Constructio ad Sensum (or, A Collection of Unrelated Items)

As a (temporary) going away gift, here's a reflection I wrote on Bonhoeffer's book, Life Together : The Christian community, the Church, is created by God in Christ, ordered by the Word of Christ in the gospel, and preserved by the Spirit of Christ against all that would seek its disruption. This is the fundamental point of Bonhoeffer’s  Life Together . Christ is the floor and the ceiling (to borrow Gordon Wenham’s metaphor) of Christian communion; he establishes it, and his life is the pattern to which it all conforms. In this way, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of community – indeed, of the Christian life as a whole – is deeply Protestant and properly evangelical (in its grounding in the  evangel ).  In essence,  Life Together  answers the question of what happens when sinful human beings are really confronted with and really changed by the Word of God in the gospel. The book could be accurately titled with language Bonhoeffer uses in the first paragraph: li...

"Six days shall you labor..." Having just finished studying Genesis through Leviticus, it felt apropos to reassess practices in my life which have generated an unhealthy rhythm of work with little rest. Many of us are guilty of doing a thing for much longer than we really should because we feel we must -- this describes me frighteningly accurately. Such (occasionally laudable) diligence must also be examined for traces of idolatry or straight up foolishness, and I've realized that this blog exhibits some of those traits. I do love writing, but with the sheer amount of writing projects on my plate for seminary alone, this blog has become a source of undue stress. So, rather than do what I have done most often in the past with previous blogs (quietly abandon it), I'm trying to be more consistent in my disposition toward this one. This has been a (not surprisingly) busy semester, and as a result I'm feeling very strongly that I need to pause the blog. I mig...