Bryan M. Christman's Blog, page 2
February 22, 2021
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Poem “Christians and Heathens”
People go to God when they’re in need,
plead for help, pray for blessings and bread,
for rescue from their sickness, guilt, and death.
So do they all. all of them, Christians and heathens.
People go to God when God’s in need,
find God poor, reviled, without shelter or bread,
see God devoured by sin, weakness, and death.
Christians stand by God in God’s own pain.
God goes to all people in their need,
fills body and soul with God’s own bread,
goes for Christians and heathens to Calvary’s death
and forgives them both.
From Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8, Letters and Papers From Prison, pp. 460-61.
This poem by Dietrich Bonhoeffer is perhaps one of the most accurate statements in Christian theology regarding the question of where God is, in relation to human need and suffering. I may try to elaborate more on its meaning in…
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Augustine on finding the highest good
“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”From “Confessions” by Augustine of Hippo, 354-430
February 21, 2021
“The Gospel in the Dock”
Is the Gospel of Jesus Christ Good for the Church, Humanity, and the World?
“The Gospel in the Dock” presents a serious romp through the mysteries of God, life and humanity, as they are disclosed by the gospel of Jesus. The reader begins as a juror in a satirical trial of the gospel, and then travels back in time to observe the perfect storm of Christ’s life and death to discover why Jesus’s gospel and way of faith appear as foolishness to human reason. The reader travels even further back to observe Cain and Jonah as prime exemplars of secular and religious anti-gospel ways that follow the will to power. This adventurous journey through time and place provides a new look at the old gospel, sitting “in the dock” where Adam and Eve first placed it.
But this is no journey through the past for history’s sake. For we also discover how the human community is built either by faith or the will to power, bringing human flourishing or oppression. Finally, an excursion into the perennial nature and mysteries of human existence, in an “Unscientific Exegetical Postscript,” reveals that all people of all time continually wrestle with God and others, power and faith, to obtain the costly blessing of life.
Forthcoming, Fall of 2021, from Resource Publications, Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Bryan M. Christman has been happily married for many years, and is a blessed father of four and grandfather to a growing number of lively grandchildren. He is a life-long landscaper, avid reader, aspiring writer, and with his wife Debbi a lover of God’s creations both old and new. He has undergraduate degrees from Alfred State College and the Northeast Branch of Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary.
