Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christianity

  • Theodicy Interview with Bruce Epperly

    Theodicy Interview with Bruce Epperly

    The second in my series of interviews on theodicy is now available. Dr. Bruce Epperly discussed this with me for around an hour. You can see the video below. (The first interview can be found here.)

    The purpose of this series is to showcase a variety of views on theodicy and even ways of expressing those views. I expect the next interview to be with Dr. Allan R. Bevere.

    Speaking of Allan, he participated in a discussion on the problem of evil with Bruce some time ago. You might want to go back and listen to that as well.

  • A Robust Theodicy?

    A Robust Theodicy?

    As I conduct interviews on theodicy with various authors, I’d like to suggest this:

    We need a theodicy (and in fact a full theology) that is as comfortable in Job as in Deuteronomy. This would be the expression of a faith that isn’t forgotten in good times or repudiated in bad.

    Here again is the first video:

    I will be interviewing Dr. Bruce Epperly and Dr. Allan R. Bevere on Thursday, November 10, 2022 and will be posting those interviews over the next couple of days. Further interviews will be announced here.

  • Church Titles, Anyone?

    Church Titles, Anyone?

    I have frequently observed that if we were to understand the way authority works in the Kingdom of God, we would have less arguments about who gets what title. Maybe we’d drop as many titles as possible.

    Dave Black comments on this, and quotes Markus Barth today. I think he has a point.

    Seven Marks of a New Testament Church
    Ditch the Building
  • Are the Pillars Choking Your Church?

    Are the Pillars Choking Your Church?

    I wrote this essay some time ago. I’m strongly in favor of caring for our long-term church members, those who keep the church going through thick and thin, and have been doing so for a long time.

    But as a member of the long-enduring group, I advocate every effort being made for the next generation, physically and spiritually.

    Of Trees and Saplings

    Featured image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

  • Believing Impossible Things

    Believing Impossible Things

    In Alice in Wonderland, the queen says that sometimes she has believed six impossible things before breakfast. A fair number of years ago, someone told me that in response to points of my Christian faith. The aim was most likely to shock or offend me.

    How did I respond? I don’t recall what I said. It wasn’t terribly memorable. But I do know what I thought. Yes, indeed, I do believe a number of impossible things before breakfast, not to mention after breakfast as well. I have never understood the desire to make so many of the very difficult aspects of the Christian faith as rational as possible. If God can be explained rationally within the incredibly tiny sphere of my personal knowledge, there’s really no point. That’s a mini-god.

    Now I don’t mean here that all aspects of religious faith are irrational. There are things I believe that can be rationally explained. Various arguments for the existence of God can, for example, open up a crack through which some light may shine. The arguments of a historian may create a place in which a virgin birth, or a resurrection might just be hinted at as an explanation for so many things.

    But I believe in a God who created the universe. I was thinking the other day while I gazed at a picture of galaxies seen from the Hubble Telescope in a part of space that looked empty to the naked eye. The space was filled. Now it’s not entirely impossible to suggest that this was created by someone or something. But when you add to that the idea that the entire universe was created by Someone who actually cares about anything that happens to me, you are proposing something patently impossible. If you claim it is possible, other than in one’s imagination, I suspect you of not really comprehending just how far that is out of the boundaries of comprehension.

    As we come up to Easter, we will commemorate a God who became flesh, lived here, and ultimately permitted himself to be tortured and killed. I believe that happened. If you try to reply to that problem with the doctrine of the trinity, let me note that you have responded to an apparent physical impossibility with a logical impossibility, the idea that one person can really be three, and three can be one.

    Yet I believe all of those things. I have disappointed not a few people when I decline to try to make all these beliefs rational. The incarnation (a person being 100% God [whatever we mean by that] and 100% human at the same time) is both a logical and, should we be able to figure out what would be involved, would doubtless also be a physical impossibility.

    People who believe all these things can certainly also believe in a great number of truly rational and reasonable things. I believe in the laws of nature and live my life largely in accordance with them. (Some of that health stuff is overcome by my general desire to enjoy life!) I find often that I agree to a large extent with those who do not believe in God on matters of ethics, politics, and as far as it applies to daily life, rational interaction with the universe.

    But I still believe that God, one capable of creating all those galaxies, well past my imagination already in the physical universe, also, as one member of the trinity (three in one!) became flesh (100% divine and 100% human), died, and rose again from the dead.

    The same God also notices when a sparrow falls.

    Six impossible things before breakfast?

    Trivial!

  • A God Without Wrath

    … a God without wrath does not plan to do much liberating. Indeed, that God’s anger is kindled when harm is done to the least among us not only gives us hope that earthly injustices don’t have the last word but also insight into God’s compassionate nature.

    Deanna Thompson, Deuteronomy (Belief: a Theological Cimmentary on the Bible), 31

    This is an excellent point. We need to think about what is necessary when evil asserts itself.

  • Kierkegaard on Heresies

    Kierkegaard on Heresies

    “The established church is far more dangerous to Christianity than any heresy or schism. We play at Christianity. We use all the orthodox Christian terminology — but everything, everything withour character …. There is something frightful in the fact that the most dangerous thing of all, playing at Christianity, is never included in the list of heresies or schisms” . 

    (Provocations, p. 227) – via Dave Black Online
  • Suicide Recovery at Church

    Suicide Recovery at Church

    This video is my interview with Dr. Veronica Sites, author of the newly released book Love Me to Life: Suicide Recovery at Church. I was particularly pleased both to publish this book and to do this interview because suicide is often ignored or swept under the rug in the church. This results in harm to just about everyone, those who contemplate suicide, those who survive it, family, and friends.

    Veronica takes this issue head-on and discusses it seriously. There are many practical points in the interview, pointing to even more practical materials in the book. I think any pastor or church leader would benefit from a serious study of this. Don’t be caught off guard!

    Do you know where you can refer someone who is contemplating suicide? Do you know how to listen? Are you going to add condemnation to the burdens that person is already bearing?

    Love Me to Life will help you respond faithfully and positively to those who are very much in need.

  • The Healing Hands of Jesus

    The Healing Hands of Jesus

    My brother, Dr. Robert Neufeld, preserved a recording of our father preaching, something he did not do all that often. Dr. Raymond D. Neufeld spent his life in service as a doctor. He didn’t talk about it a great deal. He just kept doing what he believed was right.

    In this recording, the final 2 minutes and a bit were lost, and my father re-recorded it at my brother’s request.

    I hope you enjoy and are blessed. The presentation is titled “The Healing Hands of Jesus.”

    My mother was an RN and served with my father in various places. You can learn more about their experiences in the book Directed Paths.

  • Love Is All You Need

    Love Is All You Need

    Starting on Martin Luther King’s birthday, we have seen a number of quotes advocating love. I intended to post something that day, but as I frequently do I got diverted.

    I wrote something about this long ago. It’s unfortunate that love has become a sort of cliche for a benevolent feeling combined with inaction. We can post comments about love and unity, and then go on doing what we were going to do anyhow.

    I wrote about this back in 2006 in a post titled On Being a Love Preacher. I still am.

    But love isn’t easy. I fail at it on a daily basis. That’s why I’m also a grace preacher. Grace deals with our failure to love.

    The next error follows quickly after. Grace is not an alternative to sanctification. It isn’t a way to get out of being transformed. It’s not grace vs holiness. Rather, grace is the one means by which sanctification can happen. Wesleyans call it “sanctifying grace.” But all too often we pretend that sanctifying grace is something other than grace. It’s nice to have all those labels for grace applied in different ways at different times. But we can also forget that some of them are grace.

    Sanctification is God working in you. It begins with God’s love and spreads through you. It is very active. It is not easy, any more than love is.

    I hope that we don’t just comfort ourselves with quotes about love in action, but rather begin to see others through God’s work in us. Recognizing our limitations and failures and the way God has worked with us, we let grace sanctify the way we see our neighbors.

    In the incarnation, God crossed the greatest gap possible, from the infinite to the finite, indeed miniscule on the scale of the finite. Your differences with your neighbor cover much less ground than God already covered.

    The same gap crossing God can work in me, and in you.

    Featured Image by Pexels from Pixabay.