unnamed woman, a concubine who was gang-raped to death and then dismembered by her husband

These are difficult stories. And Trible's book is valuable because it keeps us, as readers, from too quickly sanitizing the Bible.

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H/T Daily Dish

Last week a couple of theology blogs posted and reposted favorite Dorothy Day quotes. Here's the one that captured my attention:

My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.

As I've been living with The Book of Common Prayer I am, of necessity, living with the Psalms. During the Morning Office you read a couple of psalms. When I can, I read these aloud outside on my back porch. With a cup of coffee.

If you asked me to summarize the "message" of the Psalms, what the big recurring themes are, I'd have to say this:

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At church I've been co-teaching a class on 1 Peter. A few weeks ago I had to work through the material in 1 Peter 3 where there are some difficult gender texts. Specifically, in 1 Peter 3 we read that wives are to "submit to your husbands" just like Sarah "obeyed Abraham and called him Lord." More, husbands are asked to be "considerate" of their wives because she is the "weaker partner/vessel."

For many men and women these passages give us the chills. They smack of patriarchy and power. It's hard to see how these passages, if you were evangelizing non-Christan women, could be heard as "good news."

And yet, many Christian conservatives see in these texts a blueprint for "God's plan for marriage." Consider, as an example, the recent New York Times article Housewives of God.

So what is 1 Peter 3 talking about?

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Continuing from my last post on liking and loving...

If you ask Christians to succinctly define God's agape my guess is that the most common definition would be "unconditional love." Consequently, Christians feel called to live out this unconditional love for the world. As the bible says, "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." We didn't have to get it all right before Christ, the Incarnation of God's Love, would embrace us and forgive us. As Jesus prayed on the cross for those who killed him: "Father, forgive them."

In my last post, following the thoughts of James Alison in his book On Being Liked, I suggested that liking, rather than loving, might be the higher calling for Christians. That liking might be a better reflection of agape than loving, as least as "loving" is commonly practiced among Christians. So I called for Christians to start liking the world.

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As I mentioned in my prior post, I'm reading James Alison's book On Being Liked. In the book Alison uses the category of "liking" to discuss our experience with God--being liked by God--and our stance toward others. One of Alison's arguments is that in feeling liked by God we are empowered to like other people. What is interesting in all this is how Alison is using the category 'liking' where most Christians use the word 'loving.' That is, Christians talk a great deal about feeling loved by God. Rarely do they speak of being liked by God. In a similar way, Christians claim to love the world, if only as a goal. But I've never heard a Christian say he was called by God to like people.

Here is Alison on why he thinks liking might be a better starting point than loving:

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I want to thank all of you who have been recommending to me (and to all who read this blog) to read the work of James Alison. You were right. He's an amazing thinker. I've finished Raising Abel and am now in the middle of On Being Liked.

Here's a passage I read this morning about atonement theory from On Being Liked:

My second problem with atonement theory is the perception of God which it enjoins as normative. I mean this in two senses, one obvious, and one less obvious. The obvious sense is that it involves God and his Son in some sort of consensual form of S&M--one needing the abasement of the other in order to be satisfied, and the other loving the cruel will of his father. Or another way of saying the same thing, perhaps slightly less provocatively: there is no way that the theory could work without some element of retribution, which presupposes vengeance. Well, I wonder whether this could be shown, but I suspect that over the long haul this element of necessary retaliation, stubbornly held to by many who profess our faith, has done more to contribute to atheism among ordinary people than any number of clerical scandals, and that if being a believer means believing this, then it is better to be among the non-believers...

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After my Cornerstone class on technology and complicity I followed up with a second class, a conversation relating technology to social activism. Our discussion centered on a recent article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker entitled Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.

In the article Gladwell pushes back on the hype that Web 2.0--mobile social computing such as texting, Facebook and Twitter--will be the next big leap in social activism. With its power to connect like-minded individuals, Web 2.0 has this seemingly unlimited power to increase social and moral awareness and to link up people who want to make a difference in the world.

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I had an interesting conversation last week with my students in my freshman Cornerstone section. In the Spotlight lecture on Monday our speaker talked about the revelations that Chinese workers at the Foxconn factory were committing suicide due to their inhumane working conditions. This is worrisome because the Foxconn factory helps manufacture Apple products like the iPhone, the mobile device ACU gives to every incoming freshman. The speaker noted that by having iPhones we at ACU "have blood on our hands." That is, as consumers of Apple products, we were complicit in the Foxconn suicides.

So I asked, at our next class meeting, what my students thought about this.

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Have you seen the new Window's phone commercial?



I like the commercial right up until the end. I think it nicely illustrates a problem: Distraction with mobile technology at the expense of living.

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One of the things at ACU I look forward to is the Carmichael-Walling lectures in New Testament and Early Christianity. This year Gail R. O'Day delivered lectures entitled Jesus as Friend. The 4:30 lecture I attended was on the topic Jesus as Friend in the Gospel of John.

In the lecture O'Day took as her main text this passage from John 15.12-15:

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

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After a completely depressing post yesterday how about something more cheerful and uplifting?

My friend Bill, in a lecture on campus this week, introduced me to Playing for Change. One of the things Playing for Change does is to travel the world over getting street musicians to listen to recordings of each other and then to add their voice to the song. These voices and instrumentals are then mixed together. The end product is as thrilling as it is diverse. Here's Playing for Change's version of that classic song Stand by Me:

This will be my last "note" on John Dominic Crossan's book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. My observations concern the chapter "The Dogs Beneath the Cross" where Crossan deals with the death and burial of Jesus.

This chapter is, perhaps, the most controversial chapter in the book. But I reacted to the chapter in a way that surprised me.

To cut to the chase, Crossan's argument is that after Jesus' arrest the disciples flee and abandon Jesus. The Synoptic gospels seem to support that claim. The implication of this, for Crossan, is that Jesus' disciples would have lost track of the body of Jesus before, during, and after the crucifixion. This means that the body of Jesus, after his death, was likely handled by the Romans.

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For those of us who believe in universal reconciliation and apocatastasis, today, All Souls Day, just might be our defining holy day. Theologically speaking.

Yesterday, November 1st, was All Saints Day, the day when we remember the "faithful departed" now in heaven. We remember these saints as spiritual examples and as sources of encouragement for our own journey. They are where we want to be. They are who we want to be.

Today, November 2nd, is All Souls Day, a holy day linked with All Saints. Specifically, on All Saints we remember the saints who have attained to the Beatific Vision (what we often call "heaven"). On All Souls we remember the saints who dwell in torment because they have fallen short of attaining the Beatific Vision. These saints are undergoing a time of purification in purgatory. However, prayers and good deeds done in the name of these saints is believed to shorten their time in torment. This is what we do on All Souls, pray for those in torment to hasten their purification. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

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In Parts 1 and 2 of these notes I discussed how Crossan in his book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography sees Jesus subverting social hierarchies. Jesus does this in two different ways. First, Jesus' practice of open commensality welcomes social and moral outcasts into table fellowship. Second, Jesus' healing ministry challenges the cultic system that divides people into "clean" and "unclean." For Crossan, these aspects of Jesus' ministry suggest that Jesus' vision of the Kingdom of God was one of radical egalitarianism, "of an absolute equality of people that denies the validity of any discrimination between them and negates the necessity of any hierarchy among them."

Beyond open commensality and the healing ministry, Crossan also sees evidence for Jesus' vision of radical egalitarianism in the itinerancy of Jesus' ministry, Jesus' refusal to settle down and his wandering from town to town.

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