Greetings!
Peace, mercy, and grace be with you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
May God preserve life in the wake of the storm devastation in the Midwest, and grant us all peace in light of current national and world affairs.
Sunday, April 28, 2024
The Voice 14.17: Romans 14:1-15:7, Part I: Textual Commentary
Romans 14:1-15:7 should be where we go in order to understand how to best work together and glorify God despite disagreements on minor matters of no concern to God.
But, as you can imagine, almost everything about the passage proves controversial and a source of contention and dispute. A sad and savage irony, and unfortunately quite telling about us.
We begin considering it in depth by exploring the text itself.
The Letter of James | James 2:14-26
James 2:14-26 is infamous as ground zero for discussions about the role of works in faith and disputing those who hold to “faith only” doctrines. Yet how much of our understanding of this passage is centered on doctrine? What was the kind of faith without works regarding which James was concerned, and how can we avoid that?
Lesson: Ruth | Books of the Bible
Outline | Podcast | Conversation
The story of Ruth is pretty well-known. We do well to better understand the context of the story and why everyone is acting and behaving as they are. In that light Ruth’s faithfulness proves all the more astounding; although, ladies, you might not really want to be waiting for “your Boaz,” for he might already have a wife and children.
We continue in the British Museum with today’s image: Assyrian archers attacking some unfortunate ancient Near Eastern city.
The British Museum features a lot of Assyrian relief panels; they cut down and shipped to London whole rooms of palaces in Nineveh and the like.
When the Assyrians devastated Israel and Judah, this is what it would have looked like.
Book Reviews
If there has been an unappreciated fact of the past four years, it is how we have all been going through it.
I say “unappreciated” because ever since mid-March 2020 almost everyone has seemed bound and determined to try to get “back to normal” or to establish some kind of “new normal.”
But we all went through a pretty harrowing experience. Granted, for some it went deeper and lasted longer than it did for others for various reasons. Yet it seems almost all of us bear the marks of that collective trauma, and in most respects, it remains an untreated collective trauma.
In All Our Griefs to Bear: Responding with Resilience after Collective Trauma (affiliate link; galley received as part of an early review program), Joni Sancken explores collective trauma in terms of and in light of the COVID-19 pandemic experience and ways in which people might well respond to it.
Even though few of us really need an introduction to collective trauma after having lived through the past few years, the author does well in setting forth what it is and some of the reasons it may come about. Collective traumas, as experienced by collectives, do best when there is some kind of collective response. The author highlights three areas in which she believes Christians can do well in collective trauma response: lament, storytelling, and blessing.
Through lament the trauma is recognized for what it is, named as such, and the challenge it presents set before God. Traumas indicate a world which is not entirely at right, and the first step often must be to recognize and declare it. Through storytelling we can contextualize and make sense of who we are and what we have experienced. And we can provide blessings and serve as blessings to others as a means by which to connect and as a way for people to be seen, recognized, and valued.
The author throughout refers to and is informed by psychological and sociological expertise on matters related to collective trauma and resilient response.
This is a good resource. We all would do well to recognize and lament what we’ve all experienced, to try to find ways to make sense of what we’ve experienced in the story of who we are and what we are about, and seek to be blessings to others - and to be willing to receive the blessings others might give us.
Regardless of whether you consider it a significant improvement or some kind of apostatizing backsliding, it is beyond a doubt many in Churches of Christ are reassessing and reconsidering their pneumatology and how they understand the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Christians.
Behind all such reassessment and reconsideration remain the concerns of becoming overly “Calvinist” in terms of what one expects the Spirit to do to the Christian, or overly “Pentecostal” in terms of expressing life in the Spirit.
And yet here is Gary Tyra in Getting Real: Pneumatological Realism and the Spiritual, Moral, and Ministry Formation of Contemporary Christians (affiliate link) arguing how many Evangelicals, even plenty of Pentecostal Evangelicals (whom he deemed “Pentevangelicals”), have themselves become functionally deist in their understanding of God and destitute in their relationship with His Spirit!
One can only imagine what he might think of a pneumatology which suggested the Spirit’s only engagement with the Christian is mediated by his or her reading and studying the Scriptures.
The author began by setting forth his thesis: Christians are called to maintain what the author deemed pneumatological realism, in which the Spirit of God is recognized as a real presence in one’s life and not merely some kind of abstraction. He compared and contrasted this pneumatological realism with the functional deism he identifies in much of what passes for Protestantism in the early twenty-first century, relying on both the Enlightenment concept of deism and the pervasiveness of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as suggested by Christian Smith et al. He then considered what pneumatological realism looks like in terms of faithful engagement in and with the Spirit in terms of one’s spirituality, one’s moral behaviors, and in accomplishing the mission of God. He concludes with suggestions about how to practically encourage and foster pneumatological realism in a local church environment. The appendix seems to be the author’s thesis on Barth and prophetic preaching.
The author does come from a Pentecostal heritage but attempts to present pneumatological realism in more ecumenical ways.
The author does well when considering how God’s Spirit may prompt people in terms of faithfulness and service and how God is able to communicate in and through people in all kinds of different ways. “Coincidences” often aren’t. Yet I wonder if the author makes a bit too much of “prophetic preaching” because of a Pentecostal blurring of the lines between the one-time apostolic witness and our later efforts at contextualizing and applying that witness to our own time and place. It would be good to heed how the Spirit might prompt us in terms of that witness and how to make it effective in the twenty-first century. We might even be able to speak of a prophetic type of proclamation, one like the prophets inasmuch as it strongly and consistently applies the truth of God to people in the twenty-first century. But such messages are not inspired; we all have our limitations and what we focus on and what we comparatively neglect; as with all preaching, it is excellent to consider how the Spirit might work in and through such messages, but do we need to attempt to sacralize them further as prophetic utterances from the Spirit? Whatever possible upside is drowned out by the possible downsides.
There is much which would commend itself for pneumatological realism: the gift of the Holy Spirit was one of the great promises of the new covenant which would demonstrate a significant contrast with what had come before, and Paul makes much of the presence of the Spirit in the life of the believer. Such conversations have become far too reductive to information acquisition and distribution: some who have gone on before us seemed to think about the Spirit only in terms of making information known, and thus failed to imagine how the Spirit’s presence in life might energize and empower faithfulness in Christ. The same is true about the Calvinist emphasis and concern: yes, Calvinists went way too far in suggesting it is only the Spirit who could impart faith into a person, but imagining a person comes to faith without any spiritual influence is just as extreme as an over-reaction. Throughout the Scriptures, God works and people work; God works both in His own ways and through His servants. We are called to come to faith in Christ by our own initiative, and the Spirit will not compel or coerce us; nevertheless, do we not see, time and time again, how Paul encouraged believers to view the presence of the Spirit as the down payment of their salvation, to cultivate their relationship with God in Christ through that Spirit unto sanctification and the manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit, and to heed and follow the promptings of the Spirit? None of those things are the “speaking in tongues, prophecy, and knowledge” which would cease in 1 Corinthians 13:8-10. They remain no less important or powerful in 2024 than they were in 54.
So we do well to come to a better appreciation for the work of the Spirit of God in the life of the believer and how Christians are called to live their lives in the Spirit of God. Yet such has always, and will always, require discretion and wise judgment, discerning the Spirit of God from the various demonic spirits which would lead us astray. Making the Spirit all about information is almost a sure path to a functional deism which is bereft of the flourishing life of God in Christ through the Spirit, and it has not worked out that well for us.
No matter your views about what America is or should be, what makes up American culture, and immigration into America, one thing proves impossible to deny: the United States of America is becoming ever more Latin.
Perhaps part of our challenge has been our denial and ignorance regarding the presence of Latino/a Americans for generations. Marie Arana seeks to present the history and present of Latino/as in America in LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority (affiliate link; galley received as part of early review program).
The author is of Peruvian descent and has found great success in America and has worked at the highest echelons of the American publishing industry. Her writing is thorough and compelling. She interviewed a great number of people and their experiences provide a lot of color and depth in her narrative.
Throughout the author recognizes the challenge of speaking about “LatinoLand” as a coherent unity: as indicated at the end, perhaps there is greater unity today in terms of the experience of Latino/as in America than before, yet the various groups of Spanish speaking people from previously Spanish dominated nations remain quite different and often at least somewhat mutually antagonistic. Some might feel more affinity with white Americans or Black Americans than some other groups of Latino/as; woe to anyone who would act as if all Latino/as are essentially the same.
The author began with the basic historical outline: Columbus, the Spaniards, colonization and Catholicization, exploitation, and oppression. Then came the white Americans and the conquest of Texas and much of the rest of what was northern Mexico and which is now the American Southwest.
She ultimately will profile almost every national community: some aspects of their unique history and what conditions on the ground would motivate them to want to immigrate to the United States. She of course discusses the fraught nature of immigrating to the United States, whether by some kind of student or work visa or by crossing the border by means of coyotes, and presents examples.
She discusses the constant depredations and degradations which came at the hands of the white Americans: invitations to work in substandard conditions, willingness to expel not only undocumented but also documented Latino/a immigrants when it proved convenient to do so, with even some American citizens getting deported in the process. She does not shy away from demonstrating how many times the dire conditions which compel Latino/as to risk so much to come to the United States and live as undocumented stem from our misbegotten intrusions into their political systems and as the fruit of our seemingly bottomless demand for illegal drugs.
But the author is also not sparing about challenges within Latino/a cultures: the celebration of whiteness and the desire to “whiten the race”; prejudice between communities; the very divergent political trajectories of different groups of Latino/as, and the historical and modern reasons why plenty of people whose ancestors might have come from Spanish colonized areas do not identify as Latino/a but as white.
In this book I learned that not only did FDR et al detain Japanese-Americans and detain them in concentration camps, but our government also put pressure on our Latin American allies to round up their citizens of Japanese descent and to send them to the United States so we could detain them in those camps as well. Apparently the former president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, thus spent time in an American concentration camp. Tragic.
The author also addressed how Latino/as both attempt to belong and the challenges of trying to belong in American society. She well explored religion among Latino/a populations: the historical legacy of Catholicism; the surge of interest in Pentecostalism; how the “evangelication” of the Latino/a population has proven significant over the past forty years and what changes have attended on account of it.
She explores various ways of thinking in Latino/a cultures, but also emphasized how diligently Latino/as labor, and how well known they are for their work and work habits. She also highlights the many contributions made in almost every discipline, from academia to the sciences, music, television, movies, publishing, government, etc., by Latino/as. She laments how these Latino/as are poorly known and their contributions left unacknowledged as well as how poorly Latino/as are represented in corporate governance, governance in general, the highest levels of academia, etc., relative to their population in the United States.
The book might be long but is well written and easy to read. If you want to understand the great growth of Latin American cultures in the United States, and want to better understand and appreciate Latino/a presence and contribution to these United States, I highly recommend this book.
As always, thanks for your interest and support. Please share and subscribe!
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
Ethan