The Week at Tov Unleashed

Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash

On Saturday I like to review the Newsletters/posts of the week, and this week began with a wonderful new book by Greg Mamula called Table Life: An Invitation to Everyday Discipleship. What’s the church for? Worship, instruction, and fellowship all flowing into a public life of witness.

Jesus knew this, Jews knew this, in fact the entire world knew this until the Industrial Revolution. Until then evenings were about eating, sitting around the table or the garden and chatting with family and friends and fellow believers. Gospel scholars know that most of Jesus’ teachings that we now know were responses to questions people asked Jesus, and the most common setting for those questions and responses were evening post-dinner conversations.

Tuesday we turned to Jemar Tisby’s wonderful new book. His new book How to Fight Racism, and he subtitles it Courageous Christianity and the Journey toward Racial Justice, and he develops three major topics: awareness, relationships, and commitment. He calls these the “ARC” of Racial Justice.

The journey is transformative for “transformed nonconformists,” what Tisby calls “courageous Christianity” because Christians have a past of racism to respond to, because they have a transcendent narrative that shows why racial justice important and it has the resources, which he calls moral and spiritual, to become dissidents against racism.

The opposite is “complicit Christianity” and, grabbing a wonderful expression from Brueggemann, he says it will need “prophetic imagination.” The book is an opportunity to dream and to reimagine a world without racism and then to work toward that world.

Wednesday — another new book — by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt’s,  The God That is Love: An Invitation to Christian Faith. He begins where perhaps more theology should begin: with love. Theology that is not about love is not theology: it’s divorced from God who is love.

On Thursday we joined Brent Strawn in asking if the Old Testament is spiritually enriching.

Brent Strawn, in Lies My Preacher Told Me., probes into the accusation that the OT is not spiritually enriching. He’s kind about it because he’s dealt with it so often, but he does open his chapter with this: “If you’re in my line of work, it’s hardly to take [this claim] seriously.” I would up him one: if you read Jesus you must not take this claim seriously.

To put the matter more directly: the Old Testament is spiritually enriching if it is read for spiritual enrichment, if we approach it as a spiritually enriching book, if we come to it expecting to be addressed by a word that can change us for the better.

Approach matters. It may be the whole story. If you think our ancestors have to be as “perfect” or as “enlightened” as we are you will be guilty not of moral judgment but of presentism with a blindness – as all have been – to your own faults and weaknesses.

Finally, yesterday (Friday) I looked at six approaches to reading the Gospels of the New Testament. Here’s one part:

Fifth, we can read them as literature. We all were given some rubrics for reading literature (fiction etc) and the very principles learned there can help us read the Gospels: look at characters and their development, watch for the plot and once we grasp it (birth to death and resurrection!), then read the Gospel again watching for how the author forms that plot, look at events and how the events fit into the larger plot. Look for tension points, and protagonists and antagonists, and resolutions and open-endedness. Foreshadowings and retrospective summaries. All these can be at work in us as we read the Gospel of John. It works. Try it. Take your time and let it do what it can do. Do with each of the Gospels.

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