Bishop Linda Nicholls of the Church of Canada on a potential pandemic flu: The whole of society will be affected, including the Church, and it behooves us to reflect both pragmatically and theologically on how we will respond. Although the pragmatic response is often the easiest and quickest to deal with, it is especially important to reflect on the theological roots for our response.
The Gnostics and similar heretics denied the goodness of creation. They denied that the Creator of the universe is the same good God as the Father of Jesus. And lastly, they denied that Jesus came and suffered in the flesh. I would submit to you that there is nothing particularly progressive or liberating in these theories.
It’s Jesus alive and with us that makes us Christian. The ‘how’ of the mystery of resurrection matters because it points toward Jesus and also makes us talk as well as we can, as much as we understand about bodies and selves, the incarnational demand of finding words to preach Jesus’ ‘resurrection from the dead’ and the promise of our own resurrection.
Jesus is the life of God. Not just a godly life. Not just a good life. But the Life of God. The life coursing through God’s being – the blood in his veins – the active principle, the verb of action and living, the essential name.
The pivotal assumption on my part is the centrality of the Incarnation – the God-man, Jesus Christ. Here, my Incarnation theology is more in the tradition of the Wisdom literature of the Scriptures, the
Church Fathers and the Orthodox tradition (in contrast to that of Anselm). The Incarnation is the
very reason for creation, so that God might graciously share the Divine life with the “other”.
“Hence persons who raise questions about biblical prohibitions of certain species of sexual behavior between individuals of the same gender may be “revisionists”; but they are no more so than many of the prophets—or Jesus, or Paul, or certain of the saints of later times (Athanasius, e.g., or MartinLuther, or the Wesleys, or Wilberforce, or F. D. Maurice, or Martin Luther King, Jr.).”
Church historian Mark Noll noted in America’s God that prior to the Civil War belief in the Bible’s support for the institution of slavery so thoroughly dominated American Christianity that Christian abolitionists necessarily relied on ethical arguments against slavery that were independent of scripture.
It is easy to be thankful when everything is going well. But how to be thankful when things are not going so well? The company is on shaky ground and the job may disappear; the kids are going through a really rough time; the economy appears as unstable as it has been in many years; people we love are seriously ill or have died; the future is uncertain. What can I say to those suffering, to you, about these things in your lives?
The saddest example of church architecture I have ever seen is the Dunker Church situated on the Antietam Civil War battlefield in Maryland. What saddened me was neither the damage from cannonballs nor inadvertently poor choice of location. What saddened me was that the church, structurally and in terms of its décor, was distinguishable from some mid-eighteenth century schoolhouses.
Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori is featured in an article, on this the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, discussing her own experience of how science and theology mutually inform one another