A Thinking Reed

  • Why early Christians confessed Jesus as divine

    In his review of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God, Luke Timothy Johnson readily concedes that neither the empty-tomb stories nor the accounts of Jesus’ appearing to the disciples after his crucifixion prove–or could prove–the Christian confession that Jesus is divine. Rather, Johnson says, this confession was rooted in the early Christians’ experience of being…

  • What happens when we pray the Psalms?

    According to Walter Brueggemann, in his essay “The Counter-World of the Psalms,”* the Psalms mediate to us a “counter-world” that subverts our “closely held world”–that is, the narrative or worldview we commonly live by. What is this “closely held” world like? For Brueggemann, it is a picture of the world characterized by anxiety and scarcity,…

  • Extremists for love and justice

    But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love–“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice–“Let  justice roll down like waters and righteousness…

  • Keep the Bible weird!

    Peter Enns recounts a conversation he had with a Jewish colleague in graduate school about the story of Adam and Eve: So my classmate and I were having lunch talking about this story and I mentioned casually the “fall” of humanity. “The what?” “The fall of humanity. You know, Adam and Eve’s sin plunged all…

  • Favorite books of 2014

    I should say, books I read in 2014. Most of these weren’t published this year. Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, H. W. Brands A compelling and readable (indeed, almost novelistic) account of the life and times of our 32nd president. Brands doesn’t gloss over his flaws,…

  • Heschel’s trilemma

    Reading 20th-century Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel’s important work God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism recently, I was struck by this passage: There are only three ways of judging the prophets: they told the truth, deliberately invented a tale, or were victims of an illusion. In other words, revelation is either a…

  • Overdue blog retirement party

    I’ve been blogging for over ten years(!), but it’s become apparent to me–and quite likely to you, dear readers–that this blog has been running on fumes for quite some time. The truth is, at this point in my life I have neither the time nor much of an inclination to update this blog on a…

  • “Get down, you damn fool!”

    When Confederate General Jubal Early drove a small Union army out of the Shenandoah Valley in the summer of 1864, crossed the Potomac, and threatened Washington itself before being driven off, Lincoln went personally to Fort Stevens, part of the Washington defenses, to observe the fighting. It was on this occasion that a Union officer…

  • Cosmic piety

    There’s a lot going on in Douglas Ottati’s Theology for Liberal Protestants–much more than I’m going to be able to cover in a blog post (or several). But as I’m nearing the end of the book, I think what will stick with me most is Ottati’s insistence on a cosmic theocentric piety.* What does this…

  • Alice in Chains, “Sea of Sorrow”