Anne Rice has been much in the news because of her announcement that she is leaving Christianity. No more church for her, she says. Not that she is abandoning Christ—just the institutional church. “I refuse to be anti-gay,” she says. “I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to […]
In my recent blog posting on the “golf bag” image of atonement theory, I thought I was clearly defending the essential nature of substitution. But several readers somehow took me to be waffling, particularly because I allowed that in some cases we might look for a “hole in one” by presenting the defeating-the-Powers aspect to someone who is caught...
I am no expert on N. T. Wright’s theology, but I know enough to reject those charges of his critics that he is weak on “the substitutionary atonement.” Here is the clincher for me, from one of his meditations in The Crown and the Fire: “Jesus, the innocent one, was drawing on to himself the holy wrath of God...
I resented Billy Berger (I’m changing his name here) for four decades. Sometimes, in the earliest years, the resentment felt like it approached outright despising. At the root of it, though, was envy.
Like me, Billy Berger was a preacher’s kid. In fact, our fathers served as pastors of the same congregation—with Billy’s dad serving first. Billy was the same...
Phyllis and I have been talking lately about what we sometimes hear as a reason why people do not attend church. It’s not that they have no interest in spiritual matters, they say. It’s just that they get their spiritual inspiration by “spending time in nature.” Walking in the woods, listening to birds sing, watching a sunset, reflecting along...
The Muslim scholar and I were sitting at dinner together, and he was telling me about his involvement in a Muslim project devoted to interfaith dialogue. “How about the faith and culture questions?” I asked. “The attempt in places like France to regulate how Muslim women dress in public—is that a big topic for you and your...
BP, as we all know, is in big trouble as the oil continues to spill into the Gulf waters. But recently the company drew additional criticism when its board chair said that his company recognized the woes that this crisis was inflicting on the “small people.”
The angry response to his comment temporarily caught me up...
There have been reports in a couple of different places about a 30-year study of the capacity of empathy in college students. Among other things, the researchers tested the ability to “read” another person’s facial expressions. Comparing the data between 1979 and 2009, the report concludes that there has been a 40 percent decline among folks in...
Shortly after the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity early in the fourth century A.D., he issued the Edict of Milan (in 313), not only legalizing Christianity, but actually making it the official religion of the Roman Empire. This resulted in such a close relationship between church and state—the “Christendom” arrangement—that infant baptism was for all practical purposes...
I’m a year behind in watching Lost. I’m in the middle of last season’s DVDs in my time each morning on the exercise bike. So I did not watch the grand finale. But I’ve heard a lot of talk about it around the Fuller campus. And much of it is theological: purgatory, salvation, good and evil, crucifixes and church...
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