Deus Misereatur

Here's the link to the op-ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/opinion/31brooks.html?_r=1 I do believe he has hit the target in the 10! Mike

I highly recommend this work. I finished it yesterday and was impressed with the author's ability to keep my attention, and pull together the historical facts as well as ideological concepts. After reading the book I'm sold on Bonhoeffer's orthodoxy, courage, brilliance, and example for 21st Century Christians.

‎ 28 December is the feast day honoring the death of the holy innocents (the infants and toddlers slaughtered by Herod as he sought to wipe out the child Jesus-Matthew 2.16-18). It is a good day for remembering others (fellow human-beings, as well as Christian brothers and sisters) who have been forced to their deaths because of tyrants, malicious ideologies, evil, abortion, euthanasia and cowardice.   ‎"We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil powers, tyrants, and those who take the lives of others unjustly; and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen" (adapted and modified from the Book of Common Prayer-1979).

[Note: Here at the end of 2010, I felt it was appropriate to present to you some of the things I said at the Reformation Theological Conference on Nov. 6.] In what we are about to read, you must recognize what the people were doing. They are often pictured as following the dictates of their own heart (9.14), taking their direction from their own internal desires, to the point that they had made their own words divine oracles (23.36). The result was public pandemonium & ethical upheaval. Into this environment God speaks: Jer. 6.14-16. “They have also healed the hurt of My people slightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? No! They were not at all ashamed; nor did they know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time I punish them, they shall be cast down,” says the LORD. Thus says the LORD: “Stand in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; t...

The following is written in reply to someone who emailed me last night about my 1st post on Billings: The Word of God for the People of God. The writer wanted to correct Billings' position (and mine) about the fact that Christ is the primary focal point of the Old Testament. ---------------- Are there real, valid reasons for reading the whole of Scripture (Old and New Testaments) as one book, the book about Jesus Christ? Though some want to see a rock-solid barrier between the Old Testament and the New, and others even go so far as to pronounce a wall of separation between Paul’s writings and the writings of the other apostles, it appears that the Jesus truly has “broken down the middle wall of separation” (Eph. 2.14) in Himself. To begin with, Jesus Himself declares, after the resurrection, that all the Old Testament spoke of Him. “Then He said to them, "These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were writ...

One of the primary premises espoused in “The Word of God for the People of God,” is that there is a proper way to approach Holy Scripture. To begin with, the Bible reader needs to come with humility. She is not a technician who manufactures meanings out of Scripture, or manipulates and controls the outcome of this Word of God, but that through Scripture “God “reads” us, reshaping us into Christ’s image by the Spirit’s power” (80). Instead of Christians owning the truth, we are owned by the One who is the truth (82), which means that as the Word of God comes to inhabit us and our cultural context, it will often critique and challenge us and our cultural context (108). Therefore, coming to Scripture in this expectant humility, there is renunciation and transformation, for “reading Scripture is about being mastered by Jesus Christ through a biblical text that functionally stands over us as the word of God, not under us as a word we can control, rearrange, and use for our own purposes” (20...

I ran across this guy while playing online chess. He identified himself as an Orthodox Jew in Canada and asked me a question, “I see you’re a Christian minister. How do you Christians interpret Scripture?” It was an excellent question I thought. We had a nice, short discussion. The major answer I gave him came as a direct quotation from J. Todd Billings’ recent book “The Word of God for the People of God: An Entryway to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture”, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010. Billings writes, “”Jesus was not just a great teacher, nor was he just God with limbs and a mouth. In Jesus, the whole history of Israel--and through Israel, humanity--was recapitulated, or lived again. But this time the one who was true Israel and true human being did not take the path of the first Adam. As the second Adam, Christ was the righteous one, the perfect human covenant partner. But this perfect covenant partner was also the Word incarnate, the one in whom the fullness of d...