This Past Week on Tov Unleashed

We began last Monday looking at Beth Allison Barr’s new book, whose opening …

… in The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth shakes me every time I’ve read (three times now). It’s a searching story and a seering confession. I begin this series on Beth’s book with her story because we are all thinking in and out of our stories. It is the most captivating personal account of this topic I have ever read. I clip pieces but you can catch the narrative arc.

I NEVER MEANT to be an activist.

A single woman behind the pulpit was aberrant; married women behind their husbands were the norm.

The number of people who have told me the impact of Dobson continues to amaze me because he was not a voice when I grew up. Tradition was in the air but complementarianism as an ideology was not yet known. It would not be known until Piper and Grudem. It is now an ideology. One of my former colleagues called this issue – back in the early 90s – “principial.” That means “First Order” theology. Deny it all they want, but complementarianism is a dividing line as much as Trinitarian theology, and the latter has been subdued by the former by some.

Then we turned to a new book by John Dickson:

There were five crusades by European Christendom against the Muslim occupation of Jerusalem, in particular. The first in 1096-1099 and the fifth in 1213-1229. John Dickson, in his splendid new book called Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History, unflinchingly looks at hard at the good and the bad and evil. We need more church history books this honest.

I’m reading this book because I’m thinking many of you won’t or don’t want to (and I don’t blame you!).

He begins with the horrific breaking through into Jerusalem and the merciless slaughter of men, women, and children. It was barbaric, brutal, it was bloody.

And more significantly: understood as God’s judgment on sinners.

Wednesday we finished the enlightening and challenging book by Ryan Burge:

Those not seeking and those not attending are called The Nones. We’ve been looking through what may be one of the most significant books of the last, Ryan Burge’s book, and after our sketches of his sketches of the data, he offers two suggestions of what we can do.

Before we get to those two suggestions, he offers a stiff arm — two of them that push a clear point: it’s not about to turn around if things remain as they are. Globalization is not backing up and it means fewer jobs and less income and more and more having to relearn a trade or find a new job or work more than one job.

Secularization is real. Define it as you want but fewer people are attending church even though about 90% of Americans believe in God. The Nones are unaffiliated even if religious. They don’t claim a local church and don’t attend on a regular basis.

Globalization and secularization are the borg. (Yes, I believe God can bring revival and I pray for it, but until then I want to stare realities in the eyes. They stare back.)

They seem unstoppable. If they are, what can we do?

And then Eugene Peterson and how our life experiences became a major form of guiding us to our calling — and the comments were wonderful.

Guidance for many is not all of a sudden perfectly clear. For most it is not. I really like this line by Collier: “His life and work had been more like tracing a scent than following a map” (60). Do I hear an Amen!?

Not everyone chasing a scent finds its source, but the chase was all worth it. The scent shapes the path we follow, the turns we navigate, and the direction we go.

In seminary Peterson found one of his greatest passions: Bible reading as conversation.

The Bible – as Eugene had known it – offered principles for moral living, artillery for theological skirmishes, and clichés providing therapeutic salve. His church had implicitly used it as a textbook or occasionally even a weapon, but no one had ever guided him into the wonder, beauty, and artistry of the ancient pages (68).

This is what he learned from Robert Traina, whose Methodical Bible Studywas a favorite of my “inductive Bible study” class in undergraduate. That book helped teach me to read the Bible myself and to see what I saw and to listen to what I heard. Peterson’s personal reading of the Bible became a conversation. No better term for how best to read the Bible. None.

The beginnings of his perception of pastoral work came to him from the well-known George Buttrick, and this maybe one of the most significant statements describing what became Peterson’s way.

Our Friday lecture was on the six dimensions of conversion.