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.
Continue reading Atonement and the OrdinaryTag Archives: Atonement
Exploring the Meaning of Jesus’s Death
The Winnipeg Free Press faith reporter John Longhurst asked me to put some thoughts together on the subject of atonement to assist him in an article he was writing for Holy Week. Longhurst’s column can be found here. He has also posted the reference article I wrote for him in its entirety on his blog, here.
“The Death of an Extremist”: A Good Friday Sermon
Over the summer, my Good Friday sermon “The Death of an Extremist” appeared as the Feature Sermon in an issue of Theodidaktos on the theme of “Atonement: What is the Message of the Cross?” Theodidaktos is published by the Evangelical Mennonite Conference. The sermon goes back to my time serving as a congregational pastor in Toronto, but it is one of my favourites, narrowly missing the cut for inclusion in Leaps of Faith. Continue reading “The Death of an Extremist”: A Good Friday Sermon
Proclaiming the Crucifixion
The following is the conclusion to a lecture I recently gave, entitled “Parsing the Grammar of Atonement.”
All of the biblical metaphors for atonement are needed. They serve as necessary imaginative windows into the utterly irreducible reality of the reconciliation accomplished in the person of Christ. “The metaphors,” Colin Gunton observes, “are the means by which it is possible to speak of the meaning of the gospel narratives taken as a whole.”1 This quotation from Gunton is helpful as it gestures towards two significant aspects of how metaphors function, both of which are sometimes forgotten when the metaphors are pressed in an overly theorized direction. Continue reading Proclaiming the Crucifixion
- Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 42. ↩