Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Review of Derek Flood's 'Disarming Scripture' - Brian Zahnd

Theologian, author, and blogger Derek Flood has a new book out — Disarming Scripture. His book has a provocative subtitle: Cherry-Picking Liberals, Violence-Loving Conservatives, and Why We All Need To Learn to Read the Bible Like Jesus Did. I’ve read it and gave it this endorsement:

“Jesus is the savior of everything — including the Bible! That’s what I kept thinking while reading this brilliant book. There have been a number of excellent books in recent years on how Christians should read the Bible, but Disarming Scripture is the very best. Derek has done us an immeasurable service in showing us how to read the Bible like Jesus did.”

That’s my two cents worth. More significantly, preeminent Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has given Disarming Scripture this endorsement:

“A perceptive and honest book about the vexed question of violence in the Bible. Taking with great seriousness the dynamism of the biblical tradition and the interpretive process, the distinctive contribution of Disarming Scripture is an exploration of the way in which the biblical text itself interprets texts of violence. This is a fine contribution to our common work.”

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St Isaac the Syrian and Apokatastasis - Fr Aidan (Alvin) Kimel

On 27 November 2014 I gave a talk titled “St Isaac the Syrian, Apokatastasis, and the Renewal of Orthodox Preaching” at the first Theotokos Institute Conference in Cardiff, Wales. An expanded, footnoted version of the talk will be published in the journal Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2016. I am grateful to the Theotokos Institute for the invitation to deliver this address and for the helpful and encouraging responses from the conference participants. I have divided my talk into three sections: (1) St Isaac the Syrian and Apokatastasis, (2) the Proclamatory Rule of the Gospel, and (3) Preaching the Kingdom. Please do not reblog or reproduce these articles without permission.

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How is the gospel of Jesus Christ rightly proclaimed? How do we tell the narrative of the Savior in such a way that the kingdom of God is made present? How do we preach the good news as good news? These are the questions to which I will be speaking in this morning’s address. Underlying my address is a simple premise: how we understand the conclusion of the gospel story will necessarily inform and shape how we tell the story.

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Is Religion Breathing It's Last Breath? - Michael Hardin

I have been reading the work of Rene Girard now for a quarter century and have been applying the insights of the mimetic theory to the Bible and Christian theology for all that time. Girard is not a theologian but he has provided us with an anthropology, a way of understanding the human and human culture that explains so much of the data from so many sciences that its insights have become conclusive for me (or at least as conclusive as one can admit to in our postmodern world).

In mimetic theory, both religion and culture originate from the same place: the generative mimetic scapegoating mechanism (as Robert Hamerton-Kelly so aptly named it). As humans evolved and became more and more violent, in order to stop groups from total collapse, humans learned to turn their collective hostilities onto a single victim, thus temporarily securing ‘peace’ through cannibalistic cooperation. This cooperation is the ground for culture and the ritualizing of this mechanism is the ground of religion.

Religion is widely criticized, vilified and condemned in the world today. It is easy to see why. The interface between religion and war, politics, money and power (in other words, human culture), leaves us feeling uneasy or angry, frightened or dystopian. From ISIS in the Mid-East to the flag waving rallies of American Christianity, all around the world we see the ever present specter of a god who devours humanity, of a god who hates the other. We start and fight wars for this god, we behead others for this god, we send others to concentration and labor camps in the name of this god and we have secularized this god in the form of the modern nation-state. There is only one god in this world and its name is Violence and Death.

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