parables of a prodigal world

I confess that I've been too busy over the last few days to have read any further from Christians at the Cross . But maybe that was providential, inasmuch as there was a theme that occurred early in the book that had been pressing on my heart to share, one that was less explicit than Wright's presentation of the fresh, new paradigm that I spoke of in my first post . In Chapter 1, The Sermon at the Eucharist on Palm Sunday , Wright says and does something that, I believe, is indicative of one of the central lessons I've learned from grappling with his work in its entirety. Toward the end of the chapter, he says (addressed to the congregation to whom the sermon was originally delivered): "I want you to write down, over the next two or three days, just a sentence or two, or maybe a word or two, about the particular griefs that this community has had to bear in recent years. And over the course of the week we'll gather them up, we'll put them in a basket here somew...

I just got my hands on N.T. Wright's newest book, Christians at the Cross: Finding Hope in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus . I made it about halfway through last night. The book is essentially a collection of a series of sermons delivered during Holy Week 2007 in the town of Easington Colliery in the Northeast of England, a town who's economic lifeline, a mammoth coal mining pit that employed thousands, was shut down in 1993, leading to more than a decade of hopelessness in the community, economic and otherwise. I'm not sure if it was providence or coincidence that I began to read the book at precisely the same time that I've been engaging in a conversation over at the Emergent Village blog about the collapse of "Emerging Church" as a defining label . That conversation has, perhaps naturally, morphed into one about how we as a Church can best communicate the Good News of Jesus. And it is that question that is so freshly tackled by Wright in Chri...

My good friend Tandy commented in an earlier post : "I think you are on track and given Piper’s statement that He does not think that Wright is under the curse of Galatians 1:8-9 we will have to take him at his word. I would still like to know how Piper would apply Galatians 1:8-9. It does not satisfy me to say that the original readers would know but we cannot know how the curse is to be applied. Once you have this opinion on difficult sayings where does its application stop? If you are correct how can we know anything biblical with certainty?" It really made me think, especially about the notion of knowing things with certainty. And I guess I can say it no better than N.T. Wright himself in the following excerpt from a lecture on the Resurrection that he delivered at Cambridge in May of last year, one that truly and radically changed the way I view issues of truth and knowing. Though the specific topic is different, the point is germane. "I want, rather, to finish wit...

Well, the discussion on the Emergent Village post on predictions of the collapse of "Emerging Church" as a defining label has been both prolific and edifying. Many of the commentators have made me think anew about the issue. But an interesting sub-current within the commentary was the theme of how we Christians should or should not be conducting ourselves within the conversation. If you read through the 30+ comments, you will sense a dynamic of anger swelling right toward the middle, and then subsiding as a new sense of loving rebuke was introduced, and that tone then prevailing toward the end. And I think that dynamic is a beautiful metaphor for the Christian story as a whole, which also reminds me of another such metaphor, one that I personally experienced a few years ago. For those who don't know me personally, I'm an attorney (please don't hold that against me). Some years ago, I was representing a client before the Social Security Administration. We had just ...