To persuade them, in short, that theology matters to a liberal education.
.. But nothing outrages them — not the writings of Augustine or Erasmus or Luther — more than two or three pages of John Calvin.
.. Calvin was the most influential religious reformer of the 16th century. His theological imagination and organizational genius prepared the way for almost all forms of American Protestantism, from the Presbyterians to the Methodists to the Baptists. He was also a severe and uncompromising thinker. The Ayatollah of Geneva, some have called him.
.. “Some are born destined for certain death from the womb, who glorify God’s name by their own destruction.” This is the heart of Calvin’s teaching of predestination, his insistence that God determined each human destiny before the creation of the world. The elect are bound for heaven, the reprobate to hell, and there is absolutely nothing to be done about it, ever.
.. Your merits, your good will, your moral action: None of these make a difference. The chosen Jacob is no better than the rejected Esau. The damned glorify God’s name. And God is pleased by the whole business.
.. The first lesson that Calvin teaches us is about the power of an idea, uncompromisingly expressed and shrewdly argued.
.. Be careful what you believe in. Consider the consequences of your commitments. Investigate what your own views demand.
.. The third lesson is this: that we don’t need to take Calvin’s bait.
.. “All those who do not know that they are God’s own will be miserable through constant fear.”
.. The German sociologist Max Weber’s view — that it was precisely the uncertainty generated by Calvin’s doctrine of election that helped spur the rise of capitalism — is one canonical analysis that I can now share with them. The historian Perry Miller’s view — that the inability to hew to election was crucial to the formation of colonial American Protestantism — is another.
How Male Theologians Ruined Parenting
A pastor and a rabbi talk about kids, poop, and tearing down the patriarchy in institutional religion
The Bible is a man’s book. It was mostly written by men, for men, and about men. The people who then interpreted the text have also been predominately male.
No wonder there’s not much theology preoccupied with weird-colored poop and the best way to weather tantrums. Throughout history, childcare has largely been considered women’s work—and, by extension, not theologically serious.
.. What in theology is traditionally associated with women? There’s this whole realm of human experience to which our texts are oblivious—they’re not considered important because they’re not on the radar screen of the people who are traditionally writing theology.
.. And there are times when a critique is necessary, like with mikvah. There are some traditionally misogynistic undertones in the way it’s been framed and deployed throughout history. Yet, to throw out the baby with the bathwater didn’t feel right either, because it is actually probably the closest thing to magic that I’ve ever experienced. I think we can do feminist work to grapple with and reclaim, on our own terms, some of the more problematic aspects of Judaism for women.
.. one day the question popped into my head, “I wonder how many theologians throughout history have been mothers?” The answer is, of course, almost none.
.. I’ve never been big on what you call atonement theology: An angry God demands a bloody sacrifice of his beloved child. But the fact that if I said that to a kid it would give them nightmares and make them hate and fear God—that gives good reason to think of another understanding about what Jesus is all about.
.. There’s certainly a place in the tradition for folks who have vowed to be celibate to speak about intimacy and love and childbearing. If there are men who are doing the good work of parenting while doing other things, then I think, certainly, they could be bridge-builders, too. But you’d really want folks who know what they are talking about.
.. I look at them and think, “Wow, you exist, and I’m not really sure how”—technically, yes, but not really. When I go down deep enough into my love for them, I feel like that can take me everywhere. That’s as much a portal to the holy as it was in those moments when I was in my 20s and blissing out in prayer by myself and having deep powerful meditations at three in the morning and crazy mystical experiences and all of that. I think God is at least, if not more, present in all of my interactions with them... There’s sometimes been a sense that evangelical Christians were more concerned about your marriage and your kids and your family, and the more liberal, mainline Protestants were more concerned with civil rights and social justice, and those were sort of separate entities.
Vulnerability–Even in God!
Only vulnerability allows all change, growth, and transformation to happen–even in God.Who would have imagined this?
.. Only later does Paul have the courage to confront Peter and James in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:16-21), and then a full fourteen years later he tells Peter “to his face” that Peter is wrong (2:11) for imposing non-essentials on people that only give them an incorrect understanding of their correctness or righteousness. (Apparently Peter, the first Pope, was himself fallible, and he too had to learn how to be wrong to grow up!)
.. In Paul’s letters, he consistently idealizes not power but powerlessness, not strength but weakness, not success but the cross. It’s as if he’s saying, “I glory when I fail and suffer because now I get to be like Jesus–the naked loser–who turned any notion of God on its head.” Now the losers can win, which is just about everybody.
Stanley Hauerwas
Hauerwas, therefore, believes that the Niebuhrs’ thinking is subject to the same flaws as Jerry Falwell, with Hauerwas and Willimon stating that “few books have been a greater hindrance to an accurate assessment of [the Church’s] situation” than H. Richard Niebuhr’s famous book Christ and Culture.[66] Thus according to Hauerwas, while they may have disagreed when it comes to policy, both the Niebuhrs and Falwell fell prey to the notion Christians have a duty to use the political process as a means to enact “Christian” legislation or pursue justice.