One more Easter sermon: early on the first day of the week

A sermon by Douglas Harink

Text: Matt. 28:1-10; 2 Cor. 5:11-6:2

The arch of the sun’s journey is now noticeably higher and longer. We step into its path and feel its warm renewing power as it passes over. The lawn, only last week heavily burdened with its white winter coat, now wears a lighter green. In that sunny patch of soil on the south side of the house the first shoots of crocuses and daffodils push out from their dark habitation. The robin – even if she is just plain annoying at 4:00 in the morning – joyfully and incessantly announces that she will soon steal four perfect blue ovals from the sky and put them in her nest. A jogger in a tank top and a cyclist in shorts pull on the near fringes of the reluctant season. And all over again we thrill to the very same story: the lamb of spring will slay the lion of winter, and all will be well.

We may be forgiven for thinking that spring is the season of resurrection. Yes, we may be forgiven. But it is forgiveness that we would need. Think for a moment: if you were to travel on this very Easter day to New Zealand perhaps, or the southern tips of Chile or Argentina, another season altogether would be making itself felt, with ever shorter days, and a chill in the air, and leaves falling, and sweaters and jackets being donned rather than doffed. The birds would be flying to warmer climes. The natural rhythm would be tending toward the cold and the dark and the dormant.

Easter is not a season in nature’s cycle. Resurrection is not a stage in the circle of life. The kingdom of God is not a hidden potential in this world. There is no power within us that will bring about the new creation.

In fact, there is nothing natural in any of the events of these days. On Good Friday all of Jesus’ natural human powers – and at the age of about 30 years those would be at their peak – all of his natural human powers are abruptly interrupted, halted, snuffed out: he is arrested, tried, and brutally executed. He is truly dead and buried. On the next day, the Sabbath, Jesus is not resting, as a faithful Jew should. No, he is dead, lifeless, empty – a corpse. His life has come to an end; he has no inner resources of renewal, there is no vital force of nature that can bring him back.

And so Easter is in no sense an awakening; it is not a rejuvenation; it is not a resuscitation, it is not even a miraculous reversal of death. Resurrection is not simply the next thing that Jesus does, or the next thing that happens to him in the natural course of things. No. Resurrection is something else altogether, something wholly other, something from beyond, something purely unnatural. Resurrection is God.

“All of this is from God,” Paul declares in our text. If Good Friday is about Jesus’ life being brutally interrupted, captured and destroyed by the powers of sin and death, Easter is about Jesus’ death being even more brutally interrupted, captured, and destroyed by God. Resurrection is the unimaginable power of God’s very own eternal life coming upon the lifeless, empty body of Jesus. Life swallows death. Think on that image for a moment. God’s life swallows the death of God’s Son, destroying death by consuming it. Easter is about Jesus’ dead body being taken up into the indestructible life of God, and being given back to us as the transfigured body of his living glory. Resurrection is the Father’s eternally living YES spoken over the faithful life and death of his only Son in the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit. Resurrection is Jesus’ death swallowed up in divine victory. Easter is God.

And that is why Paul must speak of a new creation. Jesus Christ lives because God has called forth a new reality from the nothingness of death. The powers of this age cannot bring about a new world. No amount of effort on our part can generate a new humanity. Trying harder, planning strategically, employing best practices, gaining more control, moving the agenda forward, being purpose-driven, taking out the competition, defeating the enemy – those are the ways that we get from here to there, from today to tomorrow, from failure to success, from defeat to victory, in our various worlds of family, work, community and nation. They are driven by the fear that there is never enough life to go around, that it is a scarce commodity, that death finally wins. And so we desire and acquire and hoard and defend the means of life for ourselves: water and land, crops and cattle, gas and oil, gold and uranium, drugs and hospitals, weapons and warships – mine, all mine, because there is never enough of life to go around, and I must survive even if no-one else does. Everyone else is potentially an enemy of my life. Does even God want his share? Forget about it!

But the new creation and the resurrection life of God can never be acquired by winning the competition over the scarce resources of life, nor even more gently, by trying harder, planning strategically, employing best practices, gaining more control, moving the agenda forward, being purpose-driven. There is no way from here to the new creation. There is no way from here to the kingdom of resurrection. The kingdom can only come. The new creation can only be given.

And the kingdom does come from God. The new creation is given by God. It pours forth from God’s own inexhaustible excess of life. While we are trying desperately to grasp after life, as much of it as possible – and don’t let anyone get in my way, or have any of what I’ve got – while we are doing that, God is pouring life out freely upon everyone – no limits, no stinginess.

“All of this is from God,” declares Paul. And it is all from God through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It comes to us from God, only because God has made all of us, the whole of humanity, sharers in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Christ we have already died. When Christ died, we died with him. “One has died for all; therefore all have died,” says Paul.

We have to grant that this is a strange thought. What can it mean? It at least means this: not even death can separate us from Christ. He himself was truly dead, and we ourselves have already truly shared in his death. The death which will still inevitably come upon us has already come upon Jesus – and yet it could not hold him. We have already died with Christ. How can death hold us in fear and bondage, if we have already been to hell and back with Jesus? Death is still real, but it has no real power, no power to bind, no power to destroy finally, and therefore no power to terrify. For Jesus Christ himself, once dead, has been raised up and now lives eternally with the very life of God. Death cannot hold us, not now, not ever. “He died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”

Easter is God’s life poured out on the crucified and buried Jesus; and poured out also on us, because our life, like our death, happens first in Jesus. A whole new human reality comes into being when Jesus is raised from the dead. He himself is the Human One, the very reality of human being fully alive with the life of God, living for God. If you want to know human being in all its truth, look to Christ. He is the new creation. If you want to know your friends or your neighbours or your fellow citizens or your enemies in all their truth, look to Christ. In him they are created anew. “From now on,” Paul declares, “all of the old standards of judgment are gone. If anyone is in Christ the new creation has already dawned; the old no longer has power; the new is all there is.”

Christ alone is the measure not only of what we see, but also of how we see. There is no human being who has not already died in Christ; there is no human being who is not already being called to life in Christ. That is how we are to know and live with every person whom we now encounter. We are not in a fierce competition with either friend or enemy for resurrection life as a scarce commodity. Easter inaugurates the economy of God’s life in abundance. Even if I share all that I think I have with another, I have not made a dent in the supply. The root of reconciliation with God, and reconciliation with my neighbour, is sunk deep in the inexhaustible soil of resurrection life.

Easter calls us to life, to be alive in that very power of divine life which raised Jesus from the dead. In him we live; for him we live; to him we live. Do I need to spell out in detail what that life looks like? I don’t think so. Would it not look like life lived according to the vision of the Sermon on the Mount, as Jesus tells us? Would it not look like life bearing the fruits of the Spirit, as Paul tells us? Would it not look like the life of holy love and practical care that we read about in the letters of John and James? Would it not look like a life of patient suffering in the face of persecution of which Peter writes? But before all, and above all, and in all, would it not look like the very life which Jesus Christ himself lived from the day of his baptism to the day of his crucifixion? He is the way, the truth and life; and this is the life given for us and to us; this is the life we are called into; this is life beyond the reach of death.

Each of the four gospels records that the risen Jesus appeared at dawn, early on the first day of the week. I believe that is much more than a note about the calendar. In those three days of Easter – the sixth day of the week, Good Friday; the seventh or Sabbath day, Holy Saturday; and the first day of the week, Resurrection Day – in those three days we find ourselves on the very hinge of creation, time and history. In the first creation, on the first day of the week the light shines in the darkness and the story of creation moves out from there. The whole week of creation finds its culmination in the seventh day, in the Sabbath of God’s delight. But through human sin and cosmic catastrophe that first creation is now in bondage to decay and death. The cross of Christ now stands as the emblem of the whole week of creation in bondage. The Sabbath is no longer the emblem of divine rest and delight, but of the deathly silence of the Word made flesh, who takes his place among the dead.

Will God abandon his Holy One to the grave, and in him all the work of his hands from the very beginning until now?

No! “Early on the first day of the week,” God renders judgment. This one who was crucified shall live with the very life of God. All of creation in its bondage to death, and all of humanity in its bondage to sin, shall be gathered up into this one human body. Nothing shall be left behind. All things, contracted to this span, shall in him now explode with the light and life of God himself. Early on the first day of the week, this day, the day of resurrection – early on the first day of the week, creation begins again, humanity begins again, life begins again. “All this is from God.” We do not live toward this day, as we once lived toward the Sabbath. We live from this day. Or rather, we live in this day. “Look,” says Paul, “now is the acceptable time; look, now is the day of salvation!”

Early on the first day of the week, the day of resurrection, the day of new creation, the day of the LORD – that’s today! Live in it.

The trial of Jesus: a Maundy Thursday sermon

A sermon by Douglas Harink

Text: John 18-19

In the real world, in the big scheme of scheme of things, what did Jesus achieve, really? Think about it.

If we scan over Jesus’ life and deeds from the time of his baptism to the day of his crucifixion what real change in history did he bring about. The people he healed from diseases sooner or later became ill or old, and died. Even Lazarus whom he raised from the dead was at some later time dead and buried again, and his decaying body began to stink again. Those crowds to whom Jesus gave bread and fish to eat – what good was it to them? They became hungry again the very next day. The huxters and profiteers which he drove out of the temple one day – they just returned the next day to continue exploiting the poor. Where is the new economic order? Those who were rulers in Jerusalem and those who were rulers in Rome were not shaken from their seats of power. The systems they put in place and promoted and protected remained unchanged, despite his criticism of them. Where is the new world order of justice and peace for all?

There was in fact a moment when Jesus could have made a “real” difference, a brief moment when history was on his side, or he was on the side of history, and maybe everything might have been different. One day he rode into the royal city of Jerusalem, the city of the great king, and was royally hailed and hosannahed by the crowds as the one who would change everything, at least for the Jews who suffered under the Romans, but maybe for the whole world too. The power to overthrow the oppressor was at that moment his. The power to deliver his people from bondage was at that moment his. The power to bring about a just social and economic order was at that moment his. History was his for the making. He needed only to take control of its reins, to steer it to the glorious goal for which his people yearned – for which he himself yearned.

But he didn’t. Not even close! No sooner was Jesus crowned the Coming Great Messiah by a massive democratic upsurge, than he began to do everything he should not have done if he truly was the Coming One. He seems to have set himself up for the violent opposition; he seems to have just handed himself over to the powers; he seems to have simply given up control to those who really should not have it at all – because look, after all, at the destructive and oppressive mess they have made of it.

And so, Jesus is arrested, and put on trial – and who knows the end that all of that will come to? Well… we do, don’t we. And so, in the real world, in the big scheme of things, in terms of bringing about health and welfare and justice and peace for all, Jesus’ mediocre messianic mission comes a miserable end. What, really, did he achieve anyway?

But wait a minute! Why does Jesus step forward without hesitation when the police and soldiers come to ask for him and arrest him, and boldly declare, “I am he”? Why do the armed men fall to the ground, and not he? And why does he stand without fear before the high priest and hide nothing of what he has been up to from him? Why does he not flinch when one of the officers of the peace strikes him hard on the face? And the crown of thorns and the purple robe and the wooden sceptre that the soldiers dress Jesus up in – why is that he in fact looks strangely and truly royal in them? And why is it so obvious that the joke is really on the mocking soldiers, and not on him?

And why does Jesus face the governing authority as an equal, or more than an equal, and put the governor’s questions right back to him? Why does Jesus claim to possess an authority and sovereignty and government in himself which the real-world governor seems to know nothing about – an authority which is not established and maintained by swords and guns and tanks and bombs? After all, doesn’t this governor, this Pilate, represent the only power and sovereignty that matters in the real world of economics and politics and law, the supreme power to control history and its outcomes, the power to decide who gets bread and who doesn’t, the power to bind and free, the power to determine who lives and who dies. Pilate himself declares to Jesus, “Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?”

Why is it that Jesus utters no demand for justice, no plea that his cause be heard, no call for witnesses to testify on his behalf? And why does he so not look or act like a victim? Who is this man – in reality? Everything is not as it seems.

Wait a minute! What if nothing is as it seems?

What if health is not finally about a balanced diet and lots of exercise, one bowel movement per day, and a regular visit to the doctor? What if it looks like sickness?

And what if life is not finally about getting a few more pain-free years added to my short time, whether through a good drug plan, or a medical miracle, or even a temporary resurrection by Jesus himself? What if it looks like death?

And what if truth is not finally about facts and claims and arguments and justifications and trumping and winning? What if it looks like silence?

And what if justice is not finally about making sure everyone gets an equal share of the goods, even though there’s barely enough to go around, and no-one comes out ahead? What if it looks like giving away everything I have?

And what if making history is not the ability to bring about the great and glorious kingdom of justice, liberty and peace for all, even if it requires that, through my power, one, or a few, or even very many have to sacrifice themselves or be sacrificed to get to that goal, which we all desire? What if making history looks like stripping to the waist, kneeling down, and scraping sod and mud and blood from someone’s feet?

And what if power is not the right to determine who eats and who doesn’t, who stays in prison and who goes free, who is executed and who gets to live? What if power looks like mercy all the way down?

Wait a minute! What if nothing is as it seems? The so-called “real world” is starting to spin. Am I crazy? Is there something I don’t know? Is the Real World anything but what I thought it was?

What if nothing is as it seems? What if Jesus is not on trial at all? What if those crying out “Crucify him!” are the ones on trial? What if those who are hitting him, and flogging him, and mocking him, and driving in the nails are the ones on trial? What if the high priest of the Jews is on trial? What if the Roman governor is on trial? What if I am on trial? What if you are on trial?

Wait a minute! What if … What if the Real is that bloody, suffocating body of human flesh now hanging there, nailed to a cross? What if the Real is that water and that blood spilling out there from his wounded side, being soaked up by the ground?

OH MY GOD!

God's politics? A response to Jim Wallis (Part Two)

A guest-series by Douglas Harink

Part 2: Whither “God’s Politics”?

As I noted in the last post, in Wallis’s vision the churches do have an important role to play, a contribution to make, an influence to have among the people of God known as America: “The politics of God is often not the same as the politics of the people of God [i.e., America]. The real question is not whether religious faith should influence a society and its politics, but how” (p. 56). “Our religious congregations are not meant to be social organizations that merely reflect the wider culture’s values, but dynamic countercultural communities whose purpose it is to reshape both lives and societies” (p. 7, emphasis added).

As those statements reveal, one of the most remarkable characteristics of Wallis’s vision, obvious on nearly every page, is the thoroughly instrumentalized understanding of religion. God, church, faith, and prophetic religion are all parts of the greater whole which is America, completely absorbed into the discourse of American politics, taken up for use in the cause of the American nation – of a just, compassionate and democratic American nation to be sure, but it is the nation that religious discourse is made to serve as its proper end.

Not only that, but religious discourse must be policed by the discourse of national social and political life. Wallis writes: “We bring faith into the public square when our moral convictions demand it. But to influence a democratic society, you must win the public debate about why the policies you advocate are better for the common good. That’s the democratic discipline religion has to be under [my emphasis] when it brings its faith to the public square… Religious people shouldn’t be told just to be quiet, they should be invited to participate as citizens… [in] the democratic discourse on the most important values and directions that will shape our society” (p. 71).

It becomes clear here and throughout the book that the proposals Wallis makes under the guise of “God’s politics” are in fact all proposals from within the system, for the system, and by the system of a so called democratic society. All discourse about God, faith, and the church is so thoroughly co-opted into the project of making America a better nation, that it is never allowed to fundamentally disrupt the solipsistic discourse of the American social and political project. In other words, there is something fundamentally idolatrous about Wallis’s theological discourse; it is certainly no less idolatrous than the discourse of the Religious Right which Wallis is very good at exposing. Unless Christian discourse about God, faith and the church is allowed in the first place to be absolutely free of its usefulness for Americanism, it will always be idolatrous.

The good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that it is God’s radical and decisive invasion of our humanly constructed worlds, and God’s deliverance from and destruction of the powers that hold us in bondage. The American nation, or the Canadian nation, or any other nation for that matter, is a humanly constructed world; it is a power that enslaves human beings and makes us serve its ends. Every nation is in the first place an idolatrous regime to which God comes in the Gospel to set his people free. Before the church and its discourse can be of any use to American people, it must learn that it does not exist in the first place as America, or to be of use to America, but it exists as the church, constituted in its worship and service of the one true God.

In other words, whether America as such stands or falls – and it will surely one day fall – should not be a matter of primary interest to the churches in America. Indeed, paraphrasing 1 Thess. 1:9-10, the church in America must learn to “turn from the idol America, to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven whom he raised from the dead, that is, Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.” The problem with the church in North America is not primarily that it has been co-opted by the Right or Left. It is that it has failed to be the ekklesia, a people called out by God from the nations, to be a loyal citizenship of the peaceable regime of the one true God, and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I am more likely to agree than disagree with Wallis on his social and political goals, many of which are already realized in Canada in some measure. I also agree when he argues against privatized faith, and therefore I disagree with the consciousness of many Canadian Christians for whom the privacy of religion is a basic creed. But in fact an understanding of faith or religion as in the first instance precisely personal and private is at the very foundation of Wallis’s vision. He does not question that assumption; he argues instead that faith or religion should not stay private. It should always in one way or another, he says, make the transition through “values” into the public and the political realm. In other words “religious” discourse about God, faith and the church is not in itself intrinsically and immediately political; it gets political by going out of itself, as it were, and translating itself into the political discourses and performances which are always already going on “out there” in the places of worldly power.

Here we come to the heart of Wallis’s failure to resist American idolatry. For he fails to see that the eternal life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the God revealed in the Gospel, is the original and true politics. He fails to see that Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, in his life, passion, death on the cross, resurrection and ascension, as narrated in the gospels and in such texts as Phil 2:6-11, is the original and true politics of God on earth, in the flesh, publicly performed for all to see. Wallis fails to see that the chosen people of God, in whom the Spirit works to bring about a faithful political life, is not America but Israel and the church. He fails to see that the first and primary and normative political performance is exclusive worship of the one God revealed in Israel and in Jesus Christ. That is divine politics in the true sense, and one need not and must not go to Ottawa or Washington DC or London to “get political” in the true sense. For, as St Augustine has taught us, in light of the divine politics revealed in the gospel, what goes on as political in those places of worldly power is a parody of politics at best, and a dangerous and deadly illusion at worst.

How then do people get truly political? They believe the Gospel, they are baptized into the body of Christ, they worship the triune God, and they participate in the eucharistic life of the congregation. Only out of this primary and constitutive political performance will the people of God be capable of interrupting, even if only among themselves, the idolatrous and destructive discourses and performances in our nations which go by the name of “politics,” and of speaking the word of truth to the nations for their judgment and healing.

God's politics? A response to Jim Wallis (Part One)

A guest-series by Douglas Harink

Part 1: The Ecclesia Called America

As a Canadian, I have asked myself whether a Canadian Christian would be likely ever to write such a book as this for the Canadian political context. It seems very unlikely indeed, for at least a couple of reasons.

In the first place, the very phrase “God’s politics” would strike many or most Canadians either as ridiculous – because “religion,” which is where God belongs, is its own thing and politics is quite another; or it would strike us as dangerous – because look what happens when people with strong religious convictions make them operative in the realm of politics: you get the likes of Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. Canadians by and large studiously observe the separation of religion and politics. Just ask Canadian politicians, even the conservative ones, who have tried to get votes by playing the God-card. It might win them some votes from a few conservative Christians, but it is more likely to lose them the election.

On the other hand, Jim Wallis shouldn’t worry too much about that for Canada’s sake, because in Canada we have a social and political landscape that is much closer to the vision that Wallis holds dear than in the United States. And we don’t need to have faith, religion or God to get us there. We have no need of that hypothesis. If God and faith are good for American politics, as Wallis is convinced they are, in Canada we know better than that. Maybe a lot of Democrats have a hunch that we are right, in which case, rather than “getting it” from Jim Wallis, they are more likely to tell him to get lost.

Here’s another odd Canadian phenomenon. It seems that many evangelical Christians in Canada are not too worried about the godless politics of our nation. You do not often hear them clamouring for more God-talk from Canadian politicians. What’s wrong with these Canadian evangelical Christians anyway? Are they simply good examples of the privatization of religion that Wallis decries? Well, there may be some truth to that. The idea that religion is a matter of strictly private conviction and practice is deeply ingrained in the Canadian psyche. The very idea that God and politics might be jammed together as in Wallis’s title, makes most Canadians, including evangelicals Christians, nervous. And I want to come back to that point in a minute, because if that is the case, I think it is a problem. But I think there is something else going on here which makes a book like God’s Politics inconceivable in a Canadian context.

Imagine Jim Wallis, as he presents himself in this book, as a Christian preacher, preaching to a congregation, the people of God. Now ask, who is that congregation? It is not in fact a congregation of the sanctorum communio, nor is it a denomination, nor is it even all the Christians in America. The assembly or congregation which Wallis addresses in the book is the American people itself, the nation. That is clear throughout the book. For example, after Sept 11, 2001, he writes, “the future of politics must become a discourse about values, which includes moral and religious ones. We should talk less about the ideological categories of Left and Right, and more about what kind of people we want to be, what kind of community, what kind of world” (p. 68, emphasis added).

Or, consider this example: “Most of the biblical prophets (whom we pass over week after week in our congregations) would offer a quite searing indictment of contemporary American society. Specifically, that we have become a nation of endangered souls and that our society and politics are governed by values quite foreign to the heart of our religious traditions…. How does a nation of endangered souls recover an authentic faith that is true to the gospel, the example of Jesus, the witness of the prophets, and the crushing needs of our time?” (p. 36, emphases added).

The assembly of the people of God whom Wallis addresses here, and whom he assumes the prophets and Jesus would be addressing, is America, a society and a nation of “endangered souls.” It is about this assembly that Wallis asks how it can “recover an authentic faith that is true to the gospel.” It is more than a little interesting, by the way, that actual congregations and churches are not mentioned as the locus of this recovery of authentic faith, but are in fact included as groups within the larger assembly of God’s people, America.

As we discover in many places in the book, actual church congregations are presented as making a contribution to the larger assembly. For example, Wallis writes, “When either party [Republicans or Democrats] tries to politicize God, or co-opt religious communities for their political agendas, they make a terrible mistake” (p. xiv). But the terrible mistake is not that the political parties expect “religious communities” to make a useful contribution to the nation, but that they expect that usefulness to be merely partisan. Instead, Wallis writes, “The best contribution of religion is precisely not to be ideologically predictable nor loyally partisan. Both parties, and the nation, must let the prophetic voice of religion be heard. Faith must be free to challenge both right and left from a consistent moral ground” (p. xiv). The message of Isaiah and Amos must be heard in the ecclesia of God’s American people because these prophets proclaim, Wallis writes, “the kind of talk we don’t want to hear much these days in America. But we need it” (p. 247). When preacher Jim says “we” he invariably means, not the church of Jesus Christ, but the assembly of his fellow Americans.

Two decades or so ago, Stanley Hauerwas complained that “the subject of Christian ethics in America is America,” that is, “the first subject of Christian ethics is how to sustain the moral resources of American society” (Against the Nations, p. 36). It would be hard to find a better example of that than Jim Wallis’s book, God’s Politics. One of the subtitles of the book makes it explicit: the book is “A New Vision for Faith and Politics in America.” The subject of this book on Christian politics is indeed American politics. Old habits die hard, it seems.

Doug Harink will conclude this series tomorrow.

Conference announcement: Saint Paul's Journeys into Philosophy

The brilliant Canadian theologian Douglas Harink is organising what promises to be a superb conference on “Saint Paul’s Journeys into Philosophy.” The conference will be held at the Vancouver School of Theology on the campus of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 4-6 June 2008. Speakers will include Stephen E. Fowl, Paul J. Griffiths, J. Louis Martyn, P. Travis Kroeker, Douglas Harink, Chris K. Huebner, Mark Reasoner, Gordon Zerbe, Jens Zimmerman, and others.

Proposals are invited for papers that address aspects of the appropriation of the work of the apostle Paul by recent philosophy, in particular by Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes and Slavoj Žižek, as well as their precursors, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Papers may address the subject from the perspectives of biblical studies, philosophy, political theory and theology.

Proposals must be no longer than 300 words, accompanied by the proposer’s name and institutional affiliation. All proposals are due by 15 January 2008, and should be emailed to Doug Harink. You can also contact Doug for details about registration and accommodation in Vancouver.

This definitely looks like it will be one of the best and most important theological conferences of 2008.