Back to the Garden

This past weekend I graduated from Providence Theological Seminary with an MA in Systematic Theology. I had the great honour of delivering the valedictory address at the convocation. Thanks to all my friends and family who were in attendance and who have supported me along this long journey. Below is a copy of the speech I delivered on Saturday: Dr. Johnson, chairman of the board, honored guests, faculty, staff, friends, family, students and graduates. Greetings. It is fitting that our graduation from seminary should be in the season of Easter. Graduation, as you well know, is a time for celebrating, giving thanks, and listening to vain platitudes from those who are appointed to give speeches. I’m afraid I do not have those things on offer for you today. But what I do have is an Easter vision of hope that makes certain the future that graduation promises but cannot deliver. St. Paul begins his epistle to the Romans in the most inflammatory way possible: Paul, a servant of Je...

Allow me to begin with a bold claim. There are, it seems to me, two general ways to make an argument. One way, the way of the polemicist, is to make grand, totalizing assertions, dismissing contrary positions as out-of-hand or ignorant. The second, the way of the academic, is to qualify claims by nuancing a position so that it can nimbly avoid most obvious objections. Of course, many academics are polemical, and some folks who make bold claims have done the hard work to nuance them properly. But it seems as though, in an intellectual climate where all claims are met with a hermeneutic of suspicion, assuming, of course, that all assertions are merely veiled power-plays, even the most nuanced of position is open to misunderstanding or death by virtue of the failings of whatever rational system makes the claim intelligible.  Now, don't get me wrong, there is an important place for careful argumentation and close analysis of evidences in order to find conceptual clarity. There ...

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend Mennonite Church Manitoba's annual general meeting. Our church conference has been having an ongoing disagreement over how we understand marriage and have been through a long process of discernment, argumentation, and study on the issue. This meeting was a huge encouragement as I witnessed church leaders who deeply disagree with each other on a host of issues surrounding the issue of marriage and sexuality extend deep grace and hope for continued peaceful worship together. My congregation issued a statement that attempted to be as gracious in its assertions as it could be and was responded to by leaders from other congregations with open hands and open hearts in spite of our deep disagreements. This image of peace-through-disagreement is exactly the kind institution the church has always and will always be. Our unity in Christ is not based on uniformity, but on our willingness to keep Christ at the center, even as we have deep d...

The wild ass is a recurring theme throughout the Old Testament. It is impossible to know for sure, but it is likely that this refers to the now-extinct Wild Syrian Ass. This specimen was once ubiquitous across the Arabian peninsula and, while being the smallest member of the equidae family, was compared to the thoroughbred in strength and beauty - though it was impossible to domesticate. In Genesis 16, the angel of the Lord proclaims in an oracle that Ishmael will be a 'wild ass of a man' after Sarah had forced Hagar and the child into the wilderness. Job frequently cites the wild ass in his lamentations and is pointed to the wild ass by God as an example of one of the many creatures that God has established and sustained even in the harsh conditions of the wilderness (cf. Job 39). The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Hosea also reference the wild ass - predominately in the context of other judgment, wilderness, and desolation oracles and metaphors. (cf. Hosea 8:9, Dani...

( Readers may be aware that I began this blog to help me think through my graduate thesis on the work of Stanley Hauerwas. I handed it in tonight, here is the conclusion which may serve as a brief overview for anybody who is interested in what I've been writing about these past months. ) Stanley Hauerwas always claims that he neither has a position to defend nor is he intelligent enough to come up with a position to defend. [1] Yet, there are characteristic ways in which Hauerwas does theology and it is my hope that I have at least been able to describe the particular imagination that Hauerwas displays in trying to show the difference that Jesus makes to how the church is to live and think. That Jesus matters for Christian theology and ethics should be part of the definition of these practices, yet so often this has failed to be the case. In attempts to be ‘relevant’ or ‘rational’ in modernity, theology, especially in North America, has often abandoned the particular claims of ...

"But this  is how it is - " I say to myself over and over again. I feel as though, if only I could fix my gaze absolutely sharply on this fact, get it in focus, I must grasp the essence of the matter. ( Philosophical Investigations, I, 113)  This is truly the madness of writing. Deadlines loom, "w ords strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still," and I am unmade.

I cannot believe in God, that is why I study theology. Ben Myers once wrote: Theologians are people for whom the Christian faith is especially difficult, incomprehensible, infuriating. As a rule they are not especially talented or spiritually adept individuals. They are people whose minds have been hurt by God, and they are restlessly searching for – what? Healing perhaps, or catharsis? To expect so much from the study of theology would be futile or even dangerous. At any rate there is no lack of opportunities for theological catharsis: often our worship services seem calculated to remove the difficulty of believing, to make God easy and accessible, more a cure than a wasting sickness. Perhaps then we should define theologians like this: They are people for whom even the Christian worship service does not provide adequate catharsis of the hurtfulness of God.  That is why, as a general rule, you should try to show kindness to theologians. Not because they are necessarily exemp...