Personal Update and Challenge for myself

So, just to let whoever reads this know what I am up to quickly. I am currently taking classes in my Ph.D. program. I am taking a class on Christian Thought from Reformation to the Present Day, a class in Christian Eschatology, and a class in Eastern Orthodoxy - from Athanasius to Zizioulas. Interesting, eh?

I also have just received notification that I will be allowed to give two papers this semester at different conferences. The first is entitled "The Gift and Natural Theology" and is for the Loyola University Chicago-Marquette University Colloquium on Theology. My paper is essentially a thought experiment in how we may think about natural theology after Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida's discussion of the gift. I think that Rahner allows us a place to do this. If anyone would like to read it, let me know.

The second paper is a paper for a conference on Christianity and Consumer Culture. For this paper, I am offering a critique of contemporary Christianity's language. I believe it is laden with consumeristic concepts. I am then offering Bernard's On the Love of God as a counter to this. I'm still working all of this out, but it is what I am up to.

Finally, on this blog, I am going to begin to outline and write something that is on my mind a lot - social holiness. I really started the blog to comment upon this, but have not really done so. However, at one point (when inspiration struck) I began to outline a book for social holiness, something of an introduction to social holiness. So, this blog will now serve as my working out of this, with my thoughts on how I would go about constructing this book. Hopefully, it will serve as a very rough draft for a future publication.

So, if this stands in the place of an introduction to my thoughts, it may serve well to tell how I will go about this. First, I will look at what it means to "think" social holiness. When I am "thinking" social holiness, what am I thinking? What does it refer to? etc. etc. I will then look at what I think is the biblical foundations. I will then go through a few historical examples. Finally, I will end with looking at different problems posed to social holiness and responses I would implore.

We'll see how this goes. Peace.

A Real Good Book

So, this week, I come supporting a book. The book is by Michael Pasquarello and is called Sacred Rhetoric. Pasquarello is a professor of preaching at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is interesting though, because his Ph.D. is not in homiletics, but in early church history. He did his disseration on Latimer (the preacher of the English Reformation). However, Pasquarello is also a former pastor and an ordained elder in the UMC.

I know Pasquarello from seminary. I was privileged to sit in a reading group with him for two semesters. I was also privileged to be in his History of Christian Preaching class at Asbury. This is where the book comes from.

I must confess, I have not read the whole book yet as it is in its published form. I did however read the rough draft. Essentially, what the book does is to call preaching "back to the future." What Mike (as I call him) does is to look at different preachers through the centuries from the early church until the reformation. For Mike, this is really the glory period of Christian preaching.

Mike though does not say that we must do things like these guys did them. What Mike encourages is to go about preaching the way that these people did - as a theological discipline. For Pasquarello (along with many other preaching professors, ie William Willimon) preaching today has become something separate from the practice of theology. Preachers today are only required to know the basics of theology so that they may not preach heresy. After that though, theology is kind of dismissed. Preachers are only expected to be entertaining and relevant.

However, to be entertaining and relevant does not mean that someone is Christian. Thus, preaching must again become a theological practice. Essentially, a sermon is what gives the Christian language to the church for any given week. Let me explain. By language, I mean a way of living our life through what we say and how we act. For many theologians today, saying and acting are very intertwined (like they were for the early church and, dare I say, Jesus). Thus, the language we use becomes the way that we live our life. The sermon is that which gives the language to people to live life. The sermon encourages people to think differently, act differentlly, and to live differently.

Essentially, Pasquarello looks at different preachers and evaluates how they gave their people a language to live in their circumstances and settings. This then becomes the example for ourselves.

Impossible Possible - Holiness

In church this morning the band leader talked about being "holy." He said that this essentially meant to be "set apart." He then talked of how being "set apart" is what God is and this is how we should emulate him.

Now, there are no Wesleyan or holiness churches around me - no good ones at least. So, I go to an Evangelical Free Church that is a typical, Reformed style evangelical church. Whatever. However, when they begin to talk about salvation and specifically holiness, I get a little antsy.

I realized though, that when holiness people talk about holiness, they mean being "set apart" as well. However, is this really holiness? Is it holy to be set apart? Is this how Jesus was holy? The apostles? Paul? The church?

It seems to me that holiness is the impossible possible of the Christian life. "Be in the world but not of it." No matter what we may say, this is a contradiction. It is impossible. Yet, we attempt to live it. This is our prayer. This is our call to holiness. What?

I turn to Jesus as the ultimate example. Jesus lived in the world. He was definitely human. He walked in the world. He acted in the world. However, He was not of this world. Why? Well, leaving the entire kenosis thing aside, I believe that Jesus is really not of this world because His "lifesource" is God, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. See, Jesus lives, breathes, acts, and does work in the world. He never walks away from it. He never shys away from healing the sick, feeding the poor, freeing the sinner, or giving His life. And yet, the souce of all of His energy to do this is not Himself - it is the God that He worships it. It is the power of God within which He acts. He exists in the world fully embracing the world but doing it while drawing all of His energy from an Eternal Source.

I think the church today should follow. It's time to start living the impossible. We have all too often picked one or the other - in the world or not of it. We need to live both at the same time at all times. God has placed us in the world to be the world and yet to be the world in way that is God in the world. Very incarnational ministry here. We are to be set apart in a way that is living in the world differently. We are the people called to feed the orphans and the widows, the sick, the poor, to be peaceful, live peacefully, to embrace our own poverty, etc. etc. Our life is one in which we live the impossible made possible by God.