The Urge to Post

I have not posted in a few days, and suddenly I feel the need. I really have nothing spectacular or insightful to post, but that has not stopped me before. It has been a while since I reviewed a book, and it looks like that trend will continue. I am working my way through Repentance in Christian Theology, which is a fairly lengthy collection of essays by some quite gifted scholars. Also in the loop right now are Colossians Remixed which started strong, but is starting to weigh me down, Robert Jenson's Systematic Theology, which is brilliant but slow going for me so far and A Long Obedience in the Same Direction which I am reading with an amazing group of college students. All of this reading at the same time insures two realities, 1. No book reviews for a while, and 2. Once one of the reviews posts, there will two or three more shortly thereafter. In the meantime two quotes I found particularly insightful:

1. In describing the emergence of post-modernism, Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat give the best, succinct account of the motivating forces:
"We live inside the future of a shattered past because that past told grand stories proved to be destructive lies. The grand story of a Marxist utopia collapsed with the Berlin Wall. The heroic tale of tecnological progress blew up with the Challenger explosion. The progress myth of democratic capitalism that promised economic prosperity and social harmony strains under the weight of economic contraction, ecological threat, and an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, both domestically and internationally. The postmodernist ethos insists that stories such as these- stories that have so shaped our lives- are not stories of emancipation and progress after all but stories of enslavement, oppression, and violence." Colossians Remixed, 23.

2. Terence Fretheim in his essay makes this very crucial point about repentance in the OT: "[T]he former prophets understand that repentance is possible, finally only because of God's promise. Human repentance constitutes a gift of God in view of the promise; indeed , repentance is not possible without the promise being understood as directly applicable to the one who would repent." Repentance in Christian Theology, 33.


More to come.