Resident Theologian

Good news: the book I am editing for Oxford University Press, The Triune Story: Essays on Scripture—a comprehensive collection of the late theologian Robert Jenson's writings on the Bible, with a foreword by Bruce Marshall—is available online at both OUP's website and Amazon.

Oxford says the book will be out mid-June; Amazon says mid-July. I'd go with Amazon on that one. I'm working on indexing the book right now, after which point, late this month, I'll get the proofs. So perhaps the revised proofs will be ready by May 1? I don't know how quickly the turnaround is on these kinds of books, but perhaps quicker than I imagined. We also need to get the blurbs, about which more soon.

But, anyway, I only just happened upon this bit of news, and I couldn't be more delighted. This volume is going to be a real resource going forward, for Jenson scholars as well as for theologians interested in Scripture more broadly. I can't wait for y'all to have it in you…

It seems to me that most Christians today—in my context, I mean: college-educated or middle-class American Christians, especially those raised in the church—see their spiritual options as basically threefold. Either they maintain Christian faith of some kind; or they become spiritual but not religious; or they become officially agnostic, though functionally atheist. That is, there are basically two "exit" options from Christianity, both of which can be described as a form of nonbelief: faith in nothing at all, or faith in something-or-other left undefined.

In other words, such wayward believers aren't drawn to other religious traditions: the primary question is organized theism. Give up the former, you remain spiritual but not Christian; give up the latter, you're neither Christian nor spiritual. The temptation isn't ordinarily to become a Muslim or Sikh or Hindu. (Though the other day I did hear someone say, "If it weren't for X in Christianity, I'd…

Last week, in my upper-level majors course on systematic theology, the topic was providence. We read classical accounts of divine and human agency and discussed the nature of God's will. I wrote up some provisional, incomplete theses to help guide them through the thicket. I'm sharing them below, partly as an aid to others, partly as an invitation to be corrected by my betters—this area is simply not my specialty. St. Thomas, pray for this theologian's poor soul!

*                        *                         * Affirmations
God, as the sole creator and author of creation ex nihilo, is solely responsible for the ongoing existence and well-being of the creation.God is sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient, and good.God is Lord of creation.God upholds creation as a whole and in all its parts at all times, without ceasing.God underlies, informs, and enables any and all activity in creation: nothing happens apart from God; no creature can act apart from God’s sovereign will.God …

One of the silliest, and most annoying, trends in public Christian discourse is the use of academic scholarship. I've no doubt the trend I have in mind is present on all sides, but where I see it most is in newly liberated ex-evangelicals, whether pastors or laypeople, but certainly in popular writers.

Not only is "scholarship" used in the singular, as if two centuries' worth of study of the Bible in all its variety of contexts across dozens of countries in as many languages can be considered monolithic and unanimous. Even more, it's waved around as a kind of talisman, evidently with the expectation of an effect that can only be called apotropaic—which, we may infer, is the effect it had initially on the person so using it.

It's true that any number of stupid or damaging claims about the Bible and Christianity are a function or result of ignorance, and that education can remedy some of this. But the truth is that scholars disagree about very nearly anything a…

I've written recently about my technology habits, and now I write with an update. Last week I took email off my phone, moving ever closer to the reduction of my iPhone to the basic features of a dumb phone, plus pictures/video, maps, weather, WhatsApp, and podcasts. That was why I purchased an iPhone in the first place, in the fall of 2015: to send and receive pictures and video of my children and nephews, and to get around easier when traveling. But Facebook and Twitter and Gmail and the rest colonized my phone and, in turn, my mind and, eventually, my daily habits; and this is part of my ongoing purgation of that colonization. Get thee behind me, Satan!

My iPhone's weekly Sunday morning report of usage told me my screen time declined by 30%, to an average of 49 minutes/day. I bet the next report will be even smaller. As I've said, my goal is an average of 45 minutes/day. But honestly, if I'm not texting much, and instead of reading Instapaper articles I'm reading…

Recently I've been reading through Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing, edited by Christopher Caldwell and the late Christopher Hitchens. It's a collection of 40 essays written during the 1990s, nearly all under the Clinton administration.

It's been a revelation. I was 7 years old when Clinton was elected the first time. I came of age politically and intellectually during the second Bush's two terms, and I didn't start consistently reading serious—or at least good—political writing from across the ideological spectrum until Obama's second term.

That means I'm basically a novice in these matters. I have a fairly good sense of the historical scope and shape of these arguments; I've read political philosophy, old and new; I'm conversant with what's going on at present. But I've little idea what it was like in the moment, in weekly and monthly political journalism, in each of the previous decades, even those I lived through.

…

This Day

By Denise Levertov

i Dry wafer,
sour wine.

This day I see

God’s in the dust,
not sifted

out from confusion.
ii Perhaps, I thought,
passing the duckpond,
perhaps—seeing the brilliantly somber water
deranged by lost feathers and bits of
drowning bread—perhaps
these imperfections (the ducklings
practised their diving,
stylized feet vigorously cycling among débris)
are part of perfection,
a pristine nuance? our eyes
our lives, too close to the canvas,
enmeshed within
the turning dance,
to see it?
iii In so many Dutch 17th-century paintings
one perceives
a visible quietness, to which the concord
of lute and harpsichord contribute,
in which a smiling conversation
reposes;
‘calme, luxe,” and—in auburn or mercurial sheen
of vessels, autumnal wealth
of fur-soft table-carpets,
blue snow-gleam of Delft—
‘volupte’; but also the clutter
of fruit and herbs, pots, pans, poultry,
strewn on the floor: and isn’t
the quiet upon them too, in them and of them,
aren’t they wholly at one with the wond…

I've got a new essay published in the latest issue of Commonweal titled "The Specter of Marcionism." It uses the combined examples from last year of Andy Stanley's controversial teaching on the Old Testament and the First Things review relitigating the Mortara case to think about the different ways in which Protestants and Catholics struggle with the election of the Jews, Israel's scriptures, and supersessionism. Here's a taste:

"On this, all can agree. God and the Jews are a package deal. As 1 John 2:23 says of God and Christ—that one cannot have the Father without the Son, or the Son without the Father—so here: you cannot have Abraham’s God without Abraham’s children. Reject the latter and you lose the former. In its rejection of Marcionism, the church staked a claim to this principle: the only God with whom it would have to do was the Jewish God, the God of Moses, Hannah, Mary, and Jesus. But the church’s consistency in maintaining this princip…

Last week I listed six virtues that make C. S. Lewis's novels, especially the Space Trilogy, so lovable. I forgot one, though: his ability to describe evil—evil persons and evil deeds—without ever making evil the least bit appealing or interesting.

This isn't because there's no evil in Lewis's world; there's plenty. In fact, it's often embodied not just in human beings but in devils, or in humans possessed by demons. The scale of evil in Lewis is cosmic. But it is also minute, even mundane. And that's what makes his depiction of evil so brilliant, so compelling, yet so unattractive. Evil is boring, ugly, deficient, and stupid. It's imbecilic, infantile, a shallow life-sucking self-sabotage of all that is—which is to say, of all that is good, beautiful, and true. It enlivens nothing and parasitically eats from the inside whatever gives it quarter.

Lewis is able to strike this philosophically informed macro/micro balance without glamorizing the good life …