Waxing Theological

To the Church - the big C, body of Christ, Church Universal church: I'm a pastor - those of you reading this post probably know that already.  I put my sermons up here and sometimes write about theology and other things that I decide to write about when the muse hits me upside the head.  And those of you who know me and who've read enough of this blog know that I'm also a dad. I am the dad of two amazing children - as I type this right now, one of them is 4 and the other is 16 months.  And every day is a new experience, a new adventure, a new opportunity to see my children learn, grow, and develop.  Each day comes with new surprises, new delights, and yes, new challenges for my wife and I as we learn about our children, who they are, what they're growing to be, and how we can love them, care for them, and help them succeed and grow in this world. It's great to see these two kids growing up from my viewpoint as a pastor, too - I love to see how they're gro...

It's been a busy couple months for my family and I - I had hoped to write some more posts exploring the models of atonement, but between traveling to New York to visit family and then taking time at Covenant Point to participate with our local church camp, things got away from me.  My goal is to make some time in the next several weeks now to continue this exploration more fully! In the first entry we started by exploring what atonement is, and then went in-depth with the most common model that we see in both Catholic and Protestant churches: Satisfaction/Penal Atonement.  We see how the Satisfaction model stacks up, both its pros and its cons, and we see that it is still the most commonly-known and used model of atonement in our culture today.  But if this model isn't... pardon the pun... satisfactory, then what other models have been proposed, and how do they look, instead? As we noted earlier, Anselm kicked much of this debate off because he was unhappy with t...

A friend of mine recently posted a video that's pretty interesting - thought I'd share it to give context before getting deeper into this exploration.  It comes from www.fallingplates.com - it's an interesting evangelism website and the video itself uses some pretty compelling visuals and metaphors to explore the relationship we are invited into with Christ and the way in which Christ brings us back into relationship with God:     As I said - my friend shared this with me and she asked my thoughts.  Naturally, my seminary brain kicked in.  I said it's a good video, but commented on its use of penal atonement theology in talking about the crucifixion.  In my conversation with this friend, I realized that this is one of those things we talk about in seminary, but don't really talk about much in the "outside" world, so I decided that rather than try to handle this in a small post on Facebook, I'd do a larger exploration of "atonement t...

Over the last couple weeks now, I've been finding myself engaged in some good, old-fashioned apologetics and discussion.  You see... the Presbyterian Church has been making some news.  And some history. Oddly enough, I haven't really had a lot of the conversations I'd been expecting to have in the community - I consider myself fortunate, especially as other sister churches in our denomination are already seeing repercussions of the PC(USA)'s decision to redefine marriage as being between "two people, traditionally a man and a woman."  I haven't (knock on wood) received threats to the church .  I haven't had people storming my office demanding explanations or wondering when the first gay marriage ceremony was scheduled to happen.  Our local paper hasn't contacted me at all about the decision - which is interesting, given that the editor is a more conservative man who tends to cover some of these kinds of things in his editorials.  But I also haven...