With my upcoming move to Vancouver and enrolment in seminary, I’ve decided to get back in to blogging again–with a completely renovated site. 100% heresy free!
I’m thinking about utilizing this for a couple of purposes (though not limiting it to those purposes):
- Reflections on the lectionary (also known as the suggested weekly bible readings set out by the Revised Common Lectionary). I thought this would be useful for a variety of reasons, with the primary being my own edification for future use in ministry as sermon material. Not only that, but I think the biblical narrative is worth sharing as a catalyst for human transformation.
- Thinking through particular elements of Christian faith and attempting to articulate them for a post-modern and largely secular society. Jesuit theologian (and Vatican badass) Roger Haight gave me the idea in a discussion of his book Jesus: Symbol of God where he tries to articulate a genuine Christology (that is to say the nature/identity and person of Jesus of Nazareth) that appeals to contemporary people that is also in continuity with historical tradition.
While I don’t think that the particular elements of Christian faith can be reduced to some sort of a-historical wisdom or essence, I do believe in the incarnation. That is to say, truth always manifests itself in particular contexts and places. There are no universal platitudes–the universal can only be found in the particular. So much contemporary discussion regarding religious faith is either done from the perspective of context-free, never-changing truism (fundamentalism) or a history-free ever-progressing now (liberalism). As such, this is my attempt to have the Christian tradition in dynamic conversation with the present day. As Jaroslav Pelikan put it:
Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition. (The Vindication of Tradition)
So we’ll give this a shot and see how it works.
I’m gonna miss your Hauerwas quote.
Didn’t you hear? You can’t be a nice minister if you even mention the name “Hauerwas”? I was thinking about quoting Karen Armstrong instead–for the liberal cred.