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The apocalyptic Jesus and the divine Christ
Continuing the series on Dale Allison’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (previous posts here and here). Despite his defense of the general picture of Jesus offered in the gospels, Allison is not out just to comfort conservatives or other traditional believers. For starters, as we’ve seen, he’s dubious that we can determine with…
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New cyber-breviary
If you haven’t already done so, you should check out this online breviary (i.e., order for praying the Daily Office) compiled by Derek and some other liturgically knowledgable web elves. I’m more of a praying-from-a-book sort of guy, but this looks to be an awesome resource.
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Manhattan evisceration
If you’re lucky, you’ve been blissfully unaware of the recent Manhattan Declaration, a quasi-ecumenical “call of Christian conscience” signed by a veritable who’s who of right-wing ecclesiastical celebrities (largely overlapping with the First Things crowd). The basic gist is to reaffirm opposition to legal abortion and same-sex marriage as the paramount Christian principles, but wrapped…
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The real Jesus
As we saw in the last post, Allison thinks that the traditional method of sifting the NT materials to reveal pristine, authentic bits of knowledge about Jesus is doomed to failure. More promising, he argued, is discerning the general picture of Jesus, based on recurring themes. For example, citing numerous passages in the synoptic gospels,…
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Dale Allison on the limits of the quest for the historical Jesus
Over the holiday I read Dale Allison Jr.’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus. Allison is a well-regarded historical Jesus scholar with a number of tomes to his name and a practicing Christian. This book is his attempt to come to terms with how his work as a historian affects his personal faith. As…
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Forthrightness needed on climate e-mails
Andrew Leonard at Salon makes a good point about what has come to be called (inevitably) “Climategate.” Yes, the hacking into private e-mails was a criminal act, but the apparently unethical behind-the-scenes behavior of the scientists involved is bound to shake public confidence in climate science, whether or not such a response is reasonable. As…
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Buddhist emptiness and Christian salvation
Kristin Johnston Largen, a professor of theology at the Lutheran seminary at Gettysburg, has written a stimulating little book: What Christians Can Learn from Buddhism: Rethinking Salvation. In it she offers a summary of the key points of what Christianity and Buddhism mean by salvation and reflects on how Buddhist notions of salvation can shed…
A Thinking Reed 