Dietrich Bonhoeffer, providing me with further ammunition in my assault upon bigness and greatness:

Thankfulness works in the Christian community as it usually does in the Christian life. Only those who give thanks for little things receive the great things as well. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts prepared for us because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. We think that we should not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must be constantly seeking the great gifts. Then we complain that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experiences that God has given to other Christians, and we consider these complaints to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the small (and yet really not so small!) gifts we receive daily. How can God entrust great things to those who will not gratefully receive the little things from God’s hand? If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian community in which we have been placed, even when there are no great experiences, no noticeable riches, but much weakness, difficulty, and little faith—and if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so miserable and so insignificant and does not at all live up to our expectations—then we hinder God from letting our community grow according to the measure and riches that are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

Currently reading: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works: Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible by Dietrich Bonhoeffer 📚

Brad East:

The church’s liturgy is the native habitat, the first home, of Holy Scripture. For Scripture is a document of devotion, the means of God’s gathered people hearkening to his voice and responding with thanks and praise. […]

Apart from ecclesial context, then, Scripture is not well understood. The reason is simple: Scripture has no existence apart from ecclesial context. Scripture is what it is within and in light of the church’s tradition. […]

The doctrine of Scripture begins with what we have, with the long-standing practices of using and relating to Scripture that have built up in the church’s life. Just as Tanakh was a given for the apostolic church, so the two-testament Bible is a given for the church after the apostles and church fathers. We rightly approach it in the faith of the church, under the teaching of the church, within the worship of the church, with the whole company of the church—that is to say, the communion of saints, past, present, and future. We open its pages with the words of the Shema and the Nicene Creed on our lips and in our hearts. Doing so will lead us into its depths, not obstruct our path.

Albarran Cabrera

A conflicted movie that left me feeling conflicted. Perhaps that was the point…

Ross Douthat:

The truth of America and the West in the first decades of the twenty-first century, a truth that helped give us the Trump presidency but will still be an important truth when he is gone, is that we have not been hurtling anywhere—except maybe in a circle. Instead, we are aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer optimistic about the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we await some saving innovation or revelation, burrowing into cocoons from which no chrysalis is likely to emerge, growing old unhappily together in the glowing light of tiny screens.

Currently reading: The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat 📚

Finished reading: Stewards of Eden by Sandra L. Richter 📚

As a work of biblical theology, it offers a fairly shallow treatment of Scripture, especially the New Testament. Still, Stewards of Eden provokes some worthwhile reflection on environmental stewardship, a much-neglected topic for Christians.

Currently reading: The Doctrine of Scripture by Brad East 📚

Finished reading: The Church’s Book by Brad East 📚

Meticulous, verbose even, but engaging and well-reasoned. Even for this theology nerd it was tough sledding at points, probably owing to the fact that it’s really a meta-analysis (i.e., reflection about our theologizing). Brad’s central point is well taken: what we think about the church matters for what we think about the Bible. By the end, it did feel like a lot of work simply to unearth where the conflict really lies in our theological interpretations. Of the three authors he treats (Webster, Jenson, Yoder), I’d only read Webster before. Moving forward, I’m most interested in digging into Jenson. But, I’m also curious to hear Brad’s constructive proposals for bibliology. He seems to have certain catholic ecclesial sensibilities resting alongside some very baptist, Yoderian impulses—a seemingly unstable concoction. I’ll be curious to see how he weaves those things together in The Doctrine of Scripture.