“We must summon the audacity to say that modernity’s scientific/metaphysical metanarrative―at the moment told by astrophysicists and neo-Darwinians―is not the encompassing story within which all other accounts of reality must establish their places, or be discredited for failing to find one. It is instead a rather brutal abstraction from reality. The abstraction has proved to be magnificent in its intellectual power and practical benefits. Nevertheless, by these disciplines’ methodological eschewal of teleology, they prevent themselves from describing what actually is. As pop scientists urge over and over, the tale told by Scripture and the creed finds no comfortable place within modernity’s metanarrative. It is time for the church simply to reply: this is certainly the case, and the reason it is the case is that the tale told by Scripture is too comprehensive to find place within so drastically curtailed a version of the facts. Indeed, the gospel story cannot fit within any other would-be metanarrative because it is itself the only true metanarrative―or it is altogether false.”
Robert Jenson, Canon and Creed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 120.
The video recording of my recent BTS Symposium presentation, “Imagining a Better Way: Towards a Theology of Transformative Preaching,” is now available on the Providence YouTube channel. There was a great turnout for the event with a capacity crowd in the room and a good group joining online. There were some insightful questions from both the in-person and online attenders.
There is still time to register for next week’s Symposium presented by the Biblical and Theological studies department of Providence Theological Seminary featuring my presentation “Imagining a Better Way: Towards a Theology of Transformative Preaching.” I’ve been told that there has been a great response so far and that we are quickly approaching the room capacity. (It’s amazing what a free lunch can do!) However, there is no limit to the number of people who can join on Zoom. To register, visit: Seminary Symposium – Providence University College and Theological Seminary
The following paragraphs contain the rather whimsical observations with which I began my sermon this past Sunday for the first season of Lent at Grace Bible Church in Winnipeg. They set the stage for my reading of Mark 1:1-15 as the interpretive key for Mark’s Gospel and for the church’s pilgrimage through the season of Lent.
Last year, I read Julie Canlis’ wonderful, little book A Theology of the Ordinary (2d, ed.;Godspeed Press, 2018). The book emerged from the author’s “extended meditation on this cultural obsession with greatness and being ‘impactful'” (2). Canlis ponders whether “our culture’s emphasis on supercharged emotions and measurable success blinded us to Romans 12 and the fact that our ordinary lives are our ‘spiritual act of worship'” (3)? In the rest of the book she precedes to sketch out a brief “theology of the ordinary” organized around the themes of creation, redemption, and new creation.
