Take a supplement

Sorry, I’ve been too busy to blog over the past few days. So if you need a supplement, just head over and check out some of Halden’s excellent posts (especially the first one, on romantic love).

• A Pacifist Ethic of Romantic Love
• Nature, Grace, and Apocalypse Revisited
• Rethinking Protology and Eschatology
• Bonhoeffer on the Marks of the New Testament Church
• The Purple Crown: A Review
• The Worst Theologian Ever? (Hmm, so many to choose from... I’ll nominate Herman Hoeksema as the scariest theologian ever. Years ago I read his dogmatics, and it gave me nightmares.)

Salvation for all

“If salvation is for any, it is for all…. The ‘return’ to the lost, the excluded, the failed or destroyed, is not an option for the saint, but the very heart of saintliness. And we might think not only of Jesus’s parable of the shepherd, but of the great theological myth of the Descent into Hell, in which God’s presence in the world in Jesus is seen as his journey into the furthest deserts of despair and alienation. It is the supreme image of his freedom, to go where he is denied and forgotten…. He comes to his new and risen life, his universal kingship, by searching out all the forgotten and failed members of the human family.”

—Rowan Williams, The Truce of God (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 30.

A glorious wedding

We were recently discussing whether a Christian marriage ought to be sharply different from the usual ho-hum of wedding ceremonies. Well, here’s a wedding with a difference:



I don’t often experience pangs of nostalgia for my old Pentecostal days. But a clip like this brings back all the fond memories… Oh the glory!

Dictionary of the Old Testament: wisdom, poetry and writings

Thanks to IVP, this big black beautiful doorstop of a book has just landed with a crash on my desk: Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry and Writings, edited by Tremper Longman III and Peter Enns. This is the seventh volume in IVP’s celebrated Black Dictionary series – surely the most indispensable reference work of its kind – and it’s the third volume in the Old Testament series. In 148 articles and nearly 1,000 pages, it covers Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ruth and Esther.

Some highlights include Ernest Lucas’s crisp discussion of Wisdom theology (pp. 901-12); Marvin Sweeney’s helpful survey of form-critical approaches to the Wisdom literature (pp. 227-41); Peter Enns’ incisive entry on the Book of Ecclesiastes, with its firm insistence that Qohelet’s thought cannot be aligned with any conventional biblical teaching (pp. 121-32); and an excellent article on “Chaos and Death” by Frederick J. Mabie: “The imagery of death as a voracious swallower meets an ironic reversal when we learn that YHWH will permanently ‘swallow up death’. Since death is the ultimate opponent of divine order, the death of death represents the establishment of the ultimate divine order” (pp. 41-54).

While the series’ earlier OT volumes include extended articles for each biblical book, in this volume each biblical book also receives two additional long articles: one on its Near Eastern background, and another on the history of its interpretation. This expanded format produces material which is valuable both for raising important contextual-historical questions, and for opening up questions of theological interpretation.

IVP’s Black Dictionaries have set a new standard for biblical reference works. They are meticulously organised, rigorously researched, accessibly written, and beautifully produced. So forget about all those overrated athletes in Beijing – series editor Dan Reid is the one who really deserves a medal.

Bonhoeffer on the task of the preacher

“It is wrong to assume that on the one hand there is a word, or a truth, and on the other hand there is a community existing as two separate entities, and that it would then be the task of the preacher to take this word, to manipulate and enliven it, in order to bring it within and apply it to the community. Rather, the Word moves along this path of its own accord. The preacher should and can do nothing more than be a servant of this movement inherent in the Word itself, and refrain from placing obstacles in its path.”

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (Bonhoeffer Works Vol. 4; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), pp. 227-28.

How (not) to preach the parables

I’ve often been struck by the way Jesus’ parables are interpreted in Christian preaching. Several years ago, I heard an extended series of sermons on the parables, and after a while I realised that each sermon had the same basic structure: first, the parable was narrated (with a few observations about historical context and such); then the pastor proceeded, with great warmth and sensitivity, to provide a “balanced” ethical interpretation, carefully guarding against any “extreme” application of the parable. So when Jesus says to sell everything, it’s not about possessions, it’s about the state of your heart – and so on.

I still remember my own psychological response to these sermons. First, the parable would be told in all its starkness and simplicity: and I would feel my heart pounding in dread and anticipation at the challenge of Jesus’ words. Then, by the end of the sermon, all my fears would be alleviated – no need for alarm; God’s command isn’t so uncompromising; Jesus really demands nothing of me after all!

It’s a curious thing that pastors often find it so difficult to preach Jesus’ parables. In truth, the only hard thing about the parables is that they are so simple, so straightforward in what they claim and what they demand. They are so simple that we need to make them difficult in order to escape the piercing gaze of Jesus. Or perhaps some pastors feel they need to soften the parables in order to protect the congregation from God. After all, it is God himself who bursts through these stories, coming on the scene with the unaccountable strangeness of a seed in the ground, with the disruptive suddenness of a thief in the night.

In his great book on Discipleship, Bonhoeffer highlights our tendency to “interpret” the teaching of Jesus in a way that leaves us safe, comfortable, unchallenged. Referring to typical interpretations of the story of the rich young ruler, Bonhoeffer remarks (p. 79): “Everywhere it is the same – the deliberate avoidance of simple, literal obedience. How is such a reversal possible? What has happened that the word of Jesus has to endure this game? … Anywhere else in the world where commands are given, the situation is clear. A father says to his child: go to bed! The child knows exactly what to do. But a child drilled in pseudo-theology would have to argue thus: Father says go to bed. He means you are tired; he does not want me to be tired. But I can also overcome my tiredness by going to play. So, although father says go to bed, what he really means is go play.”

In a different context, Karl Barth once told a little parable of his own: “To what shall I liken the basic principles of [liberal] theology? Is it not like a clock which is so cleverly constructed that the hands move from right to left instead of from left to right?” Our preaching about Jesus is often “cleverly constructed” in exactly the same way.

By removing everything offensive from the teaching of Jesus, we might succeed in making it easier to enter the kingdom of heaven – but in this very act, the kingdom is turned into a bland mirror image of the status quo. If we want to preach the words of Jesus faithfully, perhaps we need to lose some of our cleverness, our talent for interpretive evasion, and work instead at making our proclamation simpler – not easier, but simpler.