Extra Credit Podcast

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...

It Takes Training To Be a Sinner The movement from Adam to Christ is the movement from being born from below to being born from above. It’s the movement into becoming truly human as God is human. But that movement involves a death. Paul puts it succinctly in Colossians 3:1—11. We have already died and our lives are hidden in Christ, but we must continue to take off the “old human” (Adam) and put o...

Not “How” but “Who” Last week we began a study of what it means to be “truly human.” And we began with the truly human one: Jesus of Nazareth. It is not the case that Adam came first and then, when things went wrong, God sent his Son to be born of a virgin as a reaction to Adam’s sin. This typical way of thinking makes it so that Jesus is made in Adam’s image and—to caricature a bit—turns Jesus in...

God’s Hands in the Dirt A few years ago I noticed that there are many of passages in Scripture where God has his hands in the dirt. He’s a working-class God, not afraid to get his hands dirty. This is one of the ways in which he differs from other gods of antiquity. When I started looking into these passages I noticed that every time God “plays in the dirt” he seems to be up to the same thing. The...

"The tree of life, the cross of Christ, the center of God’s world..." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall Insider/Outsider Paradigm The book of Ruth, as we’ve said, is subversive. It’s challenging the dominant narrative of the day as seen in people like Ezra and Nehemiah. Upon reading Deut. 23, Ezra and Nehemiah conclude that there are insiders and there are outsiders. God loves and accepts Is...

“The last thing God needs is to be noticed.” -Chris E.W. Green A field trip with the old rabbis… Chapter four of the book of Ruth completes the primary movement of the story. It’s a movement from emptiness to fullness. Our story began with empty bellies—bellies that had no food and no children. It began with three deaths (Elimelek, Mahlon, Kilion), but it ends with three births (Obed, Jesse, David...

A Good Friday sermon on John 19:1—30. So they took Jesus, 17 and carrying the cross by himself he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. 18 There they crucified him and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them. 19 Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” 2...

“Only good where evil was, is evil dead… That alone is the slaying of evil.” -George MacDonald, Lilith Naomi’s Plan: Risky and Risqué Chapter 3 of the book of Ruth is the crucial episode in the story. The plot reaches its climax. But it is also the most disputed part of the book. It’s purposely written with ambiguous language that leaves a lot to the reader’s imagination. In Ruth 3 Naomi devises a...

“Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn…” John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale “And chance so chanced it…” Everything just seems to fall into place in the book of Ruth. But while nothing is predetermined, neither are there any accidents. It is no accident that Ruth and Naomi arrive back in Bethlehem at the...

“[Ruth is the] loveliest complete work on a small scale, handed down to us as an ethical treasure and an idyll.” -Goethe Subversion Many interpreters have referred to the book of Ruth as a “subversive” story. If something is subversive, it is a quiet but powerful overturning of some other authority. It’s subtle. And if something is effectively subversive, its long-term effectiveness depends on it...

“Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel makes him just a gardener.” George Herbert Already-Not Yet? We’ve let the explosive heart of the good news of our union with Christ radiate out in many different directions over the last couple months looking at faith , scripture , ethics , personality , and Israel . There is one last line of questioning that I want us to tackle: If we are so deeply...

This week we turn to a very deep question, and one that has caused terrible problems in the church throughout its history: When Saul met the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus what exactly happened for him? Saul was zealous for the the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That zeal was leading him to persecute the church and he was doing this for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In his me...

It’s not surprising that there is a wide range of opinions among New Testament scholars over what Paul means by the little phrase “in Christ.” Views range from the more figurative—to be “in Christ” is akin to being “in the hands of Christ” so that he cares for you—to the more literal and real (or, even spatial)—we are located in Christ like Noah and his family were in the ark. As I see it, the dif...