Extra Credit Podcast

I. Fleming Rutledge says that “Advent begins in the dark.” She writes, We live in a world where the season of Advent is simply relegated to the “frenzy of holiday” time in which the commercial Christmas music insists that “it’s the most wonderful time of the year” and Starbucks invites everyone to “feel the merry.” The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterize life in this...

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Psalm 42:5) Psalm 42 is a psalm of hope in the face of despair, but there isn’t a hint of optimism in it. The literary critic Terry Eagleton once said that the optimist is just as bereft of hope as the nihilist—neither has any need of it. In common usage, though, the...

The superscription of Psalm 34 contains an oddity. It reads: “ A Psalm of David, when he changed his behavior before Abimelech; who drove him away, and he departed.” The account of David “feigning madness” is found in 1 Samuel 21, but in 1 Samuel it is not before Abimelech that David “changed his behavior,” it was before King Achish . So, why has the name been changed in the superscription of Psal...

What hard travail God does in death! He strives in sleep, in our despair, And all flesh shudders underneath The nightmare of His sepulcher. The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone; All night the cold wind heaves and pries; Creation strains sinew and bone Against the dark door where He lies. The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight And stands. Pain breaks in song. Surprising The merely dead, g...

Psalm 27 7 “Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud; be gracious to me and answer me! 8 “Come,” my heart says, “seek his face!” Your face, LORD, do I seek. 9 Do not hide your face from me. Last week I was listening to an interview with theologian Geoff Holsclaw who works in the intersection of theology and neuro-science—specifically with attachment theory. In the interview he discussed how children become...

In his book A Religion Against Itself Robert Jenson makes the case that the Christianity is an anti-religious religion and that the Bible is an anti-religious religious text. At first this seems to fit nicely with our cliched (and mostly wrong) ways of speaking negatively about religion (think vapid statements like: “It’s not religion, it’s relationship). But that isn’t what Jenson is up to. He is...

Messianic Psalms The psalms are filled with promise—particularly the promise that God will put an end to evil and injustice. The so-called “messianic psalms” are the beating heart of this promise. God promises that, through his messiah, he will overcome the evil of the world (specifically the evil of “the nations” and “the kings of the earth”). The promised messiah is portrayed in the psalms as th...

One of the primary themes of the psalms is God’s care for the poor. He is their judge and defender. But the bond between God and the poor is extends beyond mere compassion, and into identity. God will not—indeed, he cannot—forget the poor any more than he can forget himself. God is poor and he is inviting us to share in his poverty that we might be rich as he is rich. Herbert McCabe makes just thi...

God Is Our Home Psalm 46 begins with one of the more memorable lines in scripture: “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble.” The psalms never tire of emphasizing this theme. Psalm 90 says that God has been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Psalm 91 says that we live in the shelter of the most high and that we abide in his shadow. In other words, God is our...

Psalm 51: Superscription Prayer for Cleansing and Pardon To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. Most of us will know the background for this psalm. King David is home in his palace as his army is off fighting one of his wars. From his palace he spots a woman named Bathsheba bathing on her rooftop and he is overcome with desire...

Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. (Psalm 32:1) The Covering (Up?) of Sin In a memorable phrase (not least because Paul quotes it in Romans 4) Psalm 32:1 says, “Blessed is the one…whose sin is covered.” The language of “covering” is striking here. What does it mean to have your sins covered? This is a suggestive metaphor. And as with any suggestive materi...

We did not meet for our typical midweek Bible study this week, so I figured I would repost an old teaching that I know I need to return to often. This teaching was from our study of 1 Corinthians 3 in the Spring of 2024. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Psalm 23 (KJV) 1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5 Thou preparest a t...

This week we continue our discussion of forgiveness and the psalms. The Soldiers that Pierced Him The soldiers are not the principally guilty party in the crucifixion of Jesus. They did not decide that Jesus should be executed. In this way we can pity them: they are just doing their job. But their job is not guiltless. There is still responsibility for the soldiers to bear for this tragedy. It is...

Psalm 130:1-4 1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. 2 Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy! 3 If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? 4 But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be feared. Kallistos Ware points out that while the psalms frequently talk about forgiveness, they do not very clearly talk about the fact that we are call...

Last week we concluded discussing the difficulty of Scripture. The Scriptures are like the music of God and they are filled with strange, unexpected, and perplexingly intricate harmonies that bewilder and frustrate untrained readers. The unskilled reader will hear in the Scriptures only dissonances, only clashes. I suggested that the only way to start to hear the deep, complex, but beautiful harmo...

The Prayerbook of the Bible The Psalms are a prayerbook, the prayerbook of the Scriptures. They contain multitudes. Athanasius of Alexandria said that the Psalms are like a garden, containing things of all kinds. What he means is that the Psalms contain every part of the Scriptures: the Torah/law, the prophets, and the rest of what we call the Old Testament. The whole of Scripture is contained in...

Are the Psalms Coherent? Most of us have a favorite Psalm the way we have a favorite song. The psalms have been a great source of comfort, a balm to weary souls since the time of ancient Israel. But if you crack open the Psalms at random, chances are you will not open to a pleasant song of praise, but a harsh (even vindictive) song of imprecation. The Psalms of complaint make up a third of the ent...

Ends or Means? Why did God become human? This is an old question and it is deceptively simple. The way we answer it will fill in answers to a lot of other questions that we aren’t directly considering. It’s sort of like coming to a dirt road that has a bunch of ruts in it from other cars that have driven down it when the road was soft. Some of those ruts have been dug in so deep that you can easil...

A Hidden God? In the early 2nd century a Greek opponent of Christianity named Celsus argued that Jesus could not be God because there was nothing visibly divine about him. Celsus writes: “If there were a divine spirit in the body of Jesus, that body would of necessity vary in some respect from other bodies…in size, in beauty, in strength, in voice. It would have something attractive in its charact...

Scripture uses a variety of terms to describe the human self (e.g. body, soul, spirit, mind, and heart). Last week we discussed the human self in its integrity. We are both embodied souls and ensouled bodies. This week we take a look at the human heart with its shallows and its depths. Fortunately, last October we had Dr. Chris E.W. Green with us for our theology conference and he lectured on a th...

The Deep Unity of the Self What does it mean to be a human self? What constitutes it? We will all be familiar with a similar vocab bank: body, soul, spirit, mind, heart, etc. It’s also probably not much of a stretch to assume that most of us have been taught that human beings are composed of two (or three) parts: body and soul (and spirit). It’s often of assumed that these composite parts of the h...

Being Human as Vocation Becoming truly human is not just a matter of being, but of doing (hence the “ becoming truly human”). In truth, being and doing are not separable, but are always one—our being is always a doing. Put otherwise, when the Spirit unites us to Christ we are not only given Christ’s identity ( being ), but Christ’s vocation ( doing ). Psalm 8:6–8, riffing on Genesis 1-2, describes...

Sin: Blocking the Flow of God’s Love The way we speak about sin is key. The metaphors we use to speak about reality always end up “using” us. Our language isn’t merely a tool we use, it shapes the way we see reality. I want to juxtapose two metaphors for speaking about sin: breaking God’s laws vs. blocking the flow of God’s life/love. It’s not that one is wrong and the other is right. It’s that th...

Curved In On Ourselves Last week I tried to argue that, contrary to much of what we’ve been taught, sin does not separate us from God. Many of us have heard that God cannot even look on it. But if the Gospel records are true we have to say, “Of course he can! If he couldn’t, how would he save us from it?” In Christ we meet a God who loves sinners so much that, not only does he look on their sin, b...