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Rather, I slowly learned by his example that to be a Christian meant that you could never protect yourself from the truth.
We cannot try to be meek or gentle in order to become a disciple of this gentle Jesus, but in learning to be his disciple some of us will discover that we have been gentled.
MY FATHER’S GREAT GIFT TO ME, MY MOTHER’S GREAT GIFT TO ME, A GIFT I did not recognize until later, was their willingness to let me go on.
I am not sure what I would have done at Augustana if I had ceased to believe in God, but increasingly I have come to believe that “believing in God” is not a description that helps us know much about what it means to be Christian.
I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth.
To learn to see the world and ourselves through the eyes of the gospel makes the world profoundly comic. Put differently, if you are a Christian, you have nothing to lose, so you might as well tell the truth. Such a truth often surprises and delights us.
Fearing immodesty, I hesitate to make such a claim. But then I have never trusted modesty because I suspect that the attempt to be modest is betrayed by the very fact that it must be attempted.
I discovered that I had to write to explore this set of convictions. I continue to do so. My writing is exploratory because I have no idea what I believe until I force myself to say it. For me, writing turns out to be my way of believing.
There is no denying my ambiguous ecclesial identity, but I cannot help but believe that there is a profound unity between those Catholics at Notre Dame and that modest group of people gathered at Broadway United Methodist Church on Easter morning. Without those communities, Adam and I would not have survived.
When you live with someone who is seriously mentally ill, you cannot live without hope, but you certainly need to learn to live without expectations.
The kingdom is not immaterial, but is more like reality than reality is.”
That something had to start it all is not what Christians mean by creation. Creation is not “back there,” though there is a “back there” character to creation. Rather, creation names God’s continuing action, God’s unrelenting desire for us to want to be loved by that love manifest in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.
Through worship, the world learns the truth that is required for our being truthful about ourselves and one another.
I have come to think that the challenge confronting Christians is not that we do not believe what we say, though that can be a problem, but that what we say we believe does not seem to make any difference for either the church or the world.
knowledge of God and what it means to be human are inseparable.
But the way she died served only to make me acutely aware of how lonely her life had been. That her loneliness was self-imposed does not make it any less sad. What possibly can be said about a life so lived? I am a Christian theologian. People assume I am supposed to be able to answer that question. I have no idea how to answer that question. If anything, what I have learned over the years as a Christian theologian is that none of us should try to answer such questions. Our humanity demands that we ask them, but if we are wise we should then remain silent.
Not all Christians need to read the work of theologians, but some Christians outside the academy do need to be able to do so. And I write for those Christians as much as I do for other academics.
no one assumes that Australian society depends on some generalized religiosity. Accordingly, Christians in Australia are not burdened with the notion that the future of Australia depends on them.
Whatever it means to be a Christian, it at least involves the discovery of friends you did not know you had.
Dennis’s “vision” for the school, as far as I could tell, assumed that the church’s primary role, a role enshrined in the Methodism of the 1950s, was to support those who think they run the world. In contrast, I wanted a church capable of reminding those who think they rule the world that they are in the grip of a deep delusion.
WRITING IS HARD AND DIFFICULT WORK BECAUSE TO WRITE IS TO THINK. I DO not have an idea and then find a way to express it. The expression is the idea. So I write because writing is the only way I know how to think. I write, moreover, because I have something to say. That I have something to say is not a personal achievement. I have something to say because I am a Christian. I also have readers who are obligated to care about what I write. They are called Christians. What an extraordinary gift. Audience makes all the difference. I am an academic, but I do not have to write only for other
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In fact, faith is nothing more than the words we use to speak of God. And yet the God to whom and about whom we speak defies the words we use. Such defiance seems odd, because the God about whom we speak is, we believe, found decisively in Jesus of Nazareth, the very Word of God. Still, it seems that the nearer God draws to us, the more we discover that we know not what we say when we say “God.” I suspect that this is why one of the most difficult challenges of prayer is learning how to address God.
A social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid the creation of a people whose souls are superficial and whose daily life is captured by sentimentalities.
For me, however, ethics is but a name for exposing the practical character of theological speech.
The challenge I have mounted against the accommodation of the church to the ethos of modernity is my attempt to help us recover our ability to pray to God, and to imagine what it might mean to be Christian in a world we do not control.
I am an academic, but I pray before class and have been published by InterVarsity Press. That is a lot to overcome if you want academic respectability.
to conserve economic liberalism is antithetical to the formation of communities capable of caring for one another in the name of the common good.
To find alternatives to war will take time. The effort to abolish war presumes that we have all the time we need to persuade others that war can be abolished. War is impatience. Christians believe that through cross and resurrection we have been given the time to be patient in a world of impatience.
Humility is a virtue that rides on the back of a life made possible by having been given good work to do.
