I believe it was the late Glenn Frey of the Eagles who said, “Rock and roll is not about perfection. It is about excellence.” If I recall correctly, Frey was responding to the notion of achieving perfection on any given take in the recording studio. Frey called into question whether anyone could really know what […]
Month: November 2016
“Thus alone is the Church renewed…”: 2016 and the Barmen Declaration
Rumor has it that on an early summer afternoon in 1934 Karl Barth took a snifter of fine brandy, five stout Brazilian cigars, a manual typewriter and a sheaf of paper and began to flesh out the essential draft of the “Theological Declaration of Barmen[i].” (It is also rumored that Barth finished the document that […]
The Church, the State, and Why Context Matters
Forty years ago this summer, I sat with a group of friends listening to a then-popular fundamentalist teacher who tried his best to make Romans 13 the only biblical source that should inform a “real Christian” what citizenship means. I’ll save you an afternoon’s worth of rabbit torture and sum it up by saying that, […]