by | Jul 1, 2024 | Uncategorized
Russell Moore is joined by Marilynne Robinson for a conversation on reading Genesis as a story of grace.
This article is an excerpt of a conversation on CT’s podcast The Russell Moore Show. Listen to the full conversation here.
Russell Moore: I’ll tell you what was surprising to me about Reading Genesis: I expected certain themes to be there—such as the mystery of human beings and the fact that we’re not reducible to causes and effects. But one of the things I was surprised by is that this is a book about grace and forgiveness. The Cain and Abel narrative shows up repeatedly in ways I hadn’t considered—from Lamech all the way on to Joseph and his brothers.
There is a sense of moral shock in the fact that God would protect Cain after killing his brother. And it struck me that, as with so many other things in the Bible, the familiarity that we have with it reduces that sense of shock that that is intended.
Marilynne Robinson: It was a question that came up in a class, but it shocked me too. And I think that was the beginning of my reappraisal of these stories, because the obvious importance of Cain and Abel is a master narrative of so much else. The mark of Cain, which we know protected him, was something that stigmatized him.
RM: I’ve kind of unconsciously seen the story as primarily about Cain and Abel’s rivalry, Abel’s subsequent murder, sacrifice, and so forth, and only secondarily about God’s response to Cain. But now, after reading your book, I’m rethinking that because it seems that the most startling thing here is not just a brother’s blood cries from the ground, but that God doesn’t execute the murderer—he protects him. And that’s something that you demonstrate repeatedly through Reading Genesis.
MR: It’s such a strongly recurring …
Continue reading…
by | Jul 1, 2024 | Uncategorized
Jesus asked if we want to get well. But do we?
At 24, I was a recent Bible college graduate and married a whopping six days when I began my first ministry as a hospital chaplain. I had never seen a dead body before. I had no experience with grief. I was way out of my depth.
After I arrived, there was a brief meet and greet with the hospital staff, who handed me four beepers and began a tour of the facility. A few minutes later, one beeper flashed brightly and I soon found myself in a small room filled with unhinged, screaming people. They had just been told their mother died on the surgery table. I had no idea what to do. That is where I first met my anxiety.
The next several weeks were similar. There is nothing like sudden death, bone marrow tests, bald children, and emergency surgeries to generate anxiety. My surprise was how much it generated in me.
Chaplains walk into dozens of anxious rooms every day. We deeply connect to strangers in the worst and most intimate moments of their lives. We bear witness to the presence of Christ in the midst of it. How do we do it day after day without catching all the anxiety flying around? How do we not infect the room with our own? Those early weeks revealed so much unrest bubbling underneath my awareness. It infected my ability to be connected and present with God and people in their worst moments.
The year I served as a chaplain, I was introduced to systems theory, which specifically helps identify anxiety—first in ourselves and then in the people around us. I studied it further in graduate school and have been studying and teaching it ever since. I now travel the world and help leaders learn the tools to notice their own triggers, notice when they are reactive instead of connected, and notice the anxious patterns that develop …
Continue reading…
by | Jul 1, 2024 | Uncategorized
Two new books consider whether one depends on the other.
Constitutional scholar C. L. Skach begins How to Be a Citizen: Learning to Be Civil Without the State with an engrossing account of her own foray into crafting the law of a land. The land in question was American-occupied Iraq, to which Skach traveled in 2008, full of enthusiasm and feeling she’d reached the peak of her profession. She recalls, “As one of my students at Oxford put it, ‘You are writing constitutions, Professor Skach; it doesn’t get any better than this.’”
Readers old enough to remember the many failures of the US government’s efforts to export democracy to the Middle East won’t be surprised to learn that her story soon takes a chaotic turn. With the work far from finished, Skach’s camp in Baghdad is hit by a rocket meant for the nearby US Embassy, and just hours later she’s riding a tank back to the airport, leaving Iraq with democracy stuck in customs.
“I realized that nothing or no one could help these people but themselves,” Skach writes. “No law, no rule” imposed by outsiders could force the culture into a shape foreign to its norms. So unsettling was the experience that, by its end, the professor of law had lost her “faith in formal rules—in the law” itself.
But the problem at the center of How to Be a Citizen is not simply a matter of law, and it has that in common with another recent book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, by political scientist Yuval Levin.
Both authors write in response to a diagnosis with which almost no observer of modern American politics could quibble: Things are not working as they should. We can’t seem to get along as a people, …
Continue reading…
by | Jul 1, 2024 | Uncategorized
As a newlywed and a new mother, I built exactly the life I wanted. The only thing missing was everyone else.
I don’t remember when I realized I didn’t have a community.
Perhaps it was one Sunday after our church service when, holding my nine-month-old son, I stepped from the nursing
room into the sanctuary and felt, with horrible déjà vu, exactly the way I had felt as a 14-year-old immigrant entering
an American school for the first time. I saw a sea of faces I didn’t recognize—people divided into their own friend groups, smiling, chatting, nodding. Everybody seemed to belong somewhere, and I was like a newcomer to a church I had been attending for five years.
Or perhaps it was the Saturday when my mother was getting scanned for pancreatic cancer in South Korea and my husband, David, was out of town. I was solo parenting at home, trying not to cry in front of my son, Tov. I longed for a friend to appear at my door and sit with me, pray out loud, or play with Tov while I washed tears off my face.
I didn’t think much about community until I really needed one and it wasn’t there.
Christians are familiar with Genesis 2:18: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” This verse is most often applied to marriage, but it is an inescapable reality that the Creator, who himself dwells in community as three persons in one, created all humankind to be with and for other people. It is not good to be alone because we were not made to be alone. We burst from our mothers’ wombs screaming for touch.
But as we grow older and more self-sufficient, distracted by life’s burdens, we learn to live independently, like accommodating a broken ankle. And so onward we limp, relationally crippled, until we face a steep hill and realize we need help.
The modern forces of loneliness, writes …
Continue reading…
by | Jul 1, 2024 | Uncategorized
Fifty years ago, the Lausanne Covenant’s solution to rampant division in evangelical ranks wasn’t uniformity.
In the 2000 movie Memento, protagonist Leonard Shelby has a specific brain injury that prevents him from forming new long-term memories. He can remember information for 30 seconds to a minute at most, but then he forgets everything.
Leonard’s disconnect from his past leaves him in a perpetual state of bewilderment about how he got into his present predicament: What enemy am I running from—and why? Why am I holding a gun? His confusion is a consequence of amnesia, an inability to remember one’s own history. If Leonard could just relearn and remember the salient parts of his past, he could finally return to a stable existence, with a sane understanding of himself and the people around him.
Being an evangelical today is much like this. We too are disconnected from our past, albeit for more reversible reasons than a brain injury. As a result, evangelicals are more divided now than ever, with many of us combating enemies who were once friends.
But what if we paused to remember our history? Not only would we recall who we are and how we got here, but we might even rediscover the best that evangelicalism has been, is, and can be once again.
Of course, one of the biggest problems today is that there seems to be almost no consensus on what the word evangelical even means. If only evangelicals from around the world could agree upon the baseline parameters for evangelicalism—something minimal enough to encourage healthy diversity but substantial enough to ensure doctrinal integrity.
What if something like this already exists?
Fifty years ago, in July 1974, around 2,700 Christian leaders from 150 countries traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland, at the behest of American evangelist Billy Graham and British theologian John …
Continue reading…
