Back to the Garden

What a time to be alive. I recall a conversation between a fellow seminarian and one of our New Testament professors during my time at Providence wherein the student suggested that maybe we should pray to receive more suffering. The professor immediately exclaimed, "NO! We never pray for more suffering, suffering will always come, we pray for the grace to get through it faithfully." I've thought a lot about that conversation over the years, and especially now, in the middle of a global pandemic. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were still planning on spending her Spring Break in Lisbon. Two days later, I was booking a flight home from the UK in an attempt to get back to Canada before borders and airports started shutting down. Beyond the re-location, my own life hasn't changed much, I continue to sit at a desk reading books all day, except now I get to do that at the family farm instead of a moldy office on the edge of the University of Birmingham. I have a deep appre...

Last week, the Anglican Church of Canada was rocked by a report that the last member would leave the church by 2040. Decline in church membership is nothing new to Anglican Church of Canada. There has been a steady decline in this denomination since our apogee in 1961, decreasing from 1.2 million adherents to just over 300k today. But for a denomination that was the third largest in Canada for most of its history, it is difficult to come to terms with the news that the institution will flatline within a generation if nothing changes. Of course, this report is, at least in part, a trick of how statistical modelling works. It is unlikely that many of the young families who still call Anglicanism home will somehow disappear in the next 20 years, but given that the overall demographic of the denomination skews elderly, it is not preposterous to suppose that many parishes will be closing their doors in the coming years. As a postulant for ordination in priestly ministry, and a PhD stud...

Intro One of the many peculiar graces of my upbringing was the opportunity to grow up in a community that put a high value on reading the Bible. Now, keep in mind, I grew up in a pretty small town, and there weren’t a lot of things to do, but I remember one evening being invited over to my friend’s house where we sat around in a circle and read through the 4 gospels aloud out of a chronological bible my one friend had. Who does that kind of thing? Well, we did. You see, one of the programs our church offered was something called “Bible Quizzing,” and yes, it’s exactly as nerdy as it sounds. Essentially, we were given portions of the new testament every year that we were supposed to memorize. Every week we would learn a new chapter of the material and then every few months we would get together with teams from other churches all across the Prairies for Quiz Meets where we would be tested on our bible memorization. The “game” aspect of quizzing was sort of like “Reach for the Top.” T...

Boersma, Hans. Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church .  Grand                Rapids, MI:Baker Academic, 2017. Hans Boersma's recent book, Scripture as Real Presence  is a valuable work of resourcement (273) for the contemporary upsurge in the Protestant interest in the theological interpretation of Scripture. Boersma's thesis is two-fold: Modern biblical scholarship has bracketed out questions of metaphysics, creating a crisis for dogmatic descriptions of Scripture , AND,  the church should recover the sacramental understanding of the Bible that rests on the Christian Platonism of the Fathers. In my Old Testament Theology course in seminary, one of the assignments we had was for each student to present a snapshot of a different scholar's OT theology. It was a large class (for that school), so we ended up covering around 20 different OT theologies that ranged from the late 19th century to toda...