/ biblical theology
Friday, August 14
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“ In its purposiveness as love, therefore, the holiness of the Father includes jealousy. ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God’ (Exod. 20.5). God’s jealousy is his creative will in its singularity and exclusiveness. But as such it is not mere self-assertion. It is the energy of God’s good will with which he directs himself in all his works and ways towards us. The jealousy of the triune God is his purposiveness; it is his refusal to negotiate away the creature’s good by allowing the creature itself to set the terms on which it will live. The holy God overcomes and destroys all that opposes his will, and in so doing loves us. Ezekiel puts it thus: ‘I will restore the fortunes of Jacob and have mercy on the whole house of Israel; and I will be jealous for my holy name’ (Ezek. 39.25). The Holy One in our midst is thus the one whose holy jealousy is restorative, and whose love is operative in the eradication of wickedness so that that to which we are destined may come to be. What we are powerless to destroy — our perverted, self-destructive versions of ourselves — God himself undertakes to destroy, to the immense dismay and terror of the sinful creature, and in just this way God fulfills his purpose by protecting and upholding us.
• John Webster, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, in Confessing God, pp. 124 – 125. Webster is one of the three most interesting and important theologians writing today. The others? Robert Jenson and Webster’s predecessor as Lady Margaret Professor at Oxford, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Tuesday, April 28
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me on the Risen Christ in Luke 24

posted 7 months ago

The risen Christ is not a generic mysterium tremendum. He is the one who identifies with the God who spoke in Deuteronomy. God is not unknowable, but encountered in a language that Jesus subjects himself to and exalts by his obedience. “This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day.”

Even Jesus knows his will and the will of God are not automatically the same. He had to conform his will to that of the Father. And his judgment about that will is not mystically endowed by inner voice, but by knowing the God whose will has been revealed in Israel’s scriptures, where sacrifice and ransom and the will that all nations be blessed are passages that conspire to insist Jesus must die not on Groundhog Day or the Winter Solstice, but during the festival of death out of life and life out of death. It is the psalms that comprise Jesus’s last words from the cross, not universal expressions of anguish or hymns to a dying and rising God from the Ancient Near East or Greco-Roman milieu.

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from my sermon A Room Furnished with Grief and Resurrection based on Luke 24: 36 – 48

Wednesday, March 25
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[W]e do not at all like the idea of a “chosen people”. Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true.

It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert, some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers.
• C. S. Lewis, Miracles