Canter Bridge

Leave it to the apostle Paul, that most bodacious of the Jesus movement’s constitutive generation, to speak in such extreme terms. Where others might have spoken of humankind’s ability to improve, repent, achieve, and so forth—with God’s good help as the wind in our sails—Paul simply says we are dead. Unable. Inert. Incapable. Clueless. Cold. (more…)

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The apostle Paul’s comprehension of grace is supported by a complex reading of the patriarchal narratives. Abraham figures both as the protagonist of the story and the paradigmatic ‘first believer’. For Paul, the redemptive drama begins nearly two thousand years before Christ and extends into his own time. Continuity is provided by the nature of human faith, which is the same throughout the story.

That is, Abraham’s faith and faith in Jesus are cut from the same cloth. This faith is the human instrument that appropriates the generosity of God towards receptive humankind.

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It is remarkable to find so much joy in the literature of lament and need.

A recurring feature of the Psalms’ prayers is the happiness of the lowly who have seen YHWH act. ‘You have turned my sorrow into dancing, ashes into a garment of praise’ is one explicit poetic recognition of a theme that runs deep and quiet elsewhere. Those who have no hope outside of YHWH, no recourse but the movement of heaven, are the most natural participants in that explosive joy that flows when YHWH is seen to act.
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Grace is at once the most threatening and satisfying of human experiences.

In biblical terms, divine grace makes it impossible for us to earn our way into God’s favor. It is so lavish, so inscrutable, so powerfully invasive of lives that it pulls out from under us the tightly-woven carpet of credits and demerits upon which we have learned to gain traction, to stand tall. It deconstructs and reconstructs identity as potently as any other force. So, it threatens the construct in which we have learned to survive and, occasionally, to thrive.
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In this moment we seem inebriated by our own self-esteem, yet with little hope of achieving it via the intoxicating route we have chosen. So it may seem a harsh time to speak of God laughing sarcastically at the little efforts of humankind to establish its status and prerogative. Yet the psalms choose just that image when their writers imagine the Lord who rules over the nations surveying efforts to unseat him. (more…)

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‘Let death take my enemies by surprise’, the psalmist cries out in the fifty-fifth of the Bible’s one hundred fifty psalms …

Let them go down alive to the grave, for evil finds lodging among them. (Psalm 55:15 NIV)

We rightly wonder whether the Bible is a violent book, too full of holy war and vengeance for the tastes and needs of civilized moderns. We ask ourselves whether an honest reading of this book might well promote the kind of division and exclusion that we least want to characterize our life together. (more…)

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Few things connote to the human spirit the strength, steadiness, and persistence of a tree. We employ its rings to establish the timing of events that occurred long before we were born. We assume its presence after we are gone. A tree stands over the passage of events that come and go under its shade, making them seem small and short-lived. (more…)

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Order is not a given. It is rather an achievement.

Revolutions fail because they do not understand that the removal of an oppressive status quo does not by itself achieve a more agreeable order. Chaos too often ensues. (more…)

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The psalmist spars with God like friend to old friend over a beer at table in their pub. It is an unsettling frankness that speaks the truth about one’s circumstance without endangering the long association that is the cement that joins such friends.

Psalms 42 and 43 are held together by this verbal link:

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Psalms 42:11 and 43:5 NIV) (more…)

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